Mephistopheles roared, the wind gusted, and Riven slashed his empowered saber into the archfiend’s head, cleaving one of his horns and sinking deeply into the skull. Thick, greasy fluid sprayed from the chasm in the devil’s head. Riven funneled his rage through his blade, lit the archfiend afire with pain.
Mephistopheles screamed and tried to stand. Riven kept a foot on his back, and drove him face down into the ice of his own realm.
Somewhere in the distance, glaciers crumbled. Mountains fell.
“Those three, those are for the three you gave Cale.” Riven eyed his friend’s body, nearly covered in ice.
Mephistopheles groaned, said something indecipherable. The wounds Riven had given him were already closing.
He rocked his saber free from the archfiend’s skull. “This one is for me.”
Grabbing a fistful of Mephistopheles’s blood-and brain-spattered black hair, he jerked back the fiend’s head, exposing his throat. The archfiend grimaced, showing a mouthful of fangs stained black with blood. Riven put his saber edge on Mephistopeheles’s neck and opened his throat. Blood that smelled like rot gouted from the gash. Riven held the flopping head in his hand for a moment before dropping it contemptuously to the ice.
Though not yet perfectly alloyed with the divine essence, Riven still sensed the arrival of two score gelugons as they teleported to the aid of their master. Their wet breathing was as a bellows in his divinely-enhanced hearing, the sound of their sudden weight on the ice like the crack of a whip.
He spun, and unleashed a cloud of viscous shadows that engulfed them all, binding them. They clicked and grunted with surprise and he sent a surge of power through the cloud to prevent any of them from teleporting out. With a minor exertion of will, he turned the thick cloud acidic.
The gelugons shrieked as the acid ate holes through their carapaces. They struggled against their bonds, hacked with their hooked polearms at the shadows that bound them, but to no avail. Foul, greasy black smoke and agonized clicks and screams rose from the slaughter. Riven put them from his mind and turned to face their master.
The gash in the archfiend’s head was closing. So, too, the opening in his throat. Riven put a knee between his wings, leaned forward, and whispered in his ear.
“Step out of the Hells and I will be waiting. Everywhere other than here, I am your better.”
Mephistopheles started to speak, gagged on blood, coughed, spit. He nodded toward Cale. “You will be back for him. And when you come, I will be waiting.”
Riven looked over to Cale but could not see his friend’s body. Perhaps the ice already had buried him, or perhaps …
For a moment, hope rose in him. But then he remembered that the archfiend was a liar, ever and always.
No, Cale was dead forever, his body encased in ice, and Riven could not spare the time to recover him. He figured Cale would understand.
“He is gone,” Riven said, trying to believe his own words. “And I will not be back.”
Mephistopheles smiled a mouthful of bloody fangs. “We will see.”
Rivalen saw the glow around Sakkors dim, saw the city right itself as the mindmage released the Source and its power once more turned to keeping the city aloft. The echo of the mindmage’s rage still rattled around his brain. His body ached, bled, but his regenerative flesh worked at closing the wounds and healing his bones. He would be able to regrow his arm in time.
It is over, the mindmage said, exhaustion and despair leaking through the mental emanation.
Rivalen shook his head and said softly, “No. It has just begun.”
He pictured in his mind oblivion, the end of all, and pulled the shadows around him. He felt the rush of instantaneous movement and materialized among the shattered ruins of Ordulin.
Darkness shrouded the dead city. Long streaks of sickly blue and dull yellow vapor floated lazily through the polluted, stale air, the bruises left on Ordulin’s corpse. Rivalen knew the acrid vapors to be poisonous but his new nature defied the weaknesses of a purely mortal form.
Walls of churning dark clouds surrounded the city, Shar’s perpetual darkness taken root in Faerûn’s Heartlands. Jagged streaks of vermillion lightning split the clouds. Ominous thunder rumbled.
But within the city, in the center of the storm, was stillness, vacuity. Only the wind stirred. It spiraled around him in insistent gusts, irritated breezes, and pushed at his back, driving him toward the core of the city and truth of Shar’s plan.
He let his consciousness, divinely expansive, reach across the breadth of the city. It was entirely devoid of life. He knew the darkness outside the city proper teemed with twisted forms of life and unlife that fed on death and fear, but the city itself was a hole.
And he knew why.
Kesson Rel had failed; Shar had not.
But Rivalen had to see it for himself. He had to know.
He could have walked the shadows to the pit he would find in Ordulin’s center but chose instead to walk through the destruction. He thought that someone living should bear witness to it.
The beat of his boots off the cracked and uneven streets were the moments recorded by a Neverwinter waterclock, dripping away the time left to Toril. He felt more and more lightheaded with each step.
Around him deformed buildings sagged on their foundations, drooped from the sides as if their stone and brick had run like melting candle wax, rounding edges, stretching shapes. The buildings leaned like drunks toward the center of the city, toward the hole in the world.
Thousands of corpses littered the city, lay in doorways, on balconies, flesh pale and drooping, twisted mouths open in dying screams. The wind tore at the rags of their clothing, Shar’s victory pennons.
As he neared his goal, the deformation of the world increased. Eventually separation of melted flesh from melted stone was lost. Parts of bodies jutted from the sagging rocks and bricks. Torsos, heads, and limbs stabbed accusatory appendages at the black sky, the bodies trapped in the wreckage of crumbling reality, insects caught imperfectly in drops of amber. He did not avert his gaze at the grisliness. He took it in, tried to comprehend it, the shadows around him swirling.
“Your bitterness was sweet to the Lady,” he said to the dead.
He felt reality, unreality, pulling at his form, trying to turn him first malleable, then unmake him all together. Only the divine power within him allowed him to remain physically and mentally coherent. He felt detached, as if watching himself in a dream.
Ahead, the street ended in a cobblestone paved plaza surrounded by a low stone wall. A bronze statue stood on a pedestal near the wall, a warrior with sword and shield. His features had flowed away, as if tears had melted his expression.
Rivalen walked past the statue and into the plaza. Kesson Rel’s spire hung over the city, feeding the rift between planes that manifested as a gash in the sky. Rivalen put out his hand and a shadowy tendril extended from his palm to the spire, wrapping around its circumference again and again again. He let power surge through the tendril and Kesson’s tower crumbled, fell to earth in huge chunks, each of them a monument to his failure. Then he intoned a stanza of power, and closed the rift. The Shadowstorm would retreat in time. Only Ordulin would remain in its shadows. Sembia would recover, mostly, and the Shadovar would rule it.
Rivalen picked his way through the rubble and there, in the center of Kesson Rel’s ruin, he found Shar’s victory.
A disc of nothingness, perhaps the size of a shield, hovered at eye height. It did not move but the border between it and the surrounding plaza blurred. Reality seemed to sag under the weight of its presence, as if the world were draining away in a wash basin.
Stillness reigned. Rivalen stared, awed, humbled.
The wind blew a ribbon of shadow into the hole and the shadow disappeared. Not consumed, Rivalen knew. Not disintegrated, but obliterated entirely, as would anything that fell into it, just as he had seen on Ephyras.
Rivalen held out his hand, his fingertips nearly touching the hol
e, his body the bridge between substance and nothingness. He looked into the hole, the lens through which he saw the end of all time and all things. He was looking at the end of the world, the unmaking of the universe. From an inner pocket, he withdrew the black coin he had taken from the ruins of Ephyras. It was cool in his hand, dead.
For the first time he understood, truly understood, the nature of his goddess, of her goals, of her needs.
She would end all things. He would be her instrument. He had murdered his mother, lost his brother, his father, his entire family, made a sacrifice of his soul, traded his faith for his humanity, and all of it for nothing. He closed his fingers over the coin, stared into the hole in the world, and wept.
Thamalon heard news of Rivalen’s return to Selgaunt and awaited him in the map room of his palace. His gaze went again and again to the chess pieces he had placed on the map of Sembia, the black line of sword-armed pawns denoting the leading edge of the Shadowstorm.
He didn’t know if the prince had succeeded in stopping Kesson Rel. He didn’t know of Mister Cale’s fate, of the Saerbians.
Impatience turned him fidgety. He paced the room, drank a chalice of wine, paced more, drank more, and still the prince did not come.
The glowballs in the room caused the chess pieces to cast shadows on the map. The pawns painted miniature shades across the whole of Sembia. Thamalon stopped pacing, stared at them, imagined himself able to step though darkness, to travel between worlds, to live forever.
He wanted what he had been promised, and wanted it badly. First things firstly, Rivalen had said, and Thamalon had accepted that, but the time had come. Thamalon rang for his chamberlain.
Thriistin’s thin body and thin hair appeared in the doorway. His coat and collared shirt, as always, appeared freshly donned.
“Hulorn?”
“You have sent for Prince Rivalen?”
“Two runners, my lord. He is not in his quarters.”
Thamalon stared at the map, at the shades, his fists clenched.
“Bring a carriage around.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Thamalon didn’t bother with Rivalen’s quarters. Instead, he instructed the driver to take him to Temple Avenue. The hunched teamster grunted an acknowledgment and snapped the reins.
The carriage rattled along Selgaunt’s cobblestone streets and Thamalon took pride in the crowded thoroughfares, the bustle of commerce, the absence of food lines. His city was well-protected and well-fed, having weathered a war and a famine and emerged the stronger. Under his rule, all of Sembia would do the same.
The populace recognized his lacquered carriage and Thamalon returned salutes and waves as he went. He was the Hulorn and the people loved their Hulorn.
Squads of Scepters patrolled the streets afoot. Two or three Shadovar soldiers bolstered the ranks of each squad, their ornate armor an odd anachronism even on the diverse, cosmopolitan streets of Selgaunt. Thamalon realized that he had come to take the presence of the Shadovar for granted. The people had, too. He imagined that no one would think twice of it when Sakkors reappeared in the sky over Selgaunt.
The teamster shouted to his team and the carriage turned onto Temple Avenue. Thamalon leaned out of the window.
Few worshipers strode the avenue’s walkways and no other carriages rode its cobblestones. The clatter of the carriage’s passage disturbed the starlings that perched in the nooks of the statues and fountains. A cloud of them took wing as the carriage approached and Thamalon ducked back inside to avoid the rain of their droppings. The driver, with no roof to shield him, cursed the birds for fouling his coat.
As they moved down the avenue, they passed one dark, abandoned temple after another, the stone corpses of dead faiths. Stairs and halls once filled with worshipers stood as fallow and empty as had Sembia’s once drought-stricken fields.
Soon Thamalon would formally outlaw all worship but that of Shar. Anything of value within the abandoned temples would be taken and placed in the city’s treasury. He would order the temples torn down and use their stone to repair damage done during the war, a fitting use for the temples of traitors.
“Stop before the House of Night,” he said to the driver, who nodded.
The temple of Shar squatted on its plot, all sharp angles and hard, gray stone. A single tower rose from the center of the two story temple, a digit pointing an accusation at Selûne. Only a few windows dotted its facade, and those the color of smoke or deep purple.
Once, Vees Talendar had tried to disguise it as a temple of Siamorphe, but all pretense had been shed. The black, lacquered double doors, standing open, prominently featured Shar’s symbol—a featureless black disc ringed in purple. A large amethyst decorated the keystone of the doors’ arch. In coming months, Thamalon would engage laborers to appropriately adorn the rest of the temple’s exterior.
Without waiting for the driver to open his door, Thamalon let himself out and walked up the stone stairs to the doorway of the temple. He could not see within. Impenetrable magical darkness cloaked the entry foyer just beyond the doors, symbolically separating the church from the outside world. A congregant was forced to take his first steps into the temple blind, a moment of vulnerability to remind them of Shar’s power. Within the darkness, the congregant was to confess a secret to the Lady.
Thamalon stepped out of the late afternoon sun and entered the darkness. Whispers plagued his ears, the combined babble of all others who had entered the darkness and made their confessions. He couldn’t make out words but he heard Rivalen’s deep voice among the cacophony, Variance’s sibilant tone. For a moment he felt as if the floor had opened and he were falling, a vertiginous spiral into an unending void.
“I hated my father,” he confessed through gritted teeth, and the feeling instantly ceased, the whispers subsided, and he knew his own secret had joined the babble.
The magic of the foyer tugged at the holy symbol of Shar he wore, lifting the symbol from his chest and pulling him by the chain. He followed its lead. In a few strides he emerged from the darkness to find himself face to face with Variance Mattick.
Shadows twirled around her in long, thin spirals. A scar along her cheek marred the dark skin of her round face. Her long, black hair melded with her shroud of shadows. She wore the purple robe of her office. He wondered if she, like Rivalen, was thousands of years old.
“Priestess,” Thamalon said, inclining his head. “In the darkness of night, we hear the whisper of the void.”
“Heed its words, Hulorn.”
“I seek Prince Rivalen. He is not in his quarters, so I thought—”
“The Nightseer is within.”
She made no move to step aside, nor offered further detail.
“May I see him?”
“He is at worship.”
Thamalon looked past her, saw only the hallway and its purple carpet. “I think he will see me.”
Variance smiled, the expression made sinister by the way the skin of her cheek creased around her scar.
“Remain here. I will inquire of the Nightseer.”
Without waiting for an acknowledgement, she turned and walked down the corridor. She soon melted into the darkness of the windowless space.
Thamalon stood in the hall, irritated with the presumptuous manner in which Variance had ordered him to remain.
“As if I were a dog,” he murmured.
His irritation only grew as the moments passed. He looked down the corridor, but saw nothing but the purple carpet and bare stone walls. Could she have forgotten him?
“Damn it all,” he said, and started down the hallway after Variance.
“Hulorn,” Rivalen said from behind him.
Surprise jolted Thamalon’s heart. He turned to see Rivalen step from the darkness.
“You startled me,” Thamalon said. “I did not see you.”
Rivalen let the shadows fall away from him entirely. “Do you see me now?”
“I do,” Thamalon said. “You look … different.” br />
Rivalen stood no taller than he ever had, yet he appeared to Thamalon to fill the hall, to occupy more than mere space. The shadows enshrouding him appeared darker, like a bottomless hole. His exposed left hand was black, as if formed of coalesced shadows. The regard of his golden eyes made Thamalon uncomfortable. Thamalon had no desire to know what secret Rivalen had confessed to the darkness.
“You have disturbed my worship, Hulorn.”
The incivility of the prince’s words surprised Thamalon. Anger lurked in Rivalen’s tone. Thamalon reminded himself that he was the Hulorn, soon to be ruler of all of Sembia. He and Rivalen were peers.
“I received word that you had returned, but had no word of the outcome of events. I expected to receive that from you.”
Rivalen’s eyes narrowed. “Expected? Why?”
Thamalon tried not to wilt under Rivalen’s gaze. “Because I am the Hulorn.”
Rivalen seemed to advance on him, though he did not move. “And what is that to me?”
“I …” Thamalon stuttered, swallowed, adopted a more deferential tone. “I should have said ‘hoped,’ Prince. I did not expect you to report to me. I hoped you would. We had kept close counsel previously and I … assumed that would continue.”
“It will,” Rivalen said, and something hid within the words. “We were … successful. The rift was closed. The Shadowstorm will retreat from Sembia, though Ordulin is lost to darkness forever.”
Thamalon’s heart surged at the news. “And what of Mister Cale? The Saerbians?”
Rivalen’s brow furrowed, as if the question pained him. “Mister Cale is dead.”
Thamalon could not contain a grin. He knew he must look like a gloating buffoon but he didn’t care.
“Splendid news, Prince Rivalen! Splendid!”
Rivalen continued, “I allowed the surviving Saerbians safe passage through Sembia. They may settle where they will.”
Thamalon lost his grin and his good humor. “You allowed?”
Thamalon regretted the emphasis the moment the words bid farewell to his teeth.
Rivalen stared at him, the shadows around him whirling. “Yes. I allowed.”