Dragonlance - Tales of the Fifth Age - Heroes and Fools by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

Author:Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman [Weis, Margaret & Hickman, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Action & Adventure, Dragons, Monsters, Magic, Heroes
ISBN: 9780786913466
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Published: 1999-07-01T07:00:00+00:00

The Perfect Plan

Linda P. Baker

Demial kept the door of the hut latched tight. She kept the heavy curtains drawn, edges overlapping, shutting out the light, the stars, and prying eyes.

No one else in the tiny village of Toral barred their doors and covered their windows. They went about their lives as they had before Ariakan’s army had come, over a year before, almost as they had before the war. It was as if they were denying that anything dark and hurtful would ever come into the small mountain village again.

Demial knew that wasn’t so. After all, she had fought in the war, hadn’t she? It wasn’t really darkness or the memories that she thought to keep out, though. It was nosy neighbors.

She kept the curtains closed all the time, and she dropped the wooden bar securely into place every night, even before she sat down alone to her meal. She checked the door and the windows again every morning before she picked up the staff that stood beside her fireplace. She checked them before she cast a spell with the staff that had belonged to a Nightlord, the gray-robed mage who had been her war leader, mentor, and teacher, who had taken Demial under her wing and out of this village. As she did each morning, she cleared a space before the cold fireplace and knelt there, with the plain, wooden staff in her hands. No words for the spell came into her mind, as they once had, memorized perfectly. Magic didn’t work the way it had before the gods departed at the end of the Chaos War. The magic should not have worked at all, not without the power of Takhisis, the dark goddess who had ruled the Gray Wizards. It did work, however, and for that Demial was grateful. She didn’t question. She merely accepted the gift that had been left to her. She asked only what she needed of the staff: warmth and food and sometimes some inconsequential, frivolous thing. Not too often a frivolous thing, because she feared that the staff’s power was limited, that it would not answer her requests indefinitely.

This morning, as every morning since she’d joined Quinn’s quest to reopen the mine, she asked only for a small amount of strength, enough to make her day go well. Asking to be just a little bit stronger than her tall, thin frame allowed was not a frivolous thing.

She clasped the staff across her body, her fingers finding a comfortable grip on it. The thick top was carved in the rough image of a dragon claw and was sharp edged with its hint of rough dragon scales. The roughness smoothed out, however, as the carved whorls began their graceful corkscrew down the staff, narrowing, growing farther apart until there was only smooth wood leading down to the brass-clad tip. There were no words for the magic now, no memorized spells, no books of ancient runes. There were only her thoughts, her wish for what she wanted the staff to do.

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