A Slaver Dies

Krand stared at the ruined face of Drekk, a few scant inches away from his own. In his blood-dimmed vision, the warcaster’s eyes, lifeless as they were, seemed accusing. It seemed inconceivable that just hours before, this same face, and those same eyes, though brimming with life, had wilted and cowered before his anger. Krand thought it ironic that in death, the spellweaver’s gaze had acquired a forthrightness it had never possessed in life.

But then, irony was apparently the order of the day.

Krand ran over the sequence of events in his mind yet again, drowning out the pain from his injuries in another overwhelming tide of disbelief. It seemed impossible that it was just yesterday that he sent the spy to the Seven Pillared Hall to gather information about the adventurers that had encountered Drekk’s band in the Labyrinth. Even more unreal was the fact that the spy had returned, barely four hours ago, with his report — a report that contained nothing but good news insofar as Chief Krand was concerned.

The self-styled “heroes,” it seemed, had gotten into trouble with the Mages of Saarun when they killed the wizards’ chief enforcer, that vile ogre, Brugg, in a brawl at the Halfmoon Inn. One of the adventurers, the pale-haired human magus, had been captured and executed, his body hung from a gibbet in the center of the Hall. The remaining members of the band, the dwarf warrior and the dragonborn tactician, were in hiding, having been declared as outlaws by the mages that ruled the Hall. As far as Krand was concerned, this was a decisive end to whatever threat these meddling outsiders had posed to his Bloodreavers. The problem had sorted itself out.

On another front, the payment for the slaves he had sold to Clan Grimmerzhul had finally arrived. Two of the dark dwarves, sent by Lord Murkelmor himself, had arrived with the gold and several kegs of duergar ale. With good news all around, Krand had ordered the kegs broken open, and allowed his troops to hold an impromptu celebration. How could he have known the state of affairs would change so abruptly?

The first hint of trouble came when he heard one of the goblins shouting a warning about intruders. “Who would dare attack the Bloodreavers,” Krand remembered thinking at that point. Still, he responded quickly, grabbing his spear and ordering Drekk and the two duergar emissaries to accompany him downstairs to the main hall. Nothing could have prepared him though for the sight that greeted him at the foot of the stairs — a plate-clad dwarf swinging a dragon-headed warhammer, a dragonborn in mail yelling commands over the din of battle, a golden-haired elf sending a withering fire of arrows at his soldiers, and the supposedly dead mage calling down bursts of bright orange fire to scour the battlefield. Krand was nothing, however, if not decisive. He had the duergar charge in, while ordering Drekk to bring down arcane destruction on the heads of the intruders.

At the start, it looked like this would be enough. The duergar made short work of the wizard, pounding him back into the corpse he was already supposed to be. Drekk, in an apparent effort to redeem his earlier failure, pummeled the adventurers mercilessly with blasts of pure force, sending them reeling. All the while, the handful of hobgoblin soldiers he had at his disposal — the rest unfortunately, being drunk in the mess hall — used their longbows to good effect, felling the elf and the dragonborn.

But then his troops started to fall.

The two duergar died first, one caught in a furious flurry of hammer blows from the dwarven fighter, the other pierced multiple times by the arrows of the elven archer. Then Drekk died, shot through the eye by that hateful golden-haired bowman. And then, alone against three warriors, Krand fell.

As he now lay on the cold-stone floor of his own hall, his lifeblood pooling around him, he listened to the sounds of combat slowly subside. The accursed “heroes” were killing the last of his hobgoblins in the next room, it seemed. It would not be long now before he joined them in darkness.

As unrelenting tide of blood slowly consumed his vision, Krand thought how fate could indeed be fickle.

~ by mmphil on November 17, 2008.