Prophet of Moonshae

Dark boards paneled the walls of the library, framing the great shelves with their rows of scrolls and tomes of arcane or historical import and the thoughts of learned sages-the most extensive library in all the Moonshae Islands.

Many sources, Deirdre knew, had been added to the royal collection only during the last twenty years. These tomes and volumes had been discovered in Caer Allisynn, the tall castle that now rested on the shores of Corwell Firth beside Caer Corwell, her father's home.

The tale of that castle had become a common legend in the isles, the topic of numerous ballads. The tomb of Queen Allisynn, bride of the hero, Cymrych Hugh, it had been built centuries ago to serve as a resting place for the young wife upon her untimely death. Bereaved, Cymrych Hugh had used the power of his druidic council to send the fortress into the sea, where for hundreds of years it had rested on the bottom, secure from trespass and plunder. But then, at Tristan Kendrick's hour of greatest need, the goddess had sent the castle forth from the depths. Its magnificent presence had helped to place him on the High Throne.

Upon the King's ultimate victory over the forces that threatened to drag the Moonshae Islands into darkness and chaos, the castle anchored itself upon the shores of Corwell Firth. There it remained proudly, a sign of the Kendrick reign. The fractious nations of the Ffolk-Moray, Corwell, Callidyrr, and Snowdown-had, for the first time since the rule of Cymrych Hugh himself, united under a strong leader. Together they formed a kingdom strong enough to stand against their traditional enemies to the north.

The northmen, savage warriors who had long ago sailed into the islands upon their sleek longships, seeking war and plunder, instead found homelands and farmsteads. Since well before Tristan Kendrick's birth, fully half the islands' land was controlled by the sea raiders. King Kendrick, however, had forged a lasting peace with their neighbors to the north. While the northmen swore no fealty to the High King's crown, they had nonetheless ceased raiding the lands of the Ffolk. In this state of truce, with the two cultures standing side by side, the isles had no cause to fear any outside threat.

All of this, Deirdre knew, was her father's legacy. His reign had changed the face of the Moonshaes and given the Ffolk the hero they had sought for centuries. For fifteen years, the promise of that gleaming coronation had been sustained. It was an auspicious start, she thought bitterly, to a reign that had slowly degenerated into a struggle for the Ffolk's survival. The threat to the people had come from an unexpected source: the skies, and the clouds, and the sea. The Ffolk had always lived as a part of their land, using the earth and her fruits as a means of prosperity, but never vanquishing the elements of nature and beauty. Led spiritually by the druids, who formed the staunch spine of their religion, the Ffolk had cared for their wild places with all the devotion they had given to their pastures and fields.

The first clerics of the New Gods had journeyed to the Moonshaes several centuries before the reign of Tristan Kendrick, and their words had been filtering through the cities and towns through all those years, enticing and converting many of the island people to the worship of deities such as Chauntea, Helm, Selene, and Talos. And though they welcomed these New Gods, and many people took them into their homes and their hearts, always the Ffolk remained rooted firmly in the earth-and the benign goddess who was the land's true mother.

But with the epic battle waged by Tristan Kendrick against the dark and warlike Bhaal, a transformation had come over the land. The Moonwells, once the lustrous sources of power for the druids, had faded to mundane ponds. The druids themselves had lost their powers. Although many of them still survived, dwelling hermitlike among the oaks, aspens, and pines of the Moonshae forests, their magic no longer flowed from the earth. Many of the Ffolk blamed the last five years' onslaught of storm, drought, blizzard, and hurricane upon the loss of this faith. They had called upon the druids to save them, to plead with the goddess for a return of her power, her benign influence and protection.

These prayers had gone universally unanswered.

Even years ago, at the wide-eyed age of fourteen years, Deirdre had known they would. She could not have explained then, nor could she now, the source of this knowledge. She only knew it to be a fundamental truth that she sensed in the deepest core of her being.

The goddess was dead! The Ffolk would turn to the New Gods and bring them into their hearts and souls. Only then would the storms cease and bounty once again return to the land. Yet the young princess inherently mistrusted gods and considered dependence upon them to be a mistake.

Still impatient, Deirdre tried to force herself to sit at the table. Opened there was a rare volume she had been perusing, The Military History of the Sword Coast, by the famed sage, Elminster of Waterdeep. She had spent more than a week with the volume and had come to the conclusion that the famed scholar was in reality a pompous old windbag. There was perhaps an element of parochialism in her opinion-the ancient authority had spent little space on the wars waged in the Moonshaes or the southern realms of Calimshan and Amn, preferring instead to prattle overlong about the crucial role of Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate to the advance of civilization in the world.

Angrily she pushed the book aside, knowing that it didn't contain the things she desired to know. She paced before the great shelf, examining scrolls-The Ballad of Cymrych Hugh, by the famed Greater Bard Dolsow. . Mastery of Arcane Transformation, a stack of parchments containing essays by many of the mightiest wizards of Waterdeep … a fresh scroll, barely ten years old, containing the epic poem called The Darkwalker War, by the bard Tavish of Snowdown.

Deirdre knew Tavish well, having called this loyal friend of her parents 'Auntie' since the days she could say her first words. This, the bard's greatest ballad, related the tale of Tristan's rise from the small kingdom of Corwell to his status as High King. Several years ago, Deirdre had confounded and embarrassed her parents by analyzing the structure of the verse and comparing it-unfavorably, and in Tavish's presence-to Dolsow's earlier work on Cymrych Hugh.

But none of these volumes, nor any others around her, answered her purpose of the moment, for in truth Deirdre sought neither knowledge nor wisdom. Her hunger was simple and well focused in a fundamental craving for power.

Anger flared within her-the old, familiar anger, mostly directed toward her older sister. Alicia was flippant and irresponsible, far less diligent than Deirdre. Yet one day Alicia would be queen! The bitter injustice rose like gall in her throat, and she paced the library, unable to contain her agitation. Power! That was the door, and knowledge was the key that would open it.

For a time, Deirdre had sought this power through the mastery of sorcery. She studied the tomes of the mages. She pleaded and begged with Keane to teach her the beginning elements of sorcery, enchantments she had mastered with an ease that had amazed her tutor.

Then suddenly Keane had told her that he would teach her no more. He offered no acceptable explanation, making some lame excuse about 'time away from her serious studies,' which she knew to be a blatant falsehood. Yet the man had evaded her every attempt to draw an answer from him, all the while refusing to aid her in any further development of her magic-using skills.

This had left Deirdre to labor on her own, and to this end, she used the library. For long hours, sometimes all through the night, she squinted at sorcerous sigils, straining in the light of a sputtering lamp to decipher the instructions left by some long-dead practitioner of enchantment. This was where Deirdre had found her solace-and where also, she sensed, she would discover her future.

Still, she couldn't bring herself now to sit and read or even to meditate. She continued to pace the room, crossing to each window in turn and gazing across the moor, seeing the rain falling in sheets, still miles away but creeping inexorably closer.

Finally her pacing worked some of the tension from her muscles and she collapsed into a soft chair, facing the open window. Slowly, reluctantly, she closed her eyes. In a few minutes, she slept, but it was not a restful slumber.

Instead, she twitched in the chair, clenching and unclenching her hands, groaning between taut lips or kicking restlessly with her feet. As she slept, the storm crept closer, and tendrils of mist reached forward like clutching fingers, struggling to pull Callidyrr into the clouds' rain-lashed embrace.

One of the tentacles probed at the castle wall, swirling like a miniature whirlwind beyond the open window of the library. It probed inward, wisping around the sleeping princess, caressing her long black hair. It poised there only for a moment as huge gray clouds massed, and then the rain swept across the city and the castle and bay, swallowing the small tendril. Yet, as proven by the thunder and by the exultant, battering rain, the storm was well pleased.