The Floodgate   ::   Каннингем Элейн

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Akhlaur stalked toward the skeletal shark, moving as easily through the magical water as he had oncewalked beneath Halruaa's sky. The necromancer's magic had sustained his life through his long exile, yet two hundred years in the Elemental Plane of Water had profoundly changed him. He was still a powerful man, tall and lank, with fine black eyes and strong, well-formed features. Now tiny scales covered his skin, and gills shaped like twin lightning bolts slashed the sides of his neck. The fingers holding the wizard's staff were long and webbed, the skin faintly green in hue.

The wizard had not just survived but prospered. His servants supplied him with robes of fine green sea linen, embroidered with runes made with black seed pearls. His necromantic artistry was much in evidence. The staff he carried was not wood, but a living eel locked into a fierce, rigid pose. Small spats of lightning sizzled from the creature's fixed snarl and sent light shimmering across the wizard's bald green head.

Akhlaur reached out with his eel staff and stroked the shark's skull between its empty, glowing eyes.

"What have you brought me, my pet?" he inquired in a whispery tone.

Blue lightning sizzled from the eel into the undead shark. The bony cage flared with sudden light, prompting a thunderous, agonized shriek from the shark's latest captive. An explosion of bubbles and a long, wavering cry spiraled out into the water.

Akhlaur, intrigued but not impressed, leaned in for a better look. His eyes widened in sudden recognition. "By curse and current! I know this beast!"

The wizard's gills flared with excitement as he considered the implications of this latest capture. This was the laraken, the spawn of water demons and elven magic! It was his own creation, and a link to his homeland. If the laraken had found a way into the Elemental Plane of Water, then perhaps at long last he, Akhlaur, could find a way out!

"How did you come to be here?" the wizard demanded, "and what have you brought me this time?" He leaned his staff against a coral obelisk and began to gesture with both hands, easily tracing a spell he had not cast in two centuries.

In response, magic seeped from the monster like blood from a killing wound. The laraken clutched its bony cage for support as the wizard drained it to some minutely defined point just short of death.

Akhlaur savored the stolen spells as a gourmand might consider a sip of wine. "Interesting. Most interesting," he mused. "A blend of all the magical schools, with some Azuthan overtones. Definitely these are Halruaan spells, but the chant inflections are slightly off, as if the wizard were not a native speaker.