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DARK HOLES
Danica saw the cave entrance far in the distance, long before she realized that the trail of death led to that spot She knew instinctively that such a creature as had caused that withering and decay would not long bask in sunlight
The trail meandered a bit, but soon bent toward the dark face of the distant on had taken flight
When Danica at last arrived at the base of the mountain, she looked up at the black reat wyrh in the mountain wall, inaccessible to any unable to fly
Or unable to climb with the skill of a master monk
Danica closed her eyes and fell inside herself, connecting mind and body in cohter, as unbounded by the press of gravity Slowly, the wo her chin to scan a path a the stones Few others would have seen e no wider than a finger seee upon which five men could stand breast
She e and locked her fingers in place, counting out the cadence of the next feweffortless, walking the wall on all fours, hands and feet reaching and stretching Danicatoward better ridges, more broken stones and better handholds
The sun crossed its midpoint, and still Danica clinored its cold bite, and would not let it dislodge her Ofher ascent was that the creature she sought was a beast of the darkness, and the last place she wanted to be when it eed from its hole was splayed out on a cliff face, hundreds of feet above the ground
With that unsettling thought inholds, however tentatively She constantly shifted her weight to it As she neared the cave opening, the ascent became more broken and not so steep, with several stretches where she could pause and catch her breath One long expanse wasthat trail and paid extra care to use any cover she could find a the path that led to the stygian darkness of the waiting cave
Nu and counting soht, to count and to add, to seek patterns in the hts
Ivan Bouldershoulder had always been fond of nuh the proper ratios and calculating the necessary strength of each piece had been areatest joys As when Cadderly had coendary hand crossbows Working froe and intuition alone, Ivan had replicated those delicate weapons to near perfection
Nu was about nuued Everything could be reduced to numbers and deconstructed at will fro the reducing was great enough to understand the patterns involved
That was the difference between the ods could reduce life itself to nuhts had never found a homatic Ivan Bouldershoulder, but apparently, he realized, Cadderly’s serer iht of the io conversation was the only thing that made the befuddled dwarf realize that the nu more than a purposeful and malicious distraction
Ivan felt as if he aking up beside a babbling brook, thathim a real space outside of his drea his thoughts fully to the waking world
The numbers continued to flash more insistently The patterns flickered and disappeared Distraction
So him off balance and out of sorts, away froainst the intrusion, because his eyes were already closed
No, not closed, he suddenly understood - whether they were closed or not was of no practical consequence, because he wasn’t the one using the aihts
And so had kept him there - some force, some creature, some intellect that was inside him
The dwarf had broken the enchantment of distraction and lashed out froh he flailed blindly
Aon a rocky slope north of Mithral Hall, of a piece of shale spinning through the air and taking the arm from his brother
As abruptly as Pikel’s arh the darkness of his ownflashes and moments of his own identity
He found another recollection, a ti substantial, just a sensation of freedo his beard out behind him
A brief flicker ofbefore hi metaphor to the dwarf He felt the same way, but within himself It was as if his mind had been lifted above the landscape of all that was Ivan Bouldershoulder, as if he were overlooking hihts
But at least he knew He had escaped the distraction and knew again who he was
Ivan began to fight He grabbed at every hts to ensure that what he remembered was true He saw Pikel, he saw Cadderly, he saw Danica and the kids
The kids
He had watched the, helpless critters to adulthood, tall and straight and full of potential He took pride in them as if they were his own children, and he would not let that notion go
No creature in all the multiverse was more stubborn than a dwarf, after all And fearves were as far-thinking as Ivan Bouldershoulder He began inition of the creature telepathically doin a flow of information back the other way
He knew his surroundings through theHe understood the threats around him, to some extent, and he felt keenly the power of the dracolich
If he wanted to survive, if there was any way to survive, he knew, in that moment when he would at last find a way to reassert control of his mortal coil, that he couldn’t allow himself to be confused and couldn’t allow himself to be surprised
The face of Ivan Bouldershoulder, controlled solely by Yharaskrik the illithid, s up
Because of the illithid’s own uncertainty, Yharaskrik knew, for as it had begun to consider the wisdo fully to consciousness within the draconic host of Crenshinibon, so it had also, unavoidably, lessened its grasp on the dwarf
Yharaskrik understood well that once a possessed creature of strong intellect and determination - a dwarf perhaps more than any other race - had broken out of the initial mental invasion of psionic power, it was like a trickle of water through an earthen damIt couldn’t be stopped, even if Yharaskrik had decided that it was critical to stop it It could be teed, perhaps, but never fully stopped, for all of the mental cobwebs Yharaskrik had enacted to keep the dwarf locked in a dark hole were beginning to erode
The illithid aht before the waitingthe dwarf’sjust a bit of consciousness within Ivan so that it could feel the desperate terror and the last moments of the dwarf’s life
What, after all, could beso inti’s final moments?
And indeed, Yharaskrik had done that very thing many times before, as it pondered the truth of death To the illithid’s frustration, however, never had it been able to send its own consciousness over into the realm of death with that of its host
It didn’t matter, the illithid decided as it pushed away those past failures with athose ulti upon the deepest privacy any sentient creature could ever know
Through the eyes of Ivan Bouldershoulder, Yharaskrik looked upon Hephaestus The dracolich lay curled at the back of the largest chamber in the , but in a state of deepof the victories to come
No, the illithid decided as it sensed the dragon’s continuing feelings of superiority Yharaskrik would not give Hephaestus the satisfaction of that particular kill
Methodically, the illithid in the dwarf’s body walked over to retrieve Ivan’s antlered hel the plan as it went It wanted to feel the dwarf’s extended terror, his fury and his fear Yharaskrikthe four undead wizards to follow, and stepped out onto the rocky descent a short way, then paused, calling Fetchigrol to its side
On Yharaskrik’s command, the specter crossed the unseen threshold once more, past the realm of death and into the other world, the Shadowfell, that had been opened to the Weave
Yharaskrik paused only a hts of Ivan Bouldershoulder
Then it let the dwarf have the control and sensibilities of his mortal coil back once more, surrounded by enemies and with nowhere to run, and no way to win
Ivan knehere he was and as coarnered that from the consciousness of his possessor He felt no shock fro, and so Ivan Bouldershoulder woke up swinging His axe hu cuts He s up a cloud of flecks of blackened skin His backhand opened wide the chest of a second zo away When another came in at him behind the arc of that cut, Ivan lowered his head and butted hard, the deer antlers on his hel beast
With a groan, the undead wizard fell backward off the hel right in the side of its head The axe blew through and dived into the fourth as it shuffled up to grasp at the dwarf
By that time, Ivan’s initial fury played out, more enemies swarmed toward him: huddled, fleshy beasts
Ivan sprinted down the trail, away froh he knew fro drop But the invading consciousness still hovered over hi just such a run
So Ivan turned and bulled his way through the close pursuit of a pair of crawling beasts, knocking theth He ran all the faster, right for the cave ht into it