Imprimus. Gloam of greatest evil, vampiric master of a fell coven. Imprimus, lich among gloams. It was this terrible gloam whom Gord sought amidst the storm of Snuffdark. Somewhere within the wilderness of the writhing plane Imprimus lurked in a secret stronghold, awaiting his moment. The foul being would settle for a sundering of the Shadowrealm, a dual direction. He and his evil circle would use their malign powers to force schizophrenia upon Shadow-king, a permanent division of mind so as to enable them to govern the plane half of the time. Gord knew that such an occurrence would turn the place toward darker and darker ends. The mind of its monarch would erode, and at some point, as the evil within Shadowrealm grew, make the tortured brain weak and vulnerable. Then would come the final assault, and Imprimus would be Lord of Shadows… le roi est mort, vive le roi noir!
Gord stood alone between Imprimus and his ultimate desire, but at best the gloam just suspected the fact. Now, during the deepness of Snuffdark, all of Shadowrealm was at its lowest energy level, and Imprimus was weak and mentally blind.
As he moved purposefully across the weird terrain, Gord sought for certain signs that would indicate the presence of the gloam-lich called Imprimus. In this land of darkness, now smothered by so great a gloom as to defy description, the young adventurer looked for a blackness of blacknesses, a greater and more terrible darkness than any that grasped Shadowrealm. Such intensity of black was the key to where the gloam lurked, for Imprimus’ own evil gathered the pitchy stuff of Snuffdark to it as a lodestone draws iron.
The green tongue of luminescence within the heart of the fire-opal talisman lent luminosity to Gord’s own eyes, and had any been about in the impenetrable murk of Snuffdark they could have observed this weird for themselves. But no shadow-creature stirred, and so Gord strode through the blackness alone, unobserved. Only the hollow moaning of the life-sapping black wind accompanied him as he sought his foe. Then the monotonous, empty sound changed.
“Hoo, hoo, hoooo…” the relentless wind seemed to call. It was a sound somewhere in the lowest audible register, a groaning bellow halfway between a laugh and a lamentation. “Hoo, hoo, ohoooo!” This time the ebon air carried the sound more strongly and with spine-chilling effect. It was no trick of the wind, but the call of some creature abroad in the suffocation of Snuffdark!
When the mournful cry sounded yet a third time, stronger still, Gord blinked and dampened his visual power. Now the young adventurer could see but a bowshot’s distance through the swirling eddies of inky blackness, as if he were an arctic wayfarer peering through the swirling snows of a blizzard. Vision opened, then diminished, as Snuffdark’s winds drove Shadowrealm into frenzied movement and tenebrous stuff swirled and drifted across the landscape.
A crunching sound came, carried by the black wind. The noise was the sound of something crushing the very substance of the shadow-plane beneath it as it came. Monstrous claws compressing the stuff of the place, crushing and crumbling it to atoms by the sheer mass of its colossal form. “Hoooo, hooooo, oohoooo!” came again now, as loud as if the sound were coming from within Gord himself.
Only one thing could be so huge, one creature sound so fearsome a call. The duskdrake was hunting for Gord, even as Gord hunted for Imprimus. No other monster of shadow could abide the Snuffdark, none but the duskdrake was so large. Knowing that flight was useless, Gord resigned himself to facing the oncoming beast. Better to die fighting than to be caught from behind and devoured as a hound snaps up a hare.
The sooty swirling lessened, revealing a jagged mass of shadowstuff a hundred yards distant. Gord couldn’t recall a spire of stone there a minute ago, yet now he clearly saw a great mass of jagged rocks. Then the tall spire crowning the crag split to reveal a cavelike opening, and from this deep hole came a rush of vapors that carried a fell call: “Ohoo, oohooo, ooooah!” The duskdrake had sighted its prey.
Shadow-ground trembled under Gord’s feet as the mighty monster trod upon the land, each step covering a dozen yards, flattening whatever it impacted with. “Futter you!” Gord shouted defiantly. The shadows roiled and flattened around the monstrous beast-a reaction to Gord’s words? Evidently the dusk-drake understood human speech.
Powerful as it was, the duskdrake was not immune to the effects of Snuffdark. The heavy darkness slowed the thing. Its angular neck moved forward and downward, parallel to the ground. It walked ponderously, as if the gigantic beast were moving to the rhythms of a stately gavotte played in courtly half-time. As the hyperdragon moved it issued a ferocious growling, a rumbling that began in its belly and thundered upward, exiting along with a steaming hiss through its massive maw. With the terrible sound came a stream of shadow-fire.
The dim flames issuing from its mouth were not at all similar to the fiery heart of the great black opal. The hissing gout of burning heat was gray and as transparent as a crystal of smoky quartz, although it was shot through with near-black tongues and had tips of diamondlike brilliance. The belching shadow-fire shot across the swarthy stuff of the plane, devouring all in its path, leaving shadow-rock superheated to a smoking dun, washing over the place where Gord had stood defiantly a split-second before. Gord had thought the shadowdragon’s breath fearsome, but now he knew the true meaning of the word.
The young thief’s lightninglike reflexes weren’t enough to save him. Despite- the sluggishness enforced upon the duskdrake by the weight of Snuff-dark, the monstrous beast was still fast to react. The edge of the spewing shadow-flames caught Gord, and the searing heat burned his exposed flesh with agonizing ferocity. At last Gord knew how terrible was the stuff of shadow-fire, understanding the refinement that resulted in the fabulous fire-ruin that had been used by human mages to devastate an empire.
Even as his nerves sent screaming messages of pain to one part of his mind, he managed to act. The hyperdragon’s awful breath had seared him, but in the process the flames had burned and melted so much of the stuff of shadow that a turbidity was created, a thick cloud of cloaking blackness within blackness, through which neither duskdrake nor man could see.
Gord lay at the edge of this concealing mass, and as the monstrous foe stomped and hissed inside the cloud, he ministered to his bums. For whatever reason, the fellow who had first greeted him by name in the Chiaroscuro Palace had later bestowed upon him a small box of salve. Head cocked to one side, birdlike, bright eyes assessing Gord in friendly fashion, this strange man had simply handed the container to him. “Here, Gord. My present to you for your coming quest. You’ll need, I fear, much more, but this is all I can offer.” When Gord had inquired as to the contents of the box, the man told him it was sovereign for all manner of cuts, bruises, and similarly painful injuries.
The ointment proved efficacious for burns, as he had hoped. Gord smeared it heavily on his burned face, blackened arms, charred hands. The balm brought both surcease from the agony and miraculous healing even as the hyperdragon ground a zigzag path through the obscuring cloud. “Hissoohh, hissaaahrr!” the duskdrake seemed to pant as it slammed its two massive feet onto the ground, mighty tail lashing, long reptilian neck swiveling and snaking this way and that as it searched the turbid terrain for its minuscule foe.
As Gord’s burned flesh healed under the soothing layer of salve, the great beast grew more and more angry at its inability to find and finish the puny human who had abused it. In frustration it lashed forth its neck, jaws distended in fury as the shadow-fire it breathed immolated the land indiscriminately. In his location close to and nearly under the duskdrake’s massive tail, Gord was spared a further bath of the incinerating flames.