These words were sufficient to bring a trickling of recollection back to him. It took a few moments for the surge of memories to emerge, wash over his mind, then sink again into their proper channels. “Dyvers! The black sapphires!”
“That is where you were slain. The gems you seek are here in Shadowrealm.”
“But if-”
The Shadowking raised his pearly-palmed hand. “The forces which split this plane now impinge upon Me most sorely. Before long I shall be as malign as the duskdrake. The gloams now work to undo the weal wrought by your gift, Prince Gord. I resist their evil now only through the renewed force granted by the power of Shadowfire. Leave Me now, for I must fight off the attack alone. When there comes an interlude in the assault, I will summon you again, for there is urgent need of your office in this matter. More I cannot say, now, for who can tell what will occur soon?”
With that the lord of the murky plane seated himself with determination stamped on his features. The Shadowking was about to fight a battle, and in it he had to stand alone.
Chapter 21
Snuffdark, the blackness after twilight, lay upon Shadowrealm as a lightless mantle of oppression. Even the folk of shadow were subject to the totality. Its strongest were near-blind, weak with the inky darkness that oppressed the plane.
In this grim midnight Gord walked alone over a landscape that moved sluggishly and with convulsive writhings. Snuffdark’s black wind howled as a dirge, and even the fearsome beasts of Shadowrealm cowered in their dens, seeking solace in deep lair or high, awaiting the return of dusk to their somber world.
Not so the black-clad young adventurer now named Count of Twilight. He strode through the pitch dark with sureness of step and firm purpose, a short-bladed sword clenched fast in his right hand. Upon the pommel of this weapon was a phosphorescent jewel, a fire opal with a strange, greenish glow in its core. By its power Gord saw, and the magical sight was clear and strong. Shadowking himself had given him the talisman, for the lord of shadows no longer had need of the gem. He had the tenfold might of Shadowfire.
Imprimus. Gloam of greatest evil, vampiric master of a fell coven. Imprimus, lich among gloams. It was this terrible gloam whom Gord sought amidst the storm of Snuffdark. Somewhere within the wilderness of the writhing plane Imprimus lurked in a secret stronghold, awaiting his moment. The foul being would settle for a sundering of the Shadowrealm, a dual direction. He and his evil circle would use their malign powers to force schizophrenia upon Shadow-king, a permanent division of mind so as to enable them to govern the plane half of the time. Gord knew that such an occurrence would turn the place toward darker and darker ends. The mind of its monarch would erode, and at some point, as the evil within Shadowrealm grew, make the tortured brain weak and vulnerable. Then would come the final assault, and Imprimus would be Lord of Shadows… le roi est mort, vive le roi noir!
Gord stood alone between Imprimus and his ultimate desire, but at best the gloam just suspected the fact. Now, during the deepness of Snuffdark, all of Shadowrealm was at its lowest energy level, and Imprimus was weak and mentally blind.
As he moved purposefully across the weird terrain, Gord sought for certain signs that would indicate the presence of the gloam-lich called Imprimus. In this land of darkness, now smothered by so great a gloom as to defy description, the young adventurer looked for a blackness of blacknesses, a greater and more terrible darkness than any that grasped Shadowrealm. Such intensity of black was the key to where the gloam lurked, for Imprimus’ own evil gathered the pitchy stuff of Snuffdark to it as a lodestone draws iron.
The green tongue of luminescence within the heart of the fire-opal talisman lent luminosity to Gord’s own eyes, and had any been about in the impenetrable murk of Snuffdark they could have observed this weird for themselves. But no shadow-creature stirred, and so Gord strode through the blackness alone, unobserved. Only the hollow moaning of the life-sapping black wind accompanied him as he sought his foe. Then the monotonous, empty sound changed.
“Hoo, hoo, hoooo…” the relentless wind seemed to call. It was a sound somewhere in the lowest audible register, a groaning bellow halfway between a laugh and a lamentation. “Hoo, hoo, ohoooo!” This time the ebon air carried the sound more strongly and with spine-chilling effect. It was no trick of the wind, but the call of some creature abroad in the suffocation of Snuffdark!
When the mournful cry sounded yet a third time, stronger still, Gord blinked and dampened his visual power. Now the young adventurer could see but a bowshot’s distance through the swirling eddies of inky blackness, as if he were an arctic wayfarer peering through the swirling snows of a blizzard. Vision opened, then diminished, as Snuffdark’s winds drove Shadowrealm into frenzied movement and tenebrous stuff swirled and drifted across the landscape.
A crunching sound came, carried by the black wind. The noise was the sound of something crushing the very substance of the shadow-plane beneath it as it came. Monstrous claws compressing the stuff of the place, crushing and crumbling it to atoms by the sheer mass of its colossal form. “Hoooo, hooooo, oohoooo!” came again now, as loud as if the sound were coming from within Gord himself.
Only one thing could be so huge, one creature sound so fearsome a call. The duskdrake was hunting for Gord, even as Gord hunted for Imprimus. No other monster of shadow could abide the Snuffdark, none but the duskdrake was so large. Knowing that flight was useless, Gord resigned himself to facing the oncoming beast. Better to die fighting than to be caught from behind and devoured as a hound snaps up a hare.
The sooty swirling lessened, revealing a jagged mass of shadowstuff a hundred yards distant. Gord couldn’t recall a spire of stone there a minute ago, yet now he clearly saw a great mass of jagged rocks. Then the tall spire crowning the crag split to reveal a cavelike opening, and from this deep hole came a rush of vapors that carried a fell calclass="underline" “Ohoo, oohooo, ooooah!” The duskdrake had sighted its prey.
Shadow-ground trembled under Gord’s feet as the mighty monster trod upon the land, each step covering a dozen yards, flattening whatever it impacted with. “Futter you!” Gord shouted defiantly. The shadows roiled and flattened around the monstrous beast-a reaction to Gord’s words? Evidently the dusk-drake understood human speech.
Powerful as it was, the duskdrake was not immune to the effects of Snuffdark. The heavy darkness slowed the thing. Its angular neck moved forward and downward, parallel to the ground. It walked ponderously, as if the gigantic beast were moving to the rhythms of a stately gavotte played in courtly half-time. As the hyperdragon moved it issued a ferocious growling, a rumbling that began in its belly and thundered upward, exiting along with a steaming hiss through its massive maw. With the terrible sound came a stream of shadow-fire.
The dim flames issuing from its mouth were not at all similar to the fiery heart of the great black opal. The hissing gout of burning heat was gray and as transparent as a crystal of smoky quartz, although it was shot through with near-black tongues and had tips of diamondlike brilliance. The belching shadow-fire shot across the swarthy stuff of the plane, devouring all in its path, leaving shadow-rock superheated to a smoking dun, washing over the place where Gord had stood defiantly a split-second before. Gord had thought the shadowdragon’s breath fearsome, but now he knew the true meaning of the word.