Thunder rolled overhead, and Gaven leaped at the giant troll, channeling all his anger into each swing of his blade. It dropped to one knee, nearly overwhelmed, and Senya ran up its back to drive her sword into the base of its skull. The troll fell hard, throwing Senya to sprawl on the ground, but it did not move again. The fight was over. As Gaven tried to catch his breath, silence fell back over the ruins of Paluur Draal.
Gaven whirled on Haldren. “So what is it, Haldren? Are you dragging me along to help you on your fool’s quest, or do you want to get rid of me?” He stood nose to nose with the old man again, and grabbed a fistful of Haldren’s shirt. “Because if you want to get rid of me, I’ll go. There’s no need to kill me.”
“Don’t be absurd, Gaven.”
“Absurd? You nearly blasted me into the fires of Fernia!” “Hardly,” Haldren said.
Gaven suddenly felt like a small child getting a scolding, and his anger boiled. He pulled Haldren up so his toes just dragged on the ground. “I’m not an idiot, Haldren.”
“Of course, Gaven.” No trace of fear came through in Haldren’s voice. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you, certainly not kill you. I simply realized too late that you had moved into the area of my spell. I did try to warn you.”
Gaven realized that his threatening steps toward the retreating trolls had taken him closer to the center of the fiery blast, so Haldren’s excuse might have been true. That possibility did little to diminish Gaven’s rage, though. He pushed Haldren away and stalked over to Darraun, who crouched on the ground beside Cart.
It seemed the troll had gotten one good blow in before it fell. Cart’s left arm looked badly hurt-or did it hurt? Gaven realized he had no idea if the warforged felt pain. In any event, Darraun ran his hands over the damaged arm, and his touch straightened bent plates and knotted broken cords back together. It was amazing and strangely fascinating-although, he realized, it wasn’t too different in principle from the way a healer’s magic knit flesh and bone back together. That was just a magic he was more used to seeing.
While Darraun tended to his injuries, Gaven traced a finger in a groove that ran through the stone on which he sat. He didn’t like to watch a healer’s magic when it was his flesh being knit together. A flash of light drew his eyes up to Haldren, who had just cast a spell to brighten the darkness inside the cave from which the trolls had emerged.
“Finished,” Darraun said, and he rose to join the others, who were gathered around the cave entrance, staring upward.
Gaven started to get to his feet, but the groove he’d traced caught his attention. He had run his finger along a straight part of the groove, but it was not straight for long-it traced the outline of Kraken Bay.
“Behold!” Haldren announced, sweeping his arm across the cave entrance. “The sixteen gods of Dhakaan!”
Gaven brushed a thin coat of mud away from the stone, his heart racing. He glanced up at Haldren, but the sorcerer was completely absorbed in the spectacle within the cave. He looked back at his work, smiled, and tried to sweep mud back over the map he had uncovered.
Darraun looked over Haldren’s shoulder at the cavern beyond. The cave might have been natural in origin, but the ancient builders of the place had carefully enlarged it, hollowing the ceiling and smoothing the walls. The debris of a thousand years and the more recent remnants of the trolls’ habitation littered the floor, but as Darraun’s eyes followed the arches up he realized that the grandeur of the ancient city was far better preserved here than anywhere else they had been so far.
Sixteen enormous figures stood around the far wall, their stone heads near the ceiling and their feet a troll’s height above the floor. Most of the figures were proud hobgoblins, dressed in archaic armor and carrying ornate weapons. Two loomed taller than the others, bugbears with their hairy hides and fang-filled mouths, and one goblin crouched near the center of the frieze, half the size of the burly bugbears. As Darraun looked, Haldren started naming them.
“On the left end is Norrakath the Hunter, who slew the great serpent and roped in the sea with its corpse. When humans first came to Khorvaire, they identified him with Balinor.”
Norrakath was a fearsome bugbear, leaning on a bow that seemed to be made of the bones of some beast-perhaps the ribs of the great serpent. He was a far cry from any representation of Balinor Darraun had ever seen, though the god of the hunt was sometimes depicted as a half-orc. Balinor smiled in every depiction Darraun had seen. Norrakath, on the other hand, snarled like a beast.
Haldren continued. “Beside him is Uthrek the Keeper. He was so fearsome a god of death that the early humans adopted him completely into their beliefs, though his Goblin name disappeared. He remains the evil god of death, the Keeper.”
Uthrek was so gaunt as to be almost skeletal, perhaps intended to be an undead hobgoblin. Darraun had seen the Keeper depicted in similar fashion, but he was more commonly shown as a grossly fat human, hungry for the souls of the dead and a god of greed as well as death.
“Kin to Uthrek, beside him is Korthrek the Devourer, likewise adopted into human myth as one of the Dark Six.” The god of the stormy sea was a hobgoblin with the many-toothed jaws of a shark.
“Next is Tauroc the Hammer, god of the forge. Obviously identified with Onatar.” Darraun was used to seeing Onatar depicted as a dwarf, but he could easily see the similarities between this hobgoblin smith and the burly Onatar. The god’s hammer, in particular, appeared the same as in many modern depictions of the god.
“Then we have Kol Korran, or I should say Rantash Mul, the Thief.” Darraun started in surprise-this hobgoblin bore no resemblance whatsoever to any depiction of Kol Korran. Perhaps modern humans valued trade more highly than the ancient hobgoblins did, because Rantash Mul was sickly, sinister, and unpleasant. Kol Korran, by contrast, was usually shown as fat and cheerful.
“Next is Dukash the Lawbringer, sort of a culture hero of the Dhakaani. I’m afraid we humans neutered him when we identified him with Aureon. His exploits as a hobgoblin are something to read about.”
Darraun could see the contrast. Aureon was the god of knowledge as well as law, and he was usually depicted as a somewhat frail, elderly wizard-sometimes even as a gnome. Dukash, in contrast, was the most vibrant figure before them now. He looked ready to leap out of the frieze, and his craftiness shone in his eyes.
“And now we come to the great mystery of the Dhakaan Empire,” Haldren said, pointing at the figure in the middle. Its body had the erect posture of a hobgoblin, though it was taller even than the hulking bugbears at either end. Its face, however, had been completely obliterated. “This god was the greatest of the goblin pantheon. When the humans conquered Khorvaire, they identified some goblin gods with their own gods-Aureon and Kol Korran, Onatar and the other Sovereigns. Six goblin gods worked their way into human myth as the Dark Six. This one alone was suppressed, forgotten, struck from written legend, and wiped from memory.”
A voice at Darraun’s shoulder startled him. “The first of sixteen.” Darraun had not heard Gaven come up behind him.
“Yes, Gaven, the first of sixteen,” Haldren said. “The Gold Serpent whom the world has long since forgotten.”
It took Darraun a moment to remember where he had heard the words before, but then he could hear the cold, clear voice of Senya’s deathless ancestor in his mind. Snippets of that strange conversation between Gaven and the undying elder flashed through his mind.
In the first age of the world, sixteen dragons transcended their mortal forms to become like the Dragon Above who had made them.