The Godborn

Chapter Four

Gerak followed the seldom-used road out of Fairelm for a few hours before cutting across the plains. The rising sun’s light did not penetrate the dark clouds and rain; it might as well have been midnight. But Gerak knew the terrain well enough to navigate it in the dark. The wet caused his cloak to hang heavy from his shoulders. He did his best to keep his bow dry. As always, he kept his eyes and ears sharp.

A lifetime ago his father used to take him to a wood that was two day’s trek out of Fairelm. Game had been plentiful then, but it had been more than two years since Gerak had ventured there. If Tymora smiled on him, he would make it there in safety, take a deer or two, rig a sled, and drag the carcasses back to the village. After drying and smoking the meat, he and Elle would use it to get them through most of the winter.

Fording flooded creeks and picking his way through intermittent stands of broadleaf trees and whispering whipgrass, he made his way toward the wood. He had trod the plains alone before, many times, but it felt different this time. He felt exposed, a man walking a darkness not meant for men. The black pressed against him, made it hard to breathe. The sounds of his breathing and footfalls broke a silence that felt lurking.

He crested a rise and looked back the way he had come, hoping to catch a final glimpse of Fairelm. But the village was gone, swallowed by the darkness. He stood there a moment, reconsidering his decision to leave on a hunt, but finally pushed away the uneasy feeling that plagued him and continued. Elle and the baby needed real food.

As the day wore on to afternoon, the hidden sun lightened the nearly impenetrable ink, turning it merely to oppressive darkness. Around midday, a high-pitched shriek sounded from somewhere out in the black, a terrified, distant wail that put Gerak in a crouch and sent his heart to pounding. He did not think it was human, and it was always difficult judging distance on the plains. It could have originated a bowshot away, or it could have originated half a league distant.

Moving in a low crouch, he stationed himself behind a rotting broadleaf stump, sweaty hands around the shaft of his bow, and waited. The sound did not recur and he saw and heard nothing more to give him alarm. After calming himself, he renewed his trek.

He walked all day, the wet ground pulling at his boots, as if the earth would suck him down under the sod. Several times he felt certain that eyes were upon him, hungry leers out in the dark, just beyond eyeshot. Always he would nock an arrow and put his back to a tree or rock, his senses alert to any sound or motion, but he never saw anything. Twice he doubled back, and once he hid in a ditch, his sword in hand, and lay in ambush, but nothing seemed to be following him.

Or at least nothing he could see.

He told himself that stress was pulling phantasms from his mind. He passed the first day out in the lonely dark without seeing another living creature, except once, a flight of pheasants far too distant to bother with an arrow. The absence of even small game did not bode well for what he might find in the wood.

The rain relented by nightfall, and before the air turned once more from merely dark to total pitch he gathered kindling and wood and found a suitable campsite under a stand of pines that swayed in the rising wind. There was risk in a fire, but he needed the warmth and the light. Besides, he’d scratch out a fire pit so the flames wouldn’t be visible from too far away-one benefit of the shadowed air.

With his sword he scraped a fire pit out of the wet sod. The kindling resisted his flint and steel but he eventually won it over, and a fitful, smoky fire provided a dim counterpoint to the night. He had never been so happy before in his life to see flames.

He stripped off his pack, staked up the tarp that would serve as his tent, and sat before the flames for a time, thinking, trying to keep from shivering. He needed to dry out his cloak, so he shed it and laid it out near the fire.

Some kind of animal brayed in the distance. Overhead, he heard the flap of wings, large wings. Furtive movement at the edge of the firelight drew his eye, a small night creature that vanished before he could nock an arrow or note its shape.

Sitting out there alone, he turned maudlin. He thought of his father, Fairelm, the cottage, Elle, the baby. He realized that he was attached to the farm because it had been his parent’s. And that was not enough of a reason to stay. Sembia was no place to raise a child. The land did not belong to men anymore, not really. It belonged to the darkness, and was no place for his family. Staring into the fire, he decided then and there that he would take Elle and the baby out of Sembia.

Having made the decision, he felt a weight come off him. He considered heading back to the cottage first thing in the morning, but decided against it. He was only a half day away from the woods where he hoped to take a stag. It would take some time for him and Elle to gather up their things and sell what they couldn’t carry. In the interim, they’d have need for some meat.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and his stomach echoed the sound. He thought of just enduring it-he’d gone without food often enough in recent years-but he did not relish the thought of going to sleep hungry. Besides, he’d need energy tomorrow. He remembered whatever small creature had crept up on his campfire, the pheasants he’d seen in the air. There was food out there. He just had to find it.

His mind made up, he threw enough wood on the fire to keep it burning for an hour or two and stalked off into the plains. He didn’t wander far, wanting to keep the fire visible at all times.

Selune was not visible through the swirl of clouds. Instead, her light created only a dim shapeless yellow smear in the sky, but once his eyes adjusted it was enough for him to see by. He realized that he had not had a clear view of the moon in many years. He would do better by his child.

In time he reached a low-lying area of tall whipgrass that looked promising. Knifewing pheasants were migrating south across the Inner Sea, and the birds roosted in whipgrass, feeding on the seeds, grasshoppers, and crickets. He’d seen a flock earlier in the day. They would be grounded for the night.

The birds were notoriously keen eared, so he knew he would not be able to sneak up on one and take it while it nested. He’d just have to be ready when they went airborne. Taking a shot in the dark would be difficult, but the moonlight, feeble as it was, would help. And Tymora smiled on the brash.

He started forward into the grass, holding his bow in one hand, two fowl-tipped arrows in the other. The ground softened as he advanced and he sometimes skirted puddles. Moving slowly, he imitated the pheasants’ ground coo-his father had taught it to him as a boy-and listened for a response. Eventually soft coos and a rustle of wings answered him.

Three, maybe four knifewings were near.

He moved closer to the sound, gliding through the terrain like a ghost, and nocked both fowling arrows. He eyed the sky. The moon lightened the clouds enough to provide some contrast with the rest of the darkness. Estimating the location of the pheasants, he circled around to give himself a shooting angle against the light part of the sky.

Ready, he gave a sudden, sharp whoop that sounded perilously loud in the dark.

Wings flapped and five startled knifewings launched into the air. He took aim, the two arrows each held between a pair of fingers, tracking their motion. He waited for the birds to rise high enough against the sky to give him a clear shot. When they did, he targeted two near each other, adjusted his finger pressure to alter trajectories, and let fly. The arrows hissed through the rain and struck. Feathers flew and both birds spiraled to the ground while the other three vanished into the night.

Grinning, and pleased to have lost none of his accuracy, Gerak kept his eyes on the exact spot they fell and hurried through the grass. Despite the darkness, he found them after a short search. He’d hit both in the body and both had died instantly. No need to wring necks.

He carefully withdrew his arrows from the carcasses, wiped the small amount of blood clean on the grass, and replaced the arrows in his quiver. He carried only four fowling arrows and could not afford to lose them. Grabbing both birds by the neck, he stood and tried to get his bearings from the fire.

He didn’t see it. Fear tightened his chest. Thunder rumbled, closer now, and a light rain started to fall. He imagined the precipitation putting out his fire, leaving him stranded on the plains until morning, and the fear he felt threatened to turn to panic.

He cursed, turned a circle, the birds dangling futilely from his fist. He wasn’t sure which direction his camp was. He’d gotten turned around when he’d angled himself to take the shot and now he wasn’t sure.

He needed to get to some higher ground and to do so fast. The rain was picking up. He eyed the terrain, spotted a rise capped with the twisted, malformed trunks of mature broadleaf trees, and tore off for it. As he ran, he nearly lost a boot to the muck.

He climbed the rise, heart racing, and looked around.

There! He saw the glow of his fire, maybe two bowshots distant.

He did not realize he had come so far.

He sagged with relief, hands on his knees. His heart started to slow, his breathing to grow more regular. His legs felt watery under him. And that was when he noticed it.

The rain had sputtered out and the plains were quiet as a grave. Even the night insects had fallen silent.

His breathing sounded loud in his ears, too loud. He remembered the whoop he’d used to startle the pheasants. The sound must have been audible for half a league.

He cursed in a whisper.

He edged toward the broadleaf, wanting to put something at his back, feeling terribly exposed atop the rise. He inhaled deeply, held his breath, remained still, and focused his hearing.

Nothing.

A breeze from the east kicked up, carrying the faint scent of putrid meat-a dead animal, maybe, or so he hoped.

How had he missed it before?

Because the wind changed.

“Damn it,” he said. A rotting animal would attract predators.

Thunder rumbled again, a promise of renewed rain. He looked at the glow of his fire and considered making a run for it. A natural predator would avoid a fire.

But not all predators on the plains were natural.

The wind gusted, causing the whipgrass to whisper, the leaves of the broadleaf to hiss, the limbs to creak.

A deep-throated bellow sounded from out in the darkness to his right, a wet snarl that reminded him of a rooting pig. His heart leaped against his ribs and the sound of flapping wings sounded from all around as two-score startled knifewings rose into the air. He found it hard to breathe. His muscles failed him, left him standing still in the dark, exposed, alone atop the rise. Sweat ran in cold rivulets down his back.

Whatever had made that sound might be able to see him, to smell him.

Move! His mind screamed. Move!

He felt heavy footsteps thudding into the sod, out there in the dark. He had no idea what it could be, but his mind summoned nightmares. He knew that aberrant creatures stalked Sembia’s plains, horrors that no man should see. A second grunt carried through the darkness, closer this time, and punctuated with wet inhalations, the sound of a creature with a scent.

His scent.

It had him.

Terror freed him at last. Fueled by adrenaline, he turned and leaped, grabbed hold of the lowest branch on the broadleaf, and scrambled up. The sound of his boots on the trunk, his soft grunts of exertion, sounded like shouts in his ears.

The creature heard him, for it bellowed loudly, and the heavy tread of its footsteps bounded toward him. He climbed a few limbs higher, frantic, awkward, catching scrapes and cuts in his haste, then froze, afraid to make more noise. He was not safe in a tree, not for long. He knew that.

He got his feet as steady as he could on a thick limb, clutched his bow in a sweaty palm, and fumbled for one of his arrows. His breath would not slow down. It was loud, too loud. His heart thudded in his chest so hard he swore he could hear it through his ribs.

A large form lumbered out of darkness on two legs, a misshapen bulk half again as tall as a man, and thudded into the broadleaf. The impact caused the tree to shiver, sent a shower of leaves and seed pods earthward, and nearly dislodged Gerak. He caught himself only by firing his nocked arrow wildly as he grabbed for a limb. The creature seemed not to notice the pointed shaft that stuck in the earth near its feet.

In shape, it looked vaguely human, and Gerak wondered if it weren’t some kind of troll. Folds of flabby skin drooped from its obese arms, legs, and mid-section. Torn, muddy rags covered skin the sallow yellow of an old bruise. Long, lank hair hung from the creature’s head, a head far too small for the rest of the bloated body, like capping a bucket with a sewing thimble.

It circled the base of the tree, sniffing the ground, raising its face to the sky to sniff the air. Small, dark eyes looked out from a pinched face. Its mouth looked malformed, the lips stretched and hugely swollen.

Gerak hoped that the foliage and the darkness hid him from the creature. He dared not reach for another arrow, not with the creature right below him. It would see the movement.

Another low growl. The creature’s stink, like spoiled milk, made Gerak wince. It fell to all fours and sniffed the bole of the tree where Gerak had gone up.

Gerak’s breath came fast.

Still sniffing, the creature got to its hind legs and put distended hands on the tree, as if it would climb. Its tiny eyes, nearly invisible in the flabby folds of its face, started to work their way up the tree trunk.

Gerak tried to shrink into himself, tried to find calm, and failed at both. He moved his hand slowly, so slowly, for his quiver.

As his fingers closed on the fletching, the creature froze, cocked its head, and gave a curious grunt. It dropped back to all fours. An eager snort escaped it, and its sniffing took on a note of urgency. It scrabbled around the bole of the tree, moved away a couple paces, its face to the wet earth. When it reached the pheasants-the pheasants Gerak had dropped in his panic-it let out a roar of pleasure and seized both in its sausage-like fingers, then began shoving them into its mouth, feathers, bones, and all.

The wet slobbering and satisfied grunts of the creature, together with the wet cracking of the bird carcasses, made Gerak nauseous. Still, he took the opportunity to pull an arrow, nock it, and draw. He sighted at the back of the creature’s thick neck, figuring he could sever the spine if not kill it outright. Something on its neck caught his eye: a leather lanyard, like a necklace. He hesitated, struck by the oddness of its presence. The creature bounded a few steps away, perhaps searching for more pheasant, and its movement took it clear of Gerak’s firing line. The boughs of the broadleaf blocked the shot.

Moving slowly, his eyes fixed on the wrinkles of the creature’s neck; he shifted his position. The limb creaked under his feet. The creature’s head jerked up, wide nostrils flaring as it sniffed the air. Gerak froze awkwardly, the muscles of his calf already starting to scream. Sweat oozed from his pores. He still did not have a good shot. He might have to just risk shifting position again.

The creature growled, a deep wet sound. The tone of it, calculating, suspicious, put Gerak’s hair on end.

He’d get only one shot, if that. He sighted along the arrow’s shaft, waited for the creature to move into position.

It held its head cocked, lank hair spilling to the side. It was listening. It shifted on its weight, its feet sinking into the soft earth.

A single loud pop from the right-the wet wood from Gerak’s distant fire, caused the creature to snort and Gerak to start. The creature roared and tore off in the direction of Gerak’s camp, the stumps of its feet puckering the sod as it went.

Gerak did not hesitate. The moment the creature disappeared into the night, he dropped from the tree, bow in hand, and ran in the opposite direction of the camp until he reached a natural ditch. He slid into it, soaking his clothes in mud and organic stink-it would help mask his smell-and remained still.

The creature’s roars carried across the plains. A shower of sparks went up from the area of the campsite, the creature’s form a frenzied silhouette in the dim light of the floating embers. It was destroying the camp.

He cursed, thinking of his lost gear, thinking of Elle’s locket still sitting in the pocket of his cloak.

The creature rampaged through his camp for a time and then the plains once more fell silent. To be safe, Gerak waited another half hour, cold and shivering. All remained quiet. He crept out of the ditch and ran in a crouch for the campsite.

He didn’t care about anything there except Elle’s locket.

Brennus stood in the doorway of his scrying chamber. A tarnished, solid silver scrying cube, two paces wide on each side, situated in the center of the round vaulted room. Shadows curled around the cube in thin wisps. The dim light of the Tears of Selune, their glow diffused by the shadowed air of Sakkors enclave, gleamed feebly through the vaulted, glassteel roof.

His homunculi, tiny twin constructs made from dead flesh and Brennus’s own blood, climbed down his robes from their usual perch on his shoulders and pelted across the chamber ahead of him. They took turns tripping each other, clambering over one another in their haste, a chaotic ball of leathery gray skin, thin limbs, high-pitched expletives, and squeals of outrage.

Smiling, Brennus followed them until he stood before the cube. In his hand he held his dead mother’s platinum necklace. He’d found it a hundred years earlier, and plumbing its mystery had been his obsession ever since. Her ghost haunted his thoughts, her voice whispering two words in his mind over and over.

Avenge me.

Again and again over the decades he returned to his scrying cube, his divinations, seeking a way, any way, to make his brother, Rivalen, pay for the murder of their mother. But always the exercise ended in frustration. Rivalen was too powerful for Brennus to confront.

Brennus had caught hints of a plan by Mask to foil Shar-and anything that hurt Shar would also hurt Rivalen-but they remained only hints. He couldn’t see how things fit together. He’d thought for a long time that Erevis Cale’s son by Varra would play some role, but the son had seemingly vanished from the multiverse. Brennus had watched Varra, pregnant with the boy, disappear from the forest meadow and he’d never been able to locate her. One hundred years had passed since then. Varra and the child would be dead by now. He thought all of it might have some connection to the mysterious Abbey of the Rose, a temple to Amaunator supposedly hidden somewhere in the Thunder Peaks. After all, Erevis Cale had been allied with worshipers of Amaunator at the Battle of Sakkors. But Brennus had never been able to divine the location of any temple in the Thunder Peaks, and now he wondered if the Abbey of the Rose wasn’t a myth.

So, with nothing else to go on, Brennus was reduced to compulsively spying on his brother, waiting and hoping for an opportunity, a moment of vulnerability, that he suspected would never come.

“Look now?” asked his homunculi, their two voices synchronous.

“Yes.”

The homunculi squeaked with delight and clambered up his cloak, their tiny claws snagging but not harming the magical fabric. They took their usual station, one on each of his shoulders, bookends to his head.

“Show, show,” they said.

Brennus put a hand on the smooth, cool face of the scrying cube and uttered the words to a divination. Goaded by the magic, the smears of tarnish began a slow swirl. Abruptly the face of the cube took on dimension, depth. The swirls and whorls of black constituted themselves into recognizable shapes.

“The dark city,” the homunculi said, their tones hushed.

“Ordulin,” Brennus said. “But it hasn’t been a city for a long time.”

Maps called it the Maelstrom, and not even the Lords of Shade set foot within it. None save one.

The scrying cube showed Ordulin from high above. The dark, miasmic air around the ruined city made everything look dull, diffuse, cloudy pigments on a surreal painting. Once-grand buildings lay in shattered heaps, the broken bones of a broken city. Streaks of green lightning split the sky from time to time, ghastly veins of light that cast the ruins in viridian light. Shadows formed and dissipated in the air, wisps of reified darkness.

Undead flitted among the bleak ruins: specters, living shadows, ghosts, wraiths, hundreds of them, thousands, the glow of their eyes like a sky of baleful stars. The hole in the center of the maelstrom-the hole his brother and his brother’s goddess, Shar, had created when they’d loosed the Shadowstorm on Sembia- drew undead the way a corpse drew flies. Ordulin was a graveyard, haunted by its past and ruled by Brennus’s brother, who had murdered their mother.

He held up a hand and intoned a refinement to the scrying ritual. The homunculi mimed his gesture, murmuring nonsense syllables.

The perspective in the face of the cube changed and the arcane eye of the divination streaked toward the blasted ground, wheeled through the shattered stone and wood, and stopped in the center of the ruins, at the edge of what once was a large, open plaza. Chunks of weathered statuary and jagged blocks of a fallen citadel lay scattered across the cracked flagstones, monuments to destruction.

A shield-sized hole hung in the air in the center of the plaza, a colorless distortion in reality that opened onto. . nothing, an emptiness so profound that looking at it for more than a moment made Brennus nauseated. The homunculi squealed and pulled the loose folds of his robes before their eyes. It seemed slowly to swirl, but Brennus was never certain. What he was certain about was that the hole represented the end to everything. He’d noticed that it grew over time, a miniscule amount each year, the mouth of Shar that would eventually devour the world. He hated it, hated Shar, hated his brother, who was her nightseer, her Chosen, and a godling in his own right.

Rivalen sat at the edge of the hole on the cracked face of a once-enormous statue. He stared into the maelstrom, his hands in his lap, unmoving. As always, Brennus wondered what Rivalen thought of when he looked into the work he’d wrought, the apocalypse he’d sown. Did he welcome it? Regret it? Did he even think like a man anymore?

The wind stirred Rivalen’s cloak and his long, dark hair. Shadows leaked from him in long tendrils. He stared at the hole as if he could see something within it, as if he wanted something from it.

“The nightseer,” the homunculi said, and covered their faces with their clawed hands.

Brennus said nothing, merely watched his brother a long while. He had no purpose in it anymore, other than to fuel his hate and remind himself of his mother. He relaxed his grip on the necklace he held.

“I’m going to kill you,” he promised his brother. Shadows oozed from his skin, swirled around him, marked his anger with their churn. “For her. I’m going to kill you for her. I’ll find a way.”

The homunculi, sensing his frustration and sadness, patted his head with their tiny hands and made cooing noises.

A cascade of green lightning veined the sky above Ordulin. Brennus blinked in the sudden glare, and when the spots cleared from his eyes he saw that his brother was gone. He saw only the hole, the ruins.

“Nightseer gone,” the homunculi said.

Before Brennus could acknowledge them, a voice spoke from behind him.

“Gone from there,” said Rivalen’s deep voice, as the power of his presence filled the room and put pressure on Brennus’s ears. “Because I’ve come here.”

The homunculi squealed in terror and curled up in the cowl of Brennus’s cloak, trembling. Brennus swallowed and turned to face his brother.

Rivalen’s golden eyes glowed in the dusky crags of his angled face. The darkness in the room coalesced around him, as if drawn to his form. The weight of his regard threatened to buckle Brennus’s knees, but he thought of his mother and held his ground.

“Every day I feel your eyes on me, Brennus.”

Brennus felt his back bump up against the still-warm metal of the scrying cube. He relied on his hate to give him courage.

“Then perhaps you’ve felt my hate, too.”

His words caused the homunculi to squeal with alarm and try to burrow more deeply into his cowl, but Rivalen’s neutral expression did not change.

“Yes, I’ve felt it,” Rivalen said. He glided over the floor toward Brennus, his form lost at the edges, merged with the darkness. He seemed to displace space as he moved, causing the room to shrink, sucking up the air.

Brennus tried to steady his breathing, his heart, tried to slow his rapidly blinking eyes. He knew he looked a fool and it only made him angrier.

“What do you want?” Brennus asked, and was pleased to hear the steadiness in his voice. The shadows leaking from his body merged with those swirling around Rivalen and were overwhelmed by them.

“That’s my question to you,” Rivalen answered. His golden eyes drifted to Brennus’s hand, to the jacinth necklace he held there. “Ah. Still that.”

Brennus dared take a step closer to his taller brother. He knew Rivalen could kill him easily, but he did not care. “Always that.”

The darkness around Rivalen intensified. His eyes stayed on the necklace. “That damned trinket.”

Brennus clenched his fist around the necklace. “Our mother wore it the day you murdered her.”

Rivalen’s eyes came up, met Brennus’s, flared in the black hole of his face. “You never told me how you found it.”

“You’re not all-knowing? Ask the whore you worship or the hole you stare into everyday.”

Rivalen held out his hand. Shadows rose from his palm, wound around his fingers. “Give it to me.”

Shadows stormed around Brennus and words leaped out of his throat before he could stop it. “No! Never!”

“I can take it if I wish.”

Rage boiled in Brennus, the steam of his anger leaking around the lid of his control. He uttered a guttural cry of hate, extended a hand, shouted a word of power, and unleashed a blast of life-draining energy that would have shriveled a mortal to a husk.

But Rivalen was not mortal, not anymore, and the beam of energy slammed into his chest, split, and ricocheted off in several directions, all to no effect.

Rivalen’s eyes narrowed. Power coalesced in him as the darkness about him deepened. He stepped toward Brennus and his form seemed to grow, to fill the room. His hands closed on Brennus’s robes and lifted him into the air. The homunculi squealed with terror.

Imminent death steeled Brennus’s courage. He glared into his brother’s impassive golden eyes, squeezed his mother’s necklace so hard the metal pierced his skin. Blood ran warm and soaked his fist before his regenerative flesh closed the wound.

Rivalen pulled Brennus close until they were nose to nose. “Give it to me.”

Brennus spat in his brother’s face, the face of a god, the globule running down Rivalen’s cheek.

“You’ll have to kill me first.”

Rivalen’s eyes flared. He studied Brennus’s face, perhaps measuring his resolve, then threw him across the length of the scrying chamber.

Brennus hit the far stone wall hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs and crack ribs. His body began immediately to regenerate itself and he winced as shadowstuff reknit his broken ribs. He grimaced as he stood, shouting at his brother.

“A hole, Rivalen! You’ve had a hole in you since you murdered our mother for your bitch goddess! Now the hole is all you have! How does it feel? How does it feel?”

“Mother died thousands of years ago, Brennus.”

The impassivity in Rivalen’s voice drove Brennus to distraction. Shadows swirled and he pointed his finger at his brother.

“You don’t get to call her ‘mother.’ You call her Alashar or don’t speak of her at all. And she did not just die. You murdered her.”

Rivalen did not deny it, did not apologize for it, said nothing at all. He stepped forward to the scrying cube, his expression thoughtful, and put his palm to its face. The entire cube turned black as onyx. In a moment the darkness lightened and an image began to resolve in the cube’s face.

Brennus’s breath left him in a rush. “Is this? This cannot be.”

“It is.”

“Don’t do this.”

“It’s done.”

His mother’s face formed on the cube. She was lying on her back amid a meadow festooned with purple flowers. Her long dark hair haloed her head. The wind stirred her clothes, caused the flowers to sway.

Brennus recognized the meadow. It was the same meadow where he had found her necklace, the same meadow from which Erevis Cale’s love, Varra, pregnant with Cale’s child, had disappeared.

His mother’s pale face looked pained, but Brennus did not think the pain physical. Her breathing was rapid, too rapid.

Brennus found himself walking slowly toward the cube.

His mother reached out a hand, her arm visibly shaking.

Brennus felt as if he could almost reach out and touch her. His hand went up to take hers into his.

“Mother,” he said softly, but her eyes were not on him. He was seeing an image of events that had occurred thousands of years before.

“Hold my hand, Rivalen,” she said, her voice a whispered gasp. Brennus saw that her other hand held the necklace Brennus now held.

Rivalen’s voice answered her, his voice from the time when he had been a young man, before he’d become a shade, before he’d become a god.

“We all die alone, mother.”

She closed her eyes and wept. Tears fell down Brennus’s cheeks in answer. He stood next to Rivalen, his hate a wall between them.

“Your father will learn of this,” Mother said.

“No. This will be known only to us. And to Shar.”

“And to me,” Brennus said through clenched teeth, as he watched the scene.

She stared at where Rivalen must have been standing, then closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.

“What did you wish for, mother?” Rivalen asked.

When she opened her eyes, Brennus was pleased to see that the hurt in her eyes was gone, replaced by anger.

“To be the instrument of your downfall.”

“Goodnight, mother. I answer to another mistress, now.”

Rivalen removed his hand from the scrying cube and the image faded.

“No,” Brennus said. “No.” He put his hands on the cube, tried to reactivate it with his own power but it remained dark, a void, a hole. Tears streamed down his face but he did not care. “Show me the rest.”

“You know the rest.”

Brennus stared at the cube, his mother’s face floating at the forefront of his memory.

“Bastard. You thrice-damned bastard. Why did you show me that?”

Rivalen, taller than Brennus by a head, stared down at him. “I thought it was time you saw what I was capable of.”

“I always knew what you were capable of.”

“I also thought it was time to remind you that my patience is not infinite.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Brennus said, wiping stupidly at his tears. “I’ll find a way.”

Rivalen put a hand on Brennus’s shoulder. “Your bitterness is sweet to the Lady, Brennus.”

Brennus slapped his brother’s hand away. “Get out of here.”

Rivalen turned away. “You see nothing, Brennus. You understand so little. I’m unmatched in power here on the Prime, but what use is my power?”

Brennus did not understand. The Lords of Shade had traveled the planes freely, always had. “You’re bound here?”

Rivalen shook his head. His left fist clenched, a small gesture of frustration. “Not bound, no. Hunted. My power protects me here. But elsewhere. . there are those who want what I possess.”

Brennus’s mind latched onto the import of the sentence. His brother feared someone, or something. Brennus could use that, perhaps. “The divinity you stole?”

Rivalen whirled on him, shadows swirling. “The divinity I took.”

“You, and Erevis Cale, and Drasek Riven.”

“Cale is gone. Mephistopheles holds his power now.”

Comprehension dawned. “Mephistopheles wants your power. He’s hunting you. He needs it for his war with Asmodeus.”

Rivalen shrugged. “No matter. I can’t safely leave this world, even as it marches to its inevitable end. I’ll be the last living thing on this planet, Brennus, screaming into the void as everything dies.”

“You’ll be dead before that,” Brennus said.

Rivalen smiled. “I could kill you easily.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. But I won’t. At least, not yet. Do you know why?”

Brennus refused to respond, but Rivalen spoke as if he did.

“Because we’re all already dead. And my bitterness, too, is sweet to the Lady.”

“Wallow in it, then,” Brennus spat. “Suffer with it.”

The shadows gathered around Rivalen. “I will. And because I do, so will everyone else.”

The darkness took him and Brennus stood alone in the scrying chamber. Sweat and shadows poured from his flesh. His heart thumped against his ribs. The homunculi emerged tentatively from the blanket of his cowl, exhaling audibly when they saw that Rivalen was gone.

“Lady was pretty,” one of them said.

“Yes,” Brennus said, turning back to the dark scrying cube where he had seen the image of his mother. He put his hand on the silver face of the cube, replaying the images in his mind, her words. They made him smile.

“You would have made her laugh,” he said to the homunculi.

His mother had encouraged Brennus’s skill with constructs and shaping magic. She’d always loved the little creatures and moving objects he’d create for her. His father, the Most High, had forced him to turn from the “frivolity” of shaping to the serious study of divination.

Something about the image Rivalen had shown him stuck in his mind, something odd.

“What did you wish for, mother?” Rivalen had asked her.

Realization struck. The meadow had been a magical place, perhaps powerful enough to grant wishes. Such places had existed in ancient Faerun. Varra had vanished from the same meadow as undead shadows had closed in on her. Brennus had seen her curl up in the flowers, had seen a flash, had visited the meadow and found the flowers gone, as if consumed.

“Gods,” he breathed, and shadows swirled around him in an angry storm.

Varra had wished herself away from there.

And the meadow had granted her wish.

“Where would she go?” he mused aloud. And then it struck him. “When would she go?”

Hope swelled in him, the antipode of Shar’s despair. He hurried to his library to renew his search.

Rivalen rode the darkness back to Ordulin, back to his haunt among the cracked stones of the plaza. Upon arrival, his expanded consciousness took in every shadow in the maelstrom. The darkness was an extension of his mind and will. In the emptiness of the ruins he heard the voice of his goddess, who whispered dooms in his ears.

Wind gusted, tore at his cloak and hair. Forks of green lightning flashed again and again across the inky vault of the sky, dividing it into a shifting matrix of jagged angles, the bursts of light painting deeper shadows on the ruined landscape.

The hole of Shar’s eye hung in the air before him, slowly rotating, imperceptibly expanding year by year, a void that would in time consume the world. Even Rivalen could not stare at it for long without feeling dizzy, nauseated. The hole took up space, but seemed apart from space, not a thing that existed but a thing that was the absence of existence.

Its depth seemed to go on forever, a hole that tunneled through the multiverse, a hole that would pull him and everything and everyone into its emptiness and stretch them across its length until all of existence was so thin that it simply ceased to be.

He felt her in there, Shar, or at least felt her essence. Her regard radiated out of the hole, like a poisonous annihilating cloud. The Shadowstorm had begun the Cycle of Night and heralded her arrival on Faerun, and The Leaves of One Night, a singular tome sacred to Shar, held her here. Rivalen had recovered the tome from the ruins of the Shadowstorm. But she was trapped now, stuck in the middle of her incarnation.

Small pieces of The Leaves of One Night, bits of parchment, whipped in the wind around the hole like wounded birds, orbiting it the way the Tears orbited Selune, darting in and out of the void, as if Shar were reading them page by page.

But she wasn’t reading them. She was writing them, writing them for Rivalen, so that he could read them and finish the Cycle of Night.

“Write the story,” he whispered to himself.

Once, long ago, he’d possessed The Leaves of One Night. When he tried to read it then, he’d found the pages empty. He’d thought the emptiness profound, meaningful somehow. How wrong he’d been. They’d merely been incomplete. They’d merely been waiting.

He watched them flutter around Shar’s eye, moths to the flame of her spite. He could see the black ink on the pages, characters, words, but the language was nothing he’d ever seen before. He needed a mortal filter to translate it, a despairing soul to serve as the lens. And that mortal filter would suffer in the process.

He intended to use Brennus. He’d lied when he said he hadn’t killed his brother because they were already dead. He hadn’t killed Brennus because he needed him, and because Brennus was not yet ripe for picking. The bitterness in his brother grew with each passing year, a tumor in Brennus’s soul. Rivalen had heightened it by showing Brennus the murder of their mother.

Rivalen would read the book’s words through the lens of his brother’s bitterness and despair.

The thought made Rivalen smile. Shadows whirled around him.

The Leaves of One Night were said to articulate Shar’s moment of greatest triumph-a ritual that would destroy a world-but also to suggest her moment of greatest weakness.

Of that Rivalen was doubtful.

He longed to read the book. He desired an end. He was tired; he existed only to complete the Cycle of Night, only to end Toril. And when that was done, either his goddess would reward him after death or he would pass into nothingness. Both appealed to him more than the state in which he currently existed.

Both Shar and Rivalen were aware that the powerful were moving in Toril. They knew that the gods and their Chosen were plotting, that something was happening with the overlapping worlds of Abeir and Toril. Wars were being fought all across Faerun, the Silver Marches, the Dalelands. Rivalen understood those events no better than anyone, but he didn’t need to, because he knew that all of it was for nothing. When he succeeded, the gods, their Chosen, and everyone else would precede him into the void, and then he would follow them to his own end.

Distantly, numbly, he admired Shar’s ability to turn what had been his zeal to preserve himself into a zeal to end himself. When he’d first turned to her worship, when he’d murdered his mother to seal his oath to Shar, he’d done so, strangely, with a sense of hope. He’d recognized even then that everything must one day end, that Shar would have her eventual victory, but he’d thought that worshiping her would allow him to extend that day far into the future and that in the meanwhile he’d have power to make the world as he wished it.

How she must have laughed at his naivete. How she must have laughed hundreds of times, thousands of times on other worlds, with other nightseers, whose worship started in hope and ended in nihilism and annihilation.

“My bitterness is sweet to the Lady,” he whispered.

Lightning split the sky. Darkness reigned. Shar’s eye looked out on the world in hunger.