Sand was bored.
After the investigation of the disappearance of the Knight-Captain of Crossroad Keep and the Betrayer of Crossroad, it was no surprise that the budget for keeping the whole thing going got whittled away to nothing over the ten years, when the lord finally announced that the keep would be a small outpost only. The remaining companions of the former Knight-Captain - the current Knight-Captain and her husband, the sergeants Bevil and Katriona, the increasingly eccentric and likely demented wizards Kailana and Aldanon, gradually wandered away in their separate directions. Well, that was not entirely true, for the first four returned to the hometown of the respective husbands, that backwater in the Mere that was on its dogged way back to being its old no-account self after being destroyed for the second time in thirty years during the war with the King of Shadows. Kailana retired to Baldur's Gate, as she had always planned, where rumor had it she did have a husband. Aldanon returned to his cavernous Manse in the Blacklake neighborhood and returned to whatever batshittery he'd always done. Sand was the last to leave, perhaps because, as the only one of them whose lifespan was expected to last a good several hundred years, he simply didn't notice that the time had passed. By the time he returned to Neverwinter, his shop had long since been shuttered and then sold to another hedge wizard, for a profit mind you, but it really was mostly run as amusement rather than survival, and so he found himself a relatively longterm resident of the local inn, the Sunken Flagon, where he observed all the refuse of the docks by day and by night, told his tale to all who cared to hear it - and many who did not.
"You've really got to snap out of it," the innkeeper, one Duncan Farlong, finally said after cutting off the drunken wizard for the fifth time that week, "You're starting to make me feel bad for you."
"Don't you ever feel like your best days are behind you, though?" the wizard asked, morosely staring at his empty martini glass.
"Behind me are the days when I lost my hometown, my betrothed, my hometown again, and then my niece," said Duncan, "So no, I don't particularly care for those days."
"But you've spent every day for the last, what is it, thirty-five years just tending bar in this dump," Sand said.
"This dump where you, for some reason, have hung your hat for six months. And where, by the way, the rent is due tomorrow," Duncan replied.
"But don't you miss, you know, really being someone?" Sand sighed, "Someone important?"
"I don't think you and I have the same definition of "important.""
"I hate to say it, but I almost miss Luskan," the wizard rambled on, "I mean, sure, it's probably for the best I got out when I did, but the intrigue! Oh, the thrill of being a power broker. A mover and shaker. A kingmaker. A - "
"A dick," the bartender finished for him, "Look, if you're seeking adventure, any number of ships leave this port on a daily basis, one of them will be looking for a man of your… skills." Sand waved him off, and promptly passed out on the bar.
Several weeks - or was it years? Later, the same - or was it a different set? Of pirates were sitting, getting absolutely shitcanned at the Sunken Flagon.
"You. Elf," one of them called, "I hear you're looking to be someone important."
Sand rose clumsily and toddled over, "Where'd you hear that?"
"The whole barroom heard that," the pirate said. Closer, Sand observed that she was human, but spoke with a Thayan accent. She wore a cloak and cowl, but he would have put her in her thirties, and the cowl covered up an impressive mop of black curls, "I know someone who can help you."
"Do you now!"
A mysterious stranger in the dark corner of a seedy bar with the promise of powerful secrets. This was too good to be true.
"Have you heard of the Isle of Loose Ends?"
"As a literary metaphor?" he replied.
"Well that's not it's actually name. It's actual name is Cully's Rock,"But it gets called the Isle of Loose Ends because it's where you go when you are seeking something you don't quite know what it is," she continued, "All the loose ends of the world roll through there eventually. Criminals, yes, but also deposed kings, wizards who got too powerful for their orders, bastard children, enchanters who create things that can unmake the very world." With her last pronouncement, the pirate pulled a smoke from somewhere in her voluminous cloak, and leaned forward to light it on the candle which lit the table.
"And how do you know of this?"
"We who ply the seas know many things," she replied mysteriously.
"And what does it take to get there?"
"It's a journey of a month or more," she said, "And you'll have to pay for passage, of course, but it just so happens that my companions and I are headed for that very isle."
And so, on a brilliant and clear morning, the wizard Sand sailed out on the sloop Dove of War under a sky so sapphire blue, even that moon elf didn't entirely believe it was real. Of course, it was the first morning in years that he hadn't been hungover as all fuck, so that might have had something to do with it.
The island known all around, as the Isle of Loose Ends, but locally as Cully's Rock, more closely resembled the latter. The route into port required many signals between the lookout and the multiple archers positioned on the rocks high up above the sea, nods, and thumbs up before the Dove of War could make its way between the rocks and up the craggy inlet to harbor. There they docked, alongside what one of the crew pointed out as the flagship of the eponymous Cully's fairly impressive fleet, the schooner Dance of the Damned.
Where have I heard that name? Sand thought. Probably Luskan. Gross.
Upon disembarking, the pirate who had welcomed him aboard, whom he'd learned over the months at sea was named Shiren and was actually the ship's doctor, embraced another ruffian, a very tall man with dark complexion, and scooped up, one after another, a parade of dark haired children in her arms.
"This must be the famous Rafa!" Sand said, impressed that the little woman could keep her balance with a ten-year-old on each hip and a toddler clinging to her shoulders.
"So you've come to see the Queen of Shadows?" the pirate's husband said.
"Queen of… well I suppose I have!" he said. This entire excursion was an exercise in simply saying yes to whatever was proposed to him. Bunk in with a burly hagspawn with a silly accent and who always exuded an aura of cold? Sure! Exotic dish that may or may not be made from reindeer testicles? Yes please! He found himself, for the first time in years, enjoying everything that came before him, or at least, finding it very interesting.
"He wants power," Shiren shrugged, "And she's the one who knows how to put people places they don't belong."
Rafa shrugged, and led him up the wharf. The docks at Cully's Rock were positively humming with activity. Sailors from every land and clime busied up and down the wharves, and locals, whom Sand identified by their colorful clothing, looked down upon them with haughty stares, though, he observed, they performed entirely the same tasks. He followed the pirate and her husband up a dusty path and into a town that seemed built right into the mountains surrounding it, and Sand realized that he was standing - indeed, the whole town was standing - in the crater of a quiet volcano.
"You here for the first time?" asked a halfling, who was seated on the porch of a fine large house. Sand narrowed his eyes at him. He'd seen him somewhere before, but he could not for the life of him remember where. He tried to imagine him as a younger man, perhaps without the gray around the temples, the fine lines that marred his otherwise boyish countenance gone, but it was no use.
"He's here to see the queen," Shiren said.
"They're all here to see the queen," the halfling chuckled, "And only about three quarters of them regret it."
"Who is this…. Queen of Shadows?" asked Sand, his pale blue eyes taking in the colorful market stalls and roofs around him. This surely was a wondrous place, he could feel the magic of it all pulsing all around as though the isle itself had a heartbeat.
"Only the most sought after information broker in all the land," he said, "A former crewman of mine. Future too, if she feels like it. She can usually get you what you want… if you can get an audience with her."
The halfling led him inland, where he saw that he was correct, that the entirety of the town and even the field beyond lay in a great crater, rimmed on all edges by blackrocked mountains. He observed, in passing, such wondrous things for sale - dragon's eggs, baby griffons led by collars around their necks, robes in every hue and crackling with every element he had ever seen and a few he had not.
At the end of their trek stood an inn, the only one in town that he had seen so far. The Pigeon and Hawk, he mused to himself, but, only too eager to get on with it, he burst open the doors, excited for whatever fate awaited him on the other side. What lay behind was, in fact, just a barroom. Fire in the hearth. Old man behind the bar, serving up beers like his life depended on it. By the hearth sat a teenage girl, playing a mandolin with no small amount of skill, and singing in a lusty treble.
There are sober men and plenty
And drunkards barely twenty
There are men of over ninety that have never yet kissed a girl
But give me a ramblin' rover
And perhaps a little closure
We'll roam the wild world over
And together we'll face the world"
She tapped the mandolin to keep the beat while her fingers danced over the strings. Sand felt a somewhat familiar crackle in the air as whatever spell that song was pulsed around her. It appeared it was just a run-of-the-mill buy-more-drinks spell, but still, for such a young player it was quite impressive. But when her light brown eyes fell on the elf, he stopped.
"Who're you?" he called out over the din of the bar, the tinkling mandolin stopping as she raked her nails over the strings.
"I've come to see the Queen of Shadows," Sand declared, his voice breaking a little.
"Of course you have," The girl paused, and put down her mandolin. She was of average height, he imagined, for a human, and her hair was cropped short for a woman, but long enough that a handful of ebony curls could tumble stylishly into her face. A familiar face, in fact, though he knew not where he knew it from, "But that does not answer my question, now does it? So I'm going to ask again - who the fuck are you?"
"How old are you to be speaking like that?" Sand stared down his nose in disapproval.
"Not just anyone can roll in off the pier and demand an audience with the Queen of Shadows," she replied, "So shall we try this again? Who. The. Fuck. Are. You?"
The wizard sighed in exasperation, but relented. "I am Sand, formerly of the Hosttower of Luskan, lately of Crossroad Keep in Neverwinter, and I am here to see the Queen of Shadows to regain my rightful place in this world."
"Crossroad Keep," the little bard said, and in an instant she'd swapped her mandolin for a nasty-looking crossbow, which she set and pointed right at him, "Get the fuck out of here. Sail from this island. Forget you ever came."
"Child, I could root you to the ground where you stand," the wizard said.
"Fucking try it then," she challenged.
"Kaya! Put that thing down," the voice of a man issued from the top of the stairs on the left side of the bar room. Sand followed the little bard's gaze to see a ghost standing at the top of the stairs, and he suddenly placed the girl's features. The years hadn't hardened the man once known to Sand as the ranger Bishop as he would have expected, the haunted look he had always had to his light brown eyes was gone, frown lines that had cut into him deep at nineteen had softened. The only sign that any time had passed at all was the small patch of gray on his left cheek that had only just begun its campaign against the brown of his beard
"I see the dead still rise from the Mere," Sand said, pitching his voice to sound nonplussed, though this was quite an unexpected turn of events, "I suspect you've a tale to tell me, Master Ranger, of how you come to be standing before me when I laid eyes on you in the City of the Dead not twenty years ago."
The ranger was silent for a long moment. "I suppose I owe you a drink for that," he said. He walked by the girl and confiscated the crossbow, "You'll get this back when you stop pointing it at everything and everyone."
"But Dad, he said he was from Crossroad Keep," she protested.
"That means you ask questions first. Shoot later," he corrected her. She pouted, but picked her mandolin back up and continued her song.
"Come on then, elf, I suppose it's not just me you'll be wanting a story from."
He only had to wonder for a moment what that statement meant as he unlocked a door behind the bar, and Sand followed him through into a finely furnished office, where two figures were hunched over a large desk with a map of some city he'd never heard of upon it. They looked up as the door opened, and Sand found himself face to face with the Queen of Shadows. They stared at each other for a long moment, and then she spoke.
"You're younger than me," Addie - for it was she - said. And it was true, the elf standing before her had not changed a whit from the last time she'd laid eyes on him, now eighteen years in the past, "Oh we are going to need so much whiskey for this…"
"Is that?" the second figure, a hagspawn with blue-tinged skin, "Why it is! I've seen your face in their dreams! You're that uppity elf who thinks he's better than everyone."
"That hardly narrows it down," Bishop pointed out.
"I suppose not," he said, "Well, I should be going. I have my work cut out for me. Off to plant the seed in the head of a king! I'll leave you three to get reacquainted."
"Let me know if he needs more persuading, Gann, I can take a nap and join you at any time," Addie said, rose from her desk, and began rummaging through one of its drawers, finally finding her prize, a bottle of Ruathym whiskey and three crystal tumblers.
"As always, I will, my lemming," the hagspawn said, and exited the office.
"So let me get this straight," Sand said, several drinks and one very long story later. "You escaped on a pirate ship… then you sailed to Thay… you" - pointing at Addie - "- got cursed- by some kind of ancient magic and kidnapped to Rashemen, and you" - pointing at Bishop - "got caught by a red wizard and had your soul ripped from your body, and then you - " Addie again - "had to lead an army against the God of the Dead for both of your souls?"
"Yeah, that's the gist of it," she said. She was, as she herself had observed, older, past forty, but the years had not settled heavily on her any more than they did the ranger. She'd put on a few pounds, the taut muscles of her arms softening, she had a smattering of silver in the black of her hair, and the line in the middle of her forehead that used to only appear when she was concentrating was now a permanent fixture. She certainly wasn't the prized beauty she had been in her twenties, but then again, Sand had always had a specific admiration for older human women.
"And the lass with the itchy trigger finger?"
"Did she pull that bow on you?" Addie asked, "I told her a thousand times don't point that thing if you're not going to use it."
"Oh, she was going to use it," Bishop pointed out.
"That's your kid," she said, "Sixteen years old and already chasing her first murder charge."
"Well then next time she sneaks off to a haystack with a paladin's daughter, she's your kid when the dad shows up looking for a fight," he shot back.
"Yeah… the haystack thing is probably my fault," she admitted.
"Can I…" Sand began, completely uninterested in the antics of a teenager, "Can I tell your father you're here?"
"Daeghun?" Addie asked, "Don't be silly, he knows where I am. Visits a few times a year. Got a red wizard friend of mine to make him his very own portal to the back of the bar."
"And Duncan?"
"Him too," she said, "Saw him last month."
"That sly little…" Sand muttered, "They've known this whole time? What about Neeshka? She was always so fond of you and…"
"Her too," Bishop said, "And the kids. Well I guess they're not really kids anymore. She's the one who bought Kaya that damnable crossbow."
"They all knew and nobody thought to tell me!"
"Well, being as you were behind the whole having us legally declared dead thing, I think they were afraid you'd be disappointed to learn you were wrong," Addie pointed out.
"And it cannot come as a shock to you that not everyone is eager to put their trust in you," Bishop mentioned, "You know… the whole… Hosttower mage bit isn't everyone's favorite. Fortunately, I am not everyone. And you and I both know very well there's a little girl out there dying to put a bolt in you if I say the word."
"Oh I have no intention of ratting you out," Sand sighed with exasperation, "So what is it you do here, anyway?"
She shrugged, "I know things. I can convince people of things. You heard Gann before, sometimes a second son comes to me and wants his father to have a change of heart about the inheritance. Sometimes it's as simple as a wife wanting her husband to fuck off and never come back. Sometimes it's as dangerous as getting out of a bargain you made with a devil. Have you made a bargain with a devil, Sand, is that why you're here?"
"Oh I wish," he sighed, "I'm simply dissatisfied with where life has put me this time. Which is nowhere."
"The Neverese government isn't in the market for your superior extrapolations anymore?"
"Not particularly," he said.
"Have you tried starting a cult?"
"No," he said.
"Running away with pirates?"
"I was seasick the whole way here."
"Deposing a government and weaseling your way to the throne?"
"Been there, done that."
"Getting married and starting a family?"
"Never."
"You don't need me, Sand, you need a goddamn imagination," Addie sighed, "Look, I've heard tell of a powerful artifact buried somewhere up the Lapendrar in a set of Imaskari ruins outside of Thay that the red wizards have been after for decades, and if they want it, it's probably worth having. So why don't… I've got a map somewhere around here…" She got up, pulled her chair to one of the vast bookshelves behind her and began rummaging, "Why don't you fuck off and make that your obsession for awhile, if that doesn't get you where you want to be, we can talk about deals with devils."
"Imaskari," mused Sand, "That does sound interesting."
She located her quarry, hopped down off her chair, and set a dusty map in front of him.
"There you go," she said, "Now, why don't you come have a good honest drink at our good honest bar. I should get out there before Kaya decides it would be hilarious to sing a song that makes everyone take their breeches off and dance on the tables with their bits all waggling about."
"There was a time when you would have found that hilarious as well," Sand said.
"Oh, it was absolutely hysterical," Addie admitted, "Do you have any idea how hard it is to pretend to be angry when you're trying not to die laughing?"
Back out in the bar, it was almost like old times, the lively, somewhat vulgar music, played by the girl who was somehow the spit and image of both of them, the boisterous sailors dancing and caterwauling, the elderly bartender serving up pint after pint, and through it all Addie and Bishop exchanging glances over the table that could have started a house fire.
"So the two of you," Sand said, after five or six more martinis, pointing from one to the other, "Even after all these years. I was right, that is some very powerful magic there."
"She fought a God for me, you know," Bishop said.
"Yes, he knows, everyone knows, you only talk about it weekly," Addie sighed, "I'm never going to top that."
"You did, though," he said, glancing at their daughter. The girl caught his eyes, and rolled hers so hard that Addie thought they would drop right out of her face "Well… she was a cute kid. Before all the eye-rolling. And being pissed off all the time."
"Oh really, a teenager who rolls her eyes at anything and everything, angry all the time… never met one of those before," Sand pointed out, his blue eyes fixing on the man who, after all, had been one of those teenagers the last time he'd seen him.
"I didn't have parents when I was her age," Bishop said.
"And if you had you'd have thought everything out of their mouths was the definition of idiocy," Sand said, "That's how human children work. They start to hate you, so they go away for awhile, and then they come back, and you understand each other."
"The Gods are punishing me for what I put Daeghun through, I swear," Addie sighed, "I suppose we could send her off with Shiren for a trip, see if that chills her out."
"I might have a better idea," Sand said.
The next day, the wizard found a spring in his step that hadn't been there in a decade, waking up and feeling the energy crackling around him in that strange but wonderful town. He spent some coin, buying the gear he would need for his travels. And then he returned to the inn to bid farewell to his hosts, and assure them he would return. He found only the aged bartender and the young bard, who was messing with her crossbow in the corner, a set of well-balanced throwing knives set before her on the table.
"You're called Kaya, right?" he called, walking up to her.
"You're too old for me, and I like girls," she said, not looking up.
"Don't be crass," he scolded, "Have you ever actually shot anyone with that thing?"
She looked up then, "Do you want me to?"
"It's an impressive weapon," he said, "Seems a shame only to use it to threaten your mother's patrons."
She narrowed her eyes, "What are you getting at, old man?"
"Well, I have it on good authority that there is a bit of Imaskari technology that the red wizards are simply dying to get their hands on. And I would prefer that I got my hands on it first."
"What in the everliving fuck does that have to do with me?" she asked.
"Can you handle yourself in a fight?"
"Sure can," she said, suddenly interested.
"Well then, kid," he said, grinning, "How would you like to go on an adventure?"