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From: foleye@viper.CS.ORST.EDU (Stilt Man)
Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn
Subject: [AD] Digging a Hole
Date: 22 Oct 1994 03:40:14 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Department, Oregon State University
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[ADMIN:  Written by myself, with a few remarks from Corey as to various
things, mainly griping at me for my patented convolutions of the sentences
again . . .]

[ADMIN2:  I give Corey Venour permission to stick this on his web site, but
everyone else has to ask before you so much as sneeze at it.  :)  BTW, his
web site is under "User Home Pages" at www.cit.gu.edu.au.  The Dragon's Inn
stuff is under "Stuff with no academic value," and all our various threads
in which I've been involved with (as well as him, in some of them) are on
there, including the BBD (both of them), DS, AD, and Tor threads.  If you
read them there, you not only can read all these great stories in their
entirety as a collection, you can even find out what my real name is!  How's
that for a deal?  ^_^ ]

The afternoon in the city of Sable was rather tranquil.  However, since
tranquility is boring, the bards don't go into much length about that.

What they state, since that is the basic point of the story that begins with
such a crusty old cliche, is that the tranquility was broken by a man running
headlong like a maniac through its streets, shouting at the top of his lungs.

Of course, the buzz of thoughts exchanged betwixt the sorcerers which
policed the city began very promptly.  Who was this madman?  Why was he
running?

The dragons of the city had their attention called to this swiftly, and
their blue-robed presences were almost immediately surrounding the block
into which the crazed man was running.  However, he was doing nothing
wrong, and the sorcerers could find no hostile intent in his mind, and
as such the dragons simply leaned upright against the wall and stood there
amusing themselves with speculation as to what this crazed fool was about.

It was the city guards that had to deal with him, the normal sorts.  They
could not make the man stop with simple words, and at length they finally
mobbed him and bodily restrained him, for nothing less would suffice to
stop his mad dash through the streets.  Of course, once they had caught
him, the questions began.

"What means this?"

"Why are you running?"

"What goes on here?"

The man screamed incoherently, struggling furiously at the arms which had
him caught, and finally stared up into nowhere in particular and shrieked,
"She's gonna EAT ME!!!"

Needless to say, this took a large number of the crowd unawares, until a
second chorus of shrieks brought the attention of the dragons from the
running madman.

From the direction whence he had come, some thing, and thing was the only
way in which it could be easily described, floated through the rabble.  The
creature had six arms of various shapes, arranged in three pairs from a
vaguely human torso.  The lowest pair was ended in large, crab-like pincers,
the middle pair in perfectly feminine hands (speculation purported that this
was about the only means by which the man may have been able to determine that
the monstrosity was female), and the uppermost pair ended in also vaguely
humanoid hands, only with merely four fingers ending in long, sharp claws.
The creature was a nauseating greenish-brown in its scaley form, which
extended to the upper pair and lower pair of arms.  The middle pair was
perfectly normal in its color of black human flesh.  The creature's torso
formed into a somewhat serpentine lower body, which eventually became
altogether incorporeal, leaving the tall form which towered over the populace
supported by a yellowish mist instead of legs.  Two bright yellow globes of
light followed the beastly shape as it approached the man who was even now
frantically trying to escape his captors ere this horror reached him.  There
was no head, eyes, mouth, or other orifice visible upon the creature; the
part of the torso that should have given support to a head simply rose in a
hump with the muscles of the shoulders.  How this creature could have been
capable of eating its crazed victim seemed strange, but the question was
never occurring to those who beheld this creature of the extraplanar depths.

The dragons were no longer amused.  They ceased any and all postures which
suggested relaxation, and prepared various deadly spells by which they hoped
to stop this destructive creature.  And that the creature was destructive was
quickly removed from doubt, as its twin pincers clamped about stunned onlookers
and cleft their bodies in twain with a quick clip.  The claws raked the faces
of another group, the skin hissing and giving off smoke at the touch.

The dragons seemed to be faring little better in protecting the people, for
their magic quickly reduced numerous other citizens to sooty ash, their life
forces and souls given up to power the bipedal wyrms' spells.  The twin
globes flared briefly as the city's guardians made their final preparations
to strike, and the twin human hands curled into unique contorted gestures.
The orbs of light flared once again, darting forth at two of the larger
wyrms, growing to such a size that the creatures' height could easily have
fit within their diameter.  At this size, they struck their two intended
targets, and muffled shrieks rang out as the dragons were silhouetted from
view within the orbs, their figures twisted and tormented until at last they
faded from view.

The other wyrms' eyes widened greatly at this, but still they essayed to strike
at the creature.  They manifested their power in brute, simple force, in
fireballs the size of city blocks which incinerated every building within sight
in their attempts to destroy this demon, in lightning bolts that glanced off
the hellspawn's skin and transfixed yet more citizens in their hail of death,
in brilliant blasts of energy that seemed only to make the creature glow as
the orbs that obviously served it glowed.  The dragons, though their
monumental pride denied the possibility, were forced to concede that the
monstrosity controlled magic beyond their own, that they would be destroyed
as utterly and surely as their fellows if they stayed in this place.

They attempted to speak the words which would remove them from the scene,
confident that they were safe once they were uttered.  But the words were
spoken, and still they were standing in the city block beholding their doom
approaching them.  As the orbs which represented the creature's wrath came
for them, they had a brief moment to consider whether their actions which had
aided in destroying their world would earn them at least a decently honored
place in whatever hell that was prepared for them.

The orbs grew ever larger when the dragons were consumed, and at last each
was nearly the size of a city block in and of itself.  Nearly the last of
the city's guardians was dead when the arch-demon was finished, and yet still
its hunger seemed without hope of satisfaction.  The creature's body was
infinitesmal when compared with the orbs under its command, until at last the
orbs began to shiver with their own size and power.  The creature's form seemed
to vibrate with it, its twin humanoid hands struggling to maintain control over
the two globes of might, yet in the end the struggle was beyond the monster,
and it fled to its havens in the Inferno.

Yet still the twin globes hung in the air, and the city looked up at them in
fear, wondering what fate the two spheres would visit upon them, now that their
master was gone.  Yet once the demon had abandoned them, the orbs took up a
stable altitude, but only for a brief moment.

Then they descended to the earth, and the citizens of the city screamed in
terror, believing that this was the end of their days.  But the pair of spheres
struck only open ground, tunnelling into the rock upon which the citadel had
been built.  The Emperor himself, it was said, could be seen standing upon the
tower from which he reigned, watching in horror as the twin nemeses ripped
asunder the ground into which they burrowed, descending deeper into the land
beneath.  The Emperor could see that the force which controlled these twin
weapons of war was no longer any force of the Inferno, nor even of any mortal
upon Yathulas.  These were under the force of some being not of this world
indeed, but rather of some other world of men.  He wracked his mind, attempting
to discern the truth of the matter, and arrived at the matter of the fair
slave the late king Althinas had kept in the city of Zaroia.

He had looked into that slave's eyes of sapphire, and had seen the truth
within.  He had not comprehended it at the time, but he knew what it had meant
now.  The girl that had once been slave to Althinas had been far more than she
had seemed, a power beyond the reckoning of her master.  At once the strange
events all seemed to come together and be clear to him.  The death of Althinas,
the destruction of his animal-dragon in Zaroia, the demon gone mad in his
capital, the control of the orbs now before him, all of it had been orchestrated
by this young woman with the ancient eyes.

The purpose of this escapade now was clear.  The life forces that had been
gathered by the dragons in their decades if not centuries of existence was
awesome in its scope.  They had expended some of it upon the demon ere it had
fled, but the bulk of it was still present.  The orbs had devoured this power
when it consumed them, grown into the mammoth things they now were.  Now,
they descended into the earth.

Into the caverns in which he kept the other animals, those dragons that had
grown so dreadfully powerful that their minds had been broken by their own
magic.

The orbs vanished from view.  The Emperor closed his eyes, held tightly to
the railing of his tower balcony.  He felt, through his feet, rather than
heard the release of energy from the orbs.  The rumbling began suddenly,
then shook the very city to its foundations.  A large section of the ground
in the center of town, nearest where the orbs had descended, began to crack
all about.  The rumbling grew, and the cracks broke into gaping holes which
descended into a milling yellow light beneath the earth.  The rock of the
ground of Sable broke asunder and fell into this hole, and the shrieks of
many animalistic dragons in their rude and brief awakening filled the city
with horror.

The dust concealed the destruction entirely from mortal eyes for a time, but
not the eyes of Emperor Saiblos.  His eyes were more than merely mortal, as
the girl had seen at the same time he had seen into hers'.  He gazed into the
billowing cloud of dust and beheld the truth:  the center of town had been
torn from its moorings and dropped upon his collected monsters, his ultimate
weapons to hold against the witch-kings that were his cowering vassals.  They
were crushed by that torrent as completely as the monster he had sent to
Zaroia had been crushed by the falling of the stone gatehouse upon it.  There
would be no survivors from his flock.

Rage shook his features, for he knew that the perpetrator of this disaster
could not be far.  The golden flecks danced wildly in his black eyes, the
wooden railing splintered in the deceptively strong grip of his feeble-
appearing hands.  He cast aside the cane that he used only to fool the unwary
into believing him physically weak, and stared into the rubble as the dust
cleared.

A shape arose from the ground like some messiah rising from the waters,
coming to stand in feminine defiance of the man looking down upon her in
fury from his tower.  The dust had not touched her; her skin and clothes
were as clean as if she had just stepped from a bath-tub.  Her eyes looked
up at the Emperor, and this time she made no endeavor to hide the strength
within.

"You . . . you have broken what it has taken me a millenium to assemble!"
shrieked the Emperor, choleric with conniptions of unutterable fury.  "You
have laid waste to all which allowed me to hold power in my Empire!"  He
closed his eyes briefly.  "No . . . not all!"  He began to grow in size.
"For there was one power which enabled me to seize that might at the start,
that power which I encouraged and harnessed in others."  His deathly pale
skin turned to the glossy black of fine ink, his skin breaking into scales
as his robes shredded in this flurry of unnatural growth.  "Power which you
have seen already in that moment in Zaroia . . ."  His belly turned to a
golden shape reflecting the flecks that had been in his eyes against the
same black.  His eyes, having cast their color to the rest of him, turned
to a bright, glittering red, the color blood exhibits when the flesh is
but recently cleaved.  Wings sprouted from his back and cast Arcania in
shadow below, blotting out the sun above.  ". . . power which extended to
more than brute force, unlike the simpletons who would claim it from me . . .
power which you will know here and now!"

The wings gripped the air, and the monstrous Emperor of Dragons glided down
upon her with its powerful claws outstretched to disembowel her where she
stood.

Arcania chose to be elsewhere when the hands tore their great rent from the
already-broken rocks.  She vanished from sight, reappearing where the Emperor
had just dived from.

The gigantic ebon dragon circled about, no longer deigning to use human speech
in its unspeakable wrath.  A great ball of light, orange and blinding,
surrounded its clenched fist briefly ere the palm was opened at the tower,
the orb's force hurled into a streak of light which no reflexive transport
spell could avoid so easily.  The streak detonated upon the balcony, shredding
the wooden supports and casting Arcania back to the ground upon which she
had stood moments earlier.

Arcania came to her knees, bleeding slightly from the strike.  She clutched
the Necklace around her throat, assuring herself that it had not fallen from
her collar as she had fallen from the shattered balcony.  She stood again,
finding her huge opponent quickly as it dove down upon her once more.  She
raised a hand, and abruptly its wings went rigid, held frozen and bound in
place.

Saiblos' scarlet eyes widened in sudden terror, as realization of his
situation came to him.  He was diving at full speed down upon her, his wings
locked beyond an ability to rise up from his path.  He had little choice within
nature but to hurl himself against the stone of the earth.

However, that was merely his choice within nature.  He conjured his magic,
the human refuse that littered the streets of Sable crumbling to ash to feed
the spell that would save his life.  He vanished from his position much as
his enemy had done, to reappear in level flight, his wings still locked but
no longer in position to make a ruinous auger into the rock.

Arcania saw that he had cured his ill, and released his wings so that she
might connive another means to attacking him.  She watched, as he turned, not
daring to dive down upon her lest she repeat the same strike, and simply turned
his head downward this time.  She looked closely, and perceived the swelling of
his chest.  Not knowing what form the blast of his breath would take, she
deigned to leap aside when it came rather than guess to its nature.

Flames leapt from the jaws of Saiblos, but not the cool yellow flames of
lesser fires.  These were the bright azure to match Arcania's eyes, of a
heat sufficient to melt the strongest of steels, and of a force to break the
studs of a stout wooden house even ere they were reduced to paper-fine ash
to be scattered in the afternoon breeze.

Arcania tumbled back to her feet, her eyes again finding her foe as he
again swirled in the air to strike back at her.  She saw the intake of the
Emperor's breath once more, only this time it was followed by the rumbling
sound that a large beast might make when forcing the mucus lining the throat
into the mouth.  Arcania recognized that a new attack was coming, and prepared
herself.

Saiblos spat a great blob of liquid down upon her, such that when it struck
the invisible umbrella about her, it fell to the stones around her and wrought
a ringing ditch at her feet.  Saiblos saw the useless result of this strike,
and mentally eliminated it from his possible means of destroying this annoying
foe.

Arcania shrugged, and sent her umbrella of force into a blinding white lance
of magical strength, striking the creature upon the breast.  The strike would
have destroyed nearly any monster Arcania had ever encountered, including the
demon which had been summoned as her means of eradicating Saiblos' minions,
but the Emperor merely grunted at the impact.  It was beginning to seem that
both opponents' defenses were so strong as to make them invulnerable to each
others' reasonable strikes.

The Emperor took a slow, leisurely pace about the sky, confident now that his
enemy could do little to harm him with direct power.  Yet his mind wandered
as he thought of the means by which he might destroy this bothersome gnat.

He sent his mind's power down upon her, bringing the will that had built one
Empire from the sky and bearing down upon the will that had built another.
Surely, the wench could not hope to resist this indomitable force of mental
strength.

Arcania's eyes narrowed, the corner of one lip twitching upward.  The Emperor
saw it, and had he not sable skin, he would have blanched.  He suspected that
there were dead mean aplenty who could have told him about that smirk.  He
tried to draw himself back, but already she had caught him, wrenching at his
senses through his cast thoughts with an agony that had not been known to him
in three millenia.  She twisted at his brain, and he flopped over in the air
and crashed into the ground.

She felt his consciousness slipping, and let him go.  She strode to the site
of his ruin, seeing the eyes fluttering with confusion and fear.  She spoke
a harsh word, traced runes in the air with three of her ten fingers, one on
her right hand and two on her left.  The complex twisting of her fingers
ended, she clapped her hands, and the ground beneath the Emperor Saiblos began
to shine with an eerie yellow-orange light.  Awareness only partially returned
to the dazed monarch, his injured mind trying to grasp what made his body
shrink with worry.

The ground gave way, and he felt himself falling . . . falling . . .

Arcania closed the portal once the Emperor had safely descended into the
Inferno.  She wondered whether or not sending him there would be safe; with
the powers there potentially at his service, he could well be more dangerous
than ever.  She shook her head at the thought.  The demons of the Inferno had
tried to find a way to escape their prison for uncounted millions of years.
The Emperor was clever, but even he could not accomplish such a feat.

Arcania decided that this city was not where she wanted to be, having just
banished Saiblos to the netherworld.  Her mind, sharp now in its perception
from its dealing with her enemy, quickly found the one other psyche that was
protected from the mundane probings of the sorcerers of the city.  She grabbed
Jiloro as she had seized Saiblos, and at opposite corners of the city, a woman
who had risen from the earth and a madman who had screamed of demons trying
to eat him vanished from Sable, never to be seen by any of that town again.

+=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=+
+	The exile of Arcania Dorval                       +
+=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=+
+       . . . scribed by the Stilt Man,			  +
+		foleye@viper.cs.orst.edu		  +
+=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=+