by James Wyatt
“She’s not possessed,” he called. “She’s changing!”
With a nervous glance down the hall, Travic ran into the room, pulling his mace free from its loop at his belt. “We’ve got to kill her before she finishes,” he said. “She’s only getting stronger.”
Roghar drew in a breath and felt Bahamut’s power welling in him. Even in that moment, he saw Gaele grow larger-her shoulders were now as broad as she was tall, and her head was turning into something alien and horrible. He swung his sword with all his might, biting deep into one of her tree-trunk arms. One of its arms, he thought-he couldn’t possibly conceive of this monster as Gaele anymore. Divine radiance erupted around them both as his blow struck true, and the demon that had been Gaele howled in pain and rage.
Then Travic was beside him, and his mace crashed into the crystal growths on Gaele’s shoulder, erupting in a similar flash of light. Travic recoiled as the crystals splintered and razor-sharp shards flew around him, but he seemed unharmed-until the demon’s claw lashed out and fastened around his neck, lifting him off the ground.
“Gaele-” Travic gasped.
The demon hesitated just an instant, and Roghar used that instant to cleave its skull open with one more mighty blow. Its body writhed and changed a little more before finally lying still, and Roghar stood over it with his sword ready in case the red liquid oozed out, like the thing that possessed Tempest had done.
The room was still and silent. Though the demon bled, nothing flowing from its wounds seemed to have a life of its own.
“The danger appears to be over,” he said at last, looking up at Travic. The priest nodded.
All at once, voices in the hallway started shouting. Roghar heard pieces of the same phrases Gaele had been repeating. “All will perish,” “so it shall be,” “open my way,” and “the Chained God says” rang out over and over. Travic ran to the hall, but a moment before he reached the doorway the shouting stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. Travic stepped into the hall, peered intently at the prisoners, and cast a fearful glance back at Roghar.
“What is it?” Roghar said.
Travic didn’t answer, but started down the hall. Roghar hurried to the door and watched him crouch beside one of the cultists-Marcan. He shook the man’s shoulder, called his name, and felt in his neck for a pulse.
“He’s dead.” He repeated his efforts for each of the other three prisoners and stood, shaking his head. “They’re all dead.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Roghar said. A sudden fear struck him, and he spun around to check on Tempest. To his relief, she was still on her feet, slumped against the wall and curled in on herself. He hurried to her side and clasped her shoulder.
Her eyes shifted to look at him, but she didn’t otherwise move.
“Let’s get you out of here, my friend,” he said softly. “Our work here is finished.”
She closed her eyes. “They’re all dead?” she whispered.
“Yes. I don’t know what killed them.”
Tempest sighed, and her long tail unfurled from around her legs. “Let’s go, then.”
Roghar helped her stand upright and guided her to the doorway. She didn’t open her eyes until they were past the cultists’ bodies in the hall, past the headless stone knight frozen in its death throes, and most of the way back to the start of the hall. After she did open her eyes, she never once looked back.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Eight slender windows at the top of Sherinna’s tower, just below the gallery, let in moonlight that spilled down the grand entrance hall. Kri closed the door to his bedchamber as quietly as he could manage, not wanting to disturb Albanon’s rest. The young wizard had spent precious little time in his trance since they’d arrived at the tower. Eladrin didn’t sleep, but without at least a few hours spent in a peaceful reverie, they started to show the same signs of fatigue, irritable moods, and even hallucinations that plagued sleep-deprived humans.
Kri could understand the young man’s excitement. He even shared it, to some extent. Here he was, after all, creeping to the library in the middle of the night to follow up a lead he’d encountered earlier in the evening. The thrill of discovery, of learning what had long been forgotten, was almost an experience of the divine for him. Sometimes he even imagined that he was waging war against Vecna, the god of secrets and Ioun’s most hated foe, by unlocking the mysteries of things and expanding his own knowledge.
He made his way up the steps toward the library, but found himself diverted along the way. Between the library and the living quarters, the fourth-floor archway led to Sherinna’s workshop. It was sparsely furnished and not half as interesting as the library for his purposes, but one item in there had caught his eye earlier, and he had resolved to investigate it further.
No better time than now, he said to himself.
He stepped through the slender arch and into the workshop. To his left, an identical arch, carved with the same gracefully curving lines, decorated a section of the wall. Had it been an actual archway, it would have opened into the empty air outside the tower, forty feet above the ground. But between the white marble columns was blank stone wall.
At the peak of the arch was the thing that had caught his eye before-a jagged piece of red crystal set into the stone.
“What is your story, crystal shard?” Kri whispered, peering up at the gleaming mineral. He closed his eyes and reached out with his other senses, the way he had taught Albanon. He saw it immediately-the stone was charged with magic, far more intense and wild than the focused energy that flowed through the columns of the arch. A glance at the overall flow of energies confirmed what he had suspected. The arch was a teleportation portal, serving basically the same function as the more common circle engraved on the floor and inlaid with silver. Properly attuned to a destination, it would allow instant transportation.
But how would one attune the portal? With an engraved circle, attuning the portal was a relatively simple matter of drawing a sequence of sigils into the circle’s edge, sigils that matched those at the destination. With this portal, there was no obvious place to write those sigils, and he suspected the crystal was instead the key.
If the crystal is what I think it is, he thought, it’s the key to a lot more than this portal.
He slid a dagger out of its sheath at his belt and stretched up to reach the blade to the stone. He pried it free from its setting with the merest effort, and fumbled to catch it before it clattered to the ground.
Peering into the crimson heart of the fragment, he left the workshop and climbed the next ring of stairs to the library.
“Ioun, guide me,” Kri whispered, stretching out his hands as he stood before the shelves in the library. He drew a deep breath and closed his eyes as he held it, listening for Ioun’s presence.
“Seek the Chained God,” a voice said.
Kri opened his eyes, and his gaze fell on an unlabeled scroll on the shelf. He lifted the heavy scroll and carried it to a table, unrolling it enough to read the writing at the top.
“A research into the Living Gate,” he read aloud. “By Sherinna, naturally.” He closed his eyes and whispered, “Thank you,” confident that Ioun had led him to the knowledge he sought.
“Three gods approached the Living Gate,” he read aloud, “desiring to know what lay behind its gleaming scarlet surface. Pelor, whose light shines into all darkness, first discovered the Living Gate, though he later wished he had not. Ioun, whose mind ever hungers to learn all things, awoke the sleeping gate. And a third, nameless god, who feared no danger and doubted all authority, distracted the guardian of the Living Gate so all three gods could glimpse the madness beyond.”
“The Chained God,” a voice repeated. Kri looked around, but the library was deserted. A chill went down his spine. Did the voice belong to Ioun, rewarding his decades of faithful service by deigning to speak to him? Or one of her angels? Or perhaps Sherinna’s shade, speaking from beyond the realm of death? He felt the weight of the mom
ent as time seemed to stretch out, each passing second laden with significance.
“The gods were changed by what they had seen,” Kri continued reading, “and they departed, swearing a solemn oath never to seek the gate again or speak of what they had seen beyond it. And for many long ages they kept their oath, even as the Dawn War raged throughout the cosmos, reshaping the world, the Astral Sea, and its dominions. But as the war raged on, one of the three gods returned to the gate, killed its guardian, and awakened the Living Gate from its eons of slumber. Madness burst forth through the gate and threatened to consume all that the gods were fighting for. Eventually, Ioun and Pelor cooperated to seal the gate once more, stemming the tide of madness.”
“Something is not right here,” a voice said. Kri jumped, startled, and looked around again.
“Something is not right,” he echoed. He went back and reread the paragraph.
“Seek the Chained God,” the voice repeated. Kri started reading again from the beginning, moving his lips with the words but no longer giving them voice.
“Everyone believes the Chained God was the one who returned and opened the Living Gate,” Kri said at last. “But the Chained God was already in his prison, before the Dawn War even began.”
“Who opened the Living Gate?” a new voice said. Kri didn’t look up from the scroll.
“Either the legend is wrong in reporting that the Dawn War had already begun,” Kri said, “or it was not the Chained God who opened the gate. Or else the Chained God was not imprisoned until later-I don’t know. And I don’t understand why it matters. What does the Living Gate have to do with Vestapalk and the demons?”
“Why don’t you ask it?”
“Ask it?” He looked around helplessly, and his eyes fell on the crystal shard he’d brought up from the workshop. “Yes, of course. Ask it.” He seized the fragment, bundled up the scroll, and carried both back downstairs.
“What did the three gods see behind the Living Gate?” a voice asked on the stairs.
“Was it the same thing that burst forth when the gate was opened?” another voice asked.
“What did Ioun see?” Still a different voice, and this one made him stop.
“Who are you?” Kri asked, his voice wavering. “I sought guidance from Ioun.”
No voice came in answer. Suddenly filled with fear, Kri hurried down the stairs until he reached the workshop and looked around for something he could use to seal the archway. He tried to drag a tall bookcase in front of the arch, but loaded with books it was too heavy for him to move alone. He threw books and scrolls onto the floor until one landed open on the floor beside him and he looked down to see a jagged spiral symbol on the scroll like an eye staring up at him.
He dropped to his knees beside the book and started reading about the Chained God. Sherinna had penned this scroll as well, and recorded her search, along with Brendis and Nowhere, for the cultists whose trail they had discovered in Nera-cultists of Tharizdun, the Elder Elemental Eye … the Dark God.
“The cultists were trying to free the Chained God,” he breathed. “I never knew.”
“You have much to learn,” a voice said over his shoulder.
Kri spun around and let his eyes range over the empty workshop.
“You must understand your enemies if you wish to defeat them,” came another voice.
He nodded. “Ask it ask it ask it-I’ll ask it.” He placed the crystal fragment on a table and rooted through the materials stored in flasks and boxes around the workshop until he found a tiny vial filled with a glittering silvery powder. “Residuum,” he said. “Excellent.”
He carefully opened the vial, the powder left behind from a broken enchantment, like crystallized magic, and tapped out just enough of it to trace a circle around the shard on the table’s smooth surface. As the circle took shape, he began chanting syllables of power, inserting occasional pleas to Ioun into the fabric of the ritual. The voices around him spoke a few times, but he blocked them out, forcing his mind to focus on the words of the ritual. So ignored, the voices left him in disgust, withdrawing to plan their next assault on his mind.
“Reveal your secrets to me!” he commanded, gripping the shard to complete the ritual.
The room around him disappeared, and he stood in a dusty ruin. A long wooden staff was held in two wooden braces in the wall beside him, and his hand clenched the head of the staff-the shard-suspended in the crook by a network of woven gut strands. Suddenly the wall opposite him burst open and a man stepped through, a man he recognized as the cult leader depicted in the mural at the top of the tower.
The man seized the staff, wrenching Kri’s perception as the world turned around him so his perspective on the crystal remained unchanged. He cut the strings holding the crystal in place and cradled the shard in his own hands, oblivious to Kri’s presence and his own hand on the shard.
And then Kri was the cult leader. “Albric,” he said. “My name is Albric.”
With his own hands, he killed one of his acolytes for impertinence, obeying the will of the Elder Elemental Eye. Then he used the crystal fragment to trace a circle on the wall where the staff had stood, opening a portal to a crowded city some part of his mind knew as Sigil, the City of Doors. He led his acolytes through the city until they were confronted by three robbers. One of the robbers was seized by the Eye, caught up in an ecstatic trance, revealing the presence and the name of Tharizdun, the Chained God.
Kri experienced Albric’s thrill of excitement, his religious awe in the presence of his god. It was a perfect expression of what he longed to feel from Ioun but found increasingly difficult to claim.
And Kri experienced Albric’s madness. He walked through a nightmare vista of liquid flesh and purple flame, and emerged in front of a ring of green flame. He howled in his madness, breaking the minds of those who heard him. And he stepped through a portal into Pandemonium.
Kri felt his pulse quicken as Albric began his ritual in the heart of the Chained God’s abandoned dominion. He chanted invocations to Tharizdun, the Patient One and the Black Sun. He watched the shard of the Living Gate rise into the air and open the tiniest of portals, a narrow wormhole leading to the prison that held the Chained God bound. And he watched with a mixture of Albric’s elation and his own dawning horror as a red crystalline liquid seeped out through the portal.
You must understand your enemies if you wish to defeat them, Kri reminded himself.
Then the vision became more confusing. Kri felt the tug of two different desires. The Chained God wanted him to fuse the red liquid-the Progenitor, he called it-with the shard of the Living Gate, and thereby create the Vast Gate. The red liquid itself, the Voidharrow, wanted him to fuse itself with him. He-or, rather, Albric-tried to follow the Chained God’s will, and he guided the fusion of the Voidharrow and the Living Gate until it grew into the archway depicted in Sherinna’s mural. His acolytes, though, obeyed the Voidharrow, and he saw them transform into demons.
The Chained God, he realized, had been betrayed. He felt the distant echo of the god’s fury as he-as Albric-fought to carry out Tharizdun’s will … and failed.
He felt what Albric did as the Voidharrow claimed his body, transforming him from the legs up into a creature of liquid crystal. He felt the tiefling’s dagger slip into his side and end his body’s life.
But Albric was no longer just his body. His will had fused with the Voidharrow as much as his body had, and he became something else. He became the creature that Albanon had described, a serpentine creature of red liquid.
“I am Nu Alin,” Kri said aloud.
“Who are you talking to?” asked a voice in the room.
Kri’s mind was jolted out of the vision, but he grasped at one last fragment of knowledge and experience. “I am in the Tower of Waiting,” he said.
“Kri? What are you talking about?”
Kri saw the crystal fragment on the table in front of him. Sherinna’s workshop came slowly into focus, and he turned toward the voice, f
ully expecting to see nothing there.
Albanon stood in the archway, a look of concern on his face.
“It’s time for us to leave,” Kri announced. Nu Alin was the key, he realized. Nu Alin was present at the beginning of it all. He had tried to fight the Voidharrow’s will, to do instead what the Chained God wanted.
“What?” Albanon whined. “We’ve barely gotten started here!”
Kri turned his back to Albanon. “I’ve uncovered some new information,” he said. As he spoke, he lifted the crystal from the table and slid it into a pocket, keeping it out of Albanon’s view.
“So have I! I think I might be close to finding the dragon. I’ve been analyzing the flow of magical energy through the Feywild and the world alike. It’s like there’s a great vortex-”
Kri shook his head sharply. “We have another quarry now.” I have to find Nu Alin, he thought. If the demon can be turned against Vestapalk, together we might defeat the Voidharrow at last.
“What other quarry?”
Kri grimaced. The urge to blast the annoying young eladrin with so much holy fire that his entire body would be consumed filled him so suddenly that he almost gave in to it.
“I’ll explain later. Collect your belongings.”
“Now? It’s the middle of the night.”
Kri thought he heard lightning crackle around his head, reflecting his frustration. He clutched his temples and drew a slow breath.
“Kri, are you unwell? You’re acting very strangely.”
“Not enough sleep, clearly. I’m sorry. Let me try to explain. Come into the stairway.” He shooed Albanon out of the workshop and followed him onto the landing beyond, suppressing a sudden desire to push the young eladrin over the railing.
Instead, he put a fatherly hand on Albanon’s shoulder and forced a smile onto his face as he pointed to the mural on the dome.
“I know where Albric is-where Nu Alin is,” he said, pointing to the man in the mural above, standing before the Vast Gate with his legs already transformed into red liquid columns. “He is the key to all of this. He holds the knowledge we seek.”