Statue and Warrior

Initially the dragon had kept her chained up all the time, but he had soon realised that without some exercise she would deteriorate physically. So he had placed magical wards, that she could not pass, on all the tunnels by which she might have been able to escape, and then let her wander freely within the central area of his domain that the wards enclosed.

But not all her time was her own. She depended on the dragon for food and drink, and in return he made her work as his slave. Most of the tasks he set her were things that he could have accomplished far more easily through magic, but it amused him to make her toil and it kept her fit.

Then one day he gave her a pickaxe and told her to dig him a new tunnel. That proved to be a big mistake. After so much time it had not occurred to him that she could be a threat, even though she had originally come to the caves in order to slay him. But now at long last she was able to achieve her objective. Before he could react, she swung the pickaxe in a great arc, so that its point went through his eye socket and into his brain. He died instantly. Then she extracted the pickaxe from his skull and used it to dig a diversion around one of his wards. That took many hours of backbreaking work, but at last it was complete and she was free.

Then it was a question of trying to find her way out of the caves, no easy task. It had been too long since she made the inward journey for her to remember it clearly. At least there was enough phosphorescent moss on the tunnel walls for the excellent night vision that she had developed through being so long in near darkness to let her see where she was going.

Eventually she stumbled into the area of the caves that Belboz had turned into his home. There she found a corpse of someone who had evidently died some time ago. Luckily it had been long enough that it no longer smelled. (Unlike Astra, who had spent two years with no opportunity to wash or bathe.) The dent in the body's skull indicated that the man - some sort of magic user judging by his robe - had been the victim of an assault. When she noticed a bloodstain on the goblet that was lying nearby she knew that it must have been the weapon.

One room over, in a fairly bare room with various cabinet doors open as if someone had been frantically searching for something, stood a panicked-looking statue of a beautiful young girl of very short stature wearing a plain dress. A spell book lay on the ground near her. How strange! Why would anyone want a statue in such an ungraceful pose and with such an alarmed expression?

It occurred to Astra that the position that the spell book was in was almost as if the girl had dropped it. Light dawned. Perhaps she had attempted to cast a spell that had gone wrong, the effect being to petrify her?

She looked at the page the book was open at. It stated that the spell on that page was "guaranteed to reverse the previous spell". That would seem to imply that the girl had started off as a statue, somehow been able to cast a spell to turn herself into a human, and then reversed it. That made no sense. Unless... Perhaps by the previous spell it meant the spell on the previous page? When she turned back, she found that the previous spell had been to bring a statur alive. That figured. The girl must have made the same mistake that she had initially made herself, and inadvertantly turned herself into a statue.

Should she try to bring the girl back to life? After all, it seemed that it must be she who had killed the magic user. Unless it had been some third party who had long ago left the scene?

1. She tried, and succeeded. How does Fred-Hannah react to the startling sight of a naked, filthy, foul-smelling amazonian woman, with a by now waist-length mane of tangled red hair and a mixture of broken and very long fingernails and toenails?
2. She tried, but failed.
3. She decided not to try.

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