Arch Wizard

Rivers flow downhill, and eventually to lakes, perhaps the sea, and if he was very lucky, a port or fishing village or something of the sort. And if he was always following a stream, he might zig and zag a lot, but he could hardly walk in circles.

Of course, all the dangerous beasties came to streams to drink, didn't they?

Huh. Dangerous beasties including him.

Not that he could think of anything better to do, even though he stood and tried for a good long time.

So eventually Rod Everlar shrugged, squared his shoulders, peered at the nearest tiny trickle of water under the trees, strode to it, and started following its flow.

He looked back several times, at first trying to keep in his mind what the spot he'd appeared at looked like, in case he needed to find it again. He doubted he could, though, once he'd walked two dozen steps or so.

Then he looked back for another reason: to see if anything was creeping after him.

Always he saw the same thing. Nothing but trees, endless trees.

He'd already descended a surprising amount, though. When he'd been looking down from where he'd first stood in the forest, the land hadn't seemed to slope so much, but… well, it did.

He trudged on.

Sigh. This tramping along in the muck was going to get wearingly old very soon. Not that he need feel lonely. After all, he had such company in his walk: bumbling fantasy writer, great conquering hero, Lord Archwizard, and Dark Lord of all Falconfar. Quite a crowd.

Rod Everlar muttered his favorite naughty word again, and kept on walking.

The tongue ardently thrusting into his mouth was cold, so cold. Narmarkoun felt lust stirring in him again as satin-smooth limbs of his own creation tightened around him, breasts brushed against his, the undead woman kissing him started to moan with need…

Well, of course. She needed his life. She longed and hungered for his warmth and vitality more than anything else in all the world. Already her thighs were locked around his, and one of her icy hands was fumbling for his loins…

Enough. He could indulge himself with scores of his servitors, whenever he wanted to; he had another purpose for this one. Reaching around behind her to capture her far elbow, Narmarkoun tugged firmly, twisting her about and away from being pressed against him, tearing their joined mouths apart.

All he needed was a brief moment. His freed mouth murmured the spell. Then he embraced her even more fiercely, pressing against her hard as the flesh he'd conjured over her bones started to flow and creep.

It was an eerie, eerie feeling. One he never tired of…

All too soon, it was done, and he gently disengaged and stepped back from her. Or rather, 'her' no longer.

His refleshed servitor was now an exact duplicate of himself. Tall, bald, and scaled, the skin blue rather than putrifying gray, his own coldly calm eyes gazing back at him. Just a few more spells to augment the decaying mind inside, to transform the undead woman who'd been embracing him into a false Narmarkoun who walked and talked like the real one.

He smiled. Whoever that was.

The stream wound on and on, snaking this way and that amid the trees. All around him, the forest was deep, green, and beautiful. In other circumstances, Rod Everlar would have been happy to enjoy the gnarled forest giants soaring all around him, the splashes of dappled light here and there in the rare spots where treefalls had opened gaps in the otherwise unbroken leaves overhead.

Could this be the Raurklor? Oldest and largest of the forests of Falconfar, he'd imagined it so long ago, now, that he could only just remember staring at the large expanse of blank white paper beyond Sardray, and deciding it should be a great woodland, larger than any kingdom…

Or had it been here all along, as the great mossy girths of these trees suggested, and he'd only dreamed of something already there? Something that had somehow-Lorontar's magic? — reached out to him, to whisper in his dreams?

Rod sighed.

Whatever, however… what did it matter?

He was lost, and if this was the Raurklor, he'd soon be hunted. Perhaps he was being hunted right now, by something padding along in velvet silence, unseen but watching him. Stalking patiently, and awaiting nightfall to pounce.

The tiny trickle had become a creek some time ago, and was now a stream. He'd instinctively edged a little farther away from its banks, lest it get deep enough to hide something with tentacles that could lunge out at him-

Angrily he banished a mental picture of dozens of little fanged mouths, all on the end of snake-like tentacles, thrusting at him in a hungry cloud…

Damn it! To think of something here might be to make it real!

He had to-had to get out of here, and get to Taeauna!

Who was somewhere else in Falconfar, that stretched away in identical green, tree-choked gloom all around him. A world as vast as the real one. A world it seemed he could alter by writing about it.

Pity he didn't have pen, pencil, or paper, only all these pouches full of gewgaws he didn't know how to use.

Thinking of which…

Rod peered down at himself a little ruefully. It wasn't all that heroic a sight. He looked, well, moth- eaten.

His once grandly-sinister armor was now nothing but a web of half-melted patches of metal, shaped something like the black markings on a black-and-white cow, and he could find nothing that seemed magical about his heavy war-gauntlets.

He'd snatched up a lot of stuff from Ult Tower, though, and not all of it had fallen or melted away with his armor.

He wore baldrics slung over both shoulders, to cross on his chest. Sheathed along them were a few daggers and something that looked like a hooked metal claw with a whip attached to it, plus some tools.

Then there were the belts. Three of them, one bearing only a water-skin and an empty scabbard. Sheathed on the second was a sword of some sort, whose pommel glowed from time to time all by itself. The third belt, now sagging low on his hips, was the one he'd threaded six pouches of various sizes onto.

There were four little thong-drawstring soft leather bags full of what had been glowing, sparkling dust, in the end pouch. The next one along held a fine neckchain-almost certainly jewelry that had no magic at all to it-that he'd hastily clasped through seven finger-rings while racing through Ult Tower. At least five of those rings had been glowing various hues, at the time he'd snatched them from the hands of sculpted Ult Tower figures. Finely sculpted, life-sized bare women, they'd been, their faces carved in the same vacant, disinterested pouts he saw on fashion models strutting down runways in the real world. On television, of course, not in person; Rod Everlar's 'real world' wasn't quite that glamorously unreal.

The third pouch was the largest, and it was stuffed full of a chain about a dozen feet long that ended in two ornate bars with runelike symbols graven all over them. He thought he'd seen a similar chain, earlier and somewhere else in Ult Tower, standing stiffly out from a wall like a flagstaff, with garments hanging from it. So perhaps this one could be made to go rigid and defy gravity, too.

The fourth pouch… oh, hell, he couldn't even keep them straight in his mind. Time to find a high spot in the forest, so he could see if anything came creeping up on him-he hoped-and stop for a rest, to go through all this stuff.

He peered around.

Ah. There. The stream curving right around it on three sides, so I can't get lost and I'm safe. Unless there's something in that monster tree right in the middle of it.

He tried to peer up through leafy boughs-and shrugged. There could be an army of Dark Helms up there, perched on every branch, and he'd not know until they started pelting him with things. Drawn daggers, for instance.

He winced, clambered up to the high spot, and sat down, instantly creating a tangle of scabbards, sheaths,