Williams, Michael - Dragonlance Villians 06 - The Dark Queen by Williams Michael

Author:Williams, Michael [Williams, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy - General, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Krynn (Imaginary place), Fiction - Fantasy, General, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fantastic fiction, Fiction, Puzzles, Games, Science Fiction - Series
ISBN: 9781560769255
Publisher: TSR
Published: 1994-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

They had been forest at one time, these ranging caverns beneath the city of Istar. A hundred thousand years ago, or two hundred, the volcanoes, now dormant and lying beneath the great Istarian lake, erupted in the last of the great geologic disasters, before the All Saints War of the ancient Age of Dreams. It had buried this landscape beneath lava and ash, and the caverns had formed slowly, inexorably, beneath the rise and fall of a hundred civilizations. The five races stepped forth onto the face of the planet, the House of Silvanos rose in the young forest to the south, the gnomes were born, and the Graystone formed in the divine forges of Reorx. It was then that the strange process of opalescence began in the petrified trunks and limbs of the buried trees, and water from the new lake hollowed passages through the porous volcanic rock.

Now, after thousands of years, living eyes marveled at the immemorial forest, and twenty years of pick and shovel had not yet spoiled its eerie, unearthly beauty. In the smokeless torches of the elven miners, the fossilized landscape glittered as though touched with an ancient, frozen dew. Three elves descended the long, narrow passage between petrified oaks, glowing amber lamps in their hands. They were masked against the dust, and their green eyes flashed like stars in their ash-blackened faces.

This night, they were not searching for opals. Despite the Kingpriest's orders, all mining had been set aside to search for the child.

They had imagined her dead, along with her mother and three other elves, when this part of the cavern collapsed two nights earlier. They had sent out runners and scouts into the midst of the rubble, clambering and crawling back into the darkness until they could clamber and crawl no more, calling the names of the five missing miners.

Tessera and Parian. Gleam. Cabuchon.

Little Taglio. Only a child, but old enough to hold a lamp while the others worked. Just this afternoon they had heard her crying. Now, having combed the most accessible regions of the mines, the Lucanesti had secretly sent several of their strongest and best into more perilous depths, the realm of cave-in and rockslide, and of the spirit naga—the serpentine monsters with the tranquil human faces, whose spellcraft dried the opalescent bodies of the Lucanesti and left them dust and brittle bone in the deep, forgotten corridors.

Dangerous territory indeed, and the sound of the elf-child's crying had haunted them for hours, as the three gaunt miners dug and scrabbled toward the source of the sound.

The oldest of the searchers, Spinel, held the lamp above the younger, stronger elves. Seventeen hundred years had dulled the sharpness of his eyes, the power and resilience of his arms, but the old elf was shrewd, tunnelwise, just as aligned to the dark shift of corridor and passage as the dwarves he had fought for centuries under the earth.

He held the light in hopes of finding one of his vanishing people.

Once a

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