The dragon, curious yet terrified, let his gaze focus on that empty vessel, on the once mighty artifact that he had inadvertently annihilated at the cost of his own eyes.

And he had destroyed it a second time, he realized. Unknown to him, there had remained residual power in the Crystal Shard, and when the tentacle-headed illithid had goaded him, he’d breathed forth fires that had again assaulted the Crystal Shard.

Hephaestus swiveled his head around. Rage engulfed the creature even more, a horror-filled revulsion that turned instantly from dismay to pure anger.

For his great and beautiful shining red scales were mostly gone, scattered about the floor. A few dotted the beast’s mostly skeletal form here and there, pathetic remnants of the majesty and power he had once shown. He lifted a wing, a beautiful wing that had once allowed Hephaestus to sail effortlessly across the high winds curling up from the Snowflake Mountains to the northwest.

Bones, torn leathery tatters, and nothing more adorned that blasted appendage.

Once a beast of grandeur, majesty, and terrible beauty, reduced to a hideous mockery.

Once a dragon, earlier that very day a dragon, reduced to … what? Dead? Alive? How?

Hephaestus looked at his other broken and skeletal wing to realize that the blue plane of strange magical power had crossed it. Looking more closely within that nearly opaque curtain, Hephaestus noted a second stream of crackling energy, a greenish dart within the blue field, backtracking and sparking inside the curtain. Low to the ground, that visible tether of energy connected the wing of the dragon to the artifact, joining Hephaestus to the Crystal Shard he thought he had long ago destroyed.

Awaken, great beast, said the voice in his head, the voice of the illithid, Yharaskrik.