Free DW01 Dragonspawn by Mark Acres

Whom?
    Elrond searched his vast memory. He did not seek food, for his vast array of roots brought him food from the depths of the earth. Water, too, was provided in abundance. Warmth would be welcome, but Elrond knew that in time, just a little time, the warmth of the sky light would come again, as it always did. But there was something, someone....
    Shulana! It required all the discipline of his millennia of training to snatch the name of a single, discrete being from the vast consciousness of half a world of living things. But when Elrond’s mind cried out the name of Shulana, the cry was so great that every tree, every budding flower, every blade of grass over a range of six hundred miles echoed that cry in the vibrations of their flowing sap. The cry, silent to human ears, leapt from the plants into the very air and was carried on the breeze until a little gust touched the fresh flowers in a vase on a table near a certain bedstead.
    “Shulana!” The call of the most ancient of all elves roared in the mind of his stripling kinswoman. Shulana, who the instant before had felt the glow of triumph as she knew that Bagsby’s own greed and pride had won him to her cause, trembled in her innermost being. True, in elven communion she had before encountered the minds of other elves, melded with little patches of green nature. But never before had so powerful another consciousness, so vast in its scope and extent, ripped into her own mind without warning and so focused on her own identity that she felt naked and completely alone. The young elf’s hands trembled. Her eyes grew wide with terror and she gazed at the vase of flowers just in time to see it tumble to the floor and shatter.
    “What was that?” Bagsby said, annoyed, glancing about. He saw the sheer terror in the elf’s eyes and leapt to his feet, grabbing his dagger. “What is it?” he called.
    Shulana neither replied nor moved. She stood stone still while her mind became a receptacle into which was poured all Elrond’s knowledge of Ruprecht’s plans and the single command, “Hurry!” For as both elves knew, once the Eggs of Parona were in Valdaimon’s hands, the vile wizard would be unstoppable.
    “Curse you, elf!” Bagsby complained, slinking around his own room in a crouch with the dagger held ready to strike at any shadow that moved. “I should have known you’d bring me danger!”
    In a single instant, the mind of Elrond flowed back into the body of the frail elf in the dungeon of Ruprecht’s castle. Elrond groaned in pain. He was no longer part of the Earth. He was merely a very tired, very old, very tortured elf. Indeed, he was the oldest elf in the world and the one in the greatest physical pain.
    “Be still, Bagsby,” Shulana replied. “You do not yet know what real danger is.” Shulana shuddered, and goose flesh rose along her arms and legs. The thought of the eggs in the hands of Valdaimon chilled her. So did the thought of the power of mind that Elrond must possess to cry out to her over a distance of hundreds of miles.... “But you will learn, Bagsby. You will learn.”

    Ruprecht clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together in gleeful anticipation. So far, the evening had gone better than he had expected. The anticipation of victory was thrilling. The display of wyvern power that Valdaimon had showed him was elating. But now would come the best part of all. “Come, smelly old tutor of mine,” he said eagerly. “Show me, show me in your ball of crystal the victories that will be mine.”
    Valdaimon smiled, his usual scraggly toothed, obsequious smile. His Majesty was in a fine form tonight, pleased and easily controlled. Even Culdus dared not cross the wizard now; the display of wyvern power had silenced him. The old mage’s long staff thudded on the stone floor of the great hall as he made his way back to his seat at the main table. Slowly, he eased himself into the chair. He breathed deeply, then began to wave his arms in broad