Dawn of Night

PROLOGUE THE SOJOURNER

Vhostym wished to make one last observation before he began the final stages of his plan. He attributed the desire to nostalgia, to a need to see things as they existed at that moment. For soon, everything would change.

Propelling his projected form upward with the power of thought, Vhostym extended the range of his illusionary proxy to the far limits of his spell-the edge of Toril's sky, leagues above the surface, where the blue of Toril's celestial sphere gave way to the bleak darkness of the cosmos. From there, he looked outward through the eyes of the image and into endlessness. The void of the heavens yawned before him, the massive, limitless jaws of the greatest of beasts. In its infinite expanse, Vhostym bore witness to the immensity of creation, the perfect mathematics of motion, and the insignificance of his own existence.

He, among the most powerful of beings on any world, felt insignificant. The feeling amused him, mostly because it was true. Even his grand plan, as ambitious as it was, faded into negligibility in the face of the endless ether.

The meaninglessness of existence comforted him. Juxtaposed against infinite time and space, even the greatest of beings were small.

Distant but still obviously enormous, Toril's sun dominated his view, once of the countless blazing eyes of the beast. Though he could not see them from that distance, he knew that the fiery star continually spat jets of flame into the cosmic darkness, the smallest of which could have immolated even the City of Brass and all of the efreeti in it. Had Vhostym been looking at the glowing orb through his physical eyes, the light would have blinded him and charred his skin as black as the void. The pain would have lasted only a few excruciating moments before the rays would have reduced him to a heap of seared flesh. Even mild starlight caused his physical form pain unless he took magical precautions-hence his underground existence. His advancing illness had only made his vulnerability to sunlight more pronounced. As a younger githvyrik, he had for centuries sought a spell that would eliminate his extreme sensitivity to light, but to no avail. He could not change what he was.

But he could change the world, at least for a time.

The details of his plan marched through his brain, a progression of steps as orderly and logical as those used to solve a complex equation. The scope of his ambition appalled and delighted even him. He could do it though, of that he was certain. He would do it.

Other, less grand courses were open to him, of course. Through his magic he could have simply adopted a form that suffered no ill effects from light. He could have faced the sun, as he did then, through the eyes of a projected image, and in that way gain the Crown of Flame. But those were paltry substitutes for the reality, and both were insufficient to satisfy him. Before the end, he would see the crown with his own eyes, feel it against his flesh. And to do that, he needed to stand on the surface of Toril. The thought of it caused him a pang of longing, a desire to feel the coolness of an unfettered breeze against the pale skin of his face.

He set aside his reverie and continued the observation.

In the infinity beyond Toril's sun, innumerable planets and stars spun through the deep, pinpricks of light dancing through the dark. Vhostym observed their motion for a time, his intellect automatically translating their movement into equations that only he could understand. Calling upon the library of data stored in his mind, he observed several distant planets, derived their mass, their precession, the length of their seasons, their aphelion and perihelion. The exercise made him smile; he recognized it as an attempt to use mathematics to make chaos predictable. Such ordering was the curse of sentience, an irrepressible desire to engage in an ultimately futile exercise.

Still, the countless celestial bodies enthralled him. To the uninitiated, the night sky seen from Toril's surface probably appeared to be a veritable ocean of twinkling lights, as though the universe was a sack stuffed full. Vhostym knew that to be fiction. All told, the entirety of the celestial bodies in the universe filled the vacuum of the cosmos no more than fish filled a sea.

The universe, Vhostym knew, was emptiness, a vacuum filled with dust motes and beings ignorant of their own insignificance. The irony was, due to Vhostym's congenital hyper-sensitivity to light, he could see the multiverse only through a projected image, itself a fiction, itself an empty form.

But soon he would see it through his own eyes rather than through the lens of his magic. Then the Crown of Flame would be his. And when he had that, he would have everything he wanted.

Millennia ago, not long after the revolution that had freed his people from their illithid tyrants, he had been of a more philosophical bent. Then, he had hopefully pondered how one being could meaningfully affect the cosmic vastness for the better. Initially, he had thought the answer to be ever-increasing power. But as his power had grown-grown so large as to be nearly unparalleled-so too had his understanding. In the end he had come to realize that attempting to affect the universe was the desire of fools. It was too big, too random, too uncaring. He was a dust mote, as was everyone and everything else.

Life had no overarching meaning, he had learned, no grand purpose. Not even his life. There was only sensation, experience, subjectivity. That realization, equivalent to an epiphany for a religious zealot, had freed him from his self-imposed moral shackles. In a flash of insight, he had realized that morality was as much a man-made construct as a stone golem. He had come to the abrupt and stunning realization that characterizing an action as good or evil was absurd. He had elevated himself beyond good and evil. What was, was. What one wanted to do and could do, one ought to do. There was no other ought, no other objective standard.

That principle had informed his subsequent existence.

He looked down through his slippered "feet" to the spinning sphere below him. The great globe of Abeir-Toril turned its way through the heavens-a whirling green, blue, and brown jewel dusted here and there with a fringe of white clouds. It too was wondrous in its way, a beautiful gear in the clockwork of the universe. True, Vhostym might have improved its symmetry by leveling a mountain range here, or draining a sea there, but still the surface of his adopted world was beautiful.

The surface. Merely thinking about it turned him maudlin. He had set foot on it in his own form only once, as a very young gith, and for only moments. But during that single visit he had seen for the first time the Crown of Flame, and that vision had birthed in his mind a possibility. He would create the crown himself, and with it walk Faerun's surface for as long as he willed.

He looked up and to his right, to the silver orb of Selune, cresting over the horizon line of Toril, and the swarm of her tears. He knew the moon goddess would not be pleased when his plan began to take shape. Neither would Cyric, the Mad God.

It amused Vhostym to think of the divine consternation he soon would cause. He cared not at all, of course. The ire of gods meant as little to him as did the morality of humankind. Gods were little more than men made immortal, driven by the same banal instincts and desires as mortals. Immortality was easy to attain, Vhostym knew. It was living a meaningful existence that was hard.

Vhostym watched Selune finish its rise above Toril and knew that the time had come to begin, but still he lingered, teetering on the edge of the void. With the object of his desire within reach he felt satisfaction in prolonging the final moments of denial. He knew the reason-consummation of his plan represented a threshold, established a line of demarcation between before and after. For the moment, he wanted to savor the before, to capture it in his mind like a portrait.

He again looked down on Toril, saw the broad outline of Faerun, and located the Inner Sea. There, below the cottony clouds, he fancied he could see the island that he had chosen to house the focus for the greatest spell he would ever cast.

Thousands would die, he knew. Perhaps tens of thousands.

So be it, he thought.

He willed what he willed, and so it would be. With that, he decided that it was time to cross the threshold, to begin the after. The before was boring him.

With a thought, he dispelled his projected image and returned his consciousness to his body. The universe instantly fell away and darkness enshrouded him. As always, it took a moment to overcome the physical and mental torpidity caused by the projection spell. He sat cross-legged on a plush rug. His flesh felt thick and clumsy compared to the lightness of his soaring soul. He imagined he would feel something akin to that lightness when he set foot again on Toril's surface, when he possessed the Crown of Flame and looked into the dark sky with his own gaze.

Inhaling as deeply as his failing lungs would allow, he opened his eyes. The darkness of his pocket plane contrasted markedly with the light of the outer cosmos but he could see clearly nevertheless. His vision extended simultaneously into several spectra, several planes, but his smooth, stone-walled sanctuary looked the same in all of them-unremarkable. He had grown weary long ago of living under the earth. Millennia before, he had pinched off an area of Faerun's Underdark, essentially creating a pocket plane of his own-a part of Faerun, but still separate from it. It felt more a prison every decade, not unlike his body.

Several magical gems orbited his head, whirring around at a distance of a few handspans. It was in observing those gems that he had found the inspiration for his plan. Still, he found their incessant hum irritating at the moment. Floating in each corner of the chamber, iridescent glowballs lit the square meditation room, their dim green light an order of magnitude dimmer than starlight and barely perceptible by most beings.

He braced himself, unfolded his legs, and started to rise. His body was weaker than usual. As always, pain wracked his bones the moment he put weight on them.

Refusing to surrender to the wasting disease that plagued his skeleton down to the marrow, he forced himself to stand without magical assistance. That small victory brought him satisfaction. For centuries, his magic had held age and disease at bay. But time was a relentless opponent, and even the most powerful of his magic was losing its battle with the passing years. He had considered lichdom of course, but had dismissed it. He relished the pleasures of the flesh too much even in his old age, though in recent years those pleasures were few. The sensory emptiness of undeath was not for him.

Besides, he had lived a full life in his ten thousand years. He had but one thing left to do. Once it was done he would be fulfilled. With the Weave Tap in his possession he could do it.

He raised his hand to cast a spell but stopped before uttering the arcane words. He stared for a moment at his outstretched hand. The appearance of his flesh disturbed him-bone white, parchment thin, speckled with dark age spots and threads of black veins. His nearly translucent skin wrapped his fingers and hands so tightly that he could distinguish individual bones.

I am almost a lich already, he thought with a touch of sadness.

He had lived too long, and spent too much time underground. The latter problem soon would be resolved. As for the former, well. . . time would claim him when it would.

He fought down a bout of melancholy, admonishing himself for indulging in such weakness. With exaggerated dignity, he straightened his magical gray robes and composed himself. It would not do for his brood of slaadi to see him dismayed. He regarded them as his children; they should not see their father in distress.

Decades ago, needing loyal servants to implement the plan he had conceptualized even then, he had removed the slaads' eggs from the chaos of their native plane of Limbo. Afterward, he had magically altered them in the egg, instilling the raw essence of magic into their still-forming bodies. After their emergence from their shells, he had nurtured them as a father, rearing them on the rarefied nutriment of raw magic and the brains of sentient creatures. They still had a taste for the latter, and a thorough understanding of the former.

Being creatures of chaos, each of his brood had responded differently to the process. Vhostym took a father's pride in their multifarious personalities-Azriim, the intelligent but willful son; Dolgan, incredibly strong and loyal but also somewhat servile; Serrin, fast and merciless; Elura the . . .

Elura the dead, he reminded himself without sadness. Had the brood been able to return her body to him, he might have resurrected her. But divinations had revealed that the priest of Mask and his comrades had reduced Elura to ash. He missed her, in his way. He would have called her the most adventurous of the brood. She had taken pleasure in the males of many species, including Vhostym himself, centuries ago....

Without further waste of sentiment, he put her out of his mind.

In the end, the pre-birth process to which he had subjected the brood had transmogrified them into more than ordinary slaadi. Their magical natures had been enhanced to various degrees. But despite the differences from their ordinary kin, their slaadi biological heritage still ran strong: each felt a compulsion to change from the caterpillar of their current form-that of a green slaad- into the butterfly of the more powerful gray. To do so, they required an influx of arcane power, an admixture of magic known to Vhostym and few others. Vhostym would provide that to his sons upon the consummation of his plan, recompense for their success in retrieving the Weave Tap and serving him for so many years.

Had it been possible, he would have retrieved the Tap himself. But even his power could not have pierced Shar's Fane of Shadows. Only a shadow adept could have done so. So his brood had manipulated the shadow mage Vraggen into gaining them entry. The plot had taken months to unfold, but at last they had succeeded and the time was nigh to move forward.

He spoke a word of power and held his open palm before one of the blank walls of his sanctuary. The magic warped space. The stone wavered, vanished, and was replaced by a door-shaped aperture. Vhostym levitated a few handsbreadths off the smooth floor-to ease the strain on his body-and floated through the portal. It sealed shut behind him the moment he cleared it.

In contrast to the austerity of the meditation chamber, the lounge beyond was stuffed with luxuries. Piles of silks, soft cushions, furs, divans, and chairs from many worlds lay strewn haphazardly around the room. As a young man, when he had sought sensation in mistleaf, potent liquors, and the pleasures of the flesh, such things had seemed important to him. No longer. Only one thing was important to him.

Of the hundreds of chambers and rooms that existed in the honeycombed rock of his Underdark pocket plane, that room alone he allowed to remain in such disarray. The chaos of the decor and the decadence of the furnishings appealed to his slaadi. It was their favorite chamber.

Azriim and Dolgan awaited him there.

Azriim sat on a divan on the far side of the lounge in the form of a half-drow, stylishly dressed. Vhostym thought his son enjoyed that body better than his own-a human form was perhaps a more suitable tool for enjoying sensation, he supposed. And what Azriim enjoyed, Azriim did. Vhostym admired that about his son. Of the four slaadi of the brood, Vhostym thought Azriim had taken after him the most.

Seeing Vhostym, Azriim stood and bowed, a reluctant gesture for the prideful slaad.

"Sojourner," he said.

Vhostym smiled. Azriim had never called Vhostym "father" or "master," only "Sojourner." It was enough. Vhostym respected his independence.

On the floor near Azriim, Dolgan crouched on his haunches in his natural form-a hulking, bipedal, toadlike creature with leathery green skin and a face full of fangs. The flesh of his muscular forearm oozed black blood from self-inflicted claw scratches. His dullest son was obsessed with pain-both giving it and receiving it. The fact that the slaadi quickly regenerated their wounds only fed Dolgan's fetish. Even as Vhostym watched, Dolgan's wounds closed to light scars.

"Master," the big slaad croaked, and abased himself on the floor.

Vhostym looked upon his largest son with impatience and replied, "Stand, Dolgan. You are my son, not my slave."

At those words, Vhostym thought he detected a sneer on Azriim's lips.

Dolgan clambered to his feet, his hind claws scratching against the stone floor, and said, "Yes, Father."

Lightly and quickly, so as not to humiliate his sons, Vhostym extended his mental perception into the brains of his slaadi and brushed their surface thoughts. He found impatience and eagerness. Azriim gave it voice.

"You have studied the Weave Tap for days, Sojourner, and now have been in sanctuary still another."

Had it been so long? Vhostym thought he had been amidst the stars but a few hours. Strange. Still, he did not approve of Azriim's tone. His sons took liberties with him that few in the multiverse would dare.

"You state the obvious, Azriim. And your tone borders on impertinence."

To give his point an edge, he entered Azriim's mind and caressed the pain-receptors of the slaad's brain. Azriim went rigid and bared his perfect teeth.

Dolgan grinned at his brother's pain.

Vhostym released his favorite son.

Azriim shot Dolgan a glare, returned his mismatched gaze to Vhostym, and adopted a more respectful tone.

"I meant only to suggest that we stand ready to begin the next phase."

Dolgan dug his claws into his palms and said, "But first Father must tell us what the next phase is."

Vhostym said, "That is your brother's very point, Dolgan." He looked at Azriim. "You wish to begin the next phase because you desire the transformation? The drive is strong upon you?"

"Now you state the obvious," Azriim replied, and his eyes-one blue and one brown-narrowed with perturbation.

At that, Vhostym considered causing more severe pain to Azriim, but decided against it. Instead, he opted for magnanimity and smiled benevolently on his son.

"I do, but my intent in doing so is to teach a lesson."

Azriim took a half step backward, no doubt thinking more pain to be forthcoming, and asked, "A lesson?"

Dolgan too looked puzzled, enough so that he stopped tearing gashes into his own hand.

Vhostym waved his hand in the air, spoke a word of power, and a chalice of two-hundred year old Halruaan wine materialized in his grasp.

"Sit," he said, in a tone of voice that the slaadi dared not disobey.

Both dropped to the floor. Vhostym floated between them and sat on the cushions of a divan. Their eyes followed him to where he sat. He sipped from the wine and sighed-full bodied, and as magically smooth as the velvet he sat upon.

"I am pleased with your success in recovering the Weave Tap. But oftentimes, we learn more from failure than from success."

The slaadi looked questions at him.

"The priest of Mask did not thwart your recovery of the Weave Tap. He failed. Not so?"

They nodded, though Azriim scowled, and his hand went to his abdomen, where the Shadowlord's priest had wounded him.

"His failure has something to teach us," Vhostym said. "Characterize him."

Dolgan looked perplexed. The big slaad looked from Azriim to Vhostym to Azriim again. His confusion caused him to scrape still more flesh from his palm.

"What do you mean, 'characterize him'?" Azriim asked.

Vhostym smiled. He enjoyed these interactions with his sons; they made him feel paternal.

"You, Azriim, are precise. You, Dolgan, are brutal. Serrin is merciless. That is each of your respective characters. Do you understand?"

Azriim nodded.

"Excellent. Now characterize this priest who killed your sister, nearly killed Dolgan, and managed to wound even you."

That tweaked Azriim's pride, exactly as Vhostym had intended.

"This is ridiculous," Azriim said, his tone bitter. "The priest is dead."

"Drowned," Dolgan added.

"Perhaps," Vhostym said. "Characterize him nevertheless."

With typical stubbornness, Azriim refused to answer. He crossed his arms across his chest and looked away. Vhostym could scarcely contain a smile. His slaadi, each of them a powerful, skillful killer when out of his sight, reverted to childishness when in his presence. He supposed the phenomenon was the same across all sentient species.

"Come, Azriim," Vhostym chided, "characterize him."

"Relentless," Dolgan blurted.

Surprised, Vhostym gave Dolgan an approving smile and the slaad fairly beamed. Perhaps Dolgan was not so dull, after all.

"Excellent, Dolgan," said Vhostym. "Relentlessness is an admirable characteristic. But it did not serve him, did it? As Azriim observed, he is likely dead."

"He is dead," Azriim said.

Dolgan merely stared.

"Now," Vhostym said, continuing the lesson, "characterize the shadow adept you manipulated into opening the Fane of Shadows."

Before Dolgan could answer, Azriim stared meaningfully at Vhostym and said, "Arrogant."

Vhostym decided to ignore Azriim's implication and said, "Very good. Consider-relentlessness in moderation is dedication. Arrogance in moderation is self-confidence. Learn this lesson, then: All things, when taken too far, become self-destructive and lead to failure." He fixed a hard gaze on Azriim. "This applies equally to both impatience and pridefulness."

Azriim understood the lesson then, and his mismatched eyes found the floor. Vhostym had made his point, so he gave his sons what they wished.

"Remember that," he said, "as the next phase begins."

Both slaadi looked at him sharply.

"It is beginning?" Azriim breathed. "The Crown of Flame?"

Vhostym smiled softly. Azriim did not understand the nature of the crown, only that his father long had sought it, only that once Vhostym possessed it, Azriim would be transformed into gray and freed.

Vhostym took a sip of wine and said, "It began, Azriim, long ago. Now it is finishing."

Vhostym had observed the universe through the eyes of his spell for the last time. Having plumbed the mystery of the Weave Tap, he was ready to put the final phases of his plan into motion.

"And afterward?" Azriim asked.

Dolgan leaned forward, eyes wide, digging his fingers into his flesh.

Vhostym looked upon his sons with approval and replied, "Afterward, my sons, you will have what I have promised to give you: transformation to gray and the freedom to pursue your own lives."

Dolgan, unable to contain his excitement, stood and capered. His dripping hand left a spatter of blood across the carpets. Azriim looked into Vhostym's eyes, as though trying to discern a lie. There was no lie to discern, of course. Vhostym would keep his word.

Azriim asked, "Yet you still will not tell us what the Crown of Flame is, or describe its appearance?"

"When the time is right," Vhostym said. He sent his mental consciousness through the various caverns and rooms of his plane until he located Serrin. The slaad was sharpening his weapon skills by slaughtering some of the penned demons Vhostym kept for research and spell component material.

"Serrin is in the barbazu pen. Retrieve him and bring him to the Weave Tap's nursery. One of its seeds are now ripe. I will explain what you are to do next."