Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol II - By Richard A. Knaak Page 0,150

either gone awry or failed completely.

“Why not just let the castle take us there?”

Dru considered the plan and dismissed it. “I would rather not be caught between floors if the castle magic began to fail.”

“We walk, then.”

“That we do.”

Fortunately, their trek was a brief one. Had he chosen to visit his sanctum for any other reason, it was probable that he would have walked in the first place. His excitement was leading to carelessness, something the spellcaster knew was far too dangerous at this juncture. The two of them had been fortunate that they had only returned to their starting point. Another time and they might have materialized in the midst of a wall or floor.

A gigantic, metallic figure blocked the doorway through which Dru and Sharissa wished to pass. Its features were roughly hewed and vaguely reminiscent of a hound. The leviathan stood on a pair of blocky legs and held in its two enormous hands a shield taller than its master. A stylized gryphon decorated the shield.

Sharissa mouthed a single world. Though her voice was nearly inaudible, the golem understood. It stepped aside and went down on one knee, a supplicant before its lord and lady.

“Did you teach it to do that?” Dru asked, eyeing the unliving servant with distaste.

A momentary look of guilt passed across his daughter’s otherwise perfect visage. “Only this morning! I just thought it would be amusing to see such a horrible-looking creature act so civilly.”

“It will do this no more.” The other Vraad would have laughed at him. Kneeling was one of the least commands they would have given their own golems. Dru, though, had found it too ridiculous. There was nothing magnificent about commanding a chunk of metal that could walk and kill. The golem was still no more than a toy.

Another sign of how he had changed. Once, he too, would have laughed.

The golem rose silently, Dru’s words now law. The two Vraad continued on, the massive doors swinging open for them as they neared.

The sanctum of a Vraad was a far more individualistic thing than his or her outer appearance. Here, the subconscious played an active role in the design and maintenance. Here, a sorcerer’s mind was free to act and create, with varying results. In the chambers of his counterparts, Dru knew, one could expect to find anything within the realms of the imagination… and often beyond.

Dru’s own chambers, on the other hand, were bare—bare, that is, with the exception of countless crystals of all shapes and sizes orbiting or floating all about the room.

The spell, of which the gems were only the physical aspect, was the culmination of his work so far. Since the discovery of the realm beyond the veil, Dru had cleared out the paraphernalia from all past experiments—some of those items raising protest—and set aside everything for research into the nature of the wraith world. While others were pounding their magical might futilely against its phantom boundaries, he and a few of the more patient had sought out answers through careful study. That study had brought about, as a side result, the rediscovery—not discovery, as Barakas had put it—of the method of ka travel. The early Vraad had known of it, but for vague reasons no one could explain, they had forgotten soon after the founding generation of the Vraad race had passed on. He had discovered many other secrets as well, but all of them paled in the face of the greatest challenge. Somehow, the stubborn spellcaster still tried to believe, there was a way to travel physically to this other place.

Perhaps now…

Dru and his daughter stared curiously at the patterns formed by the floating crystals. The primary crystals, larger and generally fixed in one place, were, as he had hoped, arranged in the pattern he had asked Sharissa to set them in. It was something that had to be done by hand and his requested appearance at the coming had made that impossible. Sharissa, while occasionally prone to dreaming, was as excellent a helper as he could have dared hope. Soon, she would be able to conduct her own series of experiments and—

And that would only happen if they found a solution before Nimth began to pull the Vraad down with it in its death struggles.

The secondary crystals, which had been organized to catch the natural emanations of any sighting and record them for his later need, floated in a complex spiral cluster near the focus, a foot-wide black sphere that kept surveillance