The Crystal Shard

The Crystal Shard is a fantasy novel by R. A. Salvatore, published in 1988 as the first book of the Icewind Dale trilogy and his first published novel. It introduced the dark elf ranger Drizzt Do'Urden, who is not fully accepted even in the far northern region where he has settled, except by the dwarves he has come to know.

The Ten Towns of Icewind Dale are remote enough that a renegade dark elf can live there, and Drizzt hunts the yetis and giants that threaten the villages. When the barbarian tribes attack, a young warrior named Wulfgar is defeated and bound to the dwarf Bruenor for five years, and a shard of ancient magic falls into the hands of a would-be wizard who means to use it to rule.

Salvatore sets the book in the Forgotten Realms and writes it as a fast adventure, with battles, a dragon and a wizard's ambition supplying the plot. It established the partnership of Drizzt, Bruenor and their companions that the rest of the trilogy follows, and it ends with the towns holding out and the question of the shard settled.