Key of Stars

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

Watch on Forever’s Edge, Feywild

Everything shattered. Sight fell away like icicles knocked loose from the eaves of the world. Taal was alone in a cocoon of night.

His totem loosed a howl of despair.

Then light returned, a piece at a time, like a puzzle reassembled by a demented god.

He was standing on an eroded stone balcony. Malyanna, the petrified corpse of Carnis, and the shadow hound were with him, though they occupied different positions than before the eladrin had used the Dreamheart. He was slightly misplaced too, and stood appreciably closer to the balcony’s edge then before.

Beyond the balcony’s curb, the Sea of Fallen Stars and the storm-shrouded skies of Faerun were gone. Instead, a great cliff face studded with eladrin watchtowers loomed. They were the final rampart against a gulf of space Taal knew too well, having stared into it for a goodly portion of his adult life. Malyanna had ripped Xxiphu out of Faerun and brought it to the Watch on Forever’s Edge.

A thunderclap of displaced air and water belled outward from the intruder city. The watchtowers shuddered under the onslaught of Xxiphu’s appearance. One swayed, cracked, and as if in slow motion, toppled backward with a groan of protest. When it came down, it broke into hundreds of pieces and sent up a plume of dust.

“The Spire of Winter’s Peace!” yelled Taal, pointing at the fallen tower.

The eladrin nodded. “I prepared the foundations to fall should the Eldest ever come here,” she said. “Less evidence implicating me will come to light, which means I have more time to act before my fellow wardens realize I’ve betrayed them.”

Images of the knights, servants, and other staff who lived within the Spire of Winter’s Peace whirled through Taal’s mind. It was too far to see any detail, but it was likely the collapsed tower meant their deaths. More than a hundred lived there. Or had.

He took a deep breath and focused on the other towers.

Though he’d never before observed the Watch from beyond its edge, he recognized Solstice Tower, Summer Mist, and the Spire of the Moon, the latter of which was the largest and best garrisoned.

A boom of splitting rock drew Taal’s eyes down to the cliff face. A mote of stone as large as an eladrin warship peeled away and launched itself directly at Xxiphu.

Malyanna gasped. She brandished the Dreamheart and uttered a word slippery with urgency.

The balcony lurched, and the cliff wall began to recede.

No, Taal realized, it was Xxiphu that receded, sailing into the darkness toward the discontinuity over which the towers watched and defended. The halo of water and cloud, ripped from Faerun’s surface, was pulled in the city’s wake.

His mistress planned to steer them into the discontinuity, past which they’d find the Citadel of the Outer Void. Horror spider-walked down his spine.

Despite the long years he’d served the eladrin noble, Taal had never faced the possibility that he might one day interact directly with the entities his mistress commanded and served in equal measure. Acid churned in his stomach.

“Taal, compose yourself,” Malyanna said.

He nodded, feeling the constraints of his oath bolster him. He kept his gaze locked on Forever’s Edge.

The onrushing mote birthed from the cliff face continued its approach. It was gaining on them, despite Xxiphu’s acceleration. If the mote got close enough, it would detonate in a massive flash of green, or red, or most likely, sky blue. Would the explosion be large enough to destabilize Xxiphu and kill the aboleths within its slimy hollows? He hoped so, despite it meaning his own death, and … despite his oath.

“The mote will catch us,” he felt compelled to say, pointing.

“No,” she said. “Watch.”

Malyanna brandished the Dreamheart again, and muttered more foul invocations.

A trio of kraken emerged from their recently claimed rookeries that gaped on Xxiphu’s steep sides. Swimming through empty space, they swarmed together in a knot of flailing arms. Then the krakens propelled themselves directly into the path of the onrushing mote.

The three kraken together were only about a tenth of the mote’s size. Still, their association with Xxiphu meant they carried taint enough to trigger the mote. One moment it tumbled in placid silence toward the clump of kraken. The next moment the void was illuminated in a sun-bright flash of blue fire. The light seared Xxiphu’s pocked face, and rocked the flying obelisk from top to bottom.

When the glare faded, the mote and the krakens were so many drifts of fading embers falling into darkness.

“Only one kraken remains,” murmured Malyanna.

“Plus a city of aboleths of every shape and size imaginable,” Taal said. “Some of the old ones surely rival a kraken in size.”

“True,” replied the eladrin noble. “But commanding members of the Sovereignty strains my strength, all of which I will need to take up the Key of Stars. Creatures of Faerun that I’ve subordinated, on the other hand, are eager to do my will.”

Taal’s face grew warm. He wondered if she counted him among those “eager” to accept her commands.

“Not that it should matter,” she continued. “With the lead we have, I can open the Far Manifold before the Watch realizes what Xxiphu’s appearance portends. Even if they raise all the platoons of the Watch and launch a pursuit across the gulf and into the Citadel, it will be too late for them to stop me.”

Taal restrained a frown.

“Let’s improve our point of view,” the eladrin said.

She gripped the Dreamheart. White fire limned the irregular sphere. She slowly rotated the relic in place. As she did, the entire bulk of the floating city followed suit. The view of the receding Watch on Forever’s Edge rotated to the left and away, until only darkness remained beyond the balcony. They faced directly into the void, toward the city’s hidden destination.

Taal gazed into the gulf. He saw Xxiphu was gaining on lesser defensive motes previously launched from the Edge. The massive face of the city overran and smashed the sentinel particles like sea flotsam broken on a ship’s prow. The motes sparked and detonated, but none were large enough to do any lasting damage. Still, some were so big the balcony shuddered and creaked. Each time that happened, Malyanna only laughed.

Taal saw things flitting in the void, briefly illuminated by distant mote detonations. They streamed out of the black, each one a unique snowflake of aberration. The light was too erratic for him to catch more than fragmented suggestions of corrupted physiologies, some of which aped creatures of the natural world, and some of which defied comparison.

Several man-sized tangles of teeth, horns, and scales arrowed in to flitter like moths around the balcony, keening out a low, raspy melody that threatened to break into comprehensibility. They smelled like a body buried in too shallow of a grave. Malyanna shooed them off with a sharp word and a gleam of power from the Dreamheart.

A serpentlike form nearly as large as a kraken coiled out of the void above them. Its oddly handlike head flexed slimy mandibles resembling reaching fingers. The creature fixed black eyes on the approaching bulk of Xxiphu and paused as if startled. A defending mote launched from Forever’s Edge clipped the beast, exploding in a spray of fire. Half the creature was incinerated, and the other half spun away, creating a nebula of fluid from jetting ichor.

Blinking in and out of sight were cascades of twining hair, as if shorn from a giant’s head, then given unholy life. Several blinked away, only to reappear too close to Xxiphu’s advancing ramparts. They screamed from hidden mouths as their lives were smeared out on the city’s black walls.

The distant, weak stars of the void glimmered beyond it all. Taal couldn’t gaze too long upon them without regret rising like gorge in his throat. More than anything else, they reminded him of his oath to Malyanna, and his unswerving obedience ever since.

Well, not utterly unswerving. He recalled the face of a man with care worn deep around his eyes who he’d met on the tor above Stardeep: Japheth the warlock.

He had told the man more than was absolutely necessary to warn him off. In fact, from a certain perspective, one might argue he’d revealed confidences. Confidences that might even provide Malyanna’s opponents clues on where to find-

The formless stricture of his sworn oath, awakened by the direction of Taal’s thoughts, tightened like a noose around his head and squeezed. He restrained a gasp, lest the eladrin notice.

The power invested in his oath was a constant threat. Usually, it lay like a snake in the grass, content to watch and wait. However, should it judge that he’d stepped beyond the confines of its constraints, it would core out his mind in a twinkling, and make a hollow vessel of him-a mindless automaton. Should he ever betray Malyanna or her aims, it would be his last action as a thinking being.

Probably.

Sometimes, he wondered.

The stricture tightened further, as if warning him that even doubt regarding the oath’s efficacy might itself be a betrayal. That time Taal couldn’t help but shudder slightly with the pain.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, Malyanna was before him.

“Don’t look too long into the void, Taal,” she said. “It is different out here than viewing it from the safety of the Edge. We are over the Edge. Even I know better. The rules are different here.”

The eladrin had misread his distress. He swallowed. Despite everything, he was buoyed by evidence that the woman was not omniscient. Her plans could still fail.

“Thank you for your concern,” he said.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” the woman replied. “I’m only worried for the potential loss of a talented servant. That, and I enjoy our little conversations.”

“Hmmph.”

Malyanna laughed, then pointed. “Look!”

Taal gazed in the direction of the eladrin’s finger.

A wide swath of void ahead wavered like a black, star-spangled curtain billowing in a breeze.

“The discontinuity?” he said.

Malyanna nodded. The grin on her face was too wide for Taal’s liking.

In the space of ten long heartbeats, Xxiphu plunged through the veil and into the pseudo-space that adhered to reality like a cyst.

Humid, briny air slapped across Taal’s face.

Xxiphu appeared over a circular plain shrouded in churning white mist. The city dived out of a pale, bruised blot of light hanging in the colorless sky like a shoddy imitation of the sun. The detritus of Faerunian seawater and flotsam pulled in the city’s wake rained down into the fog. Their impromptu halo was finally gone.

Hundreds of creatures like those he’d glimpsed in the void fluttered madly around that side of the glowing discontinuity like moths around a candle flame. They continually spiraled in, only to disappear. Their numbers were constantly replenished from curling edges of the shrouding mist below.

The fog repeatedly threw filaments of arcing white upward that fell back to create grand arches that lasted for several heartbeats. The colorless expanse pulsed and boiled, and gave up its progeny of dread to the discontinuity.

Screams echoed up from the veiling fog, savage and cruel. Mixed with those were snatches of chants, fell music, and sounds like cracking stone and shattering crystal. The cacophony bored into Taal, as if designed to compel a cry of protest. He raised his hands to his ears.

Malyanna said something. Her voice broke in easily above the ambient sounds, revealing the volume to be a chimera of his imagination. He took a relieved breath. The eladrin was looking at him expectantly.

“What?” he asked.

“Pay attention, Taal!” the eladrin said. “Do you see anything familiar?” She pointed across the expanse.

Some of the disturbances in the mist that he’d taken for prominences were actually solid structures. The tops of slender mesas peeked above the coiling white.

Something much larger loomed near the horizon, some kind of mountain perhaps, but intervening patches of mist obscured it. But in any case, Malyanna was pointing at the mesas.

“What’s their significance?” he asked.

“Can’t you tell?” she said.

He concentrated. Knowing what to look for, he saw there were hundreds, maybe more. He focused on the nearest.

The object wasn’t entirely a natural mesa, he saw. More like an … obelisk. A four-sided pillar, actually. What he’d taken for striations were actually glyphs scribed down the sides, depicting a frieze whose subject was hidden by the mist.

It looked like Xxiphu.

All the pillars looked like Xxiphu, minus a primeval aboleth crouched on top.

“I don’t understand …,” he said.

“Xxiphu is only a single seed, darling,” said Malyanna. “The first, and oldest. When I open the Far Manifold, all these will quicken, and disperse across the world and its echoes like fluffs of dandelion. Remember how beautiful a single aboleth city looked over the Sea of Fallen Stars? Imagine a thousand Xxiphus hovering over the Faerun, darkening the land with their shadows!” The eladrin laughed.

His breath caught. It was a mad vision. “The gods won’t stand for such an invasion,” he said.

“They ignored one floating city of aboleths!” Malyanna said. “But yes, you’re right, they won’t ignore an armada. But by then it’ll be too late. The Sovereignty is only a herald for the changes that await Toril.”

Taal imagined the age of horror for a land subjugated by aboleths and shuddered. “What could be worse?” he said.

Malyanna chuckled. “The Sovereignty waits for the Far Manifold to open, to quicken all the remaining seeds,” she said. “But the Sovereignty’s ascendance will be only a harbinger. When the Far Manifold gapes wide, the cosmos will be finally and fully undefended from the infinity that lies beyond it. Everything will be different then. All reality will become one with the Far Realm. And I will gain my reward.”

“You’re mad,” he said.

Pain seared his temples, and his knees buckled.

“Have a care,” Malyanna said.

Taal gasped. “What I mean is, you’re mad to believe that what lies beyond the Far Manifold will care about your efforts to open the way, or even notice you!” he said. “You’ll be … absorbed, like everything else!”

She tapped her long scarlet fingernails on the Dreamheart. “I think not,” she said. The great eye within the stone blinked.

The band of pain around Taal’s head lessened. He drew in several deep breaths. He was surprised he could still think. Though he’d explained his initial outburst as concern for the eladrin noble, he’d never before gainsaid Malyanna so bluntly.

What was wrong with him? It was as if his subconscious was finally done with servitude, and had decided to leap from the precipice of his gods-damned oath.

Malyanna drifted closer to the edge of the balcony and held up the sphere, waking new glimmers of light from its depths.

Taal’s agony faded further, but the point had apparently been made: watch it, or die. Taal got to his feet, blinking away the last slivers of pain. He joined his mistress at the balcony’s edge.

He saw Xxiphu was settling down into the mist. From a distance the fog had seemed opaque, but beneath its feathery surface, the vapor proved translucent.

A solid plain of mottled ground lay beneath the drifting white. As the city continued down, a great crater resolved. Jagged cracks burst from its periphery like streamers from a sculpture of the sun.

Xxiphu continued lower, until its foundation settled into the gaping hole. A muffled thud vibrated up through Taal’s boots.

The cries, screams, and peals of dread melody he’d heard earlier rippled across the plain. But the sound of his own breathing was louder, as was the occasional low-pitched growl of his totem.

Taal made out other obelisks, like shadows as tall as mountains, in the far distance. Odd protuberances, pools of varicolored liquids, and slick phosphorescent trails decorated the ground. Few of the creatures he’d seen above the mist apparently ventured below it. The alien threat of the scene wormed its way into Taal’s heart and cooled it to the temperature of ice.

“Come,” said Malyanna. She glanced at Taal and the shadow hound, then at the petrified form of Carnis. “Beyond these hollowed columns lies a door. And I have the Key to open it.”