by Филип Этанс
There was a loud, grinding crack, and Abdel thought he might be dead, but it was the Slayer who went limp. The sudden weight pulled Abdel to the ground on top of it. The human arm still protruding from its chest blindly groped for anything. The hand found Abdel's gore-soaked chain mail and hung on.
The sellsword did nothing to get away from the human hand's grip. He started to claw at the Slayer's lifeless head and another one of the elf mages had to turn around and vomit at the sound it made. He ripped the thing's head open as if he was peeling an orange. Beneath the chitin, slime, blood, and the withering flesh of the avatar was a human face, a girl's face.
She gasped and took in a single, chest-filling breath.
"Imoen," Abdel said, his eyes filling with tears.
"Abdel," Imoen gasped, her eyes not yet able to focus, but she recognized his voice. "Abdel. . wh-where are we?"
Abdel smiled weakly and was about to reply when Ellesime screamed, "The tree!"
Abdel turned but couldn't see her. A blaze of hot yellow light filled his vision and burned his eyes. He grunted and something tensed in his chest, and his head exploded in pain.
"Oh, no, Abdel!" Imoen shrieked. "No!"
Abdel felt something pull him downward but couldn't tell where it was holding him. It wasn't his leg—it might have been holding him around the waist. He slipped into the ground and could smell dirt fill his nostrils. His arms tensed, and he could feel them grow. A wave of rage blew his mind away.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jaheira came awake with a gasp, her head snapping back, and her mouth gaping wide to draw in the unseasonably cool air of Suldanessellar. Her body, suspended in a mass of weblike strands, shook and rocked forward, then back, and came to a vibrating stop over the course of a long, painful minute.
Her eyelids were stuck closed with something, and when she finally forced one open, she realized the other just wasn't going to cooperate. A terrible pain throbbed all up the left side of her body. Her right foot was twisted painfully in the web, and she could feel it swelling.
Her one eye was blurred, but she saw Irenicus kneeling in front of the Tree of Life. She couldn't tell if it was a trick of her fuzzy vision or an actual phenomenon, but she was sure she could see Irenicus's skeleton outlined in bright light that turned his skin and muscles translucent.
The Tree of Life was on fire.
That thought didn't sink in at first. It took the space of two heartbeats, but when it did occur to her what she was seeing and the magnitude of the disaster that meant for not only the people of Suldanessellar, the elves of the forest of Tethir, but everyone and everything in Faerun, all of Abeir-toril…
Jaheira screamed.
She heard the sound echo across the burning ruins of Suldanessellar. Irenicus didn't react at all. He just kneeled there, chanting.
She screamed again, then struggled in the web, which succeeded only in getting her more firmly caught.
"Abdel!" she screamed, between two body-racking sobs.
This made Irenicus turn. His face was as translucent as the rest of his body, and she could see his wildly grinning, mad skull. His eyes blazed a bright yellow she was all too familiar with.
"Abdel," Irenicus said, his voice like the wind rumbling across the Shaar—the voice of a god. "Yes. . Abdel."
Jaheira screamed again and tried to look away, but her head was stuck, and she couldn't.
Irenicus smiled a toothy, leering, evil grin, and sank into the ground. His body just collapsed into a hole that wasn't really there. The Tree of Life blazed into wild orange flames hundreds of feet high that scalded Jaheira's face, and she screamed again. The webs started to unravel from the heat, and Jaheira's foot shifted painfully, then her head fell sideways.
She screamed, "Abdel, where are you?" in a dry throat with air from burned lungs and fell out of the web into a crumpled pile on the ground.
* * *
Abdel was blasted with heat, and it brought his consciousness back from the brink. Physically, he couldn't tell if he was a human or a monster, but his mind came back. Unfortunately, it came back just in time to be burned to death.
Though he wasn't sure it was a really good idea, he went ahead and opened his eyes even though he was afraid they'd be burned from his skull. Oddly enough, they weren't.
At first all they registered was a mass of slowly undulating orange, and it occurred to Abdel that he was submerged in molten lava, but how could that be?
Shadows coalesced in the orange and became figures, then those figures drifted into larger, more solid masses. The shadows were ledges and outcroppings of rock.
Abdel inhaled sharply and felt his jaw open. His mouth opened wrong, sideways, like the monster that Imoen had been before. Against all odds, he'd saved her life. Abdel remembered that clearly. It had happened a minute or so before he'd been pulled down into Hell.
So that was it. He was in Hell, and he was in the body—or his body had become the body—of a hideous, demonic monster. Abdel supposed that made him pretty much right at—
He shook his big giant monster head, not believing that he could be floating in a river of lava in some living Hell just casually thinking about—
Had he come home, then?
He asked himself that question.
Have I come home?
Is this the place I was supposed to be all along?
Do I rule here, then, like my father did?
Is that what I was meant to do?
Did Irenicus in his passionate, blind greed push me toward the destiny that has been mine, has run through my veins, my whole life?
Am I even Abdel now?
Am I Bhaal?
Am I anything? Just the will of murder and death and evil…
Am I home?
Is this home?
Abdel opened his mouth, sucked in a breath of hot, brimstone-reeking air, and called, "Father!"
"Bhaal!"
Abdel snapped his eyes shut and waited for an answer.,
* * *
Jaheira knew she had to just lay there and breathe for a while. She also knew she had to do something. The Tree was still on fire.
She let her tears wet the brittle grass and crawled away from the fire, sweat washing away the rest of the webbing.
She'd come to Suldanessellar to look for Irenicus, and she found him faster and easier than she ever imagined she would. There he was, kneeling in front of the Tree of Life. Jaheira remembered feeling grateful that she hadn't been able to understand the words he was chanting. Of course she wouldn't know this hideous ritual, designed to destroy everything she held sacred.
"Mielikki," she said, not caring that her voice was ragged from the heat, from crying. "Mielikki, sweet Lady of the Forest, please …"
She put both hands down on the dry grass and pushed herself up, rolling over onto her left side. Pain made her gasp, then gag, and she sat up. She held her left side and felt wetness that might have been blood or sweat. She didn't want to take her hand away from her side long enough to check.
She looked up in the sky and saw nothing but rolling black smoke. She saw the Tree of Life giving itself up one soot mote at a time. Jaheira felt as if the whole world was draining up into the sky.
"Mielikki," she whispered, and a tear rolled into her mouth. "Dear goddess, just tell me where he is. Where is he?"
Jaheira's hands shot up to guard her face, and she fell backward, the pain in her side not even registering. She was instinctively guarding her face from the vision that flashed across her eyes.
Orange flames.
Boiling seas.
Writhing bodies.
Souls damned.
He was in Hell.
Abdel was in Hell.
Jaheira screamed again, loud enough to make her own ears ring.
* * *
Abdel kept his eyes closed knowing that the sights around him would only distract him. For the first time maybe in his whole life he was going to stop, just let the world go on, and finally demand some
answers from the universe. He was going to wait for his father to say something. In his mind's eye he drew a circle around himself, and in his mind's voice he said:
Speak to me.
Tell me.
Where are you?
What do you want from me?
What do I do?
Do I become you? Do I replace you? Do I serve you?
I'll let that tree burn, and the elf city burn, and Candlekeep itself burn. I don't care. I want to know.
I will know.
You'll come back from wherever you've been, and you'll talk to me.
You'll talk to me, you bastard.
You'll talk to me.
Bhaal.
God of Murder.
Father.
Talk to me.
And Abdel let himself drift in the lava flow of Hell and waited for his father's voice to tell him everything, to tell him what to do. He waited in the pits of damnation for a long time, but his father never spoke to him.
"You're dead." Abdel said, and opened his eyes.
* * *
"You come back," Jaheira said, her voice coming in a feral growl that sounded wrong in her ears. "You come back to me."
She rolled back onto her stomach and paused to let pain wash over her again. She waited as patiently as she could, and when the worst of it was over, she forced herself to her feet.
Irenicus had nearly killed her when she confronted him at the Tree of Life. All around them Suldanessellar was burning, and he just started to pummel her with spells. She fought back with spells of her own, and elves came to her defense, but Irenicus's supply of painful, body-twisting magic seemed endless. He smashed her with lightning, burned her with fire, cut her with blades and glass and thorns, and the bastard laughed the whole time. When she finally fell, he hung her in a web to watch. And watch she did.
She'd watched him suck the life energy out of the greatest source of life energy in the world, if not the entire multiverse.
He drained the Tree of Life and left it so dry the heat of burning Suldanessellar had touched it to flame, and it became an enormous inferno that burned away more than leaves, bark, and branches. Those flames burned away life. They burned away history. They burned away tradition and hope and the brittle dignity of a dying race.
Then Irenicus went willingly down into some hell where Abdel waited—for what? Abdel surely hadn't gone there willingly. They wouldn't embrace there in brotherhood. They'd fight, and even as much as she loved and trusted and was in awe of the Son of Bhaal, Jaheira didn't think he could win. How could he?
How could anyone stand against a man already powerful in his own right but now filled with the essence of the Tree of Life?
"Abdel," she said to the ground around her. "Just run. Get out of there, Abdel. Come back to me. Let him live. Let him live forever in Hell. Come back to me."
She realized she was looking at the point on the ground where Irenicus had sank. She took a step toward that spot, and when her foot touched the forest floor her knee gave out. She fell to the ground and ignored the pain. She tried to get back to her feet but couldn't, so she crawled.
"I'm coming, Abdel," she said.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
"He's dead, you idiot," Irenicus sneered from somewhere in the roaring flames of Hell. "Your father is dead, and you'll get no answers from him."
Abdel gave himself over to the rage and reached out for the source of Irenicus's voice. He found something that felt like flesh and clawed through it. There was the sound of a grunt and the feel of blood, then the sound of laughter.
A hand grabbed Abdel's throat and squeezed. Abdel reached up with a viciously taloned foot and ripped Irenicus's stomach open. Irenicus squeezed, and Abdel's head came off at the neck. His vision tumbled and blurred, and Abdel realized that couldn't actually have happened—not even in Hell.
He came back into his body, and it was his body, human and whole, not a monster, not a demon.
"Idiot human child," Irenicus said. "Waiting for orders, waiting for answers. You don't get any answers, child, in the flea speck of a lifetime you enjoy. You don't get to know. You don't get anything but a bit of wandering around before a painful, empty, ruthless death. You serve me now as you've served me all along. I brought out the Ravager in you and the little bitch, but it was you who brought out the Slayer. Only you—spawn of Bhaal—could have destroyed the Ravager, and only when the Ravager was destroyed could the Slayer take its place."
"Why?" Abdel asked as he ripped a piece of Irenicus's soul from him.
The necromancer laughed, and Abdel felt the piece of soul slip through his fingers.
"Why?" Irenicus asked. "Idiot man-child. Human speck. Only the Slayer could kill Ellesime. By succumbing to the blood of the god of murder and killing this girl you thought was so important to you, you gave me the weapon I needed. Now, Ellesime is dead. Now, you give me your soul, and I use it and the power of that detestable tree to make myself immortal. I get. I take. I have. You disappear."
Abdel reached out again and felt something he couldn't possibly have any words to describe. He took hold of Irenicus's soul.
"Ah," the necromancer breathed, "there you are."
"Ellesime lives," Abdel said, the words traveling not through air or fire or lava, but through the medium of immortal souls.
There was a silence filled by the roaring of the lava flow.
"You're staying here, Irenicus," Abdel said.
"Neither of us are staying here, Abdel Adrian," Irenicus replied. "There isn't really even such a place as here. I'm going back to Faerun an immortal, whether Ellesime lives or not. You're going nowhere. You go to oblivion."
* * *
The nail of Jaheira's middle finger snapped off backward, but she didn't notice the pain. She dug, clawing into the unforgiving soil under the burning tree where Irenicus had fallen into Hell. Jaheira threw out handfuls of dirt and had gone maybe a foot down, but of course there was no sign of Hell.
"Mielikki," she said, "Mielikki, help me." She dug some more though she was growing overwhelmed by the simple fact that she could dig with her bare hands forever and not get where she was going. Abdel wasn't in some place underground. He wasn't on this plane of existence. He was someplace so different from the world Jaheira knew there was no real connection between them. Irenicus had joined the two places somehow—Jaheira knew of more than one way to do that—and dragged Abdel in, then followed him himself. That joining wasn't physical.
"Mielikki," she cried, "help me … tell me …"
She stopped digging and let herself cry into the dry dirt, gave herself over to her goddess as a small, weak, desperate creature.
"Help me," she begged.
The words called to her—sounded in the wind—and Jaheira sobbed at the sound of them: Call to him.
"Mielikki," Jaheira cried, "Lady, thank you."
She pushed her face into the hole she dug and drew in a deep, soil-scented breath.
"Abdel!" she screamed into the ground.
"Abdel!" She breathed again, ignoring the pain in her throat, and screamed, "Abdel!"
* * *
Irenicus was winning.
Abdel could feel his body had changed back to the monster thing—they'd called it the Ravager.
"That's it," Irenicus said, his voice almost a purr. "That's it."
Abdel felt a piece of his soul bitten away, and he let it go. He didn't care anymore. He'd called to his father—his father. The idea was simply ridiculous. He'd called out to Bhaal and got no answer. Irenicus supplied the only thing that seemed like truth, after all was said and done.
"I'll use it well, Abdel," Irenicus whispered straight into Abdel's disintegrating soul.
Abdel felt his legs pop and twist backward, though he didn't really believe he had a body anymore.
"… del …" a woman's voice echoed from so far away, he was sure it was his imagination. He was struck by the fact that he was in Hell and thought that something as simple as the sound of Jaheira c
alling his name was imagin—
Jaheira.
"Abdel.." her voice came again, a little louder this time.
Abdel tried to force his twisted, freakish, monster's mouth to form her name. He couldn't.
"That's over now, Abdel," Irenicus said. "She's the past. She couldn't have been yours anyway, could she? A Harper druid and the son of Bhaal? What could come of… ah, well. Not that it matters now, child."
Abdel felt himself nodding, then Jaheira's voice came again.
"Abdel," she called, "please …"
That last word burst through the tattered remains of Abdel's soul like lightning, and he could feel her. Irenicus had stripped so much of him away—eaten it in a very real sense—but he'd left one part behind. He'd left the part inhabited by Jaheira. Maybe every part of his soul was home to her in some way.
Abdel felt human again, and it was a human mouth that screamed, "Jaheira!"
* * *
Every time she screamed his name, a little part of the fire that was consuming the Tree of Life went out.
"Abdel!"
Smoke was all around her, drifting over the back of her head and slipping into the hole to tickle her throat.
"Abdel, please!"
There was a flash of light that Jaheira didn't bother to recognize. It wasn't Abdel—she knew that on a primal level—so whatever it was didn't matter. Only Abdel mattered.
"Abdel!"
"Jaheira!" Imoen called from behind her.
"She's calling him out," Queen Ellesime said to Imoen.
Jaheira felt footsteps approaching her more than she heard them.
"Abdel!" the druid screamed again, not realizing that she had very little voice left.
"Help her," Ellesime said breathlessly. "We have to help her."
Imoen fell to the ground next to Jaheira without hesitation. Tears flowed anew from Jaheira's burning eyes.
"Abdel!" the young girl screamed, her voice louder than Jaheira's.
"Abdel!" Ellesime screamed.