"What happened to your hand?"
"Dwarf! A damned dwarf cut it off a few minutes ago!"
"Minutes...ago?"
"Minutes, centuries, what does it matter?" the old man said with more than a glimmer of sadness.
"How long have you been in this place?"
"A few minutes," the one-handed man mumbled. Then, sitting up straighter, he turned to the stranger who had managed to find his way into the library and asked, "So how big has she become? How monstrous?"
"Sh..she? What?" the other asked, his appearance haggard and shaken.
"The Bdellium! How big is the Bdellium!?"
"I don't know! I thought...I thought you were..."
"Bah! Get out!" the old man shouted. "Come back after a few more years, if you can manage to find your way back here again," he added, mostly to himself.
Once the stranger was gone, the old man quietly opened the drawer to his study desk and looked at his tormentor, its face swimming with swirls of black and white like a raging storm. There it sat, both calling him and mocking him.
There it sat, the Medallion.
