Needle.
Finally, her fury unabated, Dahlia reached out at Themerelis with a wide swing.
She missed badly.
She missed on purpose.
Themerelis came in right behind the strike with a burst and a stab.
Dahlia never stopped her turn and continued right around, stepping back as she went to stay out of reach of the deadly blade. She came around with a double parry, her weapons smacking the greatsword one after another.
Neither, though, released a charge into the sword, something Themerelis didn’t register. The effective double block had him slowed anyway, retracting the blade, but as Dahlia broke her momentum and reversed the swing of her left hand, he came right back in.
Her parries came simultaneously, one metal rod smacking the greatsword on either side, the right lower down the blade than the left, and Dahlia released the building charge of Kozah’s Needle.
The powerful jolt weakened Themerelis’s grip even as the woman drove through the swings, and the greatsword was lost to him, spinning end over end and falling away.
He reached for it, but Dahlia and her spinning weapon blocked his way, smacking at him in rapid succession. She hit one arm then the other, again and again, and that was only when he managed to block them. When he didn’t, the stick cracked him about the chest and midsection, and once in the face, fattening his lips.
She quickly got ahead of his blocks, the weapons coming at him from any and every angle, battering him, cutting him, raising welt after welt. One strike hit his left forearm so forcefully they both heard the crack of bone before he even knew he’d been hit.
Stunned, off balance, and nearing the end of his strength, the warrior desperately punched out at Dahlia.
She dropped, turned, and swung her right arm up, looping her weapon under and around his extended shoulder. She continued her turn, throwing the back of her hip into his, bending him over her, and with a sudden yank on the entangling weapon, she flipped Themerelis right over her shoulder.
He fell flat on his back, his breath blasted from his lungs, his eyes and thoughts unfocused.
Dahlia didn’t slow, spinning circles, finally squaring up to the fallen man as she brought her hands clapping together in front of her, rejoining the central four-foot length of Kozah’s Needle. She waved the break-staff up one way then reversed, expertly aligning the side sticks and calling upon the weapon to rejoin. The instant she was holding a singular eight-foot staff again she drove one end to the ground and pole-vaulted off it high into the air, turning the weapon as she went and screaming, “Yee-Kozah!” to the dark clouds above.
She landed right beside Themerelis, driving the break-staff’s forward tip down like a spear into the man’s chest.
Fingers of lightning crackled out from the impact and the weapon slid through the man, clipping his backbone and pressing down into the ground.
Dahlia screamed out to the ancient, long-forgotten god of lightning again as she stood victorious, one hand holding the impaled weapon at midpoint, the other arm straight out to the other side, her head thrown back so she was looking up to the sky.
A blast of lightning coupled with a tremendous thunderstroke hit the upper tip of the staff and channeled down. Some of its burning force entered Dahlia, bathing her in crawling lines of blue-white energy, but most of it jolted into Themerelis with devastating effect. His arms and legs extended out wide, to their limits and beyond, kneecaps and elbows popping in protest. His eyes bulged as if they would fly from their sockets, and his hair, all of his hair, stood out straight, dancing wildly. A great hole was blown right through the man along the length of the metal staff that impaled him.
And Dahlia held on, basking in the power as it flowed through her lithe form.
She looked down at the gathered barbarians.
Finally she spotted Herzgo Alegni among them, moving forward through their ranks.
“Herzgo Alegni, this is your son!” she cried.
She threw the baby from the cliff.
Chapter 2. AN OLD DWARF’S LAST ROAD
HE WAS JUST A BOY… MANY YEARS AGO,” THE WOMAN PROTESTED. SHE rubbed her elderly father’s shoulders, and the man was clearly uncomfortable with the obvious contradictions between his tale and the reality before them.
Drizzt Do’Urden held up his dark hands to reassure the two, to show the older man that he didn’t disbelieve him.
“It was here,” the man, Lathan Obridock, said. “As wondrous a wood as I’ve e’er seen or heard tell of. Full o’ springtime and warmth, and singing, and bells ringing. We all seen it, me and Spragan, and Addadearber and… what was that captain’s name now?”
“Ashelia,” Drizzt answered.
“Aye!” the old man said. “Ashelia Larson, who knew the lake better than any. Great captain, that lady. Just out fishing, you know. And we come across the lake…” He pointed back at the dark waters of Lac Dinneshere, tracing a line from a distance out to the rotted old remnants of what had once been a wharf, the ruins of an old shack just up the shore from it. “We were bringing that ranger… Roundie. Aye, Roundie. He paid Ashelia to get him across the lake, I guess. You should be speaking with him.”
“I did,” Drizzt replied, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice, for he had told Lathan that bit of information a dozen times at least that day, and twice that number the day before, and even before that. The previous year, Drizzt had met with the ranger, commonly known as Roundabout, or Roundie, to the south of Icewind Dale, at the urging of Jarlaxle.
Roundabout’s description of the wood was exactly the same as Lathan’s: a magical place, inhabited by a beautiful witch with auburn hair, and a halfling caretaker who lived in a hillside cave-home by a small pond. According to Roundabout, though, only the wizard Addadearber had actually seen the halfling, and only Roundabout himself and a man named Spragan had seen the woman, and they had come away with very different impressions. To the ranger, she had seemed as a goddess dancing on a ladder of stars, but Spragan, according to Roundabout and confirmed by Lathan, had never truly recovered from the horror of that encounter.
Drizzt sighed as he looked around at the sparse trees and stony ground of the sheltered nook at the end of a small cove, cleverly hidden by rocky outcroppings. Up above on the hillside stood scattered small pine trees typical of Icewind Dale.
“Perhaps it was north of here,” Drizzt offered. “There are many sheltered vales along the high ground at the northeastern stretches of Lac Dinneshere.”
The old man shook his head with every word. He pointed to the cabin. “Right behind the lodge,” he insisted. “No other lodge near here. That’s the place. This is the place. The forest was here.”
“But there is no forest,” said Drizzt. “And no sign that any forest ever was here, beyond these few trees.”
“Telled you that, too,” said Lathan.
“They came back after their encounter,” his daughter, Tulula, said. “They looked for it. Of course they did, and so did many others. Roundie’d been here many the time before that day, and came back many the time after, and never did he see the same forest again, or the witch or halfling.”
Drizzt put his hand on his hip, his expression doubtful as he continued his scan, seeking something, anything, he could bring back to Bruenor, who, along with Pwent, was visiting with some clan dwarves in the tunnels under the lone mountain of Kelvin’s Cairn, the complex that had housed Clan Battlehammer in the decades before Bruenor had reclaimed Mithral Hall.
Mithral Hall. Four decades had passed since they’d left that wondrous dwarven kingdom, since Bruenor had abdicated his throne in a most extreme and irreversible manner. How many adventures the three of them had
