Ed Greenwood - Elminster Enraged

He had been falling forever.

Drifting. Sifting. Down, down, trickling through cold, stony darkness in a vague, half-awake state as his ashes worked their separate ways down through earth and rocks and stone dust, into … open emptiness amid the chill rock. It was a cavern of the Underdark, part of a network-Elminster knew this from the gentle but ceaseless flow of damp, mineral-scented air drifting from distant elsewheres.

Whole once more-well, as “whole” as a swirling cloud of ashes could be-he turned to face the source of that breeze. He was back in the Underdark, and curiously safer than on all of his previous visits. To travel alone in the Underdark is to be desperate and all too often swiftly doomed, but he was now drifting along bodiless, attractive prey to nothing. He hoped.

He drifted along seeking a body, just as so many stealthy hunters in the deep gloom all around him were no doubt doing. In the endless dance of death in the dark , El sang silently to himself, recalling one of his favorites among Storm’s ballads. Ah, but she and he had been at this for a long time …

Serving Mystra. Our Lady of Mysteries, the goddess of magic. Who had been swept away in the Spellplague, but had returned. “Returned” after a fashion, that is. Lessened, to be sure. Yet She was his beloved tyrant now as before, her commandments were still the map by which Elminster steered his life.

However difficult or nonsensical that life might sometimes seem, without Her his life would have ended long, long ago, though it might have been a much easier, happier life. Still … he’d felt lost without her, the past century. Obeying Mystra had become not just habit, but what gave him purpose.

Mystra had ordered Elminster to recruit Cormyr’s wizards of war to her service, so he would do that. She’d told him to work with Manshoon, so he’d try to do so. Though the founder of the Zhentarim was as hot as ever to destroy a certain Sage of Shadowdale, El could not-would not-seek to slay Manshoon. No matter how richly the mad fool deserved to be blasted apart … or torn asunder and left to perish in slow agony. No matter how much Elminster ached to break him, humble him, and then destroy him forever.

He found himself staring at memories of Manshoon’s startled, furious, and pain-wracked face on the various occasions when El had humbled or slain him … and as those images rose into his mind in a long and varied flood, his flare of rage faded into satisfaction. He had dealt with the founder of the Zhentarim fittingly before, and likely would again, in time to come.

Now, though, his orders ran along different lines. He and Manshoon were to gather blueflame, and Mystra also wanted her trusted Elminster to train his descendant Amarune Whitewave to succeed him, in time, as her Chosen.

Her young, defiant face came to mind. Spirited, reckless, beautiful. El tried to sigh, his ashes swirling with the effort. His successor; he knew very well what sort of life that would mean for Amarune. El wanted very much to guard Rune, to hide her and watch over her very closely, to keep her from even a tiny measure of what he’d suffered … but that would be a mistake, likely a fatal error. A coddled Chosen would be weak, easily shattered. Rune was going to have to take what the likes of Manshoon would delight in hurling at her.

Not that Elminster of Shadowdale could protect her properly just now, anyway. Here he was, bodiless again. Easily defeated by the mad, weakened dolt Manshoon had become. The powers of the Chosen of Mystra were almost all lost to him, his own Art faded far from what it had once been … and the Spellplague had shattered and twisted all magecraft. Many spells were now nigh useless, difficult at short range and impossible from afar-and dangerous to a caster’s mind, regardless. Every last spell that sought to pry into or control minds, translocate, or detect things was unreliable and fraught with peril, and most of them were beyond Elminster’s skills as long as he lacked a body to study and incant and recall magics no longer familiar.

Aye, the shattering of the Weave-of Mystra, who was the Weave-had wrought great change in the Art. Just as the Realms themselves had been transformed, with entire lands fading away and being replaced. Yet not everything had changed. Not down in the Underdark, for instance. Where the usual dangers were still … usual.

Elminster drifted, keeping close to the rocky floor to avoid being swept apart if the breeze strengthened. Eerie glows beckoned here and there, the barely visible amethyst hues of rock radiations and the brighter, varicolored radiances of scores of fungi-some edible, some ambulatory and semi-sentient, and all of them dangerous. That standstool was deadly to eat, and this nearer one deadly just to touch, whereas yonder scabrous green-white and brown growths stole body heat from any living creature that ventured too near … aye, being bodiless had its advantages. Thank the twisted humors of the gods for such small favors.

Elminster drifted along, shaping his ash motes into a long, undulating line, hoping that if he were spotted-for a man who sought a body to inhabit risked such-he’d be mistaken for an errant strand of cave spiderweb. And down here, such would most likely be alert patrols of drow.

Ah! To think of a foe is to find him, as the saying went. Hastening out of yon side passage, at full speed were sleek black bodies, a score or more, heavily armored. A drow war band, ready for battle but moving with more speed than prudence; warriors fronting spider priestesses. The shapely backs of a few of Lolth’s holy worshipers were acrawl with message spiders, and many tame blade spiders scurried alongside the patrol and across the rock ceiling above … eight such, nay, ten … twelve, other sorts of spiders among them, like an eagerly hurrying pack of war-hounds. Definitely a war band.

El had little hope of finding whence they’d come, but wherever they were bound in such a hurry could only be … interesting. A battle meant bodies, and a drow or drow foe weakened or mind-mazed might offer the perfect new body for a down-to-ashes old archmage. Not that he’d puzzled over this decision; he was already rushing after the drow as they sped down the passage, faces into the breeze, heading along an obviously familiar route.

He felt their destination before he saw it. Those who worked long with the Weave grew used to feeling the ebbs and flows of natural forces, and even with his might gone, El could feel a strange, unsettling pulsing, a repeated echoing, a rippling …

Rippling, aye, that was the best word. Wave after wave of … weakness, a momentary sucking emptiness succeeded by a surge of energies, then weakness again, rolling over him repeatedly like waves heading for a beach. Ripples that grew stronger as the drow rushed on, headed for the source of the disturbance. It was something that could now be seen ahead, pulsing in time to the ripples he felt. With each sucking, reflections of purple-blue radiance flashed across the rocks, then faded as the next surge of energy came, then flashed again, over and over.

Elminster had seen that particular hue before. That precise shade of glowing purple-blue meant a rift. The drow were rushing to a planar rift, a break where his own world and another had connected by way of a breach uncontrolled and inevitably growing or changing … seldom for the better. Hence the feeling of weakness: the very fabric of Faerûn was being tugged or sucked at nearby, somewhere up ahead.

The drow rushed on, forcing El to hurry to keep up. Other drow war bands streamed out of side passages into the widening way ahead, all of them racing toward the rift. The passage rose, curved, then hooked around a great shoulder of rock into a large cavern where several passages converged-and a purple-blue sea was raging.