Chapter 002 - Ashes, Iron, and Plague

# Chapter 2: Ashes, Iron, and Plague Morning came to the keep in a pallid hush, the dust of hardship unmoved by even the sharpest winter sunlight. Lyra sat before a bowl of thin porridge at the long table, metal hands trembling with the paradox of their strength and their unfamiliarity. She pressed a spoon to her lips—awkward, metallic, unable to savor the heat or even trust the feel of the new body Zoltan had crafted for her. Each motion became an ordeal; every joint resisted her memory of what it meant to eat, to be alive. She set the spoon down, frustration impassive on the faceted planes of her face, and looked at her companions in mute apology. Across from her, Qwimby raked his fingers through coat and pockets with growing agitation, searching for the comfort of his lost cigar. “I can’t find my cigar,” he grumbled, knuckles whitening, not masking the edge in his tone. He stared at the floorboards as though hoping some ember of the old world might have survived beneath them. Without invitation or clear logic, he declared, “We had a Doorstreet in Kalteo, once,” the words trailing away into irrelevance. Weight gathered in his next breath—as if the morning could not bear more. “A man died in my arms before I got back. Don Quay. He was my contact in Mirabar. Got there too late. After Zargathax’s attack. The city was…” His words collapsed. “Don was with the Dwarves. Some big, dark dragon tore through. There was nothing left. I went to Mirabar to learn what Zargathax wanted with those books—came back with nothing but ghosts.” Qwimby’s mouth thinned. “I think Zargathax wanted to take the city.” He did not insist; he simply named the belief and let it live in the unsettled air. His hand struck the tabletop, as if that solitary sound might anchor him. The cigar remained lost. The others let the silence linger. No one was ready to reach for humor—least of all Qwimby, who brooded with a heaviness that made the room feel half-buried. Graxen paced, Ellette leaned against the wall, Steve hovered in the corridor as if listening for something that could not be told. A thunderclap shattered the languor, rattling every lantern in its frame. Instinct propelled them from benches and through the battered doorway, weapons and wariness in hand. Outside, wind battered the flags, but there, pulsing in the churned mud, was a sphere of pure blue energy, humming and swelling with each jagged bolt of light. The grass at its edges blackened and crumpled where the energy leapt. Qwimby, airing neither sense nor fear, stepped towards it and called aloud—a query thrown to the storm. The response was garbled, choked by power and cosmic distance, as if the orb struggled to answer but was warped by its own impossible tension. Ellette, her voice flinty, conjured Dispel Magic and thrust the energies outward. For a throbbing instant, the orb swelled and an image flickered within: Big Guy, mouth open in soundless appeal, hand pressed against the inside of the sphere as if reaching for help or rescue. The image fractured, the blue light bending inward in a drawn-out whine, and in that heartbeat the orb collapsed to nothing, tearing Big Guy from the world with it. Where he had stood was only scorched earth and an empty hush. The group scattered. Qwimby broke from them, heading at once for Big Guy and Steve’s small house near the walls. He found Steve alone, anxious, arms full of split kindling. Qwimby lingered, words caught wavering in his throat. Yet when Steve met his eyes, desperate for explanation, he did not tell her what had befallen Big Guy that morning. He asked after a light, and then turned away, burdening her with no further news. Returning to the grounds, Qwimby prowled the site where the orb had erupted—searching for any sign: ash, footprints, trailed magic—but found nothing at all. The earth was undisturbed, as if Big Guy had never existed. Near the warded threshold, Ellette bent her senses toward the residue of broken spellwork, feeling for what had not yet faded. “Perhaps a test teleportation,” she mused without full conviction, as echoes died across the frozen ground. It was only a suspicion; the truth was as hidden as the vanished man. There was no time for grief or endless sifting. Duty pressed onward. They resolved to ride for Alexandria, guesswork propelling them to seek Big Guy’s intent—his attempts to reconstruct the battered guild hall—hoping for cause or at least the balm of answers. The road that led there was heavy, not with purpose alone but with remembrances stirred as Qwimby’s mind drifted. He spoke of Don Quay and the old days, dynamite in the cabbages of an unsuspecting merchant, of Savage Cabbage with his fractured mind, and of Big Toni, a boss whose talents ran to trouble and snares. Even had anyone laughed, the stories would have rung hollow: today belonged to stronger sorrows. * * * The outskirts of Alexandria told their own story. Rows of ramshackle tents sprouted in the ditches and pressed hard against the walls; tangled, bristling with the misery of Mirabar’s survivors. Smoke from a thousand fires stung the eyes. Myrkulites—dark of robe and masked in bone, agents of the death-god—walked solemnly among the Dwarves, handing out bread, mutters of prayer, and the briefest comfort. Ellette cornered one, voice honed by despair. “From Mirabar?” she demanded. The priest nodded. “Most of what is left. All Dwarves. The others… gone.” He gestured to a cluster, numbering around fifty—no elves, no orcs, no humans. A Dwarven woman, silver threads woven through her braids, approached as Qwimby raised the matter of survivors. “Humans? None. They all died. We got free through the tunnels, the rest…” Her name was Lidia, and her eyes seemed deeper each time her voice thinned. She spoke of Mirabar’s fall, undead in every alley, the main keep rupturing under dragonfire, and—out of that carnage—a monstrous dark dragon rising. “It tore the city down,” she whispered. “We made for Alexandria, but they chased us all the way.” Mirabar’s wealth had been its undoing: “mithril, adamantine—rumors turned real.” Ellette pressed fifty gold pieces into the Myrkulite’s hand. “Medicine. Food,” she said. The Myrkulite nodded, gravely, and stooped beside a clutch of prone Dwarves, murmuring over them in rites for those near death. “They may not be long for this world,” he said, eyes misted and distant. Yet, within Alexandria proper, the throng only thickened. The city was buckling beneath the crush. The Dragonheart Guild’s battered hall offered little sanctuary—but it was there they found Big Guy again, weary and drawn but alive. He met their questions with remorse. “I was trying to teleport,” he admitted, voice shamed. Ellette—sharp—pressed him on his lack of proper focus. He explained: one focus survived at the Guild, but his attempt to make a secondary anchor in the keep failed when her countermagic broke it. He pulled a pouch of gems from his coat—blue as deep winter, light caught in every facet. “They told me at the market, just focus on the destination and you’d be there.” Again, no one could vouch for the magic or its purchase. He pressed the leftover gems into Ellette’s hand, remnants and hope together. “I wanted to reach you—to tell you of the Dwarven survivors. There isn’t room or time enough anywhere else.” As if summoned by some grim design, Graxen and Qwimby both startled, eyes fixed on motion in the crowd. A Kobold—a flash of white scales, small and desperate—wove between the Dwarves’ boots. “They came before the Dwarves did,” Big Guy said. “They crawled out of the sewers. Some blue, some white.” The tension rose as a Dwarf staggered forward, catching Lyra in the chest with a burst of silvery, powdery cough. He convulsed before words could form, collapsing in the road amidst a snow of metallic dust. Ellette swept the city’s battered streets for a site that might serve as an infirmary and found only evidence of collapse. Nowhere offered safety. At the periphery, Graxen crouched, catching a paint-stripper scent—sandy, sharp—rising from the Dwarf’s lips, mingling with the powder. Lidia called out from her post, hacking into her palm. “Others are coughing, too,” she managed before the fit overtook her. As Qwimby hurried to steady her, Lidia collapsed, her body folding on the rough flagstones—soon enough, several around her fell in the same silent embrace of exhaustion. The crowd was riddled with coughs; doom gathered in silver flakes. “Lyra—you’re immune now. Take a sample,” Ellette commanded, and Lyra, iron-jointed but careful, pressed a cloth to Lidia’s mouth and gathered the residue. She shaped an Identify spell, but it fizzled in her hands, yet behind the failure was something else—the metallic powder hummed, alive with magic she could not name or break. Sunlight caught on microscopic flecks embedded in the filth: unmistakably metal. The options narrowed to desperation. “To the Lucky Gryphon,” Ellette said. “Quincy might know something about mithril—about what this is.” As they hurried through Alexandria’s shrinking corridors, Lyra’s new memory shuddered—the Dwarves she’d tended had rashes on their arms, greenish in the right light, and beneath the flesh, growing crystals. The sensation was half-remembered from deep mines, where stones bit into skin. They found no comfort in the Lucky Gryphon—only more bodies, sick or failing, and Quincy and Bob laboring from table to table, rationing broth and urgent care where they could. Ellette forced her way to the front, words tumbling harder than before. “Books on magical experiments with mithril in living beings,” she demanded. “Something’s causing this.” Quincy, brow gleaming with sweat, began rifling for an answer. As they spoke, he coughed—a harsh, wracking sound. Ellette floated then her most fearful theory: could the Eye of Vecna be at work? Quincy shook his head, uncertain, but reported that coughing in Alexandria had broken out among the citizens the day before the Dwarves even arrived. Graxen’s senses pricked—there, beneath the clamoring bodies and panic, the paint-stripper scent returned, denser now, saturating the air. They had time for little more before a white Kobold burst through the doors, scratching at its head. “Tickle! It tickles inside!” Qwimby crouched, taking in the glint of greenish metal where scales parted on the Kobold’s skull. “My friend is worse,” the creature said, breath hitching as it led the way down an alley. Around the corner they found another, frozen by paralysis and trapped by crystalline growths, eyes rimmed with stone. Even as they watched, the first Kobold’s legs stiffened, scales petrifying in place, and the whole body turned to a statue of pale, unnatural crystal. A hush fell. From a shadowed doorway, a small Kobold child emerged, shaking. Graxen knelt. “More of you, down there?” The child pointed at a manhole, eyes pleading, and when the party shifted toward it, the child shook its head, signaling firmly not to descend or pursue. The warning was plain—there were others hiding below, but no help should come from above. Ellette, gaze softening, turned to mercy. “We should bring this child to the orphanage.” There, Quincy’s mother greeted them wearily. She confessed to exhaustion herself, as did the children in her care, but she agreed to take the Kobold child and promised it a place among the others. The orphans’ complaints of fatigue went unchallenged; sickness slept in the walls. Returning to the street, the party was met by a Myrkulite who pressed coarse masks into their hands. “Wear them. You must—this is plague,” he insisted. He named it as a force cutting through the Dwarves faster than fire. Panic made the order easy to obey. Ellette fitted her mask and looked to the others. Among them, the majority of Dwarves had already succumbed, coughing up metal-laced foam or freezing in rigid shells. “Luskan,” Ellette said, voice flat, “perhaps our last hope.” Before they departed, Graxen lingered briefly with the Bone Talker, fingers brushing the Myrkulite’s medallion. “How does one earn that?” he asked, voice laced with a longing for meaning. The Bone Talker met his gaze, seeing the seed of a new devotion. Graxen’s resolve, if not yet intention, was set. * * * They rode out of Alexandria under a sky that could not promise hope. The streets behind them were a tableau of death—every Dwarven refugee was now petrified, frozen in their last gesture and cry, the plague’s work complete and merciless. Here and there the sunlight glowered off a surface too smooth, too silver, for any blessing. At their backs, a vast black cloud churned above the city—the same that had marked Mirabar’s ruin. The land was being marked in darkness and forgetting. And so they pressed on, memory and duty both heavy, hoping still that the world ahead would be less cruel than the one behind. * * * They arrived at the gates of Luskan as night gathered. The city loomed, walls sealed, torches flickering along their parapets. The party hammered on the heavy doors, waiting until a guardsman’s voice—a stranger’s at first—echoed down. His eyes lingered suspicously on the masks. “You don’t look like the same followers,” he remarked, the words edged with challenge. “We only seek supplies,” Ellette insisted, truth and fatigue sapping her voice of bluster. “Supplies for whom?” “For Alexandria. Refugees.” She did not try to hide the urgency. The guardsman paused, then admitted, “Humans and Dwarves from Mirabar have come here, too. Gates are closed. Some of the new arrivals—coughing, same as you describe.” He turned away briefly, then stiffened as if the thought of contagion ran a chill down his spine. He eyed them, uncertain, before—swift as a sleight of hand—peeling back the falsehood: the guardsman was Jarlaxle himself. He was, in that moment, unaware there had been a Myrkulite impostor among the ranks. Ellette quickly brought him into their confidence, relaying all they’d seen of the disease, the metal, the dead in Alexandria. Jarlaxle frowned, voice low. “The dark dragon passed over Luskan after Mirabar. We’ve had to convert docks into an isolation ward for the sick—kept the humans and Dwarves inside once the coughing began. What you bring—what you know—it’s not the debt I wanted, Sordia Vignti.” Still, he added, “Truce, for now, until this is done.” Jarlaxle coughed, his composure wavering. He led them to the dock wards, his stride slowing as the hush inside deepened. “Too quiet,” he muttered. Qwimby moved ahead, pushing the door open upon shuffling and the scrape of metal. Inside, all the refugees stood petrified, but some had begun to move with jerky haste, clicking, driven by something no longer human. Qwimby slammed the door, even as a hand—a metallic claw—broke through the boards in a splintered shriek. “They roamed the city before we locked them away,” Jarlaxle explained grimly. Graxen, meanwhile, spotted crystallized rats skittering through the rubbish. Something in that sight made Jarlaxle’s worry deepen: “The tunnels beneath Luskan are crawling with undead,” he said. “If the disease gets among them, who knows what form they will take?” He urged haste. Perhaps the clerics of Luskan could still help—but even as they hurried, the streets rang with new fits of coughing, the harsh scrape of metal. Jarlaxle confessed he’d sent a contact through the tunnels to Menzobaranzen the day before. Ellette asked, her suspicion sharp, if the followers of Lloth might be behind these metallic corruptions. “No,” Jarlaxle replied. “Not their taste.” Still, hope withered. The Church of Myrkul was only a pile of shattered stone. “Three days for men and Dwarves, less than a day for Kobolds,” he calculated soberly—“for gnomes, two, if the clerics are already missing.” Still, Jarlaxle offered what help was left, asking only that news of Luskan’s aid reach Alexandria’s desperate ears. He gestured seaward, where galleys clustered in fear—dragons had been seen near the coast, including one great white beast with a rider unmatched, vanished now. “That was two days before Mirabar fell. After the black dragon passed, the white has not been seen.” Jarlaxle paused at the tunnel door, promising, “Seal it behind me. I’ll look for you in Alexandria if I return.” But as he struck the code on the stone, as the latch fell away, the door swung wide with unnatural violence, sending him sprawling. The darkness inside became absolute, all sound ceasing as if devoured. Lyra alone, with her new eyes, glimpsed a lone silhouette within. Into this abyss stepped Zargathax, bearing the Eye of Vecna and two Books of Vile Darkness. He stopped before them, ruined yet terrible. “I know nothing of your disease,” he said, voice cold as old bones. “I begged Mirabar to share what it had—they refused. I have come seeking the third book. Dragons—” and here, rage twisted his face—“will not survive my vengeance.” Ellette spoke of his wife, carelessly perhaps, and Zargathax snarled, pain baring itself as fury. “You call me weak? Hypocrite? Look how many dragons you have killed in your time—perhaps more than I have.” His flesh, once taut with stolen power, bore new marks of distress, the cost of whatever dread deal he’d made. “Mirabar—was not my intent,” he spat. Provoked too far, Zargathax reached with dread magic, seizing Ellette in the air, her body writhing as if twisted by invisible hands. Lyra stepped forward, desperate: “Let her go! She is a slayer of dragons, as you desire.” But Zargathax spoke of a power unleashed—five dragons freed upon the world. “Were you the ones, I wonder?” Lyra denied it, unwavering, but Zargathax’s suspicion only hardened. He began to shift, bones and flesh bending, dread building as scales pressed out beneath torn skin. The gems Big Guy had given fell from Lyra’s pocket and scattered. Qwimby—sharp in terror—grabbed them and thrust them into Jarlaxle’s hand, hurriedly explaining how to use them to open a portal. He raised his firearm and fired at the Eye of Vecna. The eye recoiled; the force made it blink, and as it did, the power holding Ellette faltered, dropping her hard to the ground. Graxen surged forward with a curse of blood, but it failed—the magic slipping useless away from Zargathax’s hide. Jarlaxle, following Qwimby’s frantic instructions, laid the gems on the ground and conjured a portal of blue energy in the floor. “Go!” he called, voice ragged. The party threw themselves through, scrambling for life as Zargathax’s rage gathered behind them. Ellette, last to leap, hurled a Dispel Magic upon the gems as she fled—the focus shattered, blue shards raining onto the boards. Far behind, the sound of an inhuman roar thundered into the darkness, a final warning or a promise yet to be claimed. They were gone. The world behind them—Luskan, Alexandria, the ashes of Mirabar—drew its shadowed curtains. They fell through uncertain light once more, never fully certain what would be waiting on the other side.