You went with us to hockey games and horse shows. To your concert at Great Woods went my family, and my brother even as he neared the end of his life.
And you were there with me as I wrote this book. “Sisters of the Moon,” “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?” and “Rhiannon,” all three, the songs that took me through my darkest hours and now let me go back to that place, because my friends of two decades, the Companions of the Hall, demanded no less of me.
So thank you, Stevie Nicks, and Fleetwood Mac, for writing the music of my life.
— R. A. Salvatore
PRELUDE
The dragon issued a low growl and flexed his claws in close, curling himself into a defensive crouch. His eyes were gone, having been lost to the brilliant light bursting from a destroyed artifact, but his draconian senses more than compensated.
Someone was in his chamber—Hephaestus knew that beyond a doubt—but the beast could neither smell nor hear him.
“Well?” the dragon asked in his rumbling voice, barely a whisper for the beast, but it reverberated and echoed off the stone walls of the mountain cavern. “Have you come to face me or to hide from me?”
I am right here before you, dragon, came the reply—not audibly, but in the wyrm’s mind.
Hephaestus tilted his great horned head at the telepathic intrusion and growled.
You do not remember me? You destroyed me, dragon, when you destroyed the Crystal Shard.
“Your cryptic games do not impress me, drow!”
Not drow.
That gave Hephaestus pause, and the sockets that once—not so long ago—housed his burned-out eyes widened.
“Illithid!” the dragon roared, and he breathed forth his murderous, fiery breath at the spot where he’d once destroyed the mind flayer and its drow companion, along with the Crystal Shard, all at once.