Bruce Cordell - Key of Stars

He had to do something. But he was terrified to try.

“You’d rather be dead?” he muttered to himself as he pushed his sword into the stomach of a kuo-toa trying to do the same to him with its spear. His enemy curled into a knot of unmoving scales.

With his shaking free hand, Thoster grabbed his amulet. He jerked hard, parting the leather strand securing it around his neck. He dropped it into a jacket pocket.

The ethereal music resolved to a symphony of dire portent and crystal-clear meaning. The chant of the kuo-toa sounded in nearly perfect accompaniment. The kuo-toa were indeed set to guard the ocean beneath the hovering city of Xxiphu.

With his mind now naked to the penetrating emanation, Thoster was commanded to do the same.

“No,” he said. “I am Eneas Thoster. I am slave to no one!”

The clamor of Xxiphu’s melody redoubled. He resisted the authority the music tried to assert over him. It did not have the right . Xxiphu was claiming dominion where it should have none. And Thoster wasn’t going to stand for it.

His fear turned suddenly to anger.

Something inside him reacted. Like a burning taper set to a pile of oil-soaked tinder, rage flared in his chest. It filled him up like waves fill a bay at stormcrest. It was intoxicating. His eyes and mouth popped wide, and he screamed out a challenge. His voice was louder and deeper than was humanly possible, but he was too caught up in the surge of his fury to marvel at the volume.

His wrath burned away his wall of denial. Time to stop hiding from himself.

He was of kuo-toa lineage.

Denying it was a childish pursuit. Because, he suddenly understood, the blood that flowed in his veins was akin to the scaly forms that surged around him, but … it was also more potent. There was a strength in him that the kuo-toa around him lacked.

He reached for that strength, and it fitted itself to him like a comfortable pair of gauntlets.

His shadow wavered on the deck, seeming to inflate for a moment before becoming his own shape again.

Thoster’s gaze fell upon the two kuo-toa wielding lightning. They stared back at him. Their confident grip on their pincer spears grew slack in confusion.

One spoke. Her voice slurred as it attempted Common. “What … What is this? Who are you … Should we know you?”

Thoster didn’t have an answer for her.

Anusha’s form wavered into existence once again, convulsing. It disappeared in a puff of golden light. A scream, Anusha’s physical, fleshy scream, echoed down the crowded cabinway. The invaders had found her sleeping body. Time was up.

He bellowed out a command of his own. “Stop your attack!” He felt his voice partly reaching into that same mental plane in which Xxiphu’s mental command reverberated.

All around him, kuo-toa paused.

Thoster raised both hands over his head, the palms spread wide. A vibrancy tingled beneath his skin, a feeling of freedom that, for the first time, didn’t terrify him. He wanted to see what he truly was.

Time for worry was long past. He channeled all the power surging through him into his voice. “Leave these waters, kuo-toa!” he called. “By the right of my blood, which I share with you, listen to me! Forsake this false idol, lest it command you to your doom.”

His last word hung in the air and in the ethereal space beyond hearing like the tolling of a cathedral bell. His shadow enlarged once more for the length of a heartbeat. When the sound finally died away, Thoster slumped to the decking, utterly wrung out.

But he was grinning from ear to ear. Across the entire ship, kuo-toa turned from their onslaught. One by one, they returned to the Sea of Fallen Stars.

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

Feywild

Taal strode across a vista of bare rock, jagged boulders, and the occasional stunted tree. Malyanna went before him, silhouetted by the golden illumination that rimmed the approaching horizon. The black hound Tamur slipped in and out of the shadows at the periphery of his vision.

They were leaving the Watch on Forever’s Edge behind. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be giddy at the prospect.

A thought occurred to him.

“My lady,” he said, “Why do we travel by long roads when your shadow beast could whisk us through shadow to our destination in an instant?”

“The roads we must ultimately travel are broken, and lie tangled in half-meshed demiplanes,” the eladrin noble said. “Even routes through shadow would prove laborious, since Tamur has never physically visited the site we seek.”

“I see,” said Taal, even though he didn’t, really. What did it matter? The Edge dropped farther and farther into the darkness behind them, while ahead, the trees grew thicker, the light more glorious, and the sense of desolation lighter.

Finally they topped a rise, and looked down into a valley verdant with growth, ringing with bird song, and brightened by slanting beams of sunlight. Tears welled in his eyes.

Fireflylike motes of brilliance darted on gusts of cool wind. Falls in the far distance were a thread of silver that plunged down from majestic cliffs. The land was effervescent and alive, filled with a vigor that burned in every blade of grass, every tree leaf, and even in the towering white clouds that loomed above in the sky.

“Faerie,” he said, his throat tight.

“Just so,” Malyanna replied.

“Where do we go from here?” he asked.

“From here-Oh!” she cried.

Malyanna clutched her temple. “Something’s happening. Tamur!” she said.

The hound looked up from the root tangle of a large tree it was sniffing. Its ears twitched. Its tail was curled down and its ears laid back. The dog did not like the Feywild. It slunk over to Malyanna.

“To the observation balcony, Tamur,” the woman said. “The last one we visited. As quick as you can!”

The great dog lifted its head in the air, sniffed, then padded down the slope to where the ground was broken with several jutting rocks. Malyanna and Taal followed.

“What is it?” asked Taal.

The eladrin noble ignored him.

As Tamur drew closer to the stones, their shadows lengthened and deepened. The mastiff passed into the dimness.

Taal followed Malyanna into the stone’s murky shade.

Cold whispered against his neck.

From within the boulder’s shadow, the stone seemed like a hole in the Feywild itself. Tamur stepped through, and they followed.

Beyond lay a shifting corridor of gloom.

Taal’s boots sunk a few inches with each step into the floor. The air was as cold and as still as a winter’s night. Taal’s breath steamed, though Tamur’s and Malyanna’s did not.

He’d wondered, having seen Malyanna and the mastiff fade into shadow on more occasions than he could count, what they experienced. And he knew it for what it was: a bleak, cold path with nothing to recommend it except speed of travel.

They followed the sniffing hound down the interminable corridor for what must have been at least a bell, maybe two. So much for speed …

When the cold threatened to become unbearable, he called upon the power of his totem. A layer of warmth, like invisible tiger fur, formed around him.

When the corridor ended, Taal was unprepared. One moment he trudged through shadow. The next, he was standing on a roofed stone balcony overlooking a stormy seascape from a staggering height. His totem yowled in sudden, tense warning. Wherever they were, it wasn’t a safe place.

At least it wasn’t as cold … though the tang of brine and rotting fish wrinkled his nose.

Malyanna rushed to the curblike railing and looked over. He joined her. The moment he did so, he knew why his totem had cried warning. He was standing on a balcony of what could only be the aboleth city of Xxiphu.