Drizzt - 20 - The Ghost King by James; Courtney

Author:James; Courtney
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-24T18:05:44.783847+00:00

The numbers continued to flash more insistently. The patterns flickered and disappeared. Distraction.

Something was keeping him off balance and out of sorts, away from consciousness itself. He couldn‟t close his eyes against the intrusion, because his eyes were already closed. No, not closed, he suddenly understood—whether they were closed or not was of no practical consequence, because he wasn‟t the one using them, or seeing through them. He was lost, wandering aimlessly within the swirl of his own thoughts. And something had put him there.

And something had kept him there—some force, some creature, some intellect that was inside him.

The dwarf had broken the enchantment of distraction and lashed out from the cocoon of

numbers, though he flailed blindly.

A memory flashed quickly through his thoughts, of fighting on a rocky slope north of Mithral Hall, of a piece of shale spinning through the air and taking the arm from his brother.

As abruptly as Pikel‟s arm, the memory was gone, but Ivan kept running through the darkness of his own mind, seeking flashes and moments of his own identity. He found another recollection, a time when he had flown on a dragon. It wasn‟t anything substantial, just a sensation of freedom, the wind blowing through his hair, dragging his beard out behind him.

A brief flicker of mountains‟ majesty unfolding before him. It seemed a fitting metaphor to the dwarf. He felt the same way, but within himself. It was as if his mind had been lifted above the landscape of all that was Ivan Bouldershoulder, as if he were overlooking himself from afar, a spectator in his own thoughts. But at least he knew. He had escaped the distraction and knew again who he was. Ivan began to fight. He grabbed at every memory and held it fast, steeling his thoughts to ensure that what he remembered was true. He saw Pikel, he saw Cadderly, he saw Danica and the kids. The kids.

He had watched them grow from drooling, helpless critters to adulthood, tall and straight and full of potential. He took pride in them as if they were his own children, and he would not let that notion go.

No creature in all the multiverse was more stubborn than a dwarf, after all. And few dwarves were as far-thinking as Ivan Bouldershoulder. He began immediately to use his recognition of the creature telepathically dominating him to begin a flow of information back the other way. He knew his surroundings through the memory of that other being. He understood the threats around him, to some extent, and he felt keenly the power of the dracolich. If he wanted to survive, if there was any way to survive, he knew, in that moment when he would at last find a way to reassert control of his mortal coil, that he couldn‟t allow himself to be confused and couldn‟t allow himself to be surprised. * * * * *

The face of Ivan Bouldershoulder, controlled solely by Yharaskrik the illithid, smiled. The dwarf was waking up.

Because of

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