This month, D&D Insider brings you an exclusive short story by famed author Alan Dean Foster. Ruhan Bijendra, a rakshasa Dhanesh, has come to Nentir Vale to seek out Sword Barrow. A mere trio of drunken ogres will not deter Bijendra from his mission.

The well-dressed, powerfully built stranger was tired, hungry, and angry. It was not necessary for him to hold up a sign attesting to these facts. They were plain enough to see in his hunched-over posture as he sat at the heavy wooden table, and in his face as he glared in the direction of the back bar. The bartender and temporary innkeeper, a heavy-set dwarf like much of the population of Hammerfast, dutifully continued to polish the gilded wide-mouthed goblet he held in his thick fingers. The fact that it gleamed like a gold mirror from having undergone this process nonstop for the previous ten minutes in no way induced him to put it down. It was a useful way for his hands to keep busy when they were not engaged in stroking his beard. Besides which, if trouble was brewing, it would double as an excellent missile.