The Nether Scroll Chapter 1: A Caravan Along the Vilhon Reach
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey | Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
12 Flamerule, the Year of the Arch (1353 DR)
The book opens with two young wizards sitting on horses, watching other people fix a broken cartwheel, and gossiping. That’s it. That’s how we meet Druhallen and Galimer. And honestly? It’s a perfect introduction because it tells you exactly who these two are before anything dramatic happens.
Galimer Longfingers is the one talking. He wants to know about the bride they’re escorting to Hlondeth. Is the groom half-snake? He’s curious, chatty, dressed in expensive tailored clothes. He looks like a wizard should look. Elegant fingers, gemstone-blue eyes, wine-colored tunic. His mother Ansoain nicknamed him “Longfingers” as a toddler because everyone assumed those hands were made for magic.
Druhallen is the opposite. Brown hair, plain face, heavy brows. People regularly mistake him for Galimer’s hired help. But here’s the thing: Dru is the one with real talent. A carpenter’s son who got noticed by Ansoain when he casually quieted a squealing hinge with a cantrip he invented on his own. His dad took twenty gold coins and gave the boy a swat on the rump. Druhallen left home that day with a pocketful of nails. He kept the promise to honor his father’s name. He kept the nails, too.
The Caravan
They’re ten days into a twenty-day journey escorting a bride to her arranged marriage in Hlondeth. The bride hasn’t left her cart once. Three of the five wagons are filled with brick and stone to fake a proper dowry. Her actual dowry fits in one chest she keeps at her feet. The whole thing is sad. She’s trading her family name to save her father from debtor’s court, and the groom is a leather-dyer three times her age who needs a title.
Galimer arranged this job because the groom paid double the going rate. Good money made everyone overlook the obvious questions. Dru had voiced concerns early on, and Galimer had waved them off. Now Galimer was the one complaining. Classic.
Ansoain joins them and starts quizzing them on magic. This is great because it shows how their dynamic works. She calls out a reagent or a component and they have to identify its uses. Galimer always answers first. Dru always asks for more information. And when Galimer is about to say something stupid, Dru watches his lips and jumps in with his own answer to cover for his friend.
Ansoain knows Dru does this. She positions herself so Dru can see Galimer’s face. She never calls it out. It’s this quiet, three-way understanding that tells you everything about their relationship.
The Ambush
Then the ether shifts. Ansoain feels it. Dru feels it. Something is coming, and it’s subtle and powerful.
A dozen figures in red cloaks appear on a hilltop. Fire in the sky. Black fog rolling toward the wagons. The men-at-arms fight for their lives. Galimer opens his spell-fan and Ansoain tells him to hide in the wagon if his nerves are shaky. She tells Dru to save his spells for getting the bride out.
Dru doesn’t listen. He throws fireballs at the hilltop. They bounce off like nothing. He draws his knife and wades into the fog. He fights an undead zombie, stomps its ribs. Then he goes for the hilltop itself, figuring if the Red Wizards are arrogant enough to rely on undead for protection, maybe he can stab one or two before he dies.
He doesn’t make it. An undead warrior with a glowing halberd catches him. Red magic strands paralyze his muscles. The creature flings him through the air like a stone. He never feels the landing.
The Aftermath
Druhallen wakes up under stars. Everyone else is dead or gone. He searches the battlefield at dawn, chanting his grandmother’s prayers over bodies he barely knew. The captain has been savaged beyond recognition. He vomits. He weeps.
Then he finds Galimer, alive, pinned under a burned wagon. Galimer is wrecked with shame. His mind went blank. He couldn’t cast even a simple dust spell. He hid. When the Red Wizards ransacked and burned the wagons, he stayed hidden. “I should have died,” he says.
“What’s cut, stays cut,” Dru tells him. That phrase becomes a refrain through the book. It’s the carpenter’s son philosophy: you can’t un-saw a board.
They find Ansoain. Or rather, they find pieces of her. Bits of cloth and scalp. A chunk of her hand with fingers and rings still attached. Whatever killed her tore her apart. Dru retrieves her rings and presses them into Galimer’s hand.
The Disk
On the hilltop where the Red Wizards stood, they find a palm-sized glass disk. Dark but not black. Colder than winter. Gold flecks sparkle inside when held up to sunlight. There’s writing on the edge in a script Dru doesn’t recognize.
Galimer wants to use it as evidence. Dru says no. They can’t go to the Zhentarim with proof of Red Wizard involvement because getting caught between those two powers would be a death sentence. Galimer can’t accept that. Not for his mother.
So Dru makes a vow: “We’ll avenge her ourselves. I swear to you right now and forever: We’ll hunt those wizards down. We’ll go to Thay, if we have to.”
It’s a promise made by a nineteen-year-old with a broken wrist, standing on a hilltop soaked in blood and sorcery. And it’s the promise that drives the entire rest of this story.