a building fell on him. With the king and his father both dead, and no family of his own to tie him down, Rab simply walked away.
He went on to become alternately a sellsword, a tavern bouncer, an innkeeper, a weaponsmith, then a logger. He was strong and smart, so he soon became foreman. His employers paid Rab a considerable sum in gold to gather crews to go deep into some of the most dangerous places in Faerun to find exotic woods. He quickly built a solid reputation among the lumber mill owners and loggers alike as a fair but tough leader who knew how to get the job done, and Rab always delivered.
During those hard forty-six years of life, Rab Shuoc had missed out on a lot. There had been women but never a wife and never any children. Since the war he hadn't even had a home. He rarely worked with the same men more than one season at a time and had no real friends to speak of.
He wasn't the kind of man who worried about his own happiness or even expected to be happy. He wanted to live, work, and be left alone.
When he stepped into his common room and saw some of his crew already dead at the hands of adark elf and some kind of giant demon monster, he knew that if he wanted to live, he would have to fight harder than he ever had before. It was with that thought foremost in his mind that he stepped toward the two interlopers and got started with the last thirty seconds of his life.
Raula was smart enough to tun, and Rab let her go. The dark elf watched her go too, and the demon ignored her. The huge, gray-furred creature locked its blazing red eyes on Rab and advanced on him. Rab hefted his greataxe and stepped into the demon's attack. He was aware of the drow facing him as well.
The drow came in faster than the demon, swinging his enormous greatsword in a wild, chaotic fashion. Rab was sure he could parry the uncontrolled assault with ease and he held the steel haft of his greataxe in both hands so the greatsword would bounce off it-but it didn't.
The tip of the greatsword wasn't where it was supposed to be. It didn't seem possible to Rab that someone could move such a huge, heavy weapon so quickly, but that strange dark elf had, and it was Rab who paid the price. The tip of the sword drew a deep cut across the logger's chest. Pain flared, and blood poured, and in that half-second of shock, the demon took his axe.
He'd been disarmed before but he'd never had an opponent actually reach out and take the weapon right out of his hand.
Rab was still puzzling over that when something even stranger happened: the dark elf drew his greatsword across the demon's back, cutting it deeply enough that blood sprayed from the wound and the creature roared. The drow said something in a language Rab didn't even recognize let alone understand. There didn't seem to be any anger, any emotion at all on the drow's face, but he was definitely trying to kill the demon.
The huge creature spun on the much-smaller dark elf, and Rab backed away. He only got one step back before the demon reached around and grabbed him by the shirt, taking some skin with it. The monster lifted Rab, who weighed well over two hundred pounds, right off the floor without any sign of strain.
Rab grabbed at the thing's massive clawed hand, but the demon's skin was like steel coated in coarse fur. There was nothing Rab could do but wonder at the monster's intentions. It whirled on the dark elf, who had his sword ready. The demon still held Rab's greataxe in one hand but almost seemed to have forgotten it.
The demon threw Rab at the dark elf. The human barked out an incoherent, scared sound that might have been a scream or a shout. He didn't even know. It was the sound a man makes when he knows he's got less than a second to live and there's nothing he can do about it.
Rab was impaled on the dark elf's greatsword. He could feel every inch of the cold steel as it slid through his chest. Strangely enough, it didn't hurt.
Ryld held the human up and looked past him at the draegloth. The man died trying to make eye contact