by C. M. Carney
“It cannot be helped my old friend. The Prime are coming. I have felt their presence in the aether.”
“What did they do to you to make you turn against your people, your family?”
Myrthendir stood and walked up to the Steward. He caressed the side of the half elf’s face. “I will show you. I want you to see what I have seen, feel what I have felt.” He closed his eyes and pushed his mind into the older man.
Myrthendir rushed through the tunnels of the ancient temple, desperate to get away. Fear glistened on his skin and made his breath ragged. He heard the cackling laughter behind him, knowing it heightened that fear. He had been right, when nobody believed him, not even his traitorous cousin Barrendiel. The arboleth were still on Korynn.
“They caught me. Without Barrendiel I was alone and outnumbered.”
The Steward shivered, and the vision warbled. A group of silver masked men dragged a beaten and bloody Myrthendir through a hallway lit by a sinister gray light and into a large cavern with a lake at its center. Standing on its shores were two humanoid figures in long robes. Their skin was the shade of drowned flesh, and their eyes deep pools of inky blackness. A pair of slits oozed a protective mucous where their nose should be. But the true horror of their visage was the thin mouth surrounded by four barbed limbs.
“Illurryth,” the Steward said in horror.
The Prince Regent struggled against his captors as a chittering rose from the illurryth. The crab-like appendages around their mouths writhed, the chitinous tips clacking again each other. Myrthendir screamed but got no sympathy from the men holding him.
They dragged him to the water’s edge, and both illurryth approached him, their chittering growing louder. One of them raised his right hand to Myrthendir’s face. The index finger bore an over large talon and a bead of milky white liquid flowed from its tip.
It dragged the talon down the side of Myrthendir’s face, flaying the skin. Myrthendir screamed not in pain, but in pure terror, for he knew what was to happen next. His screams tore at his throat and the shaking in his body crested and then faded as the neurotoxin filled his mind. The alien presence of the Prime filled his mind and stole his body.
The cultists released him for he was no longer a threat. The illurryth backed away, the unearthly chittering rising and falling like the refrains of some hellish anthem. Myrthendir’s eyes flitted back and forth, but then snapped to the lake as the water roiled with froth.
A massive form emerged from the lake, bloated and grotesque. Tentacles unfurled and reached out towards him as the arboleth rose from the water, floating on a telekinetic cushion of air.
Myrthendir tried to run, but the arboleth’s hold on his mind was perfect. Instead his own muscles pushed him forward. Tears pulsed from his eyes as his feet hit the edge of the water. The arboleth’s monstrous singular eye pulsed with flares of blue light, like the facets of a giant sapphire.
A tentacle eased towards him and as it got close a razor-sharp blade of bone snapped from its tip. The arboleth twisted the blade back and forth in front of Myrthendir’s eyes, the flecks of light glinting off it, another taunt designed to break his mind.
The bladed tentacle snaked around to the back of Myrthendir’s neck and sliced into his skull. Hot blood gushed down his back, and another tentacle writhed up to Myrthendir’s face. This one clutched an opaque sack of thick leathery material. Inside something shivered and moved and screamed.
The arboleth brought its bladed tentacle up to the egg sack, slicing it open with far more care than it had shown the elf lord. The sack burst open and the larva spasmed, thin, glass clear tentacles writhing in hunger.
“In that moment, I fought back. I was Myrthendir, son of the Regent of Sylvan Aenor and I would no longer beg or fear. The Prime heard the defiance in my mind, and it became angry.”
The arboleth brought its offspring, the extension of its own self, to the back of Myrthendir’s head. The larva howled in glee like a ravenous wolf finding an injured doe. The larva’s tentacles pulled the edges of his skull apart, but he refused to let the agony cloud his mind, even when it sliced through the protective layer around his brain and pushed its way inside his skull. The tentacles sliced bits and pieces of his brain away and eased them into its circular maw of razor-sharp teeth.
There was little pain as the Prime larva consumed his brain, just enough sensation to terrorize him. Terror was the Prime’s main weapon, so Myrthendir refused to let the fear take him. He pushed through the horror and the trauma twining his own will into the mind of the immature Prime and replaced the ethereal daemon with himself.
The Prime neurostructure was far denser and more complex than his own and Myrthendir finally understood their arrogance and sense of superiority. But they were mere beings of flesh and ichor and he was pure will.
By the time the arboleth realized what was happening it was too late, Myrthendir had suborned the larva’s mind to his own. He pushed his will along the unbreakable pathways the Prime used to keep their offspring enslaved, penetrating the arboleth’s mental defenses.
Once inside he tore the aetherial beast apart. Surges of psionic energy pulped its body and expanded outwards in waves of telekinetic force. The illurryth’s bones imploded and their bodies crumpled and cracked open, dumping expanding pools of yellow ichor onto the ground.
Human cultists, traitors to their own kind, screamed as their limbs twisted in directions they were incapable of turning, bones splintering and rupturing flesh.
The arboleth shuddered and fell to the hard stone of the cavern floor with a wet flop. The elf who had been Myrthendir, and was now something more than Prime, walked up to the shuddering creature and revelled in its pain. The dying arboleth tried to reach its mind through the aether seeking more Prime, but Myrthendir blocked it and let his own mind fill the aether with his challenge. “I am coming for you.” For a moment he let the rage of the Prime pour over him, but then he sent a spike of pure mental energy into the arboleth’s brain and the connection ceased along with the arboleth’s life.
Myrthendir opened his eyes and released Gartheniel. The older man was shaking. “I am sorry, I had no idea. “
“There is nothing to be sorry for. You could not have known.” With a flick of his wrist the black fog took Gartheniel’s mind once more. “None of you could, which is why only I am worthy to lead the fight against the Prime.”
Myrthendir removed the stasis cube containing the arboleth egg from his bag and stared at it for several moments. He flicked the top open and the larva inside the leathery sack launched a spike of psionic force at the elf lord. He grimaced, letting the psychic assault wash over his mental defenses. His mouth turned up in a viscous sneer as the Prime mind realized the ineffectiveness of its attack. The larva’s tentacles spasmed in terror.
“Yes,” Myrthendir said as he bent the larva’s mind to his own. The mental scream ended, leaving a hole of silence in the aether. “Now you understand that none of your kind are a match for me.”
“But I am,” came the voice of the one Myrthendir had once loved above all, even himself. The elf lord turned to see Sillendriel walking towards him on light feet, flanked by the paladins and warborn he had sent to fetch her, including the four bearing the black fog cube.
“My love,” Myrthendir said rising from the throne, replacing the stasis cube in his satchel and turning to her.
“I am sorry I failed you. I should have known. I should have tried to help you.”
“There is nothing to be done my love. This is what I am meant to be, an evolution, a perfection of this base form. I’m sorry I did not let you see the truth of it.”
“I feel what drives you. I have seen why you loathe the Prime.” She held a hand out to him. “Please, let me help you.”
“You know nothing.”
“But I do, my love. I know when your soul journeys into its reverie you do not relive your past selves as the rest of us do. You relive only one life. The life when you were an illurryth.”
Myrthendir’s eyes went wide, but he quickly recovered. “Interesting, you’ve removed the walls Lassendir and your mother built inside your mind. The world must seem a vortex of chaos to you now.”
“I am at peace with all that was, is and will come. Let me help you find peace.”
“I have purpose, I have no need for peace.” He sent another volley of magical bolts her way, yet once again she swatted them aside with no more effort than a man swatting at a fly.
“You are not to blame for what you did as illurryth.”
“Stop!” The elf lord yelled.
“You are not responsible for the battles you won against our people. You did not slaughter innocents. You were a victim, just as much as they were, a hero, taken by a great evil, not the evil that took the hero. You did not do those things.”
“Then why do I remember doing them?” Myrthendir’s voice was that of a man begging for forgiveness, for absolution, but he would not forgive himself.
“That is the great evil of the Prime.”
“They will return, unless I stop them.”
“Then let me help you. Let all of us help you.”
“It will not work. We are too fractious, too individual. It makes us weak.”
“It also gives us our greatest strength.”
For the briefest of moments doubt twined into Myrthendir's mind, but then he buried it. “I am sorry my love, but I cannot abandon my great purpose. Like you I have seen the future. I am the engine of a great evolution. I will push the Realms to the next phase of their existence, no matter how many people I must make grist for the mill of change.”
Sillendriel hung her head in resignation. “Then I must do what I can to stop you.”
“You cannot. Even without their limits on your power, you are no match for me.”
“That would be true if they were the only checks upon my power.”
Myrthendir’s eyes squinted as a twinge of worry grew inside him, a sensation that only grows to an itch if one pays it heed. He refused to be distracted and sent a pulse of thought into the Iron Crown. Inside the cube the buzzing grew fierce as the black fog awoke once again.
“You are bluffing, and it will do you no good,” he said in a cold voice as the streams of particles exploded from inside the cube, urged on by Myrthendir’s fears. “Take solace though. I will keep you by my side, always.” The black fog spun into a tight, thin lance and then punched downwards.
◆◆◆
With barely a glance in the fog’s direction Sillendriel erected a potent telekinetic shield and the black fog flowed over it, darkening her entire world. She took a deep breath, steeling herself for what would come, sat and closed her eyes, exorcising the horrors of the world from her consciousness. Her astral form, her true soul self, flowed from her body and flew. It passed through the barrier of solid thought and through the black fog.
She stood before Myrthendir and raised an astral hand up to his face, not willing to touch him, for fear that he would sense her presence. She wanted to help him, but sympathy now would lead to the suffering of untold millions. She closed her hand and expanded her mind upwards and outwards.
She was unable to cleanse the infection that had taken her people, but she could stall it, slow it, just enough for Gryph to stop Myrthendir. If he still lives. The future, always so certain, had become a world of mists and fog, and all paths leading into the future were shrouded. She was a woman suddenly gone blind and deaf walking a once familiar path without eyes or ears to guide her. All she had now was her faith. I must trust in my visions. I must trust in Gryph.
If the man Gryph was not on the bridge cradling the body of his dead friend, then all was lost. He was the one tendril of light in an ocean of darkness. Her soul form passed through the walls of the Spire and touched the trickles of life buried deep in its roots. Aurvendiel still lives, but how much longer?
She touched the thousands of souls below her, each one buried beneath the black fog. In her mind she expanded herself covering them all in her warmth and ease. The black fog screeched in rage like an animal reacting to pain and then she understood its true nature. He isn’t controlling them, he is becoming them. Soon there would be nothing left but Myrthendir.
How long before it becomes permanent?
She pulled all her will, all her strength and all her love into herself until it began a blinding singularity. Then she sent it outwards in every direction. Weapons stopped their attacks. Spells died on twining fingers. Buried minds remembered parts of who they were.
Below her everything paused. She soared over the bridge where thousands of her brothers and sisters were as rigid as statues next to another people, large men bereft of hair or ornament that she had never seen before. Deep inside these fierce warrior giants she sensed old souls, begging to serve their people.
Then she found Gryph cradling the body of the gnome Wick. Next to him stood another of the large men and a Thalmiir man clad in an armored automaton. The gnome woman stood over her lover, the dagger that had killed him flaring green in her hand, and buried beneath the fog she screamed.
Gryph, she sent. You must leave him. You must run. Gryph looked upwards and then around at the vast army paused in front of him. He stood, said something to his fellows and then sprinted down the bridge. Hurry. She sent.
◆◆◆
Myrthendir watched as the power of the black fog scoured at Sillendriel’s shield. He had no desire to hurt her, but he would allow no one, not even her, to sway him from his purpose. The millions of tiny motes pummeling against the telekinetic shield sounded like a hurricane made of sand.
She is powerful, he thought, impressed. But she can only resist for so long, and I am as patient as the stars. The paladins she’d taken from him ground to a halt, like a water wheel whose river had gone dry.
He grinned, thinking the burden of keeping her shield active required all her focus, but then he felt her through the aether. She is everywhere. Realizing she had played him, his eyes snapped to the dome of mental force. The black fog pulled away, and she was there, sitting cross legged and peaceful, as if she had no care in the world.
He thrust outwards with his mind, trying and failing a dozen times to push himself into one of his thralls, but a field of calm and peace enveloped them all like a warm blanket wrapped over a sick child.
“No!” Myrthendir screamed and sent a wave of aetherial power at the dome. It shuddered and recoiled like a soap bubble, but held its shape, bouncing the power back at the elf lord, knocking him off his feet.
He stood once more, a wicked grin focusing his will. “This will not do.” He held his hands in front of him focusing his will into a single point. Aetherial magic was the ultimate power in the Realms, and it allowed Myrthendir to change the rules of the reality itself. He grunted with the effort and then expanded the point into a hole.
Every cell in his body screamed as power thrummed through him and he forced his will into the hole, expanding it slowly. She was there on the other side of the rift, mere inches from him. A sense of pride filled him. No one had ever resisted him so effectively, but like all the others she would soon succumb.
He pushed his will forward. He had defeated the Prime, become more than any before him, and he would let no one slow him. With a howl, he expanded the hole and stepped through into what remained of her small world. His breath was ragged from the effort and her eyes eased opened, gazing upon him not with hate and anger, but sympathy and love. Then she spoke.
“Stop this, I beg you.”
“I cannot. What I do, I do for all of us.”
“There will be no more us.”
He jerked backwards under the unexpected emotion, eyes wide. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply and drew his blade. He pulled
his arm back, tip ready to plunge down into her. Her eyes did not plead, did not fear, they showed nothing but compassion and love. For the briefest of moments he hesitated, and she smiled. Then her eyes went blank.
With no further ceremony he thrust down, plunging the dagger into her chest.
42
Gryph’s world became small and made only of Wick. The gnome lay in an expanding pool of purple blood, his eyes staring without focus at everything and nothing. Tifala looked down on Wick as well, but the fleeting bits of emotion were gone, shrouded over by the power of the black fog.
The bastard won’t even let her grieve, he thought.
Her eyes turned towards him, swimming with the mites of the black fog. They held no sympathy, no warmth, no awareness she had just killed the man she loved. Gryph knew she would kill him as well. She drew green life energy into her blade once more and pulled her arm back, ready for a killing blow.
“I forgive you,” Gryph said, and then closed his eyes. He refused to add more pain to her heart by forcing her to watch him watch her. You don’t think any of you are surviving this, do you? a voice that may have been the Colonel’s or may have been his own, mocked from deep within. He smiled grimly as he waited for the sharp pain that would end this life.
It did not come.
He opened his eyes and saw Tifala, arm still raised high, her shimmering green sword still pointed at Gryph’s chest, but she was not moving, as if some outside force had frozen her body. Even her cold stare had become blank and distant.
Grimliir strode up in his goliath rig, followed by Errat. Both men were covered in blood but seemed otherwise unharmed. Grimliir reached down and tore the vines holding Gryph apart with ease, then helped him to his feet. Gryph nodded his thanks and retrieved his spear. Around them, the warborn and elves stood unmoving, rigid as statues.
“What is happening?”
“I do not know,” Errat said. “We were separated and thought we would soon die, but then they just stopped.”