Shadowrealm

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

7 Nightal, the Year of Lightning Storms

"We stand with you," Regg called from behind. "You need only give us the word, Cale."

"As do we," Nayan said in his accented Common.

Before Cale could respond, a stream of wraiths-mere hundreds had survived the battle with the shadows-swooped down from the dark sky in a long ribbon and flew between the three gods, swirled in a cyclone over Kesson's form.

"Leave them," Cale said to Riven, to Rivalen, to Regg and the Lathanderians.

A towering wraith, one of the Lords of Silver, separated from the swirl and hovered before Cale. His red eyes flared. He leaned in close, as if catching a whiff of divine spoor.

"He is yours," Cale said, and the power in his voice caused the wraith to recoil.

The wraith studied Cale a moment, bowed, and said in his whispery voice, "His corpse will rot in Elgrin Fau."

The Lord of Silver returned to the rest and the cyclone of undead whirled, their moans not despairing but triumphant. They lifted Kesson Rel's body and severed head from the ground and streaked across the battlefield, toward the rift Cale had opened.

After they'd gone, Cale, Riven, and Rivalen continued to stare at one another, their minds struggling to comprehend their new capabilities.

Cale knew a battle between them would turn Sembia into a wasteland, would destroy Sakkors, would kill everyone on the field. Rivalen had to know it too.

"A battle between us leaves nothing to the victor," Cale said.

Rivalen smiled, and energy gathered. "I disagree."

"Rivalen," Cale began, but a shriek from Magadon filled Cale's mind, filled the minds of everyone on the battlefield, the sound thick with power, incoherent with rage.

The Lathanderians and shadowwalkers fell to the ground, groaning with pain. Cale, Riven, and Rivalen winced. Pressure mounted in Cale's skull. He felt a warm trickle of blood leaking from one nostril. He tried to reach through the rage to Magadon.

Mags, he's dead. Kesson is dead. I can save you now.

But there was not enough of Magadon left to understand.

I do not need to be saved! he screamed.

Behind Cale, the Lathanderians began to scream, to die.

Power stormed in Cale's mind. His eyes felt as if they would jump out of his head. His thoughts grew confused. He tried to focus.

This is how you pay for your betrayal of me, Magadon said.

Cale staggered, felt blood drip from his ears.

"Your city is dying," he said to Rivalen through gritted teeth.

"So is your friend," Rivalen answered, and wiped the blood falling from his nose. His golden eyes, pained, looked as wide as coins.

Cale knew Magadon had little time. If he could still be saved, Cale had to do something soon. He had already made a deal with one devil. He could make a deal with another.

"A bargain," Cale said.

Rivalen nodded, hissed with pain. "Speak what you will."

"The Saerbians settle where they wish and are left alone," Cale said, his voice punctuated by grunts of pain. "Magadon goes free and unharmed."

"Magadon is already dead."

"No," Cale said with heat. "Not yet."

Rivalen looked to Cale, to Riven. "Sembia belongs to the Shadovar."

Cale nodded, wiped the blood from his face. "Done. Now we need time. Do as I do."

Cale called upon his newfound power, trusting that Rivalen and Riven would recognize his intent as he began to cast.

The pressure in his mind mounted.

Die! Die! Magadon railed.

Rivalen and Riven recognized Cale's intent and their voices joined his.

Ignoring the screams of Regg and his company, the shadowwalkers, Magadon's rage, they drew on their shared godhead and stopped time.

When they completed the casting, raindrops hung suspended in mid-air. A lightning bolt split the sky, frozen in place. Sakkors hung atilt in the air, still glowing, perhaps two bowshots from a collision with the ground. The Lathanderians and the shadowwalkers, light and shadow, were frozen in the moment on the wet ground, faces contorted with pain, blood pouring from eyes, ears, noses.

Cale had only a short time before time would resume, before Magadon would die. While the spell was in effect, they could affect no mortal beings, not directly. With no time to waste, Cale wasted none. He had already made up his mind.

"I am saving Magadon," he said to Riven and let the words register.

Riven nodded, missing his point. "Agreed, but how? We have only moments."

Cale looked him in the face. "There's only one way."

Riven looked up sharply. "You can't pay, Cale. It doesn't come out, except…"

His eye widened.

Cale nodded. The divinity could come out of him only when he died.

Riven's face fell. He shook his head, began to pace. "No, no, no. There's another way."

"This is the only way."

Riven stopped pacing and glared him. "We have this power, we can do something else. There's another way."

Cale knew better. Even if they could defeat Mephistopheles, they could not do so before he destroyed what he had taken from Magadon. "Riven, it's the only way. Riven-"

Riven held up his hands, as if trying to stop Cale's words from charging toward him.

"Just give me a damned moment, Cale. A moment."

Cale waited, felt the power of the spell draining away. He shifted on his feet.

Riven looked up, his expression hard. "No, you're giving up again, Cale."

Emotion flooded Cale but he could not determine if it was anger or something else. He stepped forward and grabbed Riven by the cloak. The shadows around him engulfed them both, spun and whirled.

"I'm not! I'm fighting all the way." He calmed himself, spoke in a softer voice, releasing Riven. "I'm fighting all the way, Riven."

Maybe Riven understood, maybe he didn't.

They stared at one another a long moment. Riven's face fell.

"How can it be the only way, Cale? After all this?"

Cale shook his head, smiling softly. "How can it not? How else could it end?"

Riven looked away, down. "You're doing this for him?"

"There's nothing else," Cale said. "Just us. That's the reason for everything. Understand?"

Riven looked up, his face stricken.

Cale held out a hand. "You've been my friend, Riven."

Riven's lower lip trembled. He clasped Cale's hand, pulled him close for an embrace.

Cale took Weaveshear by the blade, handed it hilt first to Riven. The reality of his decision started to settle on him. His legs felt soft under him. His hand shook. Riven pretended not to notice.

"The fiend doesn't get this," Cale said.

Riven took it, nodded.

"I will keep my promise," Cale said. "You keep ours to him. You remember it?"

Riven's face hardened. He nodded again. "I remember it."

Cale turned to Rivalen. "Keep your word, too, Shadovar."

Rivalen's face was expressionless, his eyes aglow.

Faces and memories poured through Cale's mind but he pushed them aside and pictured Cania. He drew the darkness around him.

At the last moment, he changed his mind and pictured not the icy wastes of the Eighth Hell but the face of a grateful boy, the boy who had once invited him into the light. It suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world that Cale see Aril, a boy he had met only once.

"Good-bye," Cale said to Riven.

Riven didn't speak, perhaps he couldn't. Eyes averted, he signed, "Farewell" in handcant.

Aril slept on his side, peaceful in his small bed. Blankets covered him to the neck. His head, with its mop of hair, poked from the bedding. Cale stared at the boy for a time, thinking of times past, friends and enemies, all of them the scar tissue of a lifetime. Aril slept peacefully, contentedly. Cale found the moment… fitting.

A boy sleeping safely in his bed, free of fear, with his whole life before him. He realized why he had needed to see Aril instead of Shamur, Tamlin, or Tazi. He wanted the last person he saw on Faerun to be innocent.

He put the back of his shadow-dusted hand on the boy's cheek and thought of Jak.

"I did what I could."

He hoped it made a difference for someone, somewhere.

He stepped through the shadows and into the darkness outside the small cottage. The quietude of the village seemed alien after the chaos of the battlefield. He had only a short while before time back in the Shadowstorm would resume.

The smell of chimney fires filled the cool air. He glanced around the village. Three score cottages sat nestled around a tree-dotted commons, quiet, peaceful, safe. The two-story temple of Yondalla, the lone stone structure among the log and mud-brick buildings of the village, sat near the common's edge and rose protectively over the whole, a shepherd to the sheep. Smoke issued from the temple's two chimneys, filling the glen with the smell of cedar, and home. The hearths burned fragrant wood and were never allowed to grow cold.

Cale inhaled deeply. He fought back tears born in realizations come too late.

He allowed that on at least one night not long ago the village owed its safety not to Yondalla, but to him. He had killed a score of trolls while he had answered to Jak's ghost, while he tried to climb into the light.

But there was no answering to the dead, and the light was not for him. Not anymore. Not ever.

He looked up into the vault of the sky, unplagued by the roiling ink of the Shadowstorm. The Sea of Stars twinkled above him, Selune and her train of glowing Tears. He fancied he could see an absence in the celestial cluster circling the silver disc of the moon, the hole out of which one of the Tears had plummeted to Faerun, the hole for which Jak had died, the hole mirrored in Cale's soul. He thought of the little man and his pipe, tried to smile, but failed. He had never filled the hole. And now he never would.

Power burned in him, cold, dark, near limitless. He could hear words spoken in the shadows on the other side of Toril, could rend mountains with his words. He knew more, sensed more, was more, than he could have imagined. His memories, Mask's memories, reached back thousands of years-before Ephyras even-recollections of deeds, people, and places long gone.

Melancholy shrouded him, wrapped him as thoroughly as the shadows. He understood Mask at last, but only now, at the end of things. He realized, too, that Mask had understood him, perhaps better than he had understood himself.

You wish to transcend, Mephistopheles had told him once.

Mask had said it to him, too, though not in words.

And Cale had wished to transcend, and so he would, though not in the way he had conceived.

He felt the connection to Riven back in Sembia, a connection that reached through time and distance. The assassin's grief, buried deeply but present, touched Cale. He swallowed the fist that formed in his throat.

They were friends, by the end. It had gone unacknowledged too long. He was glad they had said appropriate good-byes. The words had seemed small for so profound a moment. Cale would miss Riven, as he had Jak.

He reached into the pocket of his cloak and removed the small throwing stone Aril had given him. He had carried it for months, a reminder, a talisman of hope. The events involving Aril seemed ancient, something that had happened on another world, in another time. The smooth rock felt warm in his hand, solid.

"Shadowman," he whispered, recalling the name the halflings had given him.

He placed the stone on the ground in the doorway of the cottage where Aril and his mother slept, a gravestone to mark his passing. The last thing his hand touched on Faerun would be a river stone given him by a grateful halfling boy who had named him "Shadowman." He thought it fitting.

"Good-bye," he said, thinking not just of Aril.

He closed his eyes and readied himself. He did not lack for resolve but he still wanted the moment to stretch. An eternity passed between heartbeats. He savored the faint smell of pine carried by the westerly wind, the thrill of energy that permeated everything around him, all of Faerun.

He had only seen it in full in that moment. He would miss it. He took comfort in the fact that he had helped preserve it, at least for a time.

Ready, he sank into the comforting familiarity of the darkness. It saturated him, warmed him. He knew the night now the way he knew his own skin. It was part of him. It was him.

He bade it good-bye, too, and stepped through the shadows, through the planes, to Cania.

The ordinary darkness of a Faerunian night yielded to the soul-blighting darkness of the Hells. The reach of the time stop did not extend to Cania.

Cale sensed the cold of the Eighth Hell but his newfound power rendered him immune to its bite. But his enhanced senses and expanded consciousness made the horrors of the Eighth Hell more acute.

He stood on a wind-blasted plateau of cracked ice that overlooked a frozen plain cut by wide, jagged rivers of flame. Damned, agonized souls squirmed in the rivers, seethed in its heat like desperate, dying fish caught in a tidal pond. Others wandered the endless ice with empty expressions, dazed and frozen, their minds empty, their fates as cold and unforgiving as the air.

Towering, insectoid gelugons made playthings of the damned in the rivers, eviscerating, impaling, or flaying them as caprice took. Despair saturated the plane, a miasma as palpable as the cold and darkness. Shrieks of pain filled the wind, prolonged, agonized wails that Cale knew would never end. In the distance glaciers as old as the cosmos ground against each other and Cale felt in his bones the vibrations of their never-ending war.

The wind tore at his cloak, howled in his ears, and exhaled the stink of a charnel house, the reek of millions upon millions of dead who would spend eternity in pain. The suffering was eternal.

The darkness around Cale, the darkness that was Cale, swirled and churned. He felt the shadows of Cania, its deep and hidden places, its dark holes, but not as he felt them elsewhere. All shadows answered to Cale, but not to the same degree. Mephistopheles's power touched everything in Cania, tainted it, made it foreign even to Cale's divine consciousness. Cale forced Cania's darkness to answer his will and shrouded himself in its cover.

It was time to keep his promise.

Through their connection, Riven felt Cale leave Faerun and move to Cania, felt the oppressive despair and unending suffering almost as strongly as if he were standing on its ice himself. He held Weaveshear in his hand, the weapon dripping darkness. He willed his lost saber back into its scabbard and it appeared there instantly.

Around him, as still as statues, stood the company of Lathanderians, a rose-colored glow still noticeable around the edges of their shields. Several lay dead on the ground, their ears leaking lumpy red liquid.

Furlinastis's huge, dark form lay sprawled across the plains, one wing gone, countless gashes open in his scales. The shadows and wraiths that had filled the sky were gone, returned to the Plane of Shadow.

Rain hung motionless in the air. A bolt of lightning hung in the darkness, splitting the sky, caught in mid-moment by the spell. Caught so, the Shadowstorm seemed almost tranquil, beautiful.

Sakkors, too, hung in the distant sky, barely visible behind its curtain of shadows. Magadon sat in its core, lost in the Source, lost in the damage his father had done.

Rivalen eyed him, golden eyes aglow, shadows burning with the same dark power that filled Riven, that filled Cale.

"I see it, now," the Shadovar prince said, his voice hushed, pained. "It is not what I thought."

"It never is," Riven said. "Keep your promise, Rivalen."

Riven left the threat unsaid.

The shade prince nodded.

Riven looked on the faces of the Lathanderians until he found Regg. Blood and mud spattered the warrior's bearded face. Dents dotted his breastplate. Links of his mail hung loose at the shoulder. Riven reached into his beltpouch and withdrew the small pouch of Urlamspyran pipeweed. He stuffed it into one of Regg's belt pouches.

"I do not think we'll get to share that smoke."

With that, Riven drew the darkness around him, the power, and rode it to his temple on the Wayrock. He materialized on the lowered drawbridge. The night sky above him twinkled with stars instead of the oppressive ink of the Shadowstorm.

His girls slept in the entry foyer, frozen by the time stop. He went to them, petted each in turn. He enjoyed the moment. He loved his girls. They were innocence to his transgressions.

He stood, thought of his task, and hardened his will.

He set down Weaveshear, inhaled, readied himself.

The wind gusted, pushed against Cale. He held his ground, drew on his power and let it fill his voice.

"I have come to keep my promise, devil!"

His words boomed across the plain, as loud as a thunderclap. The ground cracked, split under him. Chasms opened in the ice. Great shards of soot-stained snow and rock broke off mountains and fell in roiling clouds of ice to the plains below.

A million devils looked up and answered him with a bellow. The damned, spared their tortures for a moment, sighed at the reprieve. Somewhere, the halls of Mephistar itself rang with his words.

Within three heartbeats gelugons began to materialize around Cale, their white carapaces stained with soot, their vicious hook polearms painted with the gore of ages. Wet, greasy respiration came in pants from between their clicking mandibles. The opalescent surfaces of their bulbous eyes reflected Cale in miniature.

A dozen appeared, two score, a hundred. Their eager clacks filled Cale's ears. The ice groaned under the weight of their collective mass.

Cale stared at them in turn, let them see the power lined up behind his eyes, and their eagerness turned to uncertainty. The shadows around him roiled. They encircled him, claws scrabbling in the cracked ice, but none dared advance. They sensed what he was. He was not for them and they knew it. He stood in their midst untouched, an island of shadow in an ocean of diabolism.

"Inform your master-"

Mephistopheles appeared among them in a cloud of soot and power. They bowed at his arrival, the clack of their carapaces like the breaking of a thousand bones.

"I was aware of your presence the moment you dared set foot in my domain, shadeling."

The archfiend stood as tall as a titan, towering over his minions, over Cale. His black, tattered wings cast a shadow over the assemblage, over the whole of the plane. The heat from his glowing red flesh melted the ice and snow under his feet and sent up faint clouds of steam. The wind stirred his coal-black hair, tore dark smoke from his muscular form. He held his great iron polearm in one hand and lines of unholy power danced on its tines.

Cale truly saw the archfiend for the first time. Mephistopheles was nearly as old as the multiverse, his power and presence as rooted in reality as the celestial spheres. Shar was older, but not Mask. Cale understood the archfiend's full power for the first time.

Understood, too, that he was a match for it.

Perhaps.

The archfiend's pupilless white eyes, so like Magadon's, pierced Cale, saw within him.

"You have brought only a piece of what you owe."

Cale nodded.

"A piece satisfies my promise."

Mephistopheles considered, nodded. "So it does. And so is my plan brought to fruition."

Cale summoned Riven's sneer, laughed, and the sound cracked ice. "Your plan? You have been played, the same as me, the same as him, the same as all of us."

Mephistopheles frowned and the gelugons clicked, their uncertainty manifest.

"You are mistaken."

"No," Cale said. "You are."

Mephistopheles smiled. "And yet I will have what I covet, despite the machinations of goddesses, gods, and archwizards."

"And I will have what I want," Cale said, and the pronouncement separated him from himself, split him in two. He felt outside his body, distant, an observer in events rather than a participant.

He found his mind focused not on the present, but on the past. Memories flooded him, the small, quiet moments he had shared with Thazienne, Varra, Jak, the mere hours he'd had with his mother, Tamlin, Riven, the bonds of his life born sometimes in laughter and embraces and sometimes in tears and blood.

"You are without your toy," the archfiend said, and nodded at Cale's empty scabbard.

Mephistopheles's voice seemed far away, a whisper, the faint calling of a fool in the night. Cale floated above the plain, above the devils, above himself, looking down on it all like a ghost haunting his own death. The image was blurred, as though seen through poorly-ground glass. His life, however, played out before him in clear, bright tones, the sequence of events that had brought him to this moment, here, now, when he would die.

"That is because I have not come to fight you," he heard himself say. "I have come to pay what I owe, and to collect what is due."

Riven sensed Mephistopheles's arrival, felt the sudden surge of power, malice, the eternal and unrepentant darkness. The shadows around him spun in slow spirals. Knowing what would come, what must come, Riven focused not on his sadness, not on the surprising sense of loss that turned his stomach into a hole, but on the job.

He was an assassin, as ever he had been. And he was working. He sheathed his grief, and put his hands on the hilts of his blades. He heard his heartbeat in his ears, as loud as a wardrum, each thump keeping time, counting down the moments left in Cale's life.

"To collect what is due," he said, echoing the words of his onetime enemy, now his friend, now his brother.

Mephistopheles stepped toward Cale, eyes blazing, bleeding power, malice, trailing gelugons eager to see a god's blood shed.

Cale, filled with power of his own, gave no ground, but increased his size until he stood eye to eye with the archfiend, until the gelugons were as children gathered for a story.

Dark power flared from Mephistopheles. Cale's shadows swirled in answer. The wind gusted, screamed. Glaciers groaned. The damned shrieked.

"There is only one way for it to come out of you," Mephistopheles said.

Cale knew. "I will pay what I owe."

Eagerness flashed in the archfiend's eyes, greedy hunger. He licked his lips, beat his wings once. The gelugons shifted on their clawed feet, clicked their fearsome mandibles in anticipation.

"First, what you owe," Cale said.

Mephistopheles blinked with surprise, as if he had forgotten, but recovered himself quickly. He smiled, showing pointed teeth. His eyes were as hard as adamantine. "Haggling like a Sembian to the last. Very well."

The archfiend backed up a step amidst the gelugons. He stopped, looked to Cale.

"You have what you have and yet are willing to give it up for my son, a man?"

Cale simply stared, but that was answer enough.

The archfiend shook his head. "I do not understand the minds of men. But here is the greater part of your friend."

The archfiend bent at the waist, put his hands on his knees, and began to gag, heave. Presently he vomited a gout of steaming blood and other unidentified lumps of gore onto the ice, turning it into a soup of carnage that smelled of tenday-old corpses.

Cale gagged and swallowed bile. The gelugons clicked in amusement.

In the center of the gore, slick with blood, lay the translucent remnant of Magadon's soul. It did not move.

"What did you do?" Cale said and took a step forward. The shadows around him whirled, ice cracked.

Mephistopheles eyed Cale sidelong, exhaled a breath of power on the soul. The delicate form quickened, stirred, turned, opened its eyes. When it saw the archfiend, its face twisted in despair, terror.

Cale ached for the suffering of his friend. He thought Magadon could be repaired, but never made whole. He would always have a crack, scars.

"But he is not broken," Cale said, and smiled.

Mephistopheles took the soul by the throat, lifted it high, and eyed Cale, the threat implicit. The soul squirmed and writhed, reaching desperately for Cale.

The power in Cale allowed him to see for the first time the power in the human soul, a power that transcended the trivial conventions of men, gods, and planes. Its beauty, its light, caused tears to well.

The archfiend sneered at his tears, spit, and wiped the gore from his mouth with the back of his hand.

"He is freed when I get what is mine."

Cale shook his head, let power leak from his form. "No. Free him first."

The gelugons crept closer but Cale had eyes only for Mephistopheles. Magadon's soul twisted in the archdevil's grasp, opened its mouth in silent pleading.

The devil's eyes flared. Power danced on the pointed tips of his polearm.

"Simultaneously."

Cale considered, nodded. There was no other way.

"There will be a moment after I release the half-breed's soul when I can snatch it back still," the archfiend said. "Should you renege, I will draw him back and destroy him utterly. Devour him before your eyes. Then I will find the rest of my son and cause him to suffer."

Cale was unmoved. "Should you attempt to take payment without releasing him, I will have a moment before it is done. I will fight you."

"You would lose."

"Perhaps," Cale acknowledged, "but you and everything in this plane would suffer a long while for the battle. Your rivals would know of it and come for you."

Mephistopheles smiled at Cale's point, though he showed no teeth, and there was nothing in it but malice.

"When I have what I want, my son will be of no matter to me ever again."

Cale believed him. "Let us conclude this business, then."

"Yes, let us."

The archfiend raised a hand in dismissal and the gelugons blinked out, teleporting away.

Cale held his hands at his side and let the power within him go dormant. The shadows subsided. Cale stood before the archfiend, alone, vulnerable.

"Do it," he said.

Riven calmed his heart, balanced his blades, and let the full scope of the power he had received manifest in his form. Darkness clotted the small room, as cold and unforgiving as his intentions. He stood in its midst, bouncing on the balls of his feet, hands fixed like vices around the hilts of his steel. He could not slow his heart, could not stop the clouds of shadow pulsing from his flesh.

Mephistopheles released Magadon's soul and it began immediately to disincorporate into sparkling motes of silver. The archfiend whirled on Cale, his weapon raised for a killing strike.

Shadows leaked from Riven's flesh, from his sabers, and coiled around him. He heard the exchange between Cale and the archfiend, sensed when Mephistopheles released Magadon's soul, knew when the archfiend raised his weapon to claim Cale's payment.

Riven released the time stop spell and reached out his consciousness for Magadon's mind.

Magadon? he projected.

Riven? Magadon answered in the groggy tone of a man who has just awakened. Riven, what have I done?

Riven heard gratitude in the tone, shame, and above all, grief.

He understood the feelings.

Stop Sakkors's descent and get clear of there. That is the deal.

What deal? What are you saying? Where is Erevis?

Do it, Mags. Then get away from the Source.

Cale stood his ground before Mephistopheles, eyes open, shadows swirling around him. He saw the hunger in the archfiend's eyes, knew it would blind him to everything else.

Like Magadon's soul, he, too, disincorporated, watched it all from afar. He felt light, free. For the first time in a long while he thought that he had done something out of love. For the first time since Jak's death, he felt like the hero he had promised he would be.

He felt a tickling under his scalp, behind his eyes-Magadon.

Erevis, do not!

I must, Mags. Know that you saved me. You and Jak.

Magadon's mental voice hit Riven like a punch. Riven, don't let him do it. Riven! Don't let him! But it was already done.

Mephistopheles's vicious weapon descended in a killing arc, the full force of an archfiend's power on its blades. Cale felt nothing as the first blow tore into his flesh. Instead, he smelled the welcome, familiar scent of pipeweed, Jak's pipeweed.

He fell to the ice, fell into his past, and realized that he had been mistaken.

He was not all darkness. There was light in him after all.

"Cale," said a voice.

"Jak?"

"There are so many things I want to show you…"

Riven winced, felt each blow of the archfiend's weapon, felt Cale's pain, thankfully distant, and counted them all.

One, two, three.

He shouted his rage as the blows fell. Darkness poured from him, covered Faerun for a mile. His girls darted into the temple.

Riven would exact payment for each blow. He owed Cale as much. He owed Mephistopheles as much.

The shadows carried Riven between worlds. He materialized in Cania, a curtain around his new power, invisible to even the Lord of the Eighth. He felt but was untroubled by the blistering wind, the swirl of ice flakes as sharp as knives, the biting cold. The frigidity of the Eighth Hell could not diminish the heat of his rage. The wails of the damned burning in Cania's fiery rivers mingled with the howl of the wind but Riven paid them no heed. He focused only on the back of the archfiend who stood before him, the archfiend who had murdered his friend, perhaps the only friend he'd ever had.

Cale's bloody, crumpled form lay on the ice at the archdevil's feet. A few stray ribbons of shadow lingered over his body before surrendering to the wind. Ice was already covering him, entombing him in the stuff of Cania. His eyes were closed, his arms thrown wide, his body torn open by the power of the archfiend's three-tined polearm. Cale's blood had turned the snow and ice near him to crimson slush. A few strings of shadow clung to the blood as if reluctant to abandon their maker, and held on despite the wind.

Mephistopheles slammed his polearm into the ice, impaling the plane itself. He shouted in ecstasy and held out his arms as a glistening, vaguely man-shaped cloud of black power exploded upward from Cale's ruined body-a portion of Mask's divine essence. It swirled around the archfiend, wrapping him in a shadowy helix. One end of the helix drove into his chest, eliciting a grunt, and the power of the rest poured in behind it.

"Yes!" Mephistopheles boomed, his voice a thunderhead.

He grew in size as the power merged with him. The red of his flesh darkened, the halo of unholy power shrouding him churned wildly. He roared with ecstasy and Cania trembled. The added power in his voice shattered glaciers, sent avalanches of ancient snow and ice sliding down the side of mountains as old as the cosmos, caused devils and doomed souls alike to wonder and cower. All of the Nine Hells rang with his victory.

"Tremble in your fortress, Asmodeus," the archfiend said, his voice heavy with the promise of things to come.

Having seen the debt paid in full, Riven unmasked himself. The dark fire of divine wrath boiled from his blades, streamed from his flesh, his fury made manifest. In a heartbeat he grew in size to match the archfiend.

Mephistopheles sensed him and started to turn, but too late.

"Let's dance," Riven said, as he drove his sabers into Mephistopheles's back. Power poured from the steel, coursed through the fiend's form. Mephistopheles howled with surprise, rage, agony. He arched backward, his wings flapping reflexively. Shadows swirled around them both.

Riven leaned into his blades, drove them through Mephistopheles's body until the tips of both sabers burst from the archfiend's chest in a spray of power and fiendish ichor. Mephistopheles fell to his knees and his impact caused the ice upon which they stood to vein, crack.

"You cannot kill me," the archfiend gurgled through a mouthful of ichor and bile.

Riven knew it to be true. He was perhaps a match for Mephistopheles, but only until the archfiend fully assimilated the power he had taken from Cale. Then, Riven would be vulnerable. He had little time.

He put a boot on Mephistopheles's back and kicked the archfiend flat to the ice while jerking his blades free. The heat from Mephistopheles's flesh sent a cloud of steam into the air. Riven willed a binding on the archfiend, preventing him from teleporting to safety.

"I cannot kill you," he conceded. "But I will hurt you. Hurt you so you remember it."

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 Mephistopheles'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 Faerun's Heartlands. Jagged streaks of vermilion 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 hole, 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 Selune. 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."

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."

"Of course," said Thamalon, forcing a smile. "You have the authority to act in my name."

Rivalen stared down at Thamalon, his mouth a hard line. "You will find that our relationship will change somewhat as Sembia is consolidated under Shadovar rule."

A small pit opened in Thamalon's stomach, a place for the truth to settle.

"I fear 'somewhat' does much work in that sentence, Prince."

Rivalen waved a hand in the air, batting aside Thamalon's point. "You will remain titular head of Sembia but you will answer ultimately to me and to the Most High."

Thamalon tried to keep the shock from his face and voice. "But I assumed we would rule as equals. I thought-"

"Your assumption was incorrect. We are not equals. You are an instrument of my will, and the Lady's."

Thamalon's mind spun. He struggled to keep his mental balance. "After all we have accomplished?"

"We accomplished nothing. I accomplished all. You are but the face of it to the outside."

Thamalon flushed. "But-but I worship the Mistress. I minted coins, Prince. I thought to become a shade, like you. I thought we were… friends."

Only after he had uttered the words did he realize how ridiculous they sounded, like the whines of a child. Embarrassment heated his cheeks.

"You will become a shade, Hulorn," Rivalen said. "I will keep my word. Promises are kept in these days."

"Thank you, Prince," Thamalon said, pleased at least by that, though he could not meet Rivalen's eyes.

"The transformation is prolonged and painful. Your body and soul are torn asunder and remade."

Thamalon backed up a step, eyes wide.

Rivalen followed. "The agony will plague your dreams for years."

Thamalon felt nauseated, and backed up another step.

"Your family and friends will die and turn to dust. You will linger, alone."

Thamalon bumped up against a wall. Rivalen loomed over him.

"But in the end, you will be hardened, made a better servant to the Lady, made a better servant to me."

"That is not what I wanted, Prince."

"It is exactly what you wanted. Power. You simply wanted to pay no price for it. But you are a Sembian, Hulorn. You should have known there is always a price. And the price will be pain and eternal loneliness."

Rivalen said it in the tone of one who knew that of which he spoke.

Thamalon gulped, imagined the pain of his transformation. He looked into his future and saw a friendless, solitary existence, feared and hated by those he ostensibly ruled. He did not want it, not anymore.

"Please, Prince. No. I abdicate. Here, now. To you."

"It is too late for that."

Tears leaked from Thamalon's eyes.

"What have I done?" he said, his voice soft.

Rivalen smiled, his fangs making him look diabolical. "Your bitterness is sweet to the Lady."

Mask manifested in a place that was no place, amidst the nothingness of cold and featureless gray. He manifested fully, not in one of the trivial, semi-divine forms he sometimes showed to worshipers.

He floated alone and small in an infinite void, the womb of creation. He marveled that the bustling, colorful, life-filled multiverse had been born from such yawning emptiness. He marveled, too, that the creation would one day return to the void. He was pleased he would not see it, though he knew he would have played his small role in causing it.

As would those who came after him and took his station.

Or perhaps not, if things went as he wished. He had planted his own seeds in creation's womb. Time would tell what fruit they bore.

"I am here," he said, and his voice echoed through infinity.

Fatigue settled on him all at once. He had been running a long while, delaying the inevitable. Surrender was not in him. He supposed that was why she had chosen him, why he had chosen his own servants.

His voice died as the feeling of nothingness, of endless solitude, intensified. He felt hollow, as empty as the space around him.

She was coming.

He held his ground and his nerve. The moment was foreordained. Within him, he carried all of the power he had stolen many millennia before, plus some-but not all-of the added power that he'd amassed since his ascension. And power was the coin she demanded in payment of his debts. The Cycle had turned.

"Show yourself. You owe me that, at least."

It had taken him a long while to accept that he would not be the herald who broke the Cycle of Shadows. He had stolen the power thinking he would. His hubris amused him. He found hope in the possibility that those he had chosen might break it, sever the circle.

"I see hope in your expression," she said, her voice as beautiful and cold as he remembered. "Hope is ill-suited to this place."

He swallowed and held his ground as the nothingness took on presence and he felt the regard of a vast intelligence that existed at once in multiple places, multiple times. She had seen the birth of creation. She would see it end.

"The Cycle turns," she said.

He felt her cold hands on him, felt the spark of divinity within him answer to its original owner's touch. She had taken her favorite form among many-a pale-skinned maiden with black hair that fell to her waist. The emptiness of the void yawned in her eyes. He looked at a point on her face below her eyes-he dared not look into those eyes lest he see his fate. The slash of her red lips against the paleness of her face struck him as obscene.

"I am come to pay my debt," he said, and bowed his head. He found his form quaking. In her presence he experienced the frailties he had not felt since his ascension. The experience pleased him.

She ran a hand through his hair, put her forehead to his.

"Your debt is long overdue. Mere repayment is inadequate recompense. Surely you know this, Lessinor."

He had not heard his birth name spoken in so long its pronouncement caused him to look up into his mother's eyes… and regret it.

He saw there the oblivion of non-existence, the emptiness that awaited him. He had not wished to see it. He had wished it only to happen, one moment existence, one moment nonexistence. He did not wish to know.

The frailties endemic to his one-time humanity resurfaced. His body shook. He did not wish to end. He did not wish to know what "end" meant. All that he had done, all that he had been, for nothing.

Or perhaps not. This time, he kept the hope from his face.

"Ah," his mother said, and sighed with satisfaction. "You see it now, here, at the end of things."

He nodded.

"Interest is due on your debt, my son."

He nodded once more. He had expected as much and prepared. In the millennia in which he had been worshiped the faith of his followers had made him something greater than that which he had initially stolen from her. That she knew. But she did not know its scope, and that he had hidden some.

"I am come to pay that, as well… Lady."

He could not bring himself to name her his mother. She had possessed a vessel to birth a herald, nothing more.

"I know," she said, and drew him to her in an embrace. Her arms enfolded him, cooled him, She stroked his hair, cooed. He put his head on her shoulder and wept.

Only then did he realize that he was cooling, that his power was leeching away, that the void he had seen in her eyes was coming for him. He gripped her tighter, closed his eyes, but could not dismiss the image of the end that awaited him.

"Shh," she hissed, and held him tightly.

He was sinking, disappearing in her vastness, entering the void. Non-existence yawned before him. He tried to speak, to rebel at the final moment, but could not escape her grasp.

Darkness closed in on him. He tried to enter the void with hope in his heart, recalling that he, the son of the Lady of Secrets, had kept a secret from-