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The Floodgate
Prelude
The battle had turned against the laraken. The monster knew this: its enemies did not. They continued to fight with the frenzy peculiar to brave men who wish to die well.
Men had come into the Swamp of Akhlaur before, many times. All had fed the laraken’s hunger for magic. But now came men armed not with enchantments, but with wicked swords and pikes and arrows. Swift on the heels of these warriors came a strange elfwoman who was neither food nor foe. The laraken knew, without understanding how or why, that the elf also sensed the coming defeat, and that she was not pleased.
The humans’ eyes could not yet perceive their victory. They saw the torn bodies of their comrades. They saw the mighty lion-centaur, the elfwoman’s guardian, lying broken and still amid the lurching roots of a bilboa tree. The battle had been fierce; many had died. But for the first time in its existence, the laraken fought against creatures that it could not eat.
There had been precious little magic in this army, other than the spells the laraken took from the elfwoman and the tiny draught of life-magic offered by the tall, red-haired warrior. The laraken greedily drained this scant sustenance, leaving the human as translucent as a dewdrop. Yet the man lived, and fought on!
So did his comrades, and none more fiercely than the dark-hawk human that clung to the laraken’s back like a tick, digging and slashing and tormenting until the monster shrieked with rage and pain. But the laraken’s most formidable foe was the small female, a human whose eyes were dark pools of magic and whose voice could not be ignored. She lured the laraken onward, when every instinct urged the monster to flee back to the tiny trickle of water that was its main sustenance.
She Who Called perched in a tall tree, far above the persistent warriors and the skirl and flash of their mundane weapons. The magical song pouring from her filled the laraken with mingled longing and dread. The laraken’s hunger was a dagger-sharp pain in its gut, but it could not feed upon the singer’s magic. Frustration gave way to fear: the laraken remembered with terror the long-ago wizard whose magic could not be eaten.
A flash of silver lunged for the laraken’s eye and exploded into a burst of liquid agony. The laraken screamed and clamped its upper pair of hands against its ruined eye, as the second pair raked frantically at the warrior who had blinded it. At last the man released his hold and rolled down the laraken’s back.
At that moment the elfwoman shouted a strange word and tossed a gleaming token into the bubbling spill of magic. In an instant, the bubbles grew into iridescent, man-sized domes, which burst into sprays of life-giving droplets.
The laraken was starving, nearly insane with need and pain. Its agony was also its salvation: in a desperate, mindless rush for survival, the laraken broke free of the singer’s grip and raced toward the pool of magic. It plunged into the water, moving as instinctively as a creature aflame.
The sudden waterfall rush dwarfed the fury of battle, the winds of a monsoon. The laraken fell – or perhaps flew -- certain only of a whirling white terror, and the fierce roar of water, and the thunderous, hollow thud of the magical gate slamming shut behind it.
And then, silence.
The laraken had no sense of time, and could not tell how long it floated free. Wounded in battle, dazed and disoriented by the song of She Who Calls, the laraken gave itself up to the life-giving waters. What this place was it could not say, but it recognized the primal magic, and had flown to the source of it with no more thought than an arrow gives to the target.
After a time the laraken began to take note of its new surroundings. Water was everywhere, but not like the water in its home swamp. This was liquid magic – less dense than mundane water, and more alive than air. The laraken could breathe this water, and each breath brought renewed strength.
The monster moved forward cautiously, speeding its way with swimming motions its four webbed and taloned hands. It did not see the beauty of the coral palaces or the undulating sea forest that was as lush and colorful as a jungle. It paid no heed to the intricately carved arch that framed the place where the magical gate lurked, just beyond sight and sense. The eel-like appendages that surrounded the laraken’s demon face stirred into life. Their yellow eyes snapped open and took focus, jaws yawned wide and fangs extended like unsheathed claws. The eels began to writhe about, snapping hungrily at a passing school of tiny, jewel-colored fish. The laraken paid less heed to its predatory appendages than a mermaid might give to her locks of free-floating hair. It sniffed the water for magic, instinctively testing for strong currents and high concentrations, as a shark might scent for blood.
The scent of magic came suddenly, riding a wave of acrid, gut-clenching fear. The laraken spun, snarling, to face the unknown danger.
A white blur closed in. The laraken made out a giant set of jaws, vast enough to swallow its twelve-foot prey. Wedge-shaped teeth lined the jaws in multiple rows. And beyond that, bone.
Instinct prompted the laraken to flee, but it sensed the futility of this course. Instead, the laraken leaped directly into the tooth-and-bone gate, diving powerfully for the open water beyond those white ribs.
But the bones folded in around the shark’s prey. Cartilage shrieked in protest as the ribs clattered together and laced like tightly entwined fingers. The laraken’s dive was cut short: its head slammed into the narrow end of the basket-weave of bones. One of the eel appendages was sheered off, and the head tumbled free through the roiling waters. A passing fish snapped it up and darted triumphantly away.
Surprised but still confident, the laraken wrapped its four massive hands around a pair of ribs and began to wrench them apart. But the skeleton was not brittle enough to break. The cartilage gave a little, not enough.
The laraken threw back its hideous head and shrieked like a demon new to damnation.
Sound carried weirdly through the liquid magic, sending explosions of bubbles to mingle with the thrashing currents. The monster hurled itself from one side of its prison to another until it was battered and bleeding. But the skeletal shark merely kept swimming, long past the blood-lure of dying prey.
Magic began to play at the edges of the frenzied monster’s consciousness, a magic more focused and pungent than that of the water. Instinctively the laraken reached for it, but could not draw it in. The resistance was like that elfwoman’s, only stronger. Stronger even than the magic of She Who Calls. Stronger, and suddenly, so very familiar.
Terror seized the laraken. It huddled into the farthest depths of its skeletal captor and began to shriek mindlessly, like a baby monkey that clings to a tree limb and awaits the jaws of a jungle cat.
Then the laraken saw the wizard, and its raw throat clenched into strangled silence.
Akhlaur, once the most famed and feared death-wizard in all of Halruaa, stalked toward the shark. Two hundred years in the Elemental Plane of Water had changed the necromancer. He was still a powerful man, tall and lank, with fine black eyes and well-formed features. But now tiny scales covered his skin, and gills shaped like twin lightning bolts slashed the sides of his neck. The fingers that wrapped around the wizard’s staff were long and webbed.
It was apparent that Akhlaur had not just survived, but prospered. His robes were fashioned of fine green linen such as the swamp elves wove, and embroidered with runes fashioned from black seed pearls. His necromantic artistry was much in evidence: the staff he carried was not wood, but a living eel locked into a fierce, rigid pose. Small spats of lightning sizzled from the creature’s fixed snarl and sent sparkles of light shimmering across the wizard’s scaly, bald head.
Akhlaur reached out with his eel staff and stroked the shark’s skull, rubbing between its empty, glowing eyes – an absent, almost fond gesture.
"What have you brought me, my pet?" he inquired in a whispery tone.
The laraken marshaled its fear and fury into a single roar, sending an explosion of bubbles and a long, wavering echo spiraling out into the water.
The wizard, intrigued but not impressed, leaned in for a better look. "By curse and current! I know you."
Akhlaur’s gills flared with excitement as he considered the implications of this latest capture. This creature, the spawn of water demons and elven magic, was a link to his homeland. If it had found a way into the Elemental Plane of Water, then perhaps at long last he, Akhlaur, could find a way out!
"Who sent you, little monster?" the wizard demanded. "And what do you have for me this time?"
The questions were no more than the habit of a man grown accustomed to the sound of his own voice. Akhlaur did not expect or require answers. The necromancer leaned his staff against a coral obelisk and began to gesture with both hands, easily tracing a spell he had not cast in two centuries.
Hard-won magic seeped inexorably away from the captured monster. The laraken clutched its bony cage for support as the wizard drained it to some minutely defined point just short of death.
Akhlaur savored the stolen spells as a gourmand might consider a sip of wine. "Interesting. Most interesting," he mused. "A blend of all the magical schools, with some Azuthan overtones. Definitely Halruaan spells, but the chant inflections are slightly off, as if the wizard was not a native speaker. The accent is . . . Elfish?"
The wizard considered. Yes, definitely elven, definitely Azuthan, and probably female. He snorted, sending a rift of bubble rising. "Halruaa is in a sorry state indeed. Elven wenches and Azuthan priests!" he said scornfully.
Yet the prospect did not displease him. He had slain hundreds of elves, outwitted and overpowered scores of priests. He could easily overcome such foes.
Or so he could, if only he could win free of this place.
For two hundred years, Akhlaur, the greatest necromancer of his time, had tried to do just that. Though he had not succeeded, someone else had, assuming that "success" was defined by the ability to open the gate wide enough to admit the laraken.
No one knew better than he, the laraken’s creator, that this should have been impossible. Any wizard who came near the laraken should have been destroyed, his magic and then his life drained away by the monster’s voracious need. Akhlaur was invulnerable, of course, but he had created the monster, painstakingly fashioning the channels that allowed the laraken’s stolen magic to flow to himself. It was a masterful spell, one of his finest achievements and the very height of the necromantic arts. Creating the laraken had been the work of many years, for several earlier attempts had ended in failure when the growing laraken spawn absorbed the magic and life-force of its female host many months before birth. Not until Akhlaur had thought to forge a death-bond with the green elf wench he’d nicknamed Kiva –
His thought pattern broke off abruptly, stumbling over a startling notion.
"No," he muttered. "It is not possible."
But it was. Astonishing, but possible. Kiva had been witness to some of his most innovative experiments. She had clung to life when thousands of others had yielded to pain and despair. She had even survived the laraken’s birth – barely, but she had survived. Once her purpose was fulfilled, Akhlaur had wasted no more thought on her. Apparently, he should have. But who would have thought that the scrawny elf wench was strong enough not just to survive, but to learn?
Though Akhlaur did not want to believe this, he did. Somehow Kiva’s resistance to the laraken’s hunger had outlived the punishing birth. It was logical that she could come near enough to the laraken to open the gate and let the monster in, even though that meant losing some of her wizardly spells to the monster’s hunger.
But why would she do this? Akhlaur studied the hideous beast pinioned inside the undead shark. What prompted Kiva to risk herself to send the laraken here? Not maternal warmth, surely. Elves could not abide the notion of mixing their blood with humans, much less water demons. No, the only motive that Akhlaur would perceive was vengeance.
Even so, surely Kiva understood that the laraken could not kill its creator. Therefore she must have sent the monster not as an assassin, but as a sign. A herald, perhaps, like the pompous fools who shouted out the names of noblemen before they approached the king.
The wizard glanced at the coral obelisk, and the neat runes he had carved to mark the passing of each moon tide. It was a single standing stone, such as elves and ancient barbarians raised, and it pointed to the gate. Akhlaur could feel the pull of the full moon, even through the miniscule opening his battle with the water demon, and his eventual defeat and capture, had left behind. When the moon was full and high above his Halruaa, the obelisk glowed with light, pointing the way home like the very finger of the goddess. Soon, very soon, when the moon was full and the path between the worlds shortest and surest, a vengeful and astonishingly powerful Kiva would come to repay him with his own coin.
"Come, then, little elf," he crooned, gazing in the direction of the invisible gate. "Come, and learn the full truth of the death-bond we forged."