“He will come,” Telemont said, thinking of his son, the son he no longer trusted, the son he no longer understood.
“As you say, Most High. When he comes, perhaps with his newfound power . . . ”
“His stolen divinity, you mean,” Telemont interrupted.
Again, shadows churned.
“As you say, Most High,” Hadrhune repeated, the doubt palpable in his voice. “In any event, if the prince is a godling, perhaps he has insight into what’s happening.”
“I think not, Hadrhune. The prince no longer thinks like a man.”
Nor did he think like a Lord of Shade. He was lost in the nihilism of his faith. Telemont had scried him many times. Rivalen would stare into Shar’s eye, unmoving for days at a time.
“Most High,” Hadrhune said, “I concede that Prince Rivalen is unstable but . . . ”
Telemont felt Rivalen’s presence manifest in the room as a sudden weight on his consciousness, a density in the air, as if the room’s dimensions changed shape to accommodate him. Hadrhune must have sensed it, too, for he gasped.
Rivalen said, “You speak of me as if I cannot hear every word you say, child.” “Child!” Hadrhune said, and sputtered in rage.
“You requested my presence,” Rivalen said, ignoring Hadrhune, his statement directed at Telemont.
“No,” Telemont said, still not turning, still staring out over Thultanthar. “I sent for you.”
Rivalen became still more present in the room, weightier. The darkness deepened, thickened somehow. Telemont resisted the impulse to mentally run through the wards and spells that guarded his person.
“You don’t send for me anymore, father,” Rivalen said. “You request my presence. And I come if I will it.”
Hadrhune recovered himself enough to say, “You will refer to him as the Most High, Prince Rivalen.”
“And you will say nothing more or I will kill you where you stand.”
Hadrhune gasped again to be so addressed, but he heeded Rivalen’s admonition and said nothing more.
Telemont made his face a mask and turned to face his son.
By now, Rivalen loomed large in the room. Hadrhune, standing near him, indeed looked like a child. Rivalen’s golden eyes glowed out of his sharpfeatured face. He’d inherited the features from Telemont, but father and son shared very little else anymore.
“Divinity has made you ill-mannered,” Telemont said.
“Prince Rivalen was never known for his grace,” Hadrhune said.
Rivalen turned on Hadrhune, arm upraised as if to smack him. A sizzling mass of black energy gathered on his palm.
Hadrhune’s eyes flared. He blanched, retreated a step, and held his staff defensively before him. Veins of blue light lit the crystal atop the staff.
“Rivalen!” Telemont shouted, and slammed the butt of his own staff on the tiled floor, causing a roll of thunder. “Violence is prohibited in these chambers!”
Rivalen froze, his narrow eyes fixed on Hadrhune, the annihilating ball of power crackling in his palm. “Your prohibitions no longer concern me, father. You couldn’t stop me. Not anymore.”
Telemont let his own power gather. Tendrils of shadows formed in the air, snaked around his hands, his staff.
“You’re mistaken, child,” he said, but wondered if Rivalen spoke the truth. He sensed the power in his son. Telemont had no doubt that he could hurt Rivalen, but he doubted he could kill him.
“He goes too far, Most High,” Hadrhune said, his voice high-pitched, his breathing heavy and fast. He did not lower his staff, did not release the defensive spell burgeoning in its crystal cap.
“Run along, lapdog,” Rivalen said. The ball of energy in his palm dissipated into nothingness.
“Most High—” Hadrhune began.
Rivalen clenched his fist and the crystal atop Hadrhune’s staff shattered with a pop, raining pieces onto the floor. Shadows bled from the tip of the wounded staff. Hadrhune cursed, wide-eyed.
“I said leave,” Rivalen said to him. “You aren’t needed here.”
Hadrhune’s eyes burned, but he ignored Rivalen. “Most High?”
“You may go, Hadrhune,” Telemont said, his eyes on his son.
The counselor bowed to Telemont, pointedly ignored Rivalen, and exited the chamber. Telemont knew Hadrhune would remain just outside the room with a group of elite Shadovar warriors, ready should they be needed.
“You were unnecessarily harsh with him,” Telemont said.
“He is a fool.” Rivalen walked past Telemont to the glassteel window that looked out on Thultanthar. “We fought so hard to preserve this after we fled Netheril’s fall into the Shadowfell.”
“We did,” Telemont agreed. “And we fought hard to expand our reach when we returned to Faerûn. You were instrumental throughout.”
Rivalen chuckled. “Flattery, father?”
“Truth, rather,” Telemont said. “And now I could use your help once more.”
Rivalen turned to face him. Shadows curled around him, as languid as a lover’s caress. “With the Chosen and the gods and their plots?”
“You sense it, too?” Telemont said, momentarily surprised. “But of course you do.”
“It’s trivial,” Rivalen said, and gestured contemptuously.
“Explain,” Telemont said, irritated that anyone would call anything he mentioned “trivial.”
“It’s pointless. All of it. Everything.” Rivalen gestured while he spoke, anger gathering in his voice, power gathering on his hands. “This game you play with gods and Chosen and empire. It’s trivial. Do you not see that? We’ve wasted centuries on it, and to what purpose?”
“To what purpose?” Telemont said, taking a step toward Rivalen, his own anger rising. “For survival. And then for empire.”
Rivalen’s fists and jaw clenched. Shadows swirled around him. “Both are nothing. Both have always been nothing.” He chuckled and there was a wildness in it. “It’s all ending. This world. The gods. Their Chosen. They scramble to grab at phantasms. The Cycle of Night is already begun and it can only end one way. There’s nothing left to do now but play our parts.”
Puzzlement pushed aside Telemont’s anger. “You think the world is going to end?”
“No,” Rivalen said. He put his hands in his cloak pockets and his eyes flashed with the eagerness of a madman. “I know it’s going to end. And I know how. So go on with your schemes and plots, your obsession with gods and their Chosen. Before the end, you’ll see things as I do. This world is already a corpse. It needs only to rot away.”
Telemont stared at his son a long moment. He realized he’d get nothing from Rivalen. His son was lost entirely to Shar, to nihilism, to nothingness.
“I think it’s time for you to go, Rivalen.”
Rivalen’s lips curled in a sardonic smile. “You’re right, father. And I don’t think we’ll meet again.”
“You don’t collect coins anymore, do you, Rivalen?”
Rivalen took his hands from his cloak and showed his father empty palms. “Why would I? What are coins to me? What is anything to me?”
“Indeed,” Telemont said, and felt a deep sadness. He’d lost his son. His son had lost himself.
Rivalen bowed, the gesture half-hearted, almost mocking. “Goodbye, Most High.”
The darkness shrouded Rivalen, and then he was gone, returned to Ordulin, to the thoughts and plans that plagued him, to the ideas that had, it seemed, driven him mad.
Telemont stood alone in the center of the room, his thoughts on the past, his wife, his sons as they’d been thousands of years before. He remembered his sons as children: Brennus’s laugh, Rivalen’s contagious chuckle. He remembered his wife’s smile, what it felt like to hold her in his arms every night.
“My lord?” Hadrhune said.
Lost in his thoughts, Telemont had not heard Hadrhune re-enter the room.
“You never met Alashar, Hadrhune.”
“Most High?”
“Never mind,” Telemont said, and smi
led softly.
“Most High, what of Prince Rivalen? Will he aid us in capturing the Chosen?”
“No,” Telemont said, his thoughts hardening. “Rivalen is lost to us.”
“I . . . don’t understand. What will he do, then?”
Telemont faced his most trusted counselor. “What won’t he do is the appropriate question.”
Hadrhune licked his lips, dug his thumbnail into the damaged darkstaff he still held. “I’m not following, Most High.”
Telemont walked to the glassteel window and stared out at Thultanthar.
“Rivalen wants to die, Hadrhune, but he wants to kill the world first.”
Brennus stood at his ebonwood lectern in the three-story library of his manse in Sakkors. In the past he’d spent most of his time in Shade Enclave, but the capital city of New Netheril held small appeal for him anymore.
Books and scrolls from the various ages of Faerûnian history lined shelves that extended floor to ceiling on three of the library’s walls—spellbooks, treatises on magical theory, histories from all over the continent, catalogs of arcane devices, lexicons of demonic and diabolical entities. The knowledge contained in the materials he’d gathered over the centuries could keep a sage occupied for a lifetime.
A highly detailed globe of Toril hung in the air in the center of the room, suspended only by magic. Its slow rotation mirrored that of Toril’s. At Brennus’s command, the globe could show Toril’s terrain, its political borders and cities, or the lay of magic across the planet—where it was concentrated, where it was dead, the locations of various places of power.
Spicy, pungent smoke spiraled from a block of incense burning in a platinum censer atop a table near the globe. His homunculi perched on the table to either side of the censer like tiny gargoyles, clawing at the smoke and giggling as their hands split the streams of black smoke into finer ribbons. One jumped at the smoke as it rose, lost his footing, and tumbled off the table and onto the floor. The other laughed hysterically at his sibling’s misfortune. Brennus watched them with a half-smile, wondering how constructs crafted of his own blood and essence could be so filled with humor and simple joy. Would he have been more prone to such things had his life taken a different turn? He remembered laughing often with his mother before she died.
Before she was murdered.
He’d changed after that. He’d obeyed the Most High’s wishes and turned to divination rather than shaping. He would have been an entirely different man, with an entirely different life, had his mother lived. Strange how one vacancy could so change a life. Rivalen had not just murdered their mother. He’d murdered what Brennus could have been.
He eyed the books and scrolls piled high on the lectern before him, all of them connected in some way to the dead god Mask, his worshipers, Erevis Cale, the faith of Amaunator, Kesson Rel, and the Cycle of Night. He felt that he had all the pieces of the puzzle before him, but he could not quite form them into a coherent image.
He was missing something.
He was missing the son, Erevis Cale’s son. The son had to be the key.
“Subject: Mephistopheles,” he said, and charged the words with magic.
The shadows coalesced in several dozen places around the room and took the form of tenebrous hands. The homunculi looked up at the hands, eyes wide at the simple spell. Each of the magical hands lifted a book or scroll from a shelf and whisked it to Brennus’s lectern. After setting down its burden, a hand would dissipate back into the air.
The homunculi watched the books float through the air and clapped with delight.
Brennus spent the next several hours learning all he could. He supplemented his mundane study with magical queries directed at entities in the Outer Planes. He used spells to pull knowledge from the informational currents that floated in the ether, learning what he could. More and more pieces formed.
Mask had been Shar’s herald on Toril, and possibly her son. Shar existed on many worlds, in many planes, and always her goal was the same—the annihilation of worlds. The process, The Cycle of Night, had run its course on many worlds, leaving voids in its wake, and had begun on Toril. The hole in the center of Ordulin, the hole that Rivalen spent long hours pondering, was the cycle’s seed.
But its growth appeared to have been slowed, or stopped.
In all his inquiries, Brennus could find not a single instance of the cycle ending on a world without that world’s annihilation. Not one. The Lady of Loss had murdered billions with her nihilism. And his brother embraced it now.
We’re all already dead, Rivalen had said.
His brother was murdering the world.
Brennus wanted Rivalen dead more than ever.
The guardian constructs flanking the door to the library—suits of archaic plate armor animated and given a rudimentary sentience by Brennus’s spellcasting—lurched into motion and took offensive stances, halberds held before them.
At first Brennus thought his brother might have returned, but the alarm spell that pinged in his mind told him otherwise. In a few moments the library’s door opened to reveal the thin, shadow-shrouded form of his longtime majordomo, Lhaaril.
The shield guardians moved before him, threatening him with their polearms.
Lhaaril’s eyes flashed with surprise. The shadows drew closely about his finely tailored, elaborately embroidered robe.
“An experiment,” Brennus explained. “I linked the shield guardians’ perception to various alarm spells within the manse,” Brennus explained. “They sensed you coming when your passage took you through the foyer. What is it, Lhaaril? I’m in the middle of things.”
Brennus uttered a command word that returned the shield guardians to their neutral stance flanking the door.
“I have news, my lord,” Lhaaril said. “One of the scouts has returned.
Brennus did not miss Lhaaril’s emphasis on one. “One? Something happened to the other?”
Lhaaril shifted on his feet. The shadows around him swirled, betraying his discomfort. “It appears so. I think it best that the story come from the remaining scout.”
The homunculi, no doubt sensing Brennus’s piqued interest, sprinted across the library, clambered up his cloak, and took station on his shoulders.
Lhaaril dutifully ignored them, even when they stuck their tongues out at him.
“Shall I have him brought to you, Prince?”
“Yes, and right away.”
Brennus deactivated the shield guardians before Lhaaril returned with the scout. Brennus searched his memory for the scout’s name, found it—Ovith. The scout stood a head taller than Lhaaril, perhaps a hand shorter than Brennus. Plated armor, dented from many battles, encased his broad frame. His scabbard, however, hung empty from his belt. He put his arm across his chest and lowered himself to one knee.
“Prince Brennus.”
On Brennus’s shoulders, his homunculi mirrored Ovith’s gesture.
“You may go, Lhaaril,” Brennus said.
“My Lord,” Lhaaril acknowledged, and exited the library, closing the door after him.
“Stand, Ovith,” Brennus said to the scout, and he did. “Lhaaril says you have a tale to tell.”
Ovith did not look Brennus in the eye when he spoke. “My Prince, Cronil and I patrolled the Sembian plains as you instructed, searching for any sign of the Abbey of the Rose.”
Brennus had numerous pairs of Shadovar scouts scouring the Sembian countryside in search of the Abbey of the Rose and its Oracle. He suspected the life of Erevis Cale’s son was tied up with the sun-worshipers, but he’d mostly given up hope. His men had found nothing but rumors for decades.
“We stopped to water our veserabs on the way back to Sakkors.”
“Where? And be exact.”
“At the River Draal, before it joins the River Arkhen, perhaps five leagues east of the Thunder Peaks.”
Brennus held a hand up at his globe and put power in his words. “The River Draal, five leagues east of the Thunder Peaks.”
Responding to Brennus’s command, the globe in the center of the library turned to show the location he’d named. Brennus walked toward the globe, Ovith behind him.
“Twenty leagues in all directions from that point,” Brennus said. “Expand.”
The globe unwrapped itself from a sphere into a large, flat rectangle that showed the area Brennus had named. He noted the rivers, the mountains, his mind turning.
“Continue, Ovith.”
“As we watered the mounts, Cronil heard something that alarmed him. He spotted a cave on the opposite riverbank and flew over to investigate. That’s when we were attacked.”
“The attackers emerged from the cave?”
Ovith nodded.
“Creatures or men?”
“Men, my Lord.”
“Describe them, their clothing, their weapons, their tactics. Omit nothing.”
Prompted by pointed questions from Brennus, Ovith explained how he and Cronil had been surprised, attacked by four men, all of them experienced combatants. Ovith could not be certain, but he thought two of them human, one a deva, and another. . .
“A shade?” Brennus asked, his mind and heart racing.
“Yes, Prince Brennus. I know how that sounds, but I saw him up close. He was a shade. And yet. . . ”
“And yet?”
“And yet light was in his weapon. A rose and sun featured on his shield. And he wore this.”
The homunculi leaned forward expectantly as Ovith removed something from his belt pouch and held it forth.
An exquisitely crafted rose cast in silver and attached to a few links of a necklace sat in Ovith’s open palm.
“His holy symbol,” Ovith said. “I snatched it from him during the combat. An accident, but I hope a fortuitous one.”
“You’ve no idea.” The shadows around Brennus stilled as he took the rose in his hand, felt its weight, the cool touch of its metal. The rose had a scratch on it, revealing shining silver under the dark tarnish.
Pieces started to fall into place, an image began to form. “A shade who is a worshiper of Amaunator.”
“So it seems, my Prince. The abbey is real and we must have been near it. Why else would servants of Amaunator be at that place.”