Forsaken House

by Richard Baker

  “They still have that option,” Seiveril pointed out.

  The crusade marched the rest of the day, beneath gray skies and a cold, damp wind that slowly numbed the fingers and toes until they ached as if they were on fire. That night, they bivouacked on two large knolls on the long, rumpled slope climbing up to the moor proper. The overcast hid the stars, and the cold wind simply grew stronger, until the pennants and banners fluttered and snapped like brightly colored sails. Seiveril ordered his captains to rest the soldiers as much as possible and prepare a good, hearty meal from their stores, knowing that they would need their strength the next day.

  Seiveril ate little and rested not at all, finding himself too troubled to slip into Reverie. He settled for circling the camp, watching the warriors of Evermeet making ready for battle. Beneath the songs sung by the windblown cookfires lay a note of determination and confidence that he could not have imagined when he recklessly invited any willing fighter to follow him to Faerûn. How many of them would not greet the next moonrise, lying dead on a distant and useless battlefield far from home? How long might they have lived if they had remained on Evermeet?

  He sat down heavily on a boulder, bowing his head in the dark night, weary with all the weight of his four and a half centuries. His mind turned to his wife, Ilyyela, dead for three short years after centuries at his side.

  Am I doing the right thing, Ilyyela? he asked the night. Is this what I am supposed to do?

  A soft footfall drew his attention. Seiveril looked up, and saw Fflar approaching. He waited as the moon elf hero joined him on his boulder. They sat a while in silence, each wrapped in his own thoughts against the night.

  Finally Fflar said, “Where are your thoughts, Seiveril?”

  “My wife, Ilyyela. She died in the war three years ago. The Tower of the Sun was destroyed by a spell cast by a circle of traitorous spellsingers, and she was in it.”

  “I am sorry for that, my friend,” Fflar said, staring off into the blackness of the night. “I had the good fortune of preceding my wife to Arvandor. She and my son were among the last to escape Myth Drannor, in the days before the city’s fall. Yet here I am now, walking the world once again, and now it is she who is gone, and my son as well. It has been six hundred years, after all. I wonder if he had children? It would be something to meet them, would it not?” The moon elf paused, and laughed softly at himself. “I miss them, Seiveril. I should not have come back.”

  “What do you remember of Arvandor?”

  Fflar shook his head and replied, “It is only a dim dream, as you might remember a house you lived in when you were a very small child. I remember contentment, joy … I think that the gods must veil our memories when we return from death to life. Otherwise it would be an abomination to call us out of bliss, would it not? How could I stand to be parted from my wife and son a single hour otherwise?”

  “Yet you agreed to return,” Seiveril said. “You made that decision while Arvandor was still unveiled.”

  “The difficulty with attaining everything you want is that it’s not enough. I recall contentment, yes, but I also recall regret. I died as a failure, Seiveril. Despite all my efforts, my city fell, my people were slaughtered, our light was extinguished. I do not know for certain why I returned, since my mind is clouded now, but I think I came back to finish what I had left undone in my mortal days.” Fflar looked at Seiveril, folded his arms, and said, “You are high in the faith of Corellon Larethian. You must understand all this. Why did you call me back?”

  “Because Ilyyela told me to,” Seiveril said. He did not meet Fflar’s gaze, but instead studied his hands, folded in his lap. “Soon after Amlaruil rallied us to repel Nimesin’s attack, I attempted to resurrect my wife. Perhaps I should not have tried it, but the grief … the thought was in my heart that we were both young still, young enough to walk the world for centuries yet before departing for Arvandor together.

  “Corellon did not deny me the spell. I think he knew that I had to make the attempt. At sunset of a warm summer evening I chanted the prayers and cast the spell of resurrection, and Ilyyela’s spirit answered my call. But she would not cross back into life. ‘Ilyyela, my love, come back to me,’ I begged. Yet she refused. ‘My time is done,’ she said. ‘Do not mourn for the years we might have shared in Evermeet, for we will be together in Arvandor’s summer forever.’

  “I pleaded with her. ‘I cannot stand to be apart from you, not for the long years I might remain. I will join you in Arvandor, if you will not return.’

  “Then Ilyyela regarded me with sadness. ‘That is not for you to decide,’ she told me. ‘It is not for any to decide. There is a great labor before you, my love, which you must begin before you come home. And you will not have long to wait. You will come to Arvandor very soon, Seiveril. Until that day you must live the life allotted to you’.”

  Fflar smiled in the darkness and said, “I suppose you must wonder what she meant by ‘very soon.’ But what does this have to do with me?”

  “I said my farewells to Ilyyela’s spirit then,” Seiveril said. “Before she departed entirely, she told me this: ‘I cannot answer your call, love. But there is one here who will. Heal him, Seiveril. His wait has been long.’”

  The moon elf was silent for a long time.

  “And you thought she meant me?” he said finally. “Why me, Seiveril? I never knew you in life.”

  “No, you did not. But you did know my father, Elkhazel. He told me many stories of your valor in the Weeping War. When he finally passed to Arvandor himself, he told me where to find Keryvian. I suppose I have regarded you as something of a hero, since I was a small lad.”

  “I’m only one hundred and fifty years old, Seiveril. I can’t abide the notion that a fellow three times my age regards me as his boyhood hero. Nor can I believe that I was unhappy in Arvandor,” Fflar said. He stood up, shaking his head. “You’d better get some rest, old man. You’ll need clear wits and all your strength for tomorrow.”

  At daybreak the elves broke camp and began to climb the flanks of the moor, marching in battle order—tight, disciplined companies instead of the loose columns of the past few days. They marched not more than two hours before an Evereskan scout galloped up to Seiveril and Fflar at the false standard.

  “Lord Seiveril! The daemonfey army has turned!”

  Fflar looked at Seiveril and said, “You were right. It seems they’ve stopped running.”

  The sun elf flicked the reins of his mount and followed the messenger as they rode ahead, climbing up a sparsely wooded hillside flanking the valley through which wound the weathered old track they followed. To the north the gray, flat emptiness of the Lonely Moor stretched unbroken for mile after mile. In the distance to the east Seiveril glimpsed the brown-gold desolation of Anauroch. On the rugged downlands of the moor the daemonfey army had halted, spreading out from the ragged, misshapen column the elves had chased for days into long lines facing south.

  “Can we take them, do you think?” Seiveril asked.

  Fflar replied, “That is your decision, not mine.”

  “I am asking you for your assessment of the situation.”

  The big moon elf studied the enemy ranks for a while then said, “You can’t win this war by seizing some piece of territory these demonspawn control. They have no cities for you to raze, no castles to pull down. If you want to end this threat, you have to beat their army, and that means you have to wait for them come to you, or you have to run them down. I faced this same dilemma in the Weeping War, except that time I faced an army that outnumbered mine by ten to one. This foe you can defeat, if you are certain that the fight is necessary.”

  Seiveril studied the distant ranks of the enemy army, searching for certainty. He frowned, recalling his misgivings, and wondering what had changed for the daemonfey that had encouraged them to halt their retreat and turn back. Did they like the battleground? Had they garnered reinforcements? Or had they simply reached the right time to execute some greater plan of
which he was not aware?

  “Well?” asked Fflar.

  Corellon, grant me wisdom, Seiveril prayed silently.

  He wheeled his horse around to face the officers and messengers who followed him and snapped, “Send word to all the captains. We will attack!”

  Araevin found himself standing in a strange, spherical chamber of pale white stone. The room was perhaps three times his height, and the center of the floor had been leveled, so that it was not a true sphere. The walls shone with a pale radiance that illuminated the entire chamber with a strange and threatening light. He could feel the powerful spell wards that pervaded the place, spells to foil scrying, spells to make the walls impervious…. The room was without exit, as he knew it would be—the chamber had been carved out of the bedrock hundreds of feet below the ghost’s hall, and it was only accessible by magic.

  The Nightstar hovered in the center of the room, held aloft by the spells of the ancient wizard who had built the place. It was exactly as Araevin had seen, a dagger-shaped crystal about three inches long. In color it was a deep, iridescent purple reminiscent of the last gloaming of a storm-clouded sunset, and pale lavender glyphs were etched into its surface. Unseen emanations of magical power ringed the device like heat shimmering in the air, an aura of arcane potency that halted Araevin even in the face of his compulsion to seize the gem.

  For all his years of study alongside high mages and loremasters, he had never seen a selukiira before. Like their lesser kindred the telkiira, they served to store knowledge—memories, spells, secrets, whatever their creators chose to infuse them with. But the high lore-gems were also reputed to be teaching devices, a means by which the arcane study of a hundred years might be conferred to the wearer in the blink of an eye. A selukiira might make a novice into a powerful mage in a single searing instant. If what Sarya had said was true, then locked inside its violet depths lay the secrets to high magic, knowledge of ancient rites and mighty spells that otherwise might take decades of study to encompass.

  This was made by a Dlardrageth, he reminded himself. A Dlardrageth who studied firsthand the forgotten magic of old Aryvandaar, the most powerful realm of elves that ever existed. From their mighty towers in the North the High Mages of Aryvandaar launched spells that destroyed entire nations and enslaved half a continent. What would Sarya do with such knowledge?

  It did not matter. He didn’t have the ability to refuse.

  Since the gemstone hovered ten feet above the marble floor, Araevin cast a simple spell to catch hold of it and draw it down to him—but the spell failed. The Nightstar was not to be moved by such a minor magic. He stood silent, thinking, then he muttered the words of his spell of flying, and willed himself into the air. Moving slowly, as if he watched himself in a dream, he reached out to touch the crystal. Dread welled up in his mind as his fingertips neared the gem, yet he was helpless to turn away his face or even wince in anticipation of what might happen when his flesh touched the crystal.

  Selukiira burn out the minds of those who are not meant to handle them, he reminded himself. They recognize those who are false, and destroy them utterly.

  “I refuse,” Araevin whispered.

  For an awful moment he fought to keep his hand from moving an inch nearer, his muscles straining to obey Sarya’s command while his mind and will woke to full power, shaking off the daemonfey enchantment. He closed his eyes and bared his teeth, throwing the entirety of his consciousness into the simple effort to hold his hand still.

  “I refuse!” he snarled, and he drew his hand back half an inch. Sarya’s spell enticed him toward his doom with the seductiveness of a high, rocky clifftop and the lure of the leap, but Araevin proved the stronger.

  He snatched his hand away, and howled, “I refuse!”

  The Nightstar hung before his face, less than an arm’s length from his eyes. It stood quiescent, showing not a hint of the fearsome doom it held for him. Araevin drifted back in midair, thinking hard. He took a deep breath.

  “Now what?” he asked aloud.

  Though his free will had been restored, the fact remained that he could not escape the chamber except by means of the portal, and that would return him to the hall where the daemonfey waited. Any teleportation he attempted there would destroy him, as surely as the vrock had been destroyed in the rooms above. He could try to surprise Nurthel with his sudden return, and attack—but Araevin had not had the opportunity to replenish his magic since before they entered Grimlight’s lair, and few of his spells remained. It did not seem realistic to hope that he could defeat Nurthel, the other daemonfey, and the surviving demons with a single swift assault.

  Would I have time enough to flee? he wondered. If I could escape the misty hall … but there again the barrier against teleportation would foil me. At best I could try to outrun the daemonfey, but they have wings, don’t they?

  He could try to feign compliance, returning to offer Nurthel a fake Nightstar. It was possible that the fey’ri sorcerer didn’t know what the device would look like. That might give him an opportunity to flee later, but if Nurthel discovered the deception he would know that Sarya’s compulsion had failed. Perhaps the best thing would be to simply wait in the buried chamber without ever returning, and make sure that the daemonfey were denied the Nightstar forever. Would it be worth his life to keep the selukiira out of their hands?

  “Not just your life, Araevin,” he reminded himself.

  Sarya still held Ilsevele and Maresa in her stronghold. If he did not return there quickly, and with his will untrammeled by the daemonfey enchantments, Ilsevele and Maresa would suffer for it, and he could imagine only too well what form their tortures might take.

  There is no way out, he realized.

  Even if he regarded his own life as forfeit, he could not do the same for Ilsevele and Maresa. He had to find the path that offered him some chance to return and free them.

  If he simply seized the gemstone and let it have him, there was a chance that Ilsevele and Maresa might be rescued by some other agency. Seiveril might divine her location and send help. At the very least, Araevin’s resistance would not be an excuse for Sarya to kill his companions. There was at least some small possibility that the selukiira was not programmed to destroy its defiler. How much of a risk it would be, he had no way of knowing.

  And when it came down to it, he was curious. Even if it destroyed him, he wanted to know what secrets the Nightstar concealed.

  “Damn,” he breathed.

  He reached out and grasped the Nightstar.

  His vision whirled, and in a flash of lambent light he felt himself drawn into the dormant consciousness of the gemstone. It engulfed him like a violet sea, smothering him in its power. He felt its might rising around him, ramparts and battlements of dangerous lore looming around him on all sides, penning him in, trapping him. Then the edifices vanished, leaving him to plummet screaming into a terrible and dark abyss, falling for what seemed to be hours through a cosmos of purple facets and white-glowing runes of fire. Darkness came, and a flash of brilliant light.

  Araevin opened his eyes, and found himself standing in a wondrous and terrible garden. Walls of perfect white stone, graced by elegant arches, seemed to wall out some place of infernal terror. Brutal red firelight shone through the gaps, and the sky overhead was a sickly yellow-brown, streaked with columns of toxic smoke. The garden was home to scores of exotic plants and stunningly colorful blossoms, but they were alive and predatory, slow-moving things that writhed like serpents and dripped venom from their delicate structures. The golden fountain showed a marvelous sculpted scene of elf maidens and dancing satyrs, yet on a closer look the maidens’ faces gaped with terror and the satyrs were scaly devils.

  A flicker of light caught his eye, and he turned to look. From a soft sparkle of lavender a handsome sun elf stepped into the garden, appearing from the air itself. He was a regal fellow, tall and broad-shouldered, and he wore long crimson robes with a shorter vestment of gold-embroidered black over his torso. H
is face was sharp-featured, and his eyes were a startling, powerful green in color.

  “Well,” he said, his voice lilting with sinister beauty. “You are not what I expected. Who are you?”

  Araevin steeled himself, determined not to show his dread, and replied, “I am Araevin Teshurr. Who are you?”

  “I am Saelethil Dlardrageth. Or at least, a facsimile of him—me. I am the Nightstar.”

  “What is this place?”

  “I am holding your mind within mine, as I assay you. Of course, your body still holds me in its hand.” Saelethil paced nearer, his hands clasped before him, a sinister smile on his face. “I have taken the liberty of examining your predicament, at least as you perceive it. I am rather astonished to find that five millennia have passed, while I waited in Ithraides’ prison. Saelethil did not—that is, I did not—anticipate this turn of events. If he had, I would know better what to do with you.”

  “If you mean to destroy me, then get on with it. I have had enough of bantering with daemonfey.”

  “Destroy you? Why, it’s a lovely offer, but I am afraid I cannot oblige.”

  Araevin narrowed his eyes and studied the strange apparition more closely.

  “I thought selukiira destroyed those unfit for their use,” Araevin said.

  “Of course I would do that. However, you are not unfit,” Saelethil replied. His smirk faded a bit, and his eyes darkened with ire. “My purpose, as Saelethil himself inscribed it within me, is to teach sun elves of House Dlardrageth the secrets of Aryvandaar’s high magic, provided they are sufficiently skilled in the study of magic to comprehend such things. You are a mage whose skill, while modest, still falls within acceptable limits. Therefore, I am not to destroy you.”

  “But I am not a Dlardrageth,” Araevin replied, even as he wondered how hard he ought to argue that point with the Nightstar.

  Saelethil laughed darkly and said, “Well, you may think you are not, but evidently you are. I have an infallible sense for this, and cannot be mistaken.”