“Ashelia! Wizard!” Roundabout cried, sprinting to the boat to grab a rope or something to throw to the lad, who flailed in the water some thirty feet out from the dock.
The two came out of the cabin just as a second missile soared overhead, much higher and farther than Lathan. Easily a hundred feet out from the dock, the woodsman’s axe splashed into the waters of Lac Dinneshere.
Roundabout’s very first throw of the rope proved perfect, but still it took them some time to pull the shivering, terrified Lathan from the frigid water.
“Get him inside afore his toes fall off!” Ashelia instructed.
“Spragan! Where is Spragan?” Addadearber yelled at the wailing young man.
They hustled him off the dock, and before they even reached the cabin, Addadearber had his answer. Rushing out of the forest, crying and screaming, waving his arms as if a hive of bees was right behind him, came poor Spragan, his face all cut and bloody, his jacket shredded, one shoe missing. He fell to the ground, obviously not for the first time, and Roundabout ran to him.
Spragan screamed and tried to flee.
The ranger called out his name in comforting tones and tried to reach for him in an unthreatening manner, but Spragan howled all the louder, and thrashed as if fighting for his very life against a horde of demons. He tried to run away, but got his feet all tangled and fell down again.
Roundabout was on him in an instant, expertly tying him up in a paralyzing hold, one that put the ranger’s mouth near to Spragan’s ear, where he whispered reassurances.
But if the boy heard him, he didn’t show it, and just began wailing, “She’s going to eat me! She’s going to eat me!” over and over again.
Roundabout glanced at the dark forest, then set his feet under him and hauled himself and the boy up, keeping the lad’s arms fully locked all the way. With superior strength, he lifted Spragan right from the ground so that he couldn’t dig in his heels and get any leverage to tug free.
But by then, the boy had fallen limp anyway, sobbing quietly and whispering every so often that he didn’t want to die.
A short while later, Addadearber and Roundabout stood beside the cabin, staring into the forest. Behind them, the sun reached in long rays across Lac Dinneshere.
“I see more intrigue than trepidation on your face, wizard,” Roundabout remarked after a long silence.
“Magic,” the wizard answered. “Lots of it.”
“Felt it when we first got here,” the ranger agreed. “Do you know the name of this place?”
“Didn’t know it had a name.”
“Only the barbarian tribes know it,” Roundabout explained. “They named it Iruladoon long, long ago, before Ten-Towns, when the elves were thick in Icewind Dale.”
“I’ve not heard that word before.”
“Old Elvish word,” Roundabout explained. “It translates to ‘a place without time.’ I expect the barbarians thought it appropriate because the long-lived elves didn’t seem to age.”
“Spragan talked about a girl, a woman, in various stages of age all at once. Might it be that there’s more to the naming of Iruladoon than simpleton barbarians being confused by long-lived elves?”
“You want to find out, of course,” Roundabout remarked.
“I’ve devoted my whole life to the Art,” Addadearber replied. “It is my religion, my hope that there is something more beyond this pitiful, short existence we’re offered. And now I, like so many of my colleagues, have watched the collapse of all that we hold dear. I stand before a place of magic-that much is assured. Does it hold some answers? Some hope? I know not, but know that I am bound by my faith to find out.”
“The wood’s not wanting visitors,” Roundabout reminded him.
Addadearber nodded. “I have a spell that will allow me passage. I fear to use it, but I shall. And you, of course, believe that you can enter Iruladoon.”
Roundabout nodded, and with a grin to his companion, the ranger pulled up his hood.
“Should we wait until morning?” the wizard asked.
“I prefer the dark,” Roundabout replied with a wink of his blue eye.
The ranger moved to the trees at a careful pace. He paused for just a moment when he reached the tree line, then nodded and disappeared into the forest.
Addadearber cast a minor spell upon himself and squinted into the shadows, ensuring that his spell had worked to enhance his lowlight vision. Then he paused and prepared himself for the more potent, and thus, far more dangerous, dweomer. Not long ago, the enchantment had been a routine thing to powerful Addadearber, but since the advent of the Spellplague, he hadn’t dared attempt it. Reports from all over Faerun spoke of wizards permanently trapped inside one of their own spells, and Addadearber didn’t find that prospect particularly appealing.
But the forest beckoned him, the promise of revelation. He gave a short puff, blowing out all of his doubts, and immediately launched into casting. Arms waving, he chanted furiously, throwing all of his power into the dweomer, reminding himself of the potential consequences of failure.
He turned black head to toe. Not a darker hue, but absolute black, seeming almost dimensionless in his monotone color. Then he flattened, parchment thin, as the wraithform took full hold.
Addadearber didn’t breathe in his undead form, but if he did, he would be breathing easier, to be sure. Roundabout had gone into Iruladoon cautiously, but the wizard needed no such care. Not in that form, where he could slip silently and unnoticed from deepening shadow to deepening shadow.
As if carried on a stiff breeze, a parchment blowing in the wind, Addadearber soared up and between the lines of trees.
He sensed Roundabout as he glided past the creeping man, who stiffened and sniffed and glanced all around, but never caught on to Addadearber’s passing. With great speed, he managed the entire perimeter of Iruladoon before the onset of twilight, coming back to the same area where he had first entered the wood. Then he went in deeper, following no path but his own instincts, weaving silently and invisibly in the darkening night.
His eyes flashed as he crested one hill, for there, in the distance, he saw a campfire. As he neared it, he noted that it was on the edge of a small pond. Behind it and to the side, a circular door had been set against the face of an earthen mound-the type of house he had seen in halfling communities. And so he was not surprised when exactly that, a halfling with curly brown hair and a disarming, easy stride walked out from behind the house, a fishing pole over one shoulder and his other thumb hooked under one of the red suspenders that held up his breeches, which in turn held up his rather ample belly.
Addadearber held back and let the little one set the pole upon a forked stick he had set in the bank, though he didn’t bother to cast his line just then. He went back to his fire and assembled a tripod, upon which he hung a sizable pot. Then he went to the pond with a bucket. Apparently soup or stew was on the menu for that night.
Satisfied that there was nothing amiss about the place, and likely no one else about, the wizard closed his eyes and released his dweomer. He felt only a few short instances of tingling pain as his body expanded to its three-dimensional proportions.
He allowed himself a deep sigh of relief.
“You call this place home?” the wizard asked, startling the halfling.
The little one turned to regard the man with curiosity. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, obvious alarm in his voice. “This is not your place.”
“But I am here, and I am not pleased.”
The halfling cocked his head, and if he was concerned by the wizard’s tone, he did not show it.
“Do you know who I am?”
The halfling shook his head.
“I am Addadearber of the Lightning!”
The halfling shrugged.
“I am the chief mage of Caer-Dineval, the mightiest wizard of Icewind Dale,” Addadearber declared.