Dead Rainbow

Backup Plan

Redwing left no stone unturned in Kulju's crypt. He searched every inch of the place using all his powers of deduction and when he reappeared victorious at the surface of the ancient burial site he went about exhuming every corpse in the graveyard. By morning he had desecrated the entire place just to be sure Kulju wasn't coming back again. 

Dawn crept over the forest and Lazar and a few surviving wolves of the previous night gathered at the base of a smoldering tower. 

"You have proved yourself powerful enough to be our leader," said an alpha male wolf that Lazar stood silently behind with the others. 

"I have no need for cowards the likes of you," said Redwing dismissing them with a wave.

Redwing turned his back on them, walked over to Kulju's head on his pike, and took the weapon dropping the skull to the ground. He closed his eyes and exhaled heavily not looking at the wolves he knew where still there. He could sense the anger of the slighted male. 

"Lazar you disappoint me most of all. You're not worthy of the name. No pet of mine would ever side against me."

He turned and the pack looked at him with anger. He aimed the long spear at them and shot a million volts of electricity into the wolves. They shook violently, hair igniting, hearts exploding, and fell in mass to the earth. He took the spear and drew a symbol in the dirt that would teleport him to his tower. He stepped in and vanished. 

Back in the south tower, he devoted his full attention to Kulju's spellbook of religious voodoo and black magic. The discovery of the Double spell was worth a hundred times Kulju's weight in gold and it thrilled him to find every detail explained within the book's pages. He noted it for later and kept reading to the end. 

The latter half of the book held an unexpected surprise. Kulju had managed to survive for a thousand years moving from one body to the next and for most of those years, he was the servant of Luhng the destroyer, the fire in the night, and bringer of death. A creature of immense power that was bested and imprisoned on his island over two hundred years ago by none other than Melock, himself. On the last page of Kulju's spellbook was the symbol needed to teleport to Luhng's island. 

"The dragon that killed the slayer of the Necromancer," he said to himself, "a beast like that would be a powerful ally."

After his flight with the matriarch of the frost dragons, Redwing made it a point of pursuing every bit of dragon scholarship available. He considered himself an expert on the races, history, and biology of the mythic monsters. 

The ancient fire breathing red dragon posed an interesting possibility. Normally, a creature of Luhng's temperament would be unswayable but given his imprisonment on the island and his general propensity toward wrongdoing, he might be persuaded to join Redwing... for a price. 

He flipped back through Kulju's book to the spell that would allow him to clone himself in order to cheat death. If he was going to visit a dragon that might kill him on a whim, he thought it best to have a backup plan. 

It took time to gather the requirements. In the minor's town of Fool's Gold, he commissioned the forge to build him an iron box that locked from the inside. He spent months practicing alchemy to create a stack of gold bars. And late one night in a gambling parlor on the shadier side of Verina Luki he befriended a man; a few years younger than he but of the same general build. He would supply the raw material for the double. 

Redwing cut large samples of his own genetic material off his body and through the magic ritual reprogrammed the man's DNA with his own. It took nearly half a year to complete but in the end, he sealed a lifeless copy of himself in a steel crate in the basement of his tower at the Stone Mountain castle. 

"Death is the solution to all problems," Redwing laughed at Kulju's spellbook password. 

The basement of the south tower was filled with old crates, statues, and wine barrels that hadn't been touched since the fall of the last mountain king. No one would notice one more box among the rabble. In the event of Redwing's death, he would be reborn in a new body.