by Ed Greenwood
Elminster knelt on the cold stone as the slithering, tentacled bulk drew nearer … and nearer. With almost indolent ease a long, mottled blue-brown tentacle reached out for him, leathery strength curling around his throat. Icy flames of fear surged up his back, and El trembled as the tentacle tightened almost lovingly.
“Mystra,” he whispered into the darkness, “I—”
A memory of holding a goddess in his arms as they flew through the air came to him unbidden, then, and he drew on the pride it awakened within him, forcing down his fear. “If I am to die under these tentacles, so be it. I’ve had a good life, and far more of it than most.”
As his fear melted, so did the slithering monster, melting into nothingness. It hung like clinging smoke around him for a moment before sudden light washed over him. He turned his head to its source—and stared.
What his eyes had told him was probably a bare stone wall, though the cloak of gloom made it hard to see properly, was now a huge open archway. Beyond was a vast chamber awash in glowing golden coins, precious statuary, and gems—literally barrels full of glistening jewels.
Elminster looked at all its dazzle and just shrugged. His shoulders had barely fallen before the treasure chamber went dark, all of its riches melting away … whereupon a trumpet sang out loudly behind him.
El whirled around to see another vast, grand, and warmly lit chamber. This one held no treasure, but instead a crowd of people … royalty, by their glittering garb, crowns, and proud faces. Human kings and scaled, lizardlike emperors jostled with merfolk who were gasping in the air, all crowding forward to lay their crowns and scepters at his feet, murmuring endless variations on, “I submit me and all my lands, Great Elminster.”
Princesses were removing their gem-studded gowns, now, and offering both gowns and themselves to him, prostrating themselves to clutch at his ankles. He felt their featherlike fingers upon him, stared into many worshiping, awed, and longing eyes, then shut his own firmly for a moment to gather the will he needed.
When he opened them, an eternity later, it was to say loudly and firmly: “My apologies, and I mean no offense by my refusal, but—no. I cannot accept ye, or any of this.”
When he opened his eyes, everything was melting away amid growing dimness, and off to his right another light was growing, this one the dappled dance of true sunlight. Immeira of Buckralam’s Starn was gliding forward across a bright room toward him, her arms outstretched and that eager smile on her face, offering herself to him. As she drew near, shaping his name soundlessly on her lips, she pulled open the bodice of her dark blue gown—and Elminster swallowed hard as the memories rose up in a sudden, warm surge.
The sun fell through the windows of Fox Tower and laid dappled fingers across the parchments Immeira was frowning over. Gods, how did anyone make sense of such as this? She sighed and slumped back in her chair—then, in a sort of dream, found herself rising to glide across the room, toward its darkest corner. Halfway there her fingers began to pluck at her catches and lacing, to tear open the front of her gown, as if offering herself to—empty air.
Immeira frowned. “Why—?” she murmured, then abruptly shivered, whirled around, and did up her gown again with shaking fingers.
Her busy fingers clenched into fists when she was done, and she peered in all directions around the deserted room, her face growing pale. “Wanlorn,” she whispered. “Elminster? Do you need me?”
Silence was her answer. She was talking to an empty room, driven by her own fancies. Irritated, she strode back to her chair … and came to a halt in mid-stride, as a sudden feeling of being watched washed over her. It was followed by a surge of great peace and warmth.
Immeira found herself smiling at nothing, as contented as she’d ever felt. She beamed at the empty room around her and sat back down with a sigh. Dappled sun danced across her parchments, and she smiled at a memory of a slender, hawk-nosed man saving the Starn while she watched. Immeira sighed again, tossed her head to send her hair out of her eyes, and returned to the task of trying to decide who in the Starn should plant what, so that all might have food enough to last comfortably through the winter.
Her warm, yearning eagerness and hope, her delight … Elminster reached for Immeira, a broad smile growing on his own face—a smile that froze as the thought struck him: was this spirited young woman to be some sort of reward for him, to mark his retirement from Mystra’s service?
He snatched back his hands from the approaching woman and told the darkness fiercely, “No. Long ago I made my choice … to walk the long road, the darker way, and know the sweep of danger and adventure and doom. I cannot turn back from it now, for even as I need Mystra, Mystra needs me.”
At his words, Immeira and the sun-dappled room behind her melted away into falling motes of dwindling light that plunged down far below him in the great dark void he hung within, until his eyes could see them no more.
Abruptly fresh sunlight washed in from his right. Elminster turned toward it, and found himself gazing into a long chamber lined with rows of bookshelves that reached up to touch its high ceiling. Sunlit dust-motes hung thick in the air, and through their luster Elminster could see that the shelves were crammed with spell tomes, with not an inch of shelf left empty. Ribbons protruded from some of the spines; others glowed with mysterious runes.
A comfortable-looking armchair, footstool, and side table beckoned from the right-hand end of this library. The side table was piled high with books; El took a step forward to get a better look at them and found himself striding hungrily into the room.
Spells of Athalantar, gilt lettering on one spine said clearly. El extended an eager hand and let it fall back to his side, muttering, “No. It breaks my soul to refuse such knowledge, but … where’s the fun of finding new magic, mastering it phrase by guess, and deduction by spell trial?”
The room didn’t fall away into darkness as all the previous apparitions had done. El blinked around at more spellbooks than he could hope to collect in a century or more of doing nothing but hunting down and seizing books of magic, and swallowed. Then, as if in a dream, he took a step toward the nearest shelf, reaching for a particularly fat volume that bore the title Gala-gard’s Compendium of Spells Netherese. It was … inches from his fingertips when El whirled around and snarled, “No!”
In the echoes of that exclamation his world went dark and empty again, the dusty room swept away in an instant, and he was standing in darkness and on darkness, alone once more.
A light approached out of black velvet nothingness, and became a man in ornate, high-collared robes, standing on a floor of stone slabs with a spell staff winking and humming in his hand. Not seeing Elminster, the man was staring grimly down at a dead woman sprawled on the stones before him, gentle smokes rising from her body, her face frozen in an eternal scream of fear.
“No,” the man said wearily. “No more. I find that ‘First among Her Chosen’ has become an empty boast. Find another fool to be your slave down the centuries, lady. Everyone I loved—everyone I knew—is dead and gone, my work is swept away by each new grasping generation of spell hurlers, Faerûn fades into a pale shadow of the glory I saw in my youth—and most of all, I’m … so … damned … tired.…”
The man broke his staff with a sudden surge of strength, the muscles of his arms rippling. Blue light flared from the broken ends, swirling in the instant before a mighty explosion of released magic coalesced into a rushing wave. The despairing Chosen thrust one spearlike broken shaft end into his chest. He threw back his head in a soundless gasp or scream—and fell away into swirling dust, that convulsing jaw last, an instant before the outward rush of magic became blinding.
El turned his gaze away from that flash—only to find it mirrored in miniature elsewhere, in a hand-sized scrying sphere that a bald man in red robes was hunched over. The man shook his fist in triumph at what he saw in the depths of the crystal, and hissed, “Yes! Yes! Now I am First among Mystra’s Chosen—and if they thought Elthaeris was over
bearing, they’ll learn well to kneel and quiver in fear beneath the spell-seizing scepter of Uirkymbrand! Hahahaha! The weak might just as well slay themselves right now, and yield their power to one more fitted to wield it—me!”
That mad shout was still ringing in Elminster’s ears as that scene winked out, and a circle of light occurred right beside the last prince of Athalantar. Floating with it was a dagger—and as he recognized it, it slowly turned and rose, offering its hilt to his hand.
El looked down at it, smiled, and shook his head. “No. That’s a way out I’ll never take,” he said.
The dagger winked out of existence—and promptly reappeared off to Elminster’s left, in the hand of a robed man, his back to El, who promptly drove it into the back of another robed man. The victim stiffened as his wound spat forth a blue radiance, and the blade of the murderer’s dagger flared up into a blue flame that swiftly consumed it. The dying man turned, his wound leaking a trail of tiny stars, and El saw that it was Azuth. Face convulsed in pain, the god clawed with his bare hands at the face of the man who stabbed him—and the radiance leaking out of him showed El the face of the recoiling murderer. The slayer of Azuth was … Elminster.
“No!” El shouted, raking at the vision with his hands. “Away! Awaaay!” The two figures struggled with each other in the heart of a spreading cloud of blue stars, oblivious to him.
“Such ambitions are not mine,” El snarled, “and shall never be, if Mystra grant it so. I am content to walk Faerûn, and know its ways more than I know the deep mysteries … for how can I truly appreciate the one without the other?”
The dying Azuth swirled away, and out of the stars that had been his blood strode a man El knew from memories not his own, spell-shared with him once in Myth Drannor. It was Raumark, a sorcerer-king of Netheril who’d survived the fall of that decadent realm to become one of the founders of Halruaa. Raumark the Mighty stood alone in a hall of stout white pillars and vast echoing spaces, at the top of a high dais, and his face was both pale and grim.
Carefully he cast a spinning whorl of disintegration, testing it by dragging it through one of the giant pillars. The ceiling sagged as the top of the sheered-off pillar fell away into heavy crashing shards to the unseen floor below. Raumark watched the collapse, stone-faced, and brought the whorl back to spin in front of him, just beyond the lip of the dais.
He nodded down at it, as if satisfied—and jumped through it.
The scene died with Raumark, to be replaced by a view of a dusty tomb. A man El did not recognize but somehow knew was a Chosen of Mystra was taking an old and tattered grimoire out of a shoulder sack and placing it into an opened casket, the same task El had done so often for the Lady of Mysteries.
This Chosen, however, was in the grip of a seething fury, his eyes blazing with near madness. He plucked a cobwebbed skull up out of the casket, gazed into its sightless eye sockets, and snarled at it, “Spell after spell I just give away, while my body crumbles and grows deaf and stumbling. I’ll end up like you in a few winters! Why should others taste the rewards I dole out, while I do not? Eh?”
He flung the skull back into its resting place and shoved the stone lid closed violently, the stony grating so loud that El winced. The Chosen strode forward with red fire in his eyes and said, “To live forever—why not? Seize a healthy body, snuff out its mind, ride it to ruin, then take the next. I’ve had the spells for a long time—why not use them?”
He resumed his determined walk, fading like a ghost through Elminster—but when the Athalantan turned his head to watch what happened to the Chosen, the man was gone, and the tomb he’d left fast fading behind him.
“Such a waste,” El murmured, unshed tears glimmering in his eyes. “Oh, Mystra, Lady Mine, must this go on? Torment me no more, but give me some sign. Am I worthy to serve you henceforth? Or are ye so displeased with me that I should ask ye for death? Lady, tell me!”
It was a shock to feel the sudden tingling of lips upon his—Mystra’s lips, they must be, for at their touch the thrill of raw power surged through him, making him feel alert and vigorous and mighty.
Elminster opened his eyes, lifting his arms to embrace her—but the Lady of the Weave was no more than a dwindling face of light, beyond his reach and receding swiftly into the void. “Lady?” he gasped almost despairingly, stretching out beseeching arms to her.
Mystra smiled. “You must be patient,” her calm voice came quietly into his ear. “I shall visit you properly in time to come, but I must set you a task for me, first: a long one, perhaps the most important you’ll ever undertake.”
Her face changed, looking sad, and she added, “Though I can foresee at least one other task that might be judged as important.”
“What task?” El blurted out. Mystra was little more than a twinkling star now.
“Soon,” she said soothingly. “You shall know very soon. Now return to Faerûn—and heal the first wounded being you meet.”
The darkness melted away, and El found himself in his clothes again, standing in the woods outside the ruins. A few paces away, two men were talking with an elf, all three of them sitting with their backs against the trunks of gnarled old trees. They broke off their converse to look up at him rather anxiously.
One of the mages suddenly sprouted a wand in his hand. Leveling it at Elminster, he asked coolly, “And you would be—?”
El smiled and said, “Dead long ago, Tenthar Taerhamoos, save for the fact that Mystra had other plans.”
The three mages blinked at him, and the elf asked rather hesitantly, “You’re the one they call Elminster, aren’t you?”
“I am,” El replied, “and the mission laid upon me is to heal ye.” Ignoring a suddenly displayed arsenal of wands and winking rings, he cast a healing spell upon Starsunder, then another on Umbregard.
He and Tenthar locked gazes as he finished his castings, and El inclined his head toward the ruins and asked, “ ’Tis all done, then?”
“All but the drinking,” Tenthar replied—and there was suddenly a dusty bottle of wine in his hand. He rubbed its label, peered into it suspiciously, drew out its cork, sniffed, and smiled.
“Magic seems to be reliable once more,” he announced, holding out his other hand and watching four crystal goblets appear in it.
“Mystra’s need is past, I think,” El told him. “A testing is done, and many dark workers of magic have been culled.”
Tenthar frowned and said, “It is the way of the cruel gods to take the best and brightest from us.”
Umbregard shrugged as he accepted a glass and watched several other bottles appear out of thin air. “It is the way of gods to take us all,” he added, “in the end.”
Starsunder said then, “My thanks for the healing, Elminster. As to the way of gods, I believe none of us were made to live long. Elf, dwarf, human … even, I think, our gods themselves. The passage of too many years does things to us, makes us mad … the losses—friends, lovers, family, favorite places—and the loneliness. For my kind, a reward awaits, but that doesn’t make the tarrying here any less wrenching; it only gives us something to look at, beyond present pain.”
Elminster nodded slowly. “There may well be truth in thy words.” He looked at Starsunder sidelong then and asked, “Did we meet, however briefly, in Myth Drannor?”
The moon elf smiled. “I was one of those who disagreed with the Coronal about admitting other races into the Fair City,” the elf admitted. “I still do. It hastened our passing and gained us nothing but all our secrets stolen. And you were the one to break open the gates. I hated you and wished you dead. Had there been an easy, traceless way, I might have made things so.”
“What stayed your hand?” El asked softly.
“I took your measure, several times, at revels and in the Mythal, and after. And you were as we—alone, and striving as best you knew how. I salute you, human. You resisted our goading, conducted yourself with dignity, and did well. Your good deeds will outlive you.”
“My
thanks,” Elminster replied, his eyes bright with tears as he leaned over to embrace the elf. “To hear that means a lot.”
The Fair Maid was elbow-to-elbow crowded. It seemed the High Duke’s latest idea was to send huge armed caravans along the perilous road. Ripplestones looked like a drovers’ yard, with beasts bawling and on the move everywhere. Inside, shielded a trifle from the dust if not the din, Beldrune, Tabarast, and Caladaster were sharing a table with a haughty mage from the Sword Coast, brimming tankards in every hand. The talk was of spells and fell monsters vanquished and wizards who would not die rising from their tombs, and folk were crowding around to listen.
“Why, that’s nothing!” Beldrune was snarling. “Less than nothing! This very day, in the heart of the Dead Place, I stood beside the god Azuth!”
The mage from the Coast sneered in open disbelief, and thus goaded, Beldrune rushed on, “Oh, yes—Azuth, I tell you, an’ …”
Caladaster and Tabarast exchanged silent looks, nodded, and with one accord rose and rummaged in Caladaster’s pack while their comrade snarled on, jabbing a finger in the Coast mage’s startled nose. “He needed our help, I tell you. Our spells saved the day—he said that!—an’ he gave us to understand—”
“That we’d earned these magical robes!” Tabarast broke in triumphantly, holding up the daring black gown for all to see.
The roar of laughter that followed threatened to shake the very ceiling of the inn down on top of all the table-slapping, hooting drinkers, but as their laughter finally trailed away, a high-pitched chuckle joined in, from the doorway. Those who turned to see its source went very still.
“That almost looks as if it would fit me,” Sharindala the sorceress told the four gaping mages brightly. “And I do need something to preserve my modesty, as you can see.”
The Lady of Scorchstone Hall wore only her long, silken brown hair. It cloaked her breast and flanks as she strode forward, but no man there could fail to notice that aside from her tresses, she was bare to the world from the top of her head down to her hips—where her flesh ended, leaving bare bones from there to the floor.