by Paul S. Kemp
They stood looking at the ruins for a long while, as though assuring themselves that they were not looking upon an apparition. A pinpoint of golden light flashed from somewhere in the city’s center, from amidst the low buildings, as though someone had briefly uncovered a bulls eye lantern.
Jak’s breath caught, and he strained to see. He thought he might have imagined the light but it repeated again quickly. To him, that light, that color, bespoke one thing: a way home.
“Did you see that?” he shouted to Cale and Magadon over the wind.
Both nodded.
Magadon said, “That’s the only natural looking light we’ve seen since we arrived.”
“A way back?” Jak asked.
He couldn’t keep hope from coloring his voice.
Magadon shrugged and said, “Possibly.”
They squinted into the wind. The flash came again.
“A beacon, maybe?” Riven asked.
Cale drew Weaveshear and said, “Or maybe a lure. Either way, there’s only one way to find out. Ready?”
Jak nodded and drew his short sword and dagger. Riven too drew his sabers, and Magadon his bow.
“Stay sharp,” Cale said, starting down the rain-slicked grass of the valley.
Thunder boomed and another lightning flash illuminated the city. Jak caught a clear glimpse of toppled buildings, crumbling megaliths, and broken statues worn by the weather and pitted into anonymity. It looked as though the city had been destroyed in some unrecorded cataclysm. Sculptures perched atop the roofs of the small, single story buildings in the city’s center, the only intact statuary in the ruins.
“The buildings in the center of town look odd,” Jak observed. “Too small for a home. What do you make of them?”
Cale’s voice was grim when he said, “Those are tombs.”
Jak’s skin went gooseflesh. There were a lot of them.
Magadon led them into the ruined city, marking the path ahead with his bow. Cale walked beside the guide, coiled, Weaveshear in hand. Jak and Riven followed after, widely spaced, blades at the ready, eyes alert. Butterflies fluttered in Jak’s gut. He couldn’t keep his hands from shaking, causing the shadows cast by he and his companions in the blue light of his wand to dance on the ruins.
Crumbling, weed-overgrown buildings rose out of the darkness. Even in ruin, the structures managed to imply a sense of architectural majesty. Soaring arches, thick marble columns, and elaborately carved stonework were the rule. The city must have been beautiful to behold once.
Shards of bone stuck from the earth, most human-sized, but some gigantic. Cale simply stared at them and said nothing.
A broad, flagstone-paved avenue stretched before them, extending into darkness toward the crypts in the center of town. Weeds, tall grass, drab wildflowers, and even the occasional tree sprouted from between the cracked stones of the road. The ruins were old.
All but the cemetery, at least.
Jak felt uneasy, the way he did when unfriendly eyes were upon him, but he could not pinpoint a reason. He had an ominous sense of something lurking nearby, something malevolent.
Despite the continuing rain, the air felt clingy and thick, as though they were walking through a mass of invisible cobwebs. Jak could not help but hold his dagger before his face and try to part the air with it.
In silence, they trekked through the dead streets of a dead city. Riven and Magadon took the flanks, spreading out ten paces to the left and right, clearing buildings as they moved. Jak and Cale spaced themselves a few paces apart and walked down the broad road. Having descended into the valley, the ruins blocked their view of the necropolis so they could no longer see the occasionally flashing gold light. It didn’t matter. They knew where to go. The road led directly to it.
Within a quarter hour, the rain lessened to something more moderate than a downpour, but lightning still flashed through the sky. Jak kept alert to Riven’s side of the street—Jak’s responsibility—but now and again stole a look at Cale. His friend’s faraway gaze followed Magadon, but sometimes moved dully from here to there. Jak would never get used to those yellow eyes.
The halfling moved near Cale and asked in a sharp whisper, “What is it?”
Cale, who looked startled, said, “I don’t know, Jak. I feel like I know this place somehow, like my mind is a palimpsest and the faded writing is now becoming visible.”
Jak did not even know what a palimpsest was, but his skin went gooseflesh again.
“How would you know this place?” he asked. “The book from the Fane?”
Jak watched as Riven entered the crumbling entrance of what once might have been a shop. He exited a moment later, signaling that it was clear.
Cale shook his head again and replied, “I’m not cer—”
Riven froze and gave a sharp whistle that cut through the drumbeat of the rain. With rapidity and skill, the assassin climbed atop the building he had just exited. There, he crouched low on the flat roof and looked a block over, to a cluster of tall buildings, the domed tops of which Jak could just make out.
Cale and Jak signaled to Magadon. The guide left off his search of a building and hurried to Cale’s and Jak’s side.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Look,” Jak said, and pointed in Riven’s direction.
Beyond Riven’s rooftop perch, a faint, icy blue glow rose just above the rooftops. Jak put its source perhaps a street or two away. Not the golden light they had seen in the center of town, but something else.
Riven kept his gaze on the source of the light and waved them over.
Jak, Cale, and Magadon ran to the base of the building—it was littered with decayed tables and broken ceramics—and they began to climb. Cale reached the top first and pulled Jak up the last bit. Magadon followed, struggling more with the climb but managing. All three reached the roof and crouched beside Riven. From there, they could see the cause of the glow.
“Burn me,” Jak whispered.
Magadon knocked an arrow and drew it to his ear.
Two hundred paces away, hundreds of spirits, all women and young girls, streamed out of one of the tall, ruined buildings—formerly a temple, to judge from the partially collapsed metallic dome that capped its center. In loose columns, the spirits advanced in their direction. They appeared to be walking, but their feet remained a fingerbreadth above the ground, and their robes of silvery samite rustled to a much gentler wind than the gusts that pulled at Jak’s sodden cloak. Each bore a ghostly candle, and shielded it with her hands as though to protect it from the rain that was, in reality, passing through both candle and bearer. The candle flames were the source of the blue glow. Though they made no sound, their mouths moved in unison and Jak felt as though the ghosts were chanting or singing.
From beside Jak, Cale spoke in a distant voice: “The Summoners of the Sun. The last hope of Elgrin Fau.”
Jak heard Cale’s words but their import barely registered. He could not take his eyes from the processional of ghosts. Their silent, somber beauty hypnotized him. Though the spirits were walking the road below them, Jak felt no fear; he did not bother to reach for his holy symbol. Instead, he felt a deep sadness that went before the spirits like a wave. They wore the resigned expressions of the condemned, but held fast to their candles as though those flames were the only possibility of salvation.
Magadon’s bowstring creaked and he prepared to let fly.
Cale put a hand on the guide’s shoulder and whispered, “They can cause no harm, Magadon. Let them pass.”
The woodsman hesitated for a moment before relaxing his bow.
The tide of ghosts continued toward the party then turned right exactly below them and headed up the street. They seemed oblivious to the companions. The women were all tall and slender, with light hair and fair skin. Their eyes were wide and slightly upturned at the corners, their earlobes unusually large and bedecked with several earrings. Jak thought them beautiful, surreal, and alien. He watched them as they passed by.
“Where are they going?” he asked, of no one in particular.
“East,” Cale said. “To stand in the plains and pray for the sun to rise again. They think they’re still in their own world, but they are not. The sun never rises here.” Cale’s yellow eyes fixed on the women as they moved away. “They are the lingering memories of Elgrin Fau, Jak, once called the City of Silver.”
The halfling stared at Cale with his mouth hanging open.
Magadon too looked at Cale with surprise in his white eyes.
Beside Cale, Riven nodded knowingly and said, “When Kesson Rel stole the sky, the inhabitants of Elgrin Fau began to perish. The darkness of this plane consumed thousands before it was sated. The survivors were long ago scattered to the planes.”
The assassin’s gaze swept the length and breadth of the ruins.
Jak tried to imagine the city, living, filled with people and light, but he could not. The Plane of Shadow had left it a dark husk. He thought of the tragedy represented there and a chill ran up his spine. He shared a look with Magadon, whose knucklebone eyes had grown thoughtful. Jak looked from Cale to Riven, Riven to Cale.
“How do you two know any of that?” he softly asked, and was not sure he wanted to know the answer.
“I saw it,” Cale said, then he frowned and cocked his head. “Or perhaps I read it.”
Riven looked at Cale curiously before answering, “I dreamed it.”
Jak nodded as though he understood, but he did not. He simply could think of nothing to say. Things were too large for comment. When he looked at Cale he still saw his friend, but he saw something else too, something grander, something darker. A hero? For some reason, he thought of Sephris.
The First of Five, he thought, and wondered what that actually meant.
In respectful silence, they all watched the ghosts continue their hopeless trek east through the rain, to pray for a sun they would never again see. Cale gazed upon them wistfully.
When the spirits had vanished from sight, Magadon asked in a quiet voice, “Erevis, do you know if the flashing light we saw earlier is a way home?”
Cale, who had been lost in thought, came back to himself.
He shook his head and said softly, “I don’t know, Mags. I wish I did. But … things are coming back to me.”
“Back to you?” Jak asked. “What does that mean?”
Cale shrugged and said, “That’s the only way I can explain it, little man.”
Jak resolved in that instant to get Cale away from the Plane of Shadow at all hazards. The darkness there was sinking into Cale, soaking him. Jak didn’t want to think about what would happen to his friend if he became saturated with it. He didn’t want to think about what would happen to any of them. For the first time, Jak admitted—to himself at least—that he didn’t want Cale to be this “First of Five.” He didn’t even want Cale to be a priest anymore. He wanted Cale to be Cale, his friend and nothing more.
Jak put a hand on Cale’s forearm. The shadows that clung to Cale’s person coiled defensively around the halfling’s fingers.
“Let’s keep moving,” Jak said. “We need to find the source of that flashing light. It is a way out,” he said, hoping that by saying it with certainty he would make it so.
As if in response to Jak’s words, from their position atop the roof, they again caught the tantalizing flash of golden light from somewhere near the center of the crypts. They could not see its source, but the color reminded Jak of sunlight.
Lightning flashed, casting the city in vermillion.
“Jak’s right,” Magadon said, and jumped down from the edifice.
The rest followed, and together they headed through the rain and ruin for the center of town.
As they walked, Jak tried to take Cale’s mind off of the ghosts and remind him of something ordinary, of their life before his transformation to shade.
“It was raining just like this last spring when I had a run of Tymora’s own luck at the Scarlet Knave. Do you remember that? I must have won ten hands of Scales and Blades in a row. I lived well over the next tenday, my friend. I bought five new hats.”
Cale smiled, but his eyes were distant when he replied, “I remember, Jak.” After a pause, he softly added, “I remember a lot of things.”
To that, Jak could say nothing, but he suddenly missed his hats a great deal. For a time they walked in silence.
At last, Cale looked down at him and said, “Little man, do you remember once, when you were talking about the life, and you said to me, ‘This is only what we do, not what we are?’”
“I remember,” Jak replied, “That’s the truth, Cale.”
Cale’s mouth was a hard line when he said, “Not anymore.”
Before Jak could protest, Riven interrupted them with a saber blade at each of their chests.
“You see?” the assassin said. “You two hens are too busy clucking to—”
With speed and strength that made Jak go wide-eyed, Cale batted Riven’s left-hand saber aside, grabbed the assassin by the cloak, and yanked him in close.
The assassin let his blades fall slack and merely stared. Jak detected the beginnings of a smirk at the corners of Riven’s mouth, though the assassin’s breathing came fast.
Cale answered Riven’s stare with one of his own. His yellow eyes flashed. Shadows spiraled around his head.
To his credit, Riven kept his voice level.
“If I was an enemy, Cale, you’d already be dead. It only pays to be fast if you see what’s coming. Don’t get sloppy. We both know that all of the dead in this city won’t be as harmless as those ghosts. Stay sharp, just as you said. You too, Fleet. Now—” and his eye narrowed—“put me down.”
Cale’s expression did not change, but he shoved the assassin away.
Riven kept his feet, chuckled, straightened his cloak, and turned away.
“Whoreson,” Jak said to Riven’s back.
“No, he’s right,” Cale said. “I’m losing focus. I feel like I’m in deep water, Jak.”
The halfling felt the same way. He took a protective step closer to his friend as they continued on toward the crypts.
THE DEAD OF NIGHT
The air grew darker as they neared the cemetery. It felt almost too thick to breathe, almost viscous. The buildings grew more and more blasted as they closed on the necropolis’s perimeter wall. It looked to Jak as though the eye of an unimaginable storm had sat over the cemetery, leaving it in calm even while destroying the rest of the city.
Jak’s bluelight wand illuminated little more than five paces. With each step, the sensation of being watched grew stronger in the halfling. The rain had grown colder.
Jak realized that the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. He took out his holy symbol and held it in the same hand as the bluelight wand.
“Strange to have a cemetery in the middle of town,” Magadon observed.
“Originally, it was a commons,” Cale replied over the rain. “In the final years, the inhabitants converted it to this. They wanted a cemetery within the walls, to keep their dead close. They thought that would keep them from rising. After the darkness had consumed them all, Kesson Rel returned and opened a gate in the midst of the graves. He wanted to taunt the dead with a means of escape that they could never avail themselves of.”
Jak didn’t bother to ask how Cale knew what he knew.
“A gate?” he asked.
For a moment, Cale looked as though he had surprised himself.
He nodded and said, “Yes. The light is a gate. But I … I can’t remember to where it leads.”
Jak accepted that and kept moving.
Before them stood the low, crumbling stone wall of the cemetery. Jak felt as though that weatherworn wall demarcated more than merely the borders of the graveyard. Beyond the wall was a large expanse, overgrown with weeds, trees and tall grass, and dotted with densely-packed crypts and statuary.
They walked between two obelisks—the metal gate that once joined the
m lay twisted and broken nearby—and entered. It seemed to Jak that things went quieter the moment he passed through the gate.
To Jak’s eye, all of the crypts appeared roughly similar—small, rectangular mausoleums of cut stone with pitched tops—though they varied in size and detail work. Most would have housed several dead, families perhaps. All had writing engraved into their face and tops, a jagged script that was faded and alien to Jak. Most had at least one statue of a winged woman on them, no doubt Elgrin Fau’s patron goddess of the afterlife. Typically, she perched at the apex of the roof over the sealed door of the crypt, though she sometimes flanked the doors. Sometimes she cradled a body in her arms, and sometimes she was empty-handed.
Jak was amazed at the amount of resources the people of the city had committed to burial.
As they moved deeper into the graveyard, a fog began to form around their feet—a soup of gray mist and dark shadows. The rain slowed to a drizzle, then finally stopped. Even the thunder went quiet. The atmosphere seemed pensive, ominous.
Magadon called frequent halts, as though he saw or heard something, but then restarted the march. Jak heard nothing unusual, though his head felt muzzy. The wet must have been getting to him, but he forced himself forward.
The necropolis seemed to go on forever and fatigue gradually took its toll. Jak’s legs hung from his hips like tree trunks. His vision began to grow blurry. How long had they been walking? He’d been too long on that dark plane and it was draining him.
In his dazed state, the halfling imagined deformed faces forming and dispersing in the wispy shadows that clung to their ankles and hid their feet. He shook his head frequently to clear it. The waist high shadow fog was everywhere. But hadn’t it only been at his knees moments ago?
Jak couldn’t see more than three paces in any direction. He was so tired that he felt as though the fog was clutching at him, turning him, forcing him to go only one way.
Magadon stopped, looked around at the crypts, and said in a whisper, “We’re walking in circles.” When his companions said nothing, the guide shook his head and said it again, more loudly. “We are walking in circles.”