He shuddered at the thought.
QUEEN OF THE MOUNTAIN
When the great wyrm Amrennathed, in peace and solitude, gave her last breath to the mountain, the village of Orunn died.
She knew it would be her last by the way the stone shifted, a final, protesting grate against scale and ribs that had shrunk to hold barely the breath of three men. Centuries had reshaped the mountain, sculpted it around her sinuous body, until bare stalactites plunged deep into her back, wormed thorny roots into her spine. There was no room left for life that was not stone.
Amrennathed couldn't see the changes in the mountain. Her far-staring eyes, bored out by stone into painful, dust-choked blindness long ago, gave her no hint as to the passage of time.
The dragon did not care to see her death approaching, nor had she acknowledged the loss other eyes. She had not cared to look at anything outside her mountain for a very long time. Do you hear me?
Her body was dying, but Amrennathed's mind was alive and working as furiously as it ever had against a foe. Time was her enemy now-only so much of it left to communicate her wishes, to pass on her legacy. Her thoughts were a fever raw and unfamiliar to the sedate mountain, and some of her words and desires may have been lost in the contest of wills.
Mountains, by nature and custom, are not easily stirred to speak, even to a dragon.
I have been patient. The dragon's mind-voice rumbled, banked against stone like settling embers. I have waited for you to slay my body, in your unhurried, meticulous way, a gift I would give to no living being. It is time for you to take the rest.
And from the mountain, in its unhurried way, came answer.
Aged as you are, we measure the centuries a pace apart. I will claim you, in time. We will become dust together a thousand years hence, as Faerun is reshaped, remade again and again.
Too long! Impatience flared-rock and slab felt the blow of the dragon's desperation. There must be certainty. I must know that what is in my mind and breast will not be left to scavenge.
If you leave nothing behind, will it be that Amrennathed herself never was?
This time, Amrennathed wasn't certain if it was the mountain speaking or her own traitorous thoughts.
It does not matter, the dragon insisted.
By the measure of your kind, will you have failed?
I am the measure of myself! Pride had not left Amrennathed's mind, though the mountain had laid waste to her body.
Arrow-bright, an image flashed before the stone. Unused to the hard color, light, and sound, the mountain shuddered at the sudden barrage of all three.
A Zhentarim spy crouched on his knees, head thrown back in agony as a purple-hued claw caressed his spine, shredding black robes and peeling a fine layer of flesh.
Radiances pulsed and fed from the man's slack mouth into the claw. Amrennathed's mind-voice was soft, at first coaxing, then demanding, as the man shrieked and sobbed and gave the last vestiges of the spells he'd gathered in his long life to the dragon.
The image dissolved in screams, and another memory swelled in its wake.
In a filthy Skullport loft, Iamras Sonmaire crouched before an altar of metal and bone, a bloodied dagger point thrust into the crooked planks next to his knees.
Runes glowed from the altar and the spine of the thick tome perched upon it. Their magic flooded the shuttered room with a sickly green light. Iamras trembled, wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve even as he fought to keep his other arm steady over the book. Blood flowed from a clumsy gash in his wrist into the runes, and the book hungrily drank.
Amrennathed felt amusement stir at this memory. She'd left him knowledge of the book's location and power but stripped the memory of how much was required for its opening from his mind. He would bleed out well before he re-learned what she had stolen from him.
I have raped the secrets of folk across Faerun entire, made hoard of them in place of coin-mountains, she whispered to the stone, as if all Faerun was indeed bent to listen. I have knowledge stored that kingdoms would bleed for and may still, if it is not allowed to pass with me. My body, my mind joined to yours, will be safe.
Safe from a fate you fear, from ghosts of the minds you've stolen.
Again, Amrennathed wondered if she was hearing her own voice echoing in rebuke. Either way, her once clever and manipulative mind was too weary to deny or circle the truth.
Yes. Safe. They will look for my bones and find empty stone. No one will beg secrets from a mountain. I will bury them in the deepest crevices where the lowliest creatures walk. Let them know the secrets ofFaerun's evils and her beauties, where great powers hide and sleep. Wisest of all, they will give no thought or care to my legacy. That is my wish.
None of us can know all that we leave behind.
But the mountain sensed the great wyrm fading. Its words became a sigh as it yielded at last, opening to Amrennathed's oldest, most closely kept magic.
Stone within stone within buried stone shifted and sighed in turn, bent, melted, and burned, reshaping ages of the world in one small space, for the beast that had slumbered within the mountain's breast for untold centuries.
Outside in the clear air, hundreds of feet above the joining, a pair of sharp-shinned hawks nested on a crooked slab of rock where the sun was kind. Beneath twig and talon, the mountain shuddered, heavy with the scent of burning rock and dragon death.
The female of the pair shrieked a cry and took flight, terrified as the unnatural scent wormed its way into the nest. Her talons came down in a rush of wings and scattering feathers onto her own eggs, crushing the shells.
Clouds of feathers separated and drifted down on the wind, far and down. They came to rest in a pool of soapy water at the bare feet of a woman who was singing softly to herself.
The old woman sang and scraped clothes over a wooden washboard in the same back and forth motion she'd used since her fingers had been straight and smooth with youth. She plucked stray feathers from the suds, added more soap and scraped harder, until her knuckle grated on wood, and came up raw from the water.
She didn't notice when the moss-covered rock behind her changed.
The green carpet joining stone to the nearby trees ran dark, purpling like a new bruise. It covered the tree in thick veins, blotting out the hot sun streaming behind.
Cast in sudden shadow, the old woman turned on her knees to look as the first wave of magic slammed her.
She overturned the bucket in her fall to the ground. At first, she thought it might be that her heart had finally failed her, a death, living alone on the mountainside, she had always assumed would be hers. She'd accepted, even welcomed that fate. It was not a bad way to die, not an undignified way. In the end, the pain would have been brief.
Gods' laughter, this was none of those things, the old woman thought, gasping for air and clutching her chest reflexively, though in reality it was her head that felt as if it would burst from the pressure.
Images careened through her mind: a mountain that spoke-her mountain-to a dragon that looked like it was made of purple stone.
"Am-Amrennathed." Dry lips formed the word, and a wave of fresh agony rippled over her. The name crowded more images into the old woman's mind, of wizards being drained to husks even as she was being filled up-up and over with… what? To her, it was only pain. She was drowning in it.
The old woman shuddered up to her knees and crawled blindly to the side of the mountain, grabbing at roots and stone to drag her body up the slippery rock.
"Please, lady," she sobbed out, as if the dragon might hear her, "I don't w-want this-"
Roots snapped, and she was falling again, but her ankle remained tangled with skirts and mountain. There was a second, harder crack, and the world went blessedly dark.