Dragondoom

CHAPTER 11

Year’s Long Night, 3E1600

[Two Years Past]

Always and ever did Elgo’s prideful mind return to the problem of Sleeth: how to slay the great Cold-drake and claim his hoard. A year went by, then another, and one more and more, until six all told had fled. And every year in the long winter when curtains of werelight high in the auroral night shifted and burned with strange colors, his thoughts would turn to great deeds of derring-do. And his canny mind found ways to accomplish these deeds. He would run down Flame, the red stallion, giving the mighty steed to Aranor. He would steal the fair Arianne from the very fortress of Hagor, taking her as his willing bride. He would slay Golga, single-handedly, for he ever remembered Ruric’s words about his responsibilities for the lives of others. He would do all these things and more, winning great renown; yet ever his mind returned to Sleeth and the killing of a Dragon.

And he thought upon all the things that Ruric had said, and Elyn, and even the words of Trent, searching for clues, searching for a way to do the deed, remembering his own oath.

And finally, one frigid night in a darkened castle his voice whispered in awed revelation, his words growing in strength with his conviction: “It is so simple. . so very simple. By Adon”-his wild laughter filled the enshadowed halls-“By Adon!” For Elgo had at last conceived his plan for defeating Sleeth, a plan that six months later upon Year’s Long Day would bring him and forty others into a vale along the Rigga Mountains, a vale leading unto the sundered doors of lost Blackstone, unto the very holt of the great Cold-drake.

But that was yet to be, and on this bodeful night when his plan was first cast, high in the auroral midnight sky the shifting curtains of spectral werelight burned a ghastly red. . a rending, bloody red.