Dragons & Dwarves Read Online Free PDF

TV news whore at one time—had to attend a funeral and had given me his season tickets for the game. I had gone to see a division championship battle. Instead, I had gotten the show of the millennium.
    It had been a few months shy of ten years ago, when I had seen it open—twenty feet above the Pittsburgh thirty-five yard line. Halftime, tied game, and I don’t think anyone really remembers that the Steelers went on to win the division when they played the second half at Three Rivers.
    It sort of grew out of a point in the air, swelling until it sliced into the turf. It still gives me chills the way the silence in the stands grew with the sphere. It can be really scary when thousands of people are being really quiet.
    The Portal was a mirrored sphere about fifty feet in diameter, rippling with rainbow shimmers of color. Mirror, but not quite a mirror, since the reflection on the sphere wasn’t of the surrounding stadium, but a coliseum of a much more ancient vintage. Within moments we could all feel a breeze from it carrying the smell of damp mulch and swamp gas. Probably from the reflected coliseum which seemed to have been overtaken by wetlands and reeds.
    The PA system whined, broadcasting whispered muttering. TV monitors across the stadium, and beyond, began showing strange ghost images, as if Salvador Dalí and Hieronymus Bosch had collaborated to make a Philip Glass music video.
    The cameramen were the first to approach it, hopelessly trying to get the image on tape.
    Then they came.
    A small band of folks in ragged garb first appeared in distorted reflection on one side of the mirror, growing closer until they slipped through the surface. If you tried, you could pretend this quartet of guys were funky-looking humans. But, I think to the last of us, we knew. These folks weren’t from around here.
    They were all tall, six feet to a man, and had hair that didn’t look quite right. The shade was off, and the way it grew around the skull followed subtle curves that didn’t belong to a human face. Their ears were long and pointed, eyes narrow, chin long. Three of them had a bluish cast to their skin, one was a fire-engine red that would put Chief Wahoo to shame, and the last one was black—and not the black we mean when talking about human skin color, but black, like a shadow on the brightest day.
    Elves. Fugitives from a kingdom on the other side of the Portal. A regime that must have been a true horror when you consider five guys from a feudal agrarian society—magic or not—walking into a Browns game . . .
    Let’s just say that they must have burned all their bridges before being prodded by microphone-wielding sportscasters and being surrounded by three-hundred-pound guys in dog masks started looking attractive.
    It took about ten hours to clear the stadium. The police were the first to set up a perimeter around the field. Then around the stadium. In forty-eight hours, when some of the nasty things—and Aloeus would have been classed in that group at the time—started coming through, the perimeter became the province of the National Guard.
    The next twelve months were pretty rough. No TV at all, radio intermittent enough to be almost useless. Only completely digital communications worked, and those became less than reliable. Computers would work for a time, but were subject to massive random failures. Everything was pretty damn chaotic.
    The Feds tried to step in, and that gave Mayor Rayburn his moment of glory. The common legend is that Cleveland’s mayor saw what the Portal meant, not just in relation to the short-term chaos it was causing, but in what it could mean for the area, long-term. Not that many appreciated it at the time.
    When FEMA was all set to come in, declaring northeast Ohio a disaster area, Mayor Rayburn drew a line in the sand, saying, “This far, no farther.” The nation was appalled that the city would stop federal aid at the city limits, but his explanation was terse, “I will not