The Guest in Their House

Opening

The mine had paid out at last. Not in raw ore hauled off for a quick purse — they had chosen the longer road, and told the dwarves to keep the mithril in the ground until it could be drawn out as finished work, worth more for the waiting. Their share of the profits came anyway, heavy and honest, and with it a handful of seeds and the dragonstone roots Gundren had pressed on Yeltsu.

That was the part that could be counted. The other part had no ledger. Back at the manor, Zuktind had asked Telno to lead a worship, and knelt through it, and come away with a thing he could not weigh in coin: a certainty, quiet and complete, that he had not lost his way. No voice told him where the road went. No hand pointed. Only the assurance that where he stood now, he was standing right.

He had needed it. A storm had come through Phandalin while they were gone and undone half the work — rain enough to erode the ditch the palisade needed to stand in, so that the unfinished wall had come apart into a heap of loose timber waiting for the ground to dry. But even that had turned. Yeltsu and Aurora had played to the low spirits of the town, and the playing had become a feast by the Shrine of Luck, and the feast a night of drinking that carried the town's mood back up out of the mud.

Now it was a new morning, and there was work to do, and a chat none of them yet knew they had an appointment for.

The Scrolls Divided

Before the tools came out, there was a smaller reckoning to settle. Rathenfall counted out the two thousand gold he still owed against his commissioned plate and set it aside. Then they turned to Lissandra's scrolls — a fan of them laid out, spells copied out in her steady hand: Wall of Force, Animate Objects, Counterspell, Dispel Magic, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Haste, two of Misty Step, and Hold Person.

It was a fine haul, and most of it slid straight through their fingers.

The trouble was the writing itself. A scroll answers only to a hand its magic already recognizes, and one by one the spells refused theirs. Zuktind reached for the heavy ones — Wall of Force to cage a thing, Counterspell to smother an enemy's casting — and found the craft simply would not take from a battlesmith; of the whole set, only Dispel Magic would obey him. Yeltsu, whose college let him borrow from the wizard's book, tried for Counterspell and learned he could not hold it either, not yet — not until he chose to make it his own the next time such a choice came around. He resolved, aloud and firmly, to do exactly that. Rathenfall could take none of them at all — but the ring on his finger cared nothing for spell lists, and so Haste stayed his to spend whenever he needed it.

The rest went back to Lissandra, who could actually cast them. It was, Zuktind allowed, a lot of wasted paper to end up more or less where it started.

Rebuilding

Then the town, and the work.

Zuktind and Rathenfall went to the houses of the families the fighting had turned out of doors, and set their hands to raising walls. Aldrich worked among them, and Tessa, and old Sildar Hallwinter could be seen moving through the crowd; the town was mobilized, and after the feast in the square the mood had come up out of the wet. Yeltsu split his hours between the townsfolk and his greenhouse out in the woods, where the seeds from the mine were being coaxed toward leaf and root and, eventually, into ingredients and potions of his own making.

But it was among the people that Yeltsu had become something the others had not — a figure the town wanted to look at. They called him mysterious. They asked when he would throw them another party, and a young woman near the fire said he was so mysterious and so spontaneous, and he told her, with the ease of a man who had learned to wear the attention, that she flattered him.

Underneath the ease, the old weight had not lifted. Pressed on what his god would make of all this cheerful conjuring — the performances, the lifting of spirits — Yeltsu turned it over honestly. He knew little of Sseth beyond what he had been told and what the ritual had shown him, and he doubted a god of arcana and darkness cared much whether a bard made villagers laugh. What Sseth was suffering, though — that he had an answer for. It was theft. Whatever Sseth was, evil or otherwise, his worship was being stolen from him, and theft was theft no matter whom it was taken from. That, Yeltsu decided, was reason enough to begin. He meant to start the ball rolling toward setting the god free.

Riders on the Hill

He was still turning that thought over when Aurora came hurrying across the worksite, and she was not the only one who had gone still. Aldrich had lifted his eyes to the northwest. So had a handful of others who paid attention to that sort of thing.

On the crest of the hill, black against the pale sky, five riders sat their warhorses and watched the town.

Zuktind knew what he was looking at — scouts, cavalrymen, the kind of eyes an army sends ahead of itself. These were the Zhentarim's, the same force that had promised to come back for the town's wealth in three months and were barely four or five weeks into the waiting. His first instinct pulled two ways at once: ignore them and seem asleep, or confront them and seem afraid. Neither felt right, and lately he had not trusted his own judgment on such things, so he rolled it out in the open — a moment's cast of the mind, sharpened by a flash of insight — and found the middle path.

He set down what he was holding, straightened, and looked directly up the hill. He let them see that he saw them. He held the look long enough that there could be no mistaking it — you are watched too, and you do not frighten me — and then he turned back to his wall.

The riders did not bolt. They had never been hiding; they sat square on the ridgeline against the open sky. One or two swung down to feed their horses. They stayed perhaps half an hour, unhurried, and then mounted and rode off the way they had come. When they were gone Zuktind laid it out for the others: the collapsed palisade might have escaped their notice, a heap of timber and a drying ditch and nothing more, and if that was so, the wall should be raised only when no scouts were on the hill to see it climb. It might, he thought, be worth calling a council — not the three of them deciding alone, but the whole town, deciding together how to keep the wolves patient a little longer.

The Phandalin Guard

Aldrich had a suggestion of his own. Why didn't the big Paladin go and look at the men they were training — see whether the reformed Redbrands were coming along in the right direction?

So Rathenfall went to Tresendar Manor, where the town's new soldiers drilled. They were red-handed men once; they were the town's guard now — the Phandalin Guard, the name finally settling on them — and they were recruiting, the ranks swelling toward fifty. Rathenfall gave them a day of it. He was not a man who talked, but he talked well enough with a blade, and the young men watched the way he moved and learned more in that one day than in a week of their own fumbling. He stayed on over the days that followed, walking the yard with Darren, watching for the ones who might be made to lead — reading the ground, as was his habit, for where his own effort would take root.

He was so bent on the reading that he missed something else. There was a movement at the edge of his sight one of those days — a shape in a corner, a shifting where nothing should shift — and it passed him by unnoticed, and whatever it was doing, it did unwatched.

A Night of Snakes and Light

When the rebuilt houses were finished and the displaced families given back their doors, the town did the thing it now knew how to do: it celebrated. And Yeltsu had been quietly preparing something the little town had never seen.

He had spent the afternoon in the fields and the hedgerows, calling to the snakes in their own tongue — the harmless kind, nothing venomous — gathering them a few at a time until he had close to a score of them coiling to his commands. Zuktind meant to have a hand in it too. With a touch of his tinkering he woke five ordinary pebbles into holding a picture apiece, and when night came he cycled through them one after another behind the stage, a still image swapped for the next fast enough that the eye stitched them into motion: a forest that stirred, animals moving in the dark behind the performer. Aurora took the music. She had a lyre, and a flute besides, and she laid a soundtrack under the whole thing that fit the firelight and the shadows so well it might have been written for them.

The town had never seen its like — not here, they said, not anywhere. They sat mesmerized, moved by it, and they would talk about that night for weeks and months, some of them for years. It was theater. It was a small piece of real magic. It was a memory the whole town would keep.

The Dwarves' Gift

The days ran on, and one of them brought a cart and two dwarves — not Gundren, not Nundro, but their kin, come to trade supplies for the mine and to deliver what had been promised. They unwrapped armor of a kind none of the party had worn: masterwork, Lissandra said, and imbued with real power. Studded leather for Yeltsu that carried his guard from a middling sixteen up to a solid eighteen, and plate for Rathenfall that did the same for him. There were still six-and-thirty thousand in gold owed on the work — to be quietly shaved off the party's share of the mine as the seasons turned — but the exchange left them plainly stronger than they had been, and no one begrudged the price.

And then, at last, the wall stood. The ditch had dried, the timbers had gone back up, the palisade closed the town in behind it, and the garrison behind the wall numbered twenty or thirty men learning their trade. For the first time, Phandalin could hold against an attack if one came. Somewhere in those working days a bright thing streaked past Zuktind — a flash of shine too quick to catch — and though he reached for it even through the eyes of Rusty, whose mind was tied to his own, neither of them could name what it had been.

Farewell

Aldrich and Tessa had not left when the party half-expected them to. They were not the kind to walk away from unfinished work; they stayed until the defense was done, and old Merrick stayed with them, chiefly because Aldrich had. When the wall was up and the garrison drilling, the party pressed them into one last celebration — music and fire and drink, memorable performances, poetry — and then, on the morning after, the three of them made ready to go, as though there were somewhere else they were long overdue.

Aldrich said he would come back one day, to see whether the work still stood, and charged them to take good care of it. Zuktind promised he would — they had an appointment of their own to keep, he said, and had kept the Platinum Dragon waiting long enough.

Tessa looked at him and smirked. "So to Mount Celestia then. You're still so arrogant, thinking he's there waiting for you."

"That's what we were told," Zuktind said. "He is the liberator of my people."

"Good luck. Be humble in your requests. Don't assume you're owed anything, dragonkin."

He would never knowingly dishonor the god, he told her — if not for Bahamut, his people would still be barbarians in the valley below his home, bending the knee to Tiamat. She wished him luck again, and the three of them went off up the road, having given a great deal and asked nothing, and never once having said where they came from or where they were bound.

Turning Point — The Silver Veil

The next morning Telno found Zuktind and said the words he had been waiting on: "It is time."

They would not repeat the mistake of the last crossing. Ithras had no place thriving in Mount Celestia, and so this time they brought Aurora — eager, when Zuktind asked her, at the mere thought of seeing the silver mountain he had described — and Lissandra with her. After breakfast they went to the shrine of Bahamut, and Telno did what a priestess does: she honored the Platinum Dragon, god of dragons and of justice, protector of life, and asked the others to lend their worship to his; and then she told him, plainly, that they were ready to return.

There was no thunder to it. No portal torn open. It came on so gently that they noticed it before they knew they were noticing — a whitening at one wall of the shrine, a veil of silver light where no veil had hung, stirring as though a wind moved through it. And behind the veil, when it lifted, a familiar country: silvery, shining, mountainous. Mount Celestia, waiting on the other side of a curtain of light.

Zuktind gazed at it in open awe. He rose slowly from his knees and crossed to it, trying not to blink, half-certain it would vanish if he did. It did not. He looked back at the others, gave a nod and a beckoning gesture, and stepped through — and waited on the far side while they followed him one by one onto the bright silver path, the silver sea behind them, the light of the mountain climbing ahead until it grew too fierce to look at, and they all closed their eyes.

Closing

When it was bearable again, they opened them in a room that was dark, and warm, and wrong in a way that took a moment to name — because it was not strange at all. It was familiar. A fire flickered not far off, and a figure crouched over it, feeding it, large and strong and half-known. Zuktind looked and felt the recognition rising before he could place it, and then the figure was somehow smaller than it had been an instant before, medium where it had been huge, and he could not say whether it had changed or had always been so. Simple clothes. A hood. And he had not yet noticed that the room was full of people he knew.

Then he understood where he was standing. Not Tyr's hall. Not Celestia at all. He was home — back in the hall of Tresendar Manor — and by the fire sat old Merrick, laughing softly at the look on his face, with Aldrich standing behind him and Tessa near, and five gold canaries turning slow circles through the air.

Zuktind's mouth simply opened. He knew this. He had heard of this and never once believed he would see it — Bahamut's other shape, the old wanderer Fizban, the god who had been a guest in their house the whole time, eating at their table, healing at their shrine, an old man with no evidence at all of being anything more. Two of the golden shapes were ancient dragons in canary-form; the other five were the great worms themselves. He had walked past this being for weeks and worried after his own conduct with the certainty of a fanatic — had he been disrespectful, had he done anything wrong?

Merrick looked at him and smiled, kind and easy, and gestured at the places set around the fire for all of them.

"Well — I don't want to seem like I own your home. But given that you're a bit surprised yourself, I'd love to ask you: please sit down, Zuktind. Let's have a chat."

Zuktind swallowed, and said the only thing there was to say. Anything you say, my lord. And he sat down by the fire, with the god of his people watching him across the flames, and the chat began.