Chapter 5 – Part 1

FALLING MASKS, BROKEN THOUGHTS

Deep within the Eldeen Reaches, shortly after midnight on the twenty-fifth of Aryth, 993 Y.K.

The dolgaunt moved with a grace was that beautiful and sickening at the same time. He felt full, good, and strong. A dolgrim had failed, and allowed the druids to catch a patrol unawares, so the dolgrim had become his food. It had twitched wonderfully as it died.

The dolgaunt stopped, peering about. It waved to the thirty dolgrims that still remained, sending them out in two flanking waves. It could feel, could sense quite far. The druids would no doubt be laying spells to catch his forces, expecting them to come down the middle of the valley that hid the device that the dolgaunt sought to control.

You will find its exact location, the mind flayer had told the dolgaunt, speaking directly to his mind. You will have your servants dig, and then place this Khyber dragonshard in the crook of the fork.

To destroy it then? The dolgaunt’s mental question was answered only with a psionic blast of pain, which had forced the dolgaunt to its knees.

You will follow instructions, or you will suffer beyond imagining, the mind flayer had told him coldly. We seek to make the device our own, not to destroy it!

The dolgaunt had promised feverishly to obey. He feared the mind flayers greatly. They were closest to the Great masters, and they brooked no failure.

Lights and sounds came from over three hundred feet away, ahead and to his right and ahead and to his left. The druids were attacking his two groups of dolgrims, their power spent on the unimportant, while he, the silent and dangerous monastic warrior, crept directly towards them.

The dolgaunt grinned with a toothless, red mouth. He knew everything around him, with perfect sight even in the dark. The scilla on his tentacles, the perfect biological devices grown by his masters, told him everything, let him know of everything.

Which is why the dolgaunt was quite shocked when a goblin that he’d neither seen, smelled, nor heard put three arrows into him. One penetrated the dolgaunt’s neck, one his groin, and one into his eye and then his brain.

The twisted creature fell, dead before it could think of attacking the goblin that had caught it so badly by surprise.