Death Gate Cycle 4 - Serpent Mage by Serpent Mage v1.2

Author:Serpent Mage v1.2 [v1.2, Serpent Mage]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-07-18T08:21:41+00:00

CHAPTER 17

GARGAN, CHELESTRA

WE are home. Home!

I am torn between joy and sadness, for a terrible tragedy occurred while we were gone ... But I’ll write down all, everything in its proper time and place.

As I work on this, I’m sitting in my room. Around me are all my dear possessions, just the way I left them. This astonished me beyond words. Dwarves are very practical-minded about death, unlike two other races I could mention. When a dwarf dies, his family and friends hold a night of mourning for their loss and a day of celebration for the dead one’s gain in now being a part of the One. Following that, all the dwarf’s possessions are distributed among family and friends. His room is cleaned out and another dwarf moves in.

I had assumed that the custom would have been followed in my case and was prepared for the fact that Cousin Fricka would, by now, be ensconced in my room. In fact, I don’t mind admitting that I was looking forward to bouncing my obnoxious relative and her curly side whiskers out the door and down the stairs.

Living space is a problem for dwarves on the seamoons. Since dwarves prefer to dwell below ground level, they build their homes in tunnels beneath the seamoon’s landmass. Unfortunately, due to the fact that the inner core of the moon is, in reality, a living being, the dwarves found themselves unable to go beyond a certain point. The dwarves don’t know the moon is alive; they struck a protective mass through which they could not penetrate.

However, it seems that my mother could not get it into her head that I was truly dead. She steadfastly refused to believe it, although Aunt Gertrude (so my father told me) actually went so far as to hint that my mother had lost her mind. At which point, according to my father, my mother decided to demonstrate her skill in ax-throwing, offering in a rather vigorous and alarming fashion to “part Gertrude’s hair” or words to that effect.

While my mother was hauling the battle-ax down from its place on the wall, my father mentioned casually to my aunt that while my mother’s throwing arm was still strong, her aim was not what it had been in their youth. Aunt Gertrude remembered suddenly that she had business elsewhere. She pried Fricka out of my room (probably with a winch) and they flounced off.

But I’ve wandered down a side tunnel, as the saying goes. The last I wrote, we were heading in our ship toward certain death and now we’re home safe and sound, and I really have no idea how or why.

No heroic battles in the dragon-snake cave. Just a lot of talk in a language none of us understood. Our ship broke up. We had to swim to the surface. The dragon-snakes found us, and instead of murdering us, they gave us presents and sent us into a cave. Then Haplo stayed up all night talking to them.

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