Realms of Shadow

Liar's Game

The Year of the Starfall (1300 DR)

At the edge of a city in Faerun, a sewer main empties into the swamp. The light reaching inside gives way quickly; any who enter must proceed by touch. Deeper, the sewage grows thicker. It sucks at one's calves. Deeper still, and the refuse is dry. The procession from wet to dry challenges the very imperative that water must flow downward. And yet the sewers go even deeper. Debris has come to rest here: a shoe with a foot decaying in it; a head wedged against a pipe protruding from the floor; worse.

With no heavenly bodies to mark its passing, time loses meaning. A drip falls, then fades into the past, dripping forever in its moment.

The pipes give way to catacombs. Sounds of weeping fill the close air.

From one corridor, light issues; it seeps from the walls. Shifting animal forms inhabit this hall. Bars and wire hold them in, stripe their features. Some of the creatures look normal-cats shivering in shelved cages, mongrels drooping, even a lion cramped in a forward-sloping cell, its hide pressed into the bars.

The weeping creature in one of the larger cells has retreated to a corner to express its grief. Only fur is visible. For some reason, it stops crying and shifts.

It is another cat-or rather, two. One is joined to the other, exactly upside-down on its back-head melting into head, hip into hip, one tail twitching against another limp one. The piggybacker is motionless, legs flopping, tongue protruding, yellow eyes glazed an inch or two above the green ones. The living cat is lacerated, so that its intestines have spilled from its middle and drag behind it upon the floor.

This corridor is long. It passes into more corridors with small carry-cages abandoned here and there, jumbled alongside tables, cushions, and tapestries. A doorway breaks the expanse of one wall.

Inside the doorway, a would-be archwizard turns, as if sensing a presence. Then she returns to poring over a book of beasts. Druidic scrawl covers the pages.

She appears beautiful, with that ruggedness of druids- lithe body, sun-tinted dark brown hair, blue eyes-but that is only the body she chose to wear today.

She is a descendant of a woman and a man who withdrew, with the everdark Shade Enclave, to the Plane of Shadow centuries ago. She had learned the story as a fledgling druid just starting to taste the power that would entice her to archwizardry, and the ancestral memory of Shade Enclave added fuel to that fire.

Now she can hear the enclave sometimes, calling to her, reminding her of its hold upon her. The Shadovar will soon return to her land, the land of the enclave's birth.

When they do, she will make Shade her home.

She rises and leaves her study.