The mousey deBernezan kept his shoulders defensively hunched as he glanced nervously about the hall. At Beorg's side was deBernezan, the dark-haired southerner, the only man in the room who was not born and bred of the barbarian tribes. Yet one of those wealth-chasers stood among them now in their most revered hall of meeting. They despised the people of Ten-Towns, whom they considered weak wealth-chasers possessed of no spiritual value whatsoever.
Like the ground they roamed over, their oftenbearded faces were browned from the sun and cracked by the constant wind, giving them a leathery, toughened appearance, a foreboding, expressionless mask that did not welcome outsiders. They were indeed much akin to their land.
The barbarians of Icewind Dale stood a full head and more above the average inhabitant of Ten-Towns, sprouting as though to take advantage of the wide and roomy expanses of empty tundra. Representing his people, he stood tall and straight, his wide shoulders proudly squared. King Beorg, a robust man with tousled blond locks, a beard fading to white, and lines of experience etched deeply into his tanned face, stood solemnly at the head table. Though the tribes often warred with each other, in Hengorot all differences were put aside. Great flagons of mead dotted every table, and good-natured contests of strength sprang up with growing frequency. All of the barbarians already in the encampment had assembled in Hengorot and begun the pre-council festivities. The fires outside the hall burned low this night, for King Heafstaag and the Tribe of the Elk, the last to arrive, were expected in the camp before moonset. The tribesmen called it Hengorot, "The Mead Hall," and to the northern barbarians this was a place of reverence, where food and drink were shared in toasts to Tempos, the God of Battle. In the center of this circle, a huge deerskin hall had been constructed, designed to hold every warrior of the tribes. To accomodate the leaders of the respective tribes, several deerskin tents had been laid out in a circular pattern, each encompassed in its own ring of campfires. The unwavering flatness of the horizon was broken in one small corner by a solitary encampment, the largest gathering of barbarians this far north in more than a century. And yet, the nomadic tribes who summered there with the reindeer had not journeyed with the herd's migration southwest along the coast to the more hospitable sea on the south side of the peninsula. The great bergs of the Sea of Moving Ice drifted slowly past, the wind howling off of their high-riding tips in a grim reminder of the coming season. There were no mountains or trees to block the cold bite of the relentless eastern wind, carrying the frosty air from Reghed Glacier. The Crystal Shard is first book in the Icewind Dale Trilogy and the fourth book in the Legend of Drizzt series.Many miles north of Ten-Towns, across the trackless tundra to the northernmost edge of land in all the Realms, the frosts of winter had already hardened the ground in a white-tipped glaze. But it will take even more than that to defeat the corrupt wizard who wields the demonic power of Crenshininbon—the fabled Crystal Shard. With Drizzt’s help, Wulfgar will grow from a feral child to a man with the heart of a dwarf, the instincts of a savage, and the soul of a hero. It’s in the midst of battle that a young barbarian named Wulfgar is captured and made the ward of Bruenor, a grizzled dwarf leader and a companion to Drizzt. A cold and unforgiving place, Ten-Towns sits on the brink of a catastrophic war, threatened by the barbarian tribes of the north.
With his days in the Underdark far behind him, drow ranger Drizzt Do’Urden sets down roots in the windswept Ten-Towns of Icewind Dale. Salvatore Book Summaryĭrizzt Do’Urden finds new friends and foes in the windswept towns of Icewind Dale, also the setting of the D&D adventure book Rime of the Frostmaiden