The Gem Lords

The Realms - Part 5

     The gem steed screeched with exhilaration as it was swept on to ever greater speed by the icy winds, strengthened to gale force as they were funneled between the towering peaks of the Thulian Mountains, the highest in the world. Its great leathery wings beat harder as it fought to maintain control of itself and gain altitude.

     This is flying! the creature thought excitedly as it flashed within a few feet of the almost sheer rock face with its thick glaze of blue ice. So fast that the slightest contact would have destroyed it instantly, sending it crashing to ruin into the abyssal valley that plunged thousands of feet below. This is really flying!

     The deadly danger exhilarated it, and it screeched again as it fought for altitude, a sound of pure delight and the joy of being alive. It flapped its wings madly to fight the wind that tried to push it into the mountain, and with a final effort managed to just barely clear the knife edge where two faces of the mountain came together. Beyond, the land opened out into a wide bowl of snow and ice into which the gem steed shot like a speeding arrow.

     Behind it, barely visible as two tiny black specks almost lost in the plumes of snow swept off the mountains by the howling winds, two more gem steeds followed, each bearing a sticklike figure wrapped only in a few scraps of clothing. Figures that would have aroused shivers of fear in anyone who happened to see them pass overhead. Those able to control their extreme disquiet enough to examine the riders more closely might have wondered how they could have endured the freezing temperatures which would have killed an unprotected man within minutes, even if he'd been able to breathe at that altitude.

     The three riders actually enjoyed the extreme cold, though, and the wake they left behind in the crystal clear air was, in fact, considerably colder than the rest of the atmosphere they were passing through, cooled from contact with their undead bodies. They were raks, and they wouldn't have bothered with any clothing at all if they hadn't needed to protect their hideous, mummified bodies from the light of the yellow sun, squatting on the horizon behind them like a grumpy old miser, hoarding its heat to itself. Unlike vampires, the light of the two suns couldn't actually harm them, but it made them rather uncomfortable, hurting their eyes and making their skins itch, and so they tried to avoid it whenever possible.

     As they soared out over the high plateau that lay beyond the mountains, the gem steeds stretched out their heads to their fullest extent on the end of their long, serpentine necks and tucked their wings in alongside their bodies, swooping in a great, steep dive that traded altitude for speed until they were flashing only a few feet above the flat, level ground, their jaws opening in grins of exhilaration as their wakes raised tails of snow that swept up into the air behind them.

     The rider of the lead reptile, Tak Eweela, only sighed with disappointment, though. He'd decided to come this way, the longer, more difficult route, in the hope that the strenuous crossing of the mountains would wake up some of his old sense of adventure, his love of life, but it hadn't. What had been lacking was any actual element of danger. Even if the steed had lost control and been thrown into the mountain, even if both steed and rider had been crushed and broken by the impact, he knew that his body would reform. That he would suffer no lasting harm from it.

     Being immortal and indestructible was so boring! You could do anything you wanted and get away with it, and the result was that nothing was worth doing. Life was no longer worth living. He found himself envying his steed, who was clearly having the time of his life, and along with the envy came a sudden, terrible hatred so great that for a moment he almost destroyed the creature with a single, muttered spell. Even the act of murder would have given him no satisfaction, though, and the death of the creature would have left him with a long walk the rest of the way to the Diamond Mountain.