“I will be as quick as I can,” Araevin promised. He turned to face the revolving cloud of silver lights in the room’s center. It, too, was a portal of sorts. He whispered the words of an opening spell. The nimbus of magic slowed its turning, and grew brighter, so bright that his companions could make it out even without Araevin’s help.
Without waiting, Araevin stepped into the gleaming spiral of magic. At once he felt himself carried away, lifted up into a marvelous chamber of streaming mist and translucent walls, a ghostly room that hovered in the air above the black courtyard. His companions stared at him in amazement, but they were dim and indistinct. He suspected that he’d become nothing more than a spectral blur of himself when he entered Morthil’s Door, at least to the eyes of any who waited outside. But within the ghostly chamber, he felt completely solid. He glanced down at his hands, and found that his body had indeed grown somewhat translucent. He could see the lightless hall outside through his own garments and flesh.
Some sort of extradimensional space, he decided. Araevin was familiar with spells of the sort, though he had never studied any of them at length, and hadn’t heard of any that endured as long or as perfectly as Morthil’s evidently had. He turned his attention to the chamber’s contents, and as he did so he felt himself drift farther into the ghostly walls. The world outside faded to a dull dark smear obscured by misty walls beneath his feet, and the ghostly chamber grew more substantial. Spectral shelves and tomes began to appear all around him, the secret library Morthil had preserved in the ethereal matrix so long ago.
Morthil did not want that knowledge to be lost, Araevin realized. He created a place where his books and tomes would be preserved forever, safe from harm or theft, yet accessible to anyone who entered without deceit. Even though Mooncrescent Tower had been swallowed entirely by the nilshai plane, Morthil’s library survived unspoiled.
I have to find a way to bring this out of darkness. I cannot leave it here like this.
He glanced up, at the higher and better-defined floors overhead, and his eye fell on a great dome above him. Centered beneath the streaming mists stood a reading stand carved in the shape of two entwined silver dragons. In their outstretched claws they held a large, heavy tome of burnished copper plate, its pale vellum pages shining brightly in the muted light.
It was the tome he had seen in his vision, the tome in which Morthil had inscribed the words of the telmiirkara neshyrr, the Rite of Binding.
He approached the massive tome on its ornate stand. He could feel the magical power contained in the book. Golden glyphs crawled across its burnished pages, glowing softly in the sourceless light of Morthil’s vault. He could no longer see or hear his companions in the black hall outside, but he paid that no mind. The tome absorbed his attention completely.
He touched the pages, and sigils of molten gold lifted from the tome and began to swirl around him. An eldritch melody of ancient notes thrummed in the air, as if the book itself spoke to him.
Eyes shining in wonder, Araevin began to read.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1 Flamerule, the Year of Lightning Storms
Curnil looked ahead into the thick green woods, dark and damp with the second straight day of rain, and shook the raindrops from his hair. All around him rode the cavalry of the elven-host, a column of gray-clad riders moving quietly alongside the Ashaba like so many ghosts. The battle at the Zhentish camp was six days behind Evermeet’s army. The elves and all the Dalesfolk who could be spared marched hard, retracing their steps back toward Ashabenford. Curnil was no strategist, but it was plain enough to him that Lord Miritar had no choice but to march the army back to Mistledale as fast as he could.
Since the skirmish at the farmhouse, Ingra and Curnil had stayed with Storm Silverhand, riding in a small company made up of all sorts of odds and ends. Some were plain-looking Grimmar who turned out to be former adventurers, murderously deliberate in the thickest of fights. Others were freebooters and travelers from all corners of Faerun who had simply showed up to ride at Storm Silverhand’s side. None of the twenty-odd riders who followed the Bard of Shadowdale wore a uniform or held a commission, but Curnil guessed that half of them at least wore the silver pin of the Harpers under their dirty jerkins and worn hauberks. They’d all fought like lions on the earthworks of the Zhentish camp.
Curnil glanced toward the head of their small company, where Storm Silverhand rode, her long white hair plastered to her back. She was laughing and speaking with one of the other riders in their odd little company, when she whipped her head up and to the left, searching the treetops overshadowing the narrow track alongside the river. He glanced that way, wondering what had caught her eye, when realization dawned.
“Ambush,” he hissed.
From the treetops a dozen brilliant bolts of fire streaked down, exploding among the elven cavalry all around Storm’s small company. Horses whinnied and screamed, fair voices cried out in pain or fear, and the dull gray drizzle of the day flashed into heat, steam, and mayhem. A fire-bolt blasted into a rider near Curnil, incinerating man and mount in one terrible, glaring blast that hurled gobbets of liquid fire throughout the small company. One thick gout splattered across his horse’s face and clung to the animal’s flesh, blazing fiendishly. The animal bolted off at once, fleeing in blind panic.
“Whoa! Whoa, damn you!” Curnil cried, but he realized that he would never get the animal under control with the fire clinging to its face.
Curnil kicked his feet out of the stirrups, and let the horse run out from under him. He stumbled into the mud on the trail, but a moment later he had his feet under him again, and he scrambled ten feet toward the river to crouch by a boulder and figure out what was going on.
The air was filled with winged swordsmen and sorcerers, armed for battle. Curnil stared in amazement. They were elves, of a sort, though their skin had a crimson hue and their eyes blazed with malice. “The daemonfey,” he breathed.
The first flight swooped past the panicked column, and Curnil saw that it was not a true ambush. The daemonfey had simply streaked in through the rain and drizzle, soaring low and fast over the treetops and falling on the elven column like a fiery thunderbolt. More spells and blasts came from above as the creatures wheeled in midair, scouring the track with emerald globes of acid and crackling yellow lightning. Curnil’s ears rang with the fury of the explosions.
White arrows hissed up through the air at the flying sorcerers, and a few of the daemonfey warriors reeled or crumpled in flight. Storm Silverhand burned half a dozen of the sinister warriors out of the air with a great blast of blinding silver fire, carving an argent swath out of the rain-streaked sky.
Curnil swept his swords out of their scabbards and shouted defiance up at the sky. “Come on down and fight, you bastards!”
He had cause to regret his challenge only a moment later. A wave of strange, low booming sounds washed over him, leaving a foul acrid stink in the air. All around the column terrible demons appeared, teleporting into the elven ranks. Behind Storm Silverhand a pair of hulking monsters materialized, gripping huge cleavers in their horned claws. But the silver-haired swordswoman was already engaged in a furious melee with two more monsters in front of her, her sword flashing as she battled against them.
“Storm! Behind you!” Curnil shouted.
He hurled himself forward, charging at the demons attacking her. For one timeless instant the battle drifted motionless around him, his blood thundering in his ears, and Storm turned slowly to meet the new threat. Then he crashed into the closest of the ogre-sized monsters, ramming the point of his silvered sword into the small of its back. Curnil was not a small man, and even though the green-scaled monster towered over him, he sent the thing stumbling off-balance directly into Storm Silverhand.
With a single clean slash of her gleaming sword, she took the demon’s head. She flashed Curnil one quick smile, the fierce smile of a warrior born, and her eyes flew open in horror.
A terrible blade of bronze fla
shed past Curnil’s eyes and slammed into his shoulder, driving him to his knees. He grunted in cold shock, as the hulking demon wrenched its gore-spattered cleaver out of his chest. Hot metal grated on bone, and a horrible spurt of blood burst out of Curnil’s collar.
“Curnil!” screamed Storm.
The demon’s blade stuck for a moment, and with a growl of irritation the hellspawned monster shook Curnil viciously until he was flung off the axe. He landed badly, crumpled in the mud of the trail.
Get up, he told himself. You’ll die if you just lie here.
But dark spots gathered at the corners of his vision, and he felt empty. His swords slipped from his grasp.
He tried to push himself upright, to stand, to clap a hand over the awful wound, even to call for help, but he had no strength in his limbs and no breath in his throat.
Damn, he thought. I don’t think I can get up.
Then the darkness swallowed him.
Araevin sat cross-legged on the floor of Morthil’s vault. The great tome of the star elf archmage lay open on his lap, but he no longer looked at it. The telmiirkara neshyrr was upon him, and having begun it, he was powerless to draw back. Of their own accord the endless passages and phrases of the rite tumbled from his mouth, and the air of Morthil’s library trembled with the magic he had unleashed.
Some small part of him wondered how long he had been engaged in the reading, how much time had passed since he had spoken the words Morthil had learned from Ithraides and left for others after him to find. With each word he felt his power, his strength, his vitality draining away, dissipating like frost misting away on a winter morning, leaving him empty, hollow and aching. He could not bear to continue another moment, and yet he realized that if he halted there he would not survive.
He pressed on, repeating the ancient prayers and supplications of the spell, even as his strength began to fail him and his chin drooped toward his chest.
I cannot stop, he told himself. I must not stop.
Yet even though his will was firm, his words began to slur, and his voice dropped to a mumble. He felt like a cold cinder, a graying coal reduced to nothing but an empty shell of ash.
Softly, slowly, he slumped to the mist-wreathed floor. It feels as though I’m falling asleep, he thought. Falling asleep with my mind awake. Am I dying?
He knew that he should care about dying, that he had great things to do and friends who needed him, but Araevin had no determination left to fend it off. He had lived long and well, he had traveled the world and left it a better place than he had found it. What was there to fear?
He surrendered to the soft gray blanket that was stealing over him. Darkness hovered within, strangely close and warm, but then he sensed a growing light. He felt a presence approaching, coming to him through the dark. It was a woman, radiant and beautiful, an elf in shape and features, yet incandescent with the power contained in her form.
He looked up to her, and saw her with his own eyes. She was a creature of starshine and wonder, a fey queen whose eyes shone like the sun. There was light and affection of a sort in her face, but there was something more besides-a terrible strength and willfulness that awed him. She was magic made flesh, the sudden power of the storm, the capriciousness of the wind, the delight of the ancient stars.
“An eladrin,” he whispered. I have called a queen of the Court of Stars, a high lady of the fey lords!
She stooped over him, her eyes stern, and laid a hand on his forehead. Her touch was frigidly cold.
Few have spoken the words you have spoken this day, she said with her eyes alone. Is this truly what you wish, Araevin Teshurr?
“It is what I have to do,” he answered, his breath as faint as candlelight.
There is nothing that you have to do, she said. That is the gift of the gods to mortals. To complete the telmiirkara neshyrr is to surrender something precious beyond words.
He looked into her eyes, as brilliant as suns, and did not flinch.
The fey queen seemed to sigh. You will learn the price of your power, Araevin, she told him. But this, too, you are free to choose.
She leaned down and kissed him, her lips soft yet bitterly cold, and she breathed into his mouth a single whisper of breath.
Radiance, warmth, and life poured into his heart. He drew a great breath, and felt his soul kindle in unbearable fire. Yet it did not harm him, and it did not diminish. In the space of a dozen heartbeats the fire within had spread to the tips of his fingers and the bottoms of his feet, until it felt as though his entire body was a single sheet of steel-hard flame, dancing and flowing and burning and yet frozen into the shape of an elf.
He looked at the white lady in wonder. “What have you given me?” he asked.
It is not what I have given you, Araevin Teshurr. It is what I have taken away. She smiled sadly, and her eyes glimmered. You will count this a great gift for now, yet you will also know regret.
Then she vanished, fading away into golden light and leaving him alone in Morthil’s ethereal sanctum.
Morthil’s great tome was lying beside him, closed.
Araevin lay there for a long moment, trying to understand what it was he felt. Then, slowly, he pushed himself upright. He glanced up at the ethereal walls of Morthil’s vault, and realized that he could see the threads of magic, the warp and woof of the Weave, woven with skill and care thousands of years ago. He reached out to touch a wall, and watched as his fingertips caused a ripple in the flowing magic just as a child might start a ripple in a still pool by brushing his fingers over the water.
Despite himself, he laughed out loud in delight.
He noticed that his fingertips seemed to glow in his mystic sight. Frowning, he drew his hand close to his face and studied it. Veins of magic pulsed beneath his skin, intertwined with his own blood. His flesh was possessed of an unmistakable radiance. It was still his own hand, warm, alive, and feeling, yet it was changed. Like a fine golden foil it served to indicate his shape and form, but it was delicate, paper-thin, nothing but a hollow shell of magic in which his sense of self existed.
Is this in my mind? he wondered. Only a perception of the rite’s completion? Or have I really… changed?
He decided that he simply could not encompass what had happened during the telmiirkara neshyrr, not at that moment. In time he might make sense of it, weigh the words of the eladrin queen, sort out the strange sense of self and detachment he felt mingled in his own body, but he could not do it now. He could only continue on this desperate course, and finish what he had started. There would be time to comprehend and reflect later.
Araevin drew the Nightstar from his breast and held the gemstone in his hand. In his new vision he could hardly stand to gaze on the device, so great and dire was its power; it blazed like an amethyst fire in his hand.
Is this what Kileontheal and the others saw when they looked on the Nightstar? he wondered. Or have I gained powers of perception that even other high mages do not share?
He frowned, and effortlessly he hurled his consciousness into the gemstone, descending down through its lambent depths like a falling meteor. He sensed the vastness and the purpose of the thing, just as he had before, but this time he retained his bearings. He arrowed straight for the heart of the gem. The Nightstar no longer held the power to overwhelm him.
“I am coming, Saelethil,” Araevin said, and he bared his teeth in challenge.
Ilsevele studied the oppressive gloom that smothered the ancient hall, and shuddered. The air was hot and rank, and she felt a cold sick sense of danger beneath her ribs. The place was perilous; she could feel it, and she knew that the others sensed it as well. They’d beaten off two more nilshai incursions in the time since they’d entered the place, but above and beyond the danger posed by the alien sorcerers infesting the place, the nilshai world itself was dangerous. The longer they remained, the deeper they seemed to sink into the darkness, even though they hadn’t moved from that spot for hours.
I fear that retracing our steps
back to Sildeyuir will prove harder than finding our way to this tower, she thought.
“How much longer will Araevin need?” grumbled Maresa. She glanced over at the revolving spiral of faint white light hovering in the room’s center. They’d tried several times to follow Araevin through the door, but apparently they lacked something the portal required. “He’s been in there too long! I want to get out of this place.”
“Unless the nilshai return in overwhelming force, we will remain here and guard Araevin’s back,” Ilsevele said. “He is counting on us, Maresa.”
The genasi snorted and returned her attention to Ilsevele. “What if he’s stuck in there, and can’t get out? What if it’s a one-way gate? How long do we give him before we leave?”
“We remain until we are forced to leave,” Ilsevele repeated. She turned her back on Maresa and walked a short distance away, making a show of peering down a black corridor as if to check on it, but in truth she was avoiding the argument, and she knew it.
What happens if the nilshai come back? she asked herself. Is it worth our lives to protect what Araevin is doing? Or do we abandon this expedition if the danger grows too great? It would be easier to answer that question if she were absolutely certain that Araevin’s quest was something that had to be done.
If I knew there had been no choice but to come here, it would be easy to steel myself to stand and die in this black chamber if necessary, she thought. But I wonder what Father is doing. Has the Crusade joined battle against the daemonfey in Myth Drannor? And just how might I have been able to help if I were there instead of here?
“Something is coming,” Jorin called in a low voice. The Yuir ranger crouched on the moss-covered remains of one of the higher balconies, his bow in hand. “The same thing we avoided in the forest, I think.”
Ilsevele cocked her head to one side, and she heard it as well-a distant wet wheezing or sucking sound, slowly squishing its way closer.
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