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59. The Wyvern Hunter


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#1 Guest_Oryx_*

Posted 18 July 2004 - 02:41 AM

59. The Wyvern Hunter

“By the silver strings of Milil!” Garrick paled, brown locks flopping back over his temples as his head rolled up, and he stared with saucer-sized blue eyes at the sky. His horse was outright spooked, Coran reflexively swayed in the saddle like in a canoe, ably keeping balance and remembering with little humor his topple off this horse thanks to the charmed bardic ‘ally’. The other six companions stared up in awe. Soaring through the cloudless bluebell sky and casting the party in shade for a moment, a great winged shape flapped above the forest. Viconia grimaced, unable to look up at the sun, but Coran made out its details well enough. A full yet aerodynamic body with leathery green-gray scales, great clawed wings stretched and flapping at its sides, a long neck and horned maw pointing forth, a barded tail trailing behind like a kite string, and two hind legs tucked under its body, the claws clutching an entire spotted cow. Even had the elf not been unable to perceive approximate distance to the flying monstrosity, this comparison to the bovine would have spoken to its own size, and as his human companions and discerned this they gave out ungodly cries.

That’s what we’re hunting?” Garrick drawled from the back of the saddle.

“The babies we fought are just that,” Coran explained with a thin smile.

“Big, fat, n’ nasty,” Imoen wrinkled her nose and stuck out her tongue, sitting beside them on Amalthea, who whinnied in disgust.

“Unnatural, beastly wyrm!” the unicorn subvocalized to her mistress. “The worst of the perversions of this dark forest save the men who now delve here.”

Although he didn’t quite seem to ‘hear’ the familiar, Minsc glanced at Amalthea and Imoen in an implicit agreement. “Size is not everything, even if Minsc has much of it…no matter how much a lizard may grow, it cannot stand taller than hamster justice!”

“Two thousand, was it?” Safana asked Coran, looking around Onyx’s shoulder. The paladin watched the wyvern fly onward, soaring the way they were going before dipping down into a slight valley carved by streams etching their paths down the forest mountain where the mine was thought to be. That the bounty was set by the Dawnlord who mayored Beregost, was charge enough for him. He closed his eyes, thinking about the babies in the trainer’s cave yesterday; it was the first time he had set his own sight upon a draconic creature. Behind his closed lids, dusty pages fluttered by, Candlekeep’s gathered lore and memoirs of the greatest wyrmslayers. All they had put to quill to pass on knowledge and zeal of the ancient quests against evil dragons, the most terrible of entities in the Realms.

“Hamster justice it is,” he whispered, and patted Safana’s hip.

Viconia glared from the midnight black mare poised next to Lance, “I expect you’ll be disposing your share of the bounty right back to the priest, likely to be invested in expanding his sirine harem?”

“The only act therein which should offend your drow sensibilities,” Onyx frowned in return, “Is the tithing as voluntary.”

Imoen giggled, and smiled at Viccy, tossing back with her neck the bangs the drow had helped her dye black, “Besides, at the rate Ony’s goin’, he’ll have the mayor pushing the smithy’s goodies on us for free. Isn’t bein’ heroines fun, Viccy, huh? Huh?”

“Enchanting,” the drow spat upon the forest floor.

They sloped downhill through the forest, which grew thicker again as they neared the webbing of streams crossing the valley, they would likely have been fordable by the horses but bridges in good condition were still be found nonetheless. Coran thought he had spotted, when the wyvern descended before, the very location of its lair, and rode ahead with Garrick. It was the smell that first alerted him, though, a fecund tinge of rotting meat surpassed in vileness to his experience only by the sewers of Baldur’s Gate. Both pushing forearms to their noses, Garrick and Coran spotted from a safe distance the rock outcropping sure to be the cave lair, and doubled back, mercifully back out of range of the smell and over another bridge before the rest caught up. In a defensible glade they rested for an hour; Dynaheir and Viconia needed to renew their spellpower, Onyx and Minsc were still sore from the day’s earlier fights, and the uneven floor of the mountainous forest had given most a touch of saddle sores. Above all, mental focus was needed, and Onyx and Coran sat side by side upon a log, sharing with the others what precious secondhand knowledge of the adult draconic creatures they did possess, the paladin annoyed with the frequent idle looks the archer aimed at Safana.

In breaking camp they left behind their mounts, Lance and Amalthea warily circling the others like concerned parents; the sight of the cow being flown off for a wyvern’s meal left little doubt even in a horse’s mind as it how any large mammal would be perceived. They did not like being left alone so far out, but going within possible scenting of the wyverns in their cave was more dangerous still. The eight adventurers followed Coran, and soon enough only one coniferous copse lay between themselves and the yawning mouth of rock into the lair. With lyrical gibberish for a verbal component, Garrick cast his strength spell upon himself and Safana, while Viconia’s dark blessing sent a chill up many spines, and she summoned another quintet of skeletons in sulfurous puffs of smoke. Behind the ambling undead, Onyx and Minsc led the same two-by-four formation as into the wyvern tamer’s cave and Centeol’s burrow before.

Ferocious, wet tearing sounds echoed out of the fissure, and as their eyes adjusted to the dimness the paladin and ranger saw the beast they had in the sky, and its mate, tearing apart the cow carcass to the swarming delight of half a dozen baby wyverns. The parents towered two stories high; the inference that they could slip in and out of the cavern’s mouth spoke to serpentine contortionist ability. Less threatening but more disgusting, the back wall of the domed cavern was littered with diverse rotting carnage, previous meals, wyvern eggs with broken leathery shells weeping clear fluid, the massacred body of another adult wyvern, this one the size of a house, lying upon its back with hind claws aloft like those of a dead cockroach. It was not some failed usurper or previous defender of this nest but a previous victory of man’s, for the great body so riddled with spears resembled a sea urchin.

The parent wyverns stretched wings and necks, growing like peacocks and shrieking at the humanoid interlopers. They used their rings first though to push back to safety their own progeny, who eagerly hopped like boar-sized chickens up the cave to the tasty humans. The small ones each outmaneuvered their parents however, and came bounding up, crushing through the five skeletons like so many inanimate bones in the lair. Onyx and Minsc forming a straddling phalanx just still in the narrow mouth of the cave though, to protect their companions and to force the wyverns to compete with each other in attacking. Already the hard experience of yesterday’s fight against the trainee baby wyverns showed in the maneuvers of the ranger and paladin; they boxed their swords’ spiked guards left and right to fend off and injure the wing claws, and brought the blades to bear along the writhing necks of the beasts, each losing its head as enchanted edged steel shore through leathery scales, sinewy muscle, and spine. The other four babies glanced hungrily at their fallen siblings, and fell upon Onyx and Minsc in pairs. Viconia’s hammer flew into the fray between their helmed heads, smashing the snout of a wyvern snapping at Onyx’s neck; the beast drew back while its sibling attacked and found arrow and dagger launched into its upper chest. Coran drew again, but Safana then ran right up the rocky wall on Onyx’s side and in falling past the paladin plunged down both serrated shortswords at the immature beast. Garrick dealt magic missile trios not the any baby wyvern, but first to father then to mother as the adult monsters towered over their children, shrieking in primal rage as the little one were cut down, and their long flexible tree-trunk necks whipped down, great fanged maws stretching wide to snatch Minsc and Onyx right up.

For his and his comrade’s early kills; Onyx had been distressed when the baby wyverns came first, for he knew harm upon them would drive the parents into terrible outrage. True dragons’ lifetimes lasted millennia, with egg gestations and growth cycles proportionately slow, and though egg-laying creatures their children were few. The wrath of a parent dragon, especially a mother, was a thousand fold direr than that of an angered mother bear, not only for her greater might but for this overwhelming instinct.

He and Minsc fell to their knees as the adult maws snapped, Minsc’s helm was taken right off his head, leather cords ripping in an eyeblink, and he and Onyx both took numerous scratches upon their armor from the incessant lashings of the babies with tooth and claw and barbed tail, piking up greatswords at their bellies in response.

Twin fireballs soared forth under the ceiling of the cave, exploding behind the adult wyrms and lighting the cave with a pair of flashes. Mercifully, Imoen’s aim with her wand was now on par with Dynaheir’s own from her hands, and the flaming clouds billowed forth, consuming the parents’ bodies and most of their children’s, warming the faces of the frontline adventures as if they now sat about their campfire. The two middle juveniles, run through by Spiderbane and Berserkergang and caught in both blasts, shrieked for but a moment and were slain, the one to Minsc’s far flank moved in at the ranger with blackened scales, and Safana brandished her swords before the one she had wounded, when out of the momentarily occluding flameblast the mother wyvern’s head, after missing Onyx now whipped aside, clamping the pirate around her waist with a sick wet crunch, and she was vaulted up to the ceiling as it recoiled. Onyx welt pale as he saw the body of his consort let loose to catapult into the stone of the cavern, then fall and slump right upon a broken wyvern egg, her blood pooling with its clear secretion upon the rock floor.

A surge of emotion told him to run and scream and hack, but Onyx would have kept soundly alongside Minsc, and the mother not then turned and descended for Safana’s body. Onyx charged and shouted, and the wyvern’s twisted away from Safana to shriek back at him, then in turning it threw out its right claw to wing buffet the warrior. Onyx sank down and sheared his sword to his left, slashing the wing and parting it around himself, leather flaps pushed apart and opening a gap, then slapping his shoulders in the passing. That wasn’t the end of its spin, though; he knew the barbed tail would be coming next. He cleft Spiderbane out again to meet it, just at the base of the bard so as to leave no length to flip past the blade and sting him. The wyvern mother shrieked again as her own tail slap momentum cut the blade into the tail, and pressing in with his body weight Onyx sheared off the barb.

As the paladin had run out and past the injured baby wyvern, it had turned to snap out at him only to find Viconia’s hammer crashing upon its knobbed skull. Electricity coursed through its brain and the beast sank. The father wyvern spit out Minsc’s helmet and brought its maw and claws down around its last baby at the ranger, too late to save his own progeny from being run through on Berserkergang, but nearly decapitating the bald warrior with a toothy snap. Minsc fell back withdrawing his sword, but the left claw smashed into his breastplate, not piercing the metal, but knocking him off his feet and across the cavern with a smash. Viconia only dodged his careen just in time, and hammered at the monster’s right knee, while Garrick drawing Varscona engaged on its left and Coran’s arrows bristled from its chest and neck.

Another pair of fireballs shot past each shoulder of the father, and exploded in the back corner of the cave, engulfing most of both parents’ great bodies. The monsters shrieked, wings members burning and peeling away, bodily flesh charring and choking the cavern in fumes of fresher carnage than the ambient rot. Each veered drunkenly on its hind legs, too overwhelmed with pain to retaliate. The father groaned, and toppled backwards onto the pus-bloated bodies of carrion crawlers now carrion themselves, and the mother too tilted backwards, leaning right over where Onyx stood and Safana lay. The paladin spun towards the pirate, hurtling Spiderbane back across the cavern and snatching her broken body from the eggshell; his heard lurched for he was loathe to move her in her state but they would suffer far worse here. While the mother toppled he clutched Safana awkwardly across his chest and ran after his sword, escaping an organic entombing by moments.

“Finish them,” Onyx shouted at Minsc while he ran up the mouth of the cavern, but the ranger had always recovered from his reeling and with obscene Rashemani battle cries he ran around the bodies of the adult wyverns, beheading each mate in turn with single fell executioner’s strokes.

“Even if they are dead…” Coran smirked as the heads flopped off, “We’ll be needing those.”

Viconia followed Onyx out of the cave, and knelt alongside where he had laid Safana upon grass. “She still breaths and beats,” he panted, and reached down but Viconia hissed and shook her head vigorously. “Learn more of practical necrology if you are to make best use of your orisons, sargtlin,” she growled without humor, patting her hands about Safana’s body, searching for dislocations through the conveniently conformal leather armor. Several times her hands braced and jerked, echoed by deep popping sounds within the pirate’s body, then the Sharran would chant in her infernal tongue, and blue light would flow from her ebony hands into the body. At length she nodded to Onyx, but intoned, “It may not be enough.” He splayed his fingers across the collar and sternum of the still unconscious pirate, and willed out his own healing.

He balked when Viconia slapped hard each of her bronze cheeks, flinched to catch her wrist but then drew back. Safana opened his eyes, then her mouth and let out a horrid curse as the dulled pain throbbed across her body. Viconia spun away and rose, ivory hair whipping into Onyx’s face, and Safana glanced up at her in dismissal, then over to Onyx. She groaned again, rolled her head around in the grass, and then sighed. “Did you have to use mouth to mouth?”

“No, Safana, you still…”

“In that case darlin’,” she winked, “Your loss.”




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