They left a peaceful gravesite with two grave markers on the large mound.
The first read:
THREE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN SOLAMNIC SOLDIERS, FIFTY-ONE SOLAMNIC KNIGHTS, AND TWO QUALINESTI ELVES. BATTLE OF THE SOLACE WATERSHED, CHAOS WAR. YEAR 384 AFTER CATACLYSM. THEY DIED BRAVELY.
The second read:
TWO DEAD BROTHERS, SERGEANTS OF THE KNIGHTS OF TAKHISIS, BATTLE OF THE SOLACE WATERSHED, CHAOS WAR, YEAR 384 AFTER CATACLYSM. THEY DIED… FINALLY.
Dragon’s Throat
They say the upper reaches of Gimmenthal Glacier are so beautiful it’s hard to think. Goodness knows it’s hard to breathe. Tumbling down from the airless heights of Icewall, rugged, jumbled chunks of ice pack together to inch down onto the Plains of Dust. Ice crystals sparkle as they sift into pristine drifts spanning awesomely deep cobalt fissures in the massive river of ice. In the summer, so I’ve heard, it’s so quiet you can hear the melt-off trickle down into the shadowy blue depths of the broken ice to refreeze again once out of the baleful glare of the never-setting summer sun.
‘Course nobody much goes there. Even the Ice Nomads visit the head of the glacier only sporadically, and then in the gloom of winter to start the longest and most challenging of their Ice Boat races.
Nope, for thousands of years, nobody much cared about Gimmenthal Glacier at all. And then the kender came.
It’s not like the pesky little troublemakers suddenly decided to hike up the glacier to appreciate nature. Nah. The idiots prefer to camp in the mud, scores of miles from the heights of Icewall and about twenty miles east of Ice Mountain Bay, where Gimmenthal dies in a sprawl like the flow of dirty, molten wax from a cheap candleholder. Streaked with dirt, rock, and mud in ragged stripes, pushed into its midst as tributary glaciers join the mammoth torrent of ice in its inexorable downslope progress, Gimmenthal melts. Strange as it may seem, the kender come for the melting.
Y’see, in winter, that old glacier creeps forward onto the Plains of Dust, pushing mounds of gravel and top- soil before it. Come summer, it retreats again, leaving a pockmarked landscape of mounded earth and muddy pools of water. It’s this messy melt-off that makes the glacier so popular with kender not afflicted by the destruction of Kendermore by the great dragon Malystryx.
These merry, irrepressible kender long for adventure. They want to see and “handle” baubles and gewgaws of all sorts, trade ‘em, and “find” them yet again. But with the mood of Krynn these days, they find few enough places to be happy. Their afflicted cousins are no longer any fun. Every sheriff or Knight of Neraka they run into shuffles them off to jail. Magic is getting scarcer and less interesting all the time. And travelers are few and getting fewer as the Great Dragons close roads and terrified communities close their borders.
‘Bout the only bright spot for curious kender is, of course, a visit to the Tomb of the Last Heroes in Solace, where they can celebrate the mighty feat of Tasslehoff Burrfoot in defeating Chaos. They do this by mocking the Knights solemnly guarding the Tomb, sneaking over the fence to break chunks of marble off as souvenirs, and frolicking on the picnic grounds ‘neath the giant vallenwood trees with similarly inclined and often similarly named kender.
A visit to Solace is not enough for some kender, though, and many have taken to tracing Tasslehoff s journeys during his days as a Hero of the Lance, hoping to recapture the excitement of his encounters with dragons and draconians, gully dwarves and wooly mammoths. From Pax Tharkas to the Gates of Thor-bardin, they travel. Of course, the dwarves will not actually let the kender into Thorbardin, and the kender have no way to follow Tas’s journeys into the Abyss, but they do what they can. So began the kender trips to Icewall.
Once kender began trekking to Icewall, it was only a matter of time before one wayward traveler happened upon the melting terminus of Gimmenthal Glacier. The “discovery” of Gimmenthal Glacier (the locating of huge geographic features well-known and mapped by both the Ice Nomads and the dwellers on the Plains of Dust amounts to a “discovery” to a kender) would have occasioned no great fuss if it had not been for the items found there. For, y’see, the melting glacier gives up the stuff of kender dreams: random junk. Coins, weapons, bones of all sorts, rings, pots, canteens, half-rotted hats, belt-buckles, boots, utility knives, pouches, teeth, mangled and frayed rope, and on and on and on.
Apparently, at some time long forgotten, there was a battle between two mighty armies in the heights from which Gimmenthal Glacier flows. The battle remnants were quickly covered with endless snow. The snow compacted over eons into the hard ice of the glacier, and the battlefield items slowly wound their way down to the Plains of Dust to be revealed at the melting terminus of the glacier.
Not surprisingly, Gimmenthal-quickly dubbed “Gimme Glacier” by the excited “discoverer”-became a stopping point for curious kender on the way to Ice-wall. A constant stream of kender flock over the mud-piles, dredge the ponds of melt-off, sift through the piles of mounded gravel, and even mine the irregular icy edges and smaller fissures of the glacier itself, searching for buried treasure-well, treasure to kender anyway. Though the recovered items are mostly mundane items of metal or other sturdy construction, they are from an unknown and ancient time. One can never tell what wonders might be found. Better yet, the pickings are plentiful and, at first, no pesky sheriff or angry shopkeeper kept guard over the items, shooing kender away.
Then something happened, so they say.
Once he had heard of Gimme Glacier, there was no keeping Finderkeeper Rumplton away. A thirteenth cousin, twice removed, of Tasslehoff Burrfoot himself, Finderkeeper was determined to uphold the family honor, which of course meant wandering to as many places and finding as many things as he possibly could. Following in the steps of his famous ancestor-he was constantly looking down to see if he could actually see the steps of his famous ancestor-Finderkeeper had, at first, debated whether he should take the sidetrip to Gimme Glacier before or after visiting Icewall fortress. But when he heard from passing travelers that magic had recently been discovered among the items of Gimme Glacier, he made for the site straight away. Never mind that nobody knew what the magic did or if it would still work in these days of uncertain magical effects. Never mind that flocks of kender were already swarming all over the glacier, the gravel mounds, and the mudpits. Never mind that Finder-keeper wouldn’t know what to do with a magic item if he found one. Here was an opportunity not to be missed. He whistled at his good fortune, twirled his topknot three times around in excitement, and headed for Gimme Glacier with a look of acquisitiveness so determined that it caused a passing merchant to check his pouch twice.
The scene at Gimme Glacier was chaos itself, or at least what remnants of Chaos had survived Tasslehoff s noble sacrifice at the end of the Fourth Age of Krynn. Kender plunged headfirst into muddy pools searching in the slimy muck at the bottom for artifacts. Gravel flew everywhere as mounds were enthusiastically plundered for treasure. Picks thudded regularly into the face of Gimme Glacier as impatient kender attempted to hurry the impassive ice into revealing its secrets. Tripods, pulleys, and ropes dangled over crevasses on the face of the ice sheet itself as suspended kender attempted to inspect areas that might not melt for years to come. Gaggles of kender oohed and ahhed over mud-encrusted items, trying to figure out what they were. Disappointment showed when the items turned out to be mere armor buckles or stones, but not too much disappointment.
Finderkeeper threw himself into the fray. After numerous conversations with his incredibly talkative yet refreshingly truthful cousins, and some complex calculations, he picked a spot where he judged a sensible mage would have positioned himself in relation to the main line of battle. He climbed up onto the icy surface of the glacier and made his way almost thirty feet from the soft, melting edge. No one was looking here yet. After all, so far nothing had been found near this spot. He set to exploring the crevasses-already more than ten feet deep even so close to the melting edge of the glacier.
It was dangerous. A slip into the crevasse and he would fall until it narrowed enough to pin him. Then the ice would quickly drain away heat from his body, most likely too quickly for him to be saved, even if his fellow kender were paying enough attention to hear his cries for help above the hubbub and commotion.
