Bruce Cordell - Key of Stars

His gaze fell down the side of a clifflike drop: Xxiphu’s exterior face. Terrible images were carved on the age-worn exterior, depicting thousands of interconnected images he couldn’t quite comprehend. Some inscriptions flowed and changed their shape.

The city’s base was lodged in the foot of a snow-topped mountain. No … that wasn’t what he was really seeing. It was a cloud top! Xxiphu rode the storm face like an observation tower. And miles lower yet stretched the dappled surface of the Sea of Fallen Stars.

Taal’s head threatened to spin, but iron discipline proved his anchor. He avoided showing any visible reaction.

Malyanna stabbed a finger down toward the water. “It’s that ship, Green Siren! Always meddling!”

Taal narrowed his eyes, searching. He saw a dot trailing a hair-thin wake almost lost in the glare off the sea. Was that it? The speck didn’t seem especially threatening from their position.

“I divined no one would have the stomach to continue opposing me,” the eladrin noble continued, “but they found determination somewhere. Fools. I should have made a greater effort to destroy them instead of letting them flee.”

“What, they think to enter Xxiphu again now that it’s partly roused?” he said.

She swung around to glare at him. “Who knows?” she replied. “I hope they do; they’ll find many more aboleths awake this time! But they’ve disrupted the Calling.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Ancient bloodlines, touched ages ago by the aboleths, yet live and breed on Faerun,” Malyanna explained. “Xxiphu can command their loyalty by calling in the debts of their dead ancestors. Somehow, someone on that craft severed what I set in motion days ago. Japheth, I expect. I wonder …”

“Yes?” Taal said.

“Why hasn’t the Lord of Bats slain him yet?”

Taal had no answer.

Malyanna leaned farther over the curb and studied the point, her eyes narrowed with concentration. Taal asked for sharpness of eyesight from his totem. The dot instantly enlarged, becoming a ship in truth. He saw figures on deck, but they were too far away to make out as individuals. None had the dark clothing and milk-colored skin he associated with the Lord of Bats.

“Perhaps he grew tired of the chase?” Taal said.

“Or they slew him,” she said, shrugging. “Anyhow, if Green Siren is here, I can leave to retrieve the Key of Stars unopposed. The pretend Keeper who sought to bind the Eldest in the crown chamber, or Japheth with his Dreamheart-sworn pact, will count for nothing once I have the Key.”

Before Taal could ask what Malyanna meant by “pretend Keeper,” his attention was drawn to a shadow on a nearby cloud. He shifted his gaze and couldn’t restrain a gasp.

A kraken writhed through the air, no more then a hundred yards from the balcony. One dinner-plate eye fixed on Taal as it passed. He shuddered and looked away.

The eladrin paid the swooping horror only a passing glance. “Tamur! Take us to the Forest of Moths,” she said.

A lane of shadow whisked them away from the hovering atrocity called Xxiphu.

The darkling road deposited them in the middle of a thousand birdsongs. Trills, coos, and shrill whistles resounded through the living, bark-wrapped pillars enclosing them, all of which glowed with a silver radiance. The trees supported layer upon layer of mounting canopy. Breaks in the canopy revealed stars in a vast darkness. They were at least as grand as the stars of Taal’s long vanished youth.

Moths, each glowing with the same light as the tree bark, flittered and danced through the trees on all sides. Their wingspans easily measured three hands across.

Taal breathed in air thick with the perfume of night flowers. His mind whirled … not with the heady scent, but with the rapid transition of locations. He’d spent too long at Forever’s Edge to suddenly be jerked hither and yon and not suffer pangs of displacement. If he was forced down one more path of shadow to discover another fascinating, extraordinary, utterly unique vista, the contents of his stomach would join the tableau.

He swallowed. “We are back in the Feywild?” he managed to say.

“An imperfectly connected portion,” murmured the eladrin noble. She was studying the movements of the moths. “The Spellplague restitched Sildeyuir, a fragment of Faerie broken off long ago, back with its parent. But Sildeyuir was in pieces before the rejoining, thus the process remains ongoing, and the seams where the two sibling planes meet are unstable. Some pieces are hardly reconnected at all.”

“Is it dangerous here?” Taal asked.

“Of course,” Malyanna replied. “And home to creatures stirred from wherever they lurked before, like these moths. They are fey spirits of flux and instability.”

“Undead?”

“No. Spirits of the land itself, of Faerie’s pain. They are manifestations of the disruption.”

“And they’re dangerous?”

“Yes, I just said that. But they will also guide us to the ruins of Stardeep. As spirits of the tumult and reconnection, they possess a link to the shattered geography that would require Tamur weeks to learn.”

Malyanna lifted one hand to her mouth and bit her palm. A spurt of cold air preceded the ruby red blood that welled from the wound.

She lifted her arm and whistled. Blood trickled down her ivory limb in ragged lines.

The closest flux moth twisted in the air and arrowed toward the eladrin noble. Taal’s tiger tattoo snarled.

The moth all righted on Malyanna’s palm and unfurled a proboscis half a foot long. It sipped the red fluid like dew from a flower. Its wide, glowing wings shimmered from white to red.

The insect jerked up and fluttered in the air for a moment, then darted away, streaking the night with crimson radiance.

Malyanna made a fist with her bleeding hand and followed the creature. Taal and Tamur darted after her.

“I’ve temporarily bound it,” the eladrin threw over her shoulder. “While the binding remains active, its fellows will not harm us. Do nothing to provoke them!”

Taal made no answer as he followed.

He lost track of time as they rushed through a fey wood of dreamy radiance. Only he and Tamur did not glow; Malyanna began to leak a radiance similar to the trees as she stalked after the spirit moth. A sickly purple undertone gave her skin a diseased aspect.

The forest boundary was knife sharp. When the moth broke out into open space, Malyanna followed without comment. Taal realized that what he’d taken for a bank of mist beyond the tree’s edge was a thrashing swarm of flux moths. The mass extended off into a hazed gloom to the left and right, and dozens of feet into the air.

“There must be thousands,” he said.

“Thousands, or perhaps just one, iterated many, many times over,” said Malyanna.

“Ah. And our route is through the press of wings?” Taal said.

She nodded. “Though it’s different elsewhere,” she said, “in the Forest of Moths, the flux spirits guard weak points and serve as the agents of reconnection.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Malyanna,” he said.

“Think of them as needles and stitches that, before they are drawn tight in torn flesh, can draw blood,” she replied. “Just follow, and guard me.”

Malyanna whistled, producing a hollow, low-pitched hum. The bound flux moth returned to her hand and sipped again. But before it could flutter away, the eladrin noble closed her fist, catching the creature tight.

The moth flapped madly, buffeting Malyanna. New lines of blood appeared on her face and arms where the wing edges caught her. Taal realized the insect’s wings were sharp as razors.

Ignoring her fresh wounds, Malyanna approached the greater mass of spirits. She thrust the captive moth out before her like a brand set to ward off gathering dark, and chanted in a low, steady voice.