Free The Seal of Karga Kul: A Dungeons & Dragons Novel by Alex Irvine

Corellon who lent power to the singer’s voice and the artist’s eye, the mage’s spells and the sculptor’s chisel!
    Corellon, who when the seasons were divided at the beginning of the world begged for spring and received it because along with it came the knowledge that everything must ultimately die, that the green abundance of spring is the flare of a candle cupped against the everlasting wind and dark of death. This knowledge is the fuel of art, of thoughts of beauty, of all sorceries light and dark. Corellon is the patron of those who know they will die but are determined that they will bloom and learn and love first.
    It is said that Corellon lives in a castle whose rations and dimensions haunt the dreams of artists, adorned with tapestries telling stories the troubadors can never find tongue to repeat. Vine-haired and stone-toothed, Melora strode through the arches of this castle and found Corellon, eyesclosed, listening to the music made by dust motes dancing in sunlight.
    “How would you like to push the Raven Queen a little?” she asked. Corellon’s eyes opened. Melora scattered the motes and their music jangled into chaos. “How would you like to have a little spring in her winter?”
    “If she has sent you, there is more to this offer than what you’re telling,” Corellon answered. “And I can smell her on you, which makes it a simple matter to guess what is motivating your wild little heart.”
    “To each her reasons,” Melora said. “Spring in the high country, just for a week. Think of it! What new life might grow, what stories might the peoples of the world tell of your strength in the face of the Raven Queen’s deepest winter?”
    “And why is she willing?” Corellon asked.
    “She is a good queen to her subjects, who belong to me as well,” Melora said. “The ravens are hungry.”
    “Well,” Corellon said. Already he had begun to think of the songs that might be sung. “What the Queen offered you, will you offer me?” he asked, archly, as the sculptures around them began to dance.
    That the gods have human desires is known to every child—else why should they have given those desires to us? Ah, the wilderness is fickle!
    A southwest wind curled over the passes at sunrise the next day, bringing with it smells of the lower territories where winter was forbidden. For nine days it blew. At the end of the third, each army sent scouts up the passes toward the gorge. Avalanches drove them back.
    At the end of the sixth day, each army sent scouts again. They returned, most of them, reporting that the way would be clear if the freakish thaw held for another three days.
    And hold for three days it did.
    On the morning of the tenth day, the armies marched. On the morning of the twelfth day, they stood on either side of the bridge. By noon of the twelfth day, the bridge ran knee-deep with the blood of human and tiefling, dragonborn and dwarf. The fighting on the bridge went on into the night as both sides mustered sorcerous lights to guide their armies lest they wake up in the morning and find the other side possessing the bridge.
    Centuries before, the bridge had been the Arkhosians’ mightiest work of engineering, a monument to the vision of their emperors and the building genius of the dwarves who lived in the caves along the gorge. It was a thousand feet long and wide enough for twenty men to walk across abreast, with buttresses curving down into the walls of the gorge hundreds of feet below. It was large enough that all manner of creatures had taken up residence in its stone eaves and crevices, its drains and arches. The tiefling shock troops of Bael Turath had long since slaughtered the Noon Gorge dwarves, keeping only those as slaves who might teach the Turathian architects the secrets of stone that dwarves seemed to be born with—yet the secrets of the bridge over the gorge remained known only to one man, because only that one man had performed the magics that bound its stones together.