Richard Baker - Final Gate

A shell of golden force surrounded Araevin before he could roll away. In the blink of an eye it began to tighten around him, folding him into an awkward ball and constricting. He lost the spell he was trying to speak, and fought for breath. He threw out his arms and pushed back, trying to keep from being crushed, but the relentless orb compressed tighter with his struggles.

“That is better,” Malkizid said in his beautiful voice. “I shall enjoy watching you die, mage.” Then something struck him just under the collarbone. The Branded King roared and stepped back, and Araevin glimpsed a crossbow quarrel quivering in the archdevil’s flesh. Malkizid yanked it out-only the very tip of the bolt had managed to pierce his flesh-and threw it aside. He glared into the maze of iron-bound glass columns. “You shall die slowly for that, impudent whelp!” he called into the maze of the Waymeet.

For once, Maresa had the sense to keep her mouth shut. She did not answer, prudently remaining hidden. But behind the archdevil, Nesterin stirred slowly. Still trying to resist the crushing weight of the sphere around him, Araevin’s eye fell on the shard next to the star elf. The ghost of an idea flickered through his mind.

Fighting to clear his mind of pain, he muttered the words of a simple message spell and whispered to the Sildeyuiren lord. “Nesterin! Take up your shard, and summon the Gatekeeper. The crystal may still commune with the mythal.”

Nesterin looked up at Araevin, caught in the floating sphere, and nodded. He fumbled for his shard, and concentrated on the great master stone in the heart of the Waymeet. The shard began to glow in his hands, and a few stray gleams of light leaked out from beneath the iron bands encircling the great speaking stone.

Malkizid whirled to glare at Nesterin, and strode angrily toward the wounded elf. His second step stuck abruptly, throwing him off balance. From the stone floor of the Waymeet, a spear of crystal had suddenly condensed around his foot, arresting his movement.

“What is this?” the archdevil snarled. He looked down at the luminescent crystal encasing his ankles, and pure black fury twisted his face.

Flaring his powerful wings wide, he tried to wrench himself out of the solidifying crystal. The glassy stuff cracked and split, but more filaments condensed around him, clinging to his form like gossamer webs.

“Stop this, Gatekeeper!” he demanded. “I command you!”

“You are not my maker, Malkizid.” The Gatekeeper’s voice was a weak whisper that echoed among the columns of soaring glass. “I still have some small power to resist your demands.”

“I will teach you obedience, then!” Giving up on efforts to wrench himself clear of the mythal’s snowy threads, Malkizid abruptly vanished, teleporting away… but blue lightning flickered across the highest spires of the Waymeet, and the archdevil instantly reappeared in the same place. The Branded King roared in anger, and drew his black sword to slash at the filaments settling around him.

The ruined speaking stone quivered once, and the Gatekeeper whispered to Araevin, “I cannot hold him for long, Araevin Teshurr. I beg you to release me from this durance.”

Araevin struggled for each breath as the golden sphere crushed ever tighter. Malkizid finally wrenched himself clear of the Gatekeeper’s crystal webs. He slashed his black sword in a fierce arc, gouging the glass pillars around him. “Insolent device!” he growled.

The force-sphere spun slowly and tightened more. Dark spots gathered in Araevin’s sight, and needles of icy agony transfixed him. There was no more time. He had to chance everything on one desperate throw.

He stopped fighting the sphere and let it pin his arms to his torso.

The sphere squeezed in, eagerly pressing closer, but he’d bought himself an instant for a single spell. Awash in pain, desperately short of breath, still he found the concentration to wheeze the words for a minor teleportation. In the blink of an eye he huddled ten yards away, free of the crushing sphere. The shard he had dropped lay on the ground before him, and he snatched it up. From his new vantage he glimpsed Maresa crouched in an interstice of the soaring spars a hundred feet away, laying another quarrel into her crossbow. Scarlet blood streaked the side of her head, but the genasi still had her shard. She looked at him and bared her teeth in defiance.

The archdevil realized that Araevin had moved, and he wheeled in a quick circle, searching for the mage. But Malkizid, along with the master stone, stood between Nesterin, Maresa, and Araevin.

“Now,” Araevin said.

He staggered to his feet and raised the shard of the crystal above his head, and in one swift instant of will and decision he triggered the ancient weapon’s most fearsome power. Beams of brilliant violet fire shot out from the crystal in his hands, seeking the other two shards. A lopsided triangle of unbearable brightness burned between the points anchored by Araevin and his friends.

“No!” shouted Malkizid, and he leaped into the air, climbing toward safety-too late.

Everything inside the triangle defined by the shards of the crystal vanished in a furious blast of incandescent light. The Waymeet shrieked in protest, and shattered glass scoured the place like a rain of razors. Dozens of tiny slivers drove into Araevin’s flesh before the concussion picked him up and threw him headlong into the wall behind him.

In the heart of the brilliance, the speaking stone burst apart in a fountain of blue-white power, uncapped and wild. The infernal iron bands restraining it charred into black ash and vanished. Malkizid himself staggered in the air, and wrapped his wings around his body to protect himself. Shredded by flying glass and seared by the supernal light, still the archdevil was not destroyed. He raised his head and looked on Araevin with pure hate, blood pouring from his brand.

“I will flense your soul for that!” he shrieked.

Then the terrible brilliance filling the triangle guttered out and vanished, drawn back into the uncapped speaking stone in the center. A wind of dust and glass howled into the glowing triangle as the unimaginable power of the Fhoeldin durr collapsed in on itself and drained out into nothingness. Malkizid was picked up and dragged into the vanishing stream of blue fire, then expelled screaming into the void.

One more bone-shaking detonation rocked the Waymeet, and the raving brilliance and thunder died away. A great three-sided patch of the ancient glass cathedral was dull, gray, and lifeless, absolutely devoid of power. Araevin groaned and let his head drop to his chest.

The Gatekeeper had been extinguished. It was only a matter of time until the Last Mythal of Aryvandaar died.

22 Eleasias, the Year of Lightning Storms

Sarya Dlardrageth curled her hands into fists so tight that her talons drew blood from her palms, and screamed defiance at the metal and glass around her.

“I will not stand for this!” she shrieked. “I am the rightful Queen of Cormanthor! My House has waited five thousand years to claim what was stolen from us. We will return and drive our enemies from Myth Drannor. I swear it!”

Her eye fell on a dull gray column of crystal nearby, and with hardly a conscious thought she barked the words of a violent spell and smashed it to splinters of glass with a spear of purple force. The iron cladding that had covered the thing fell to the stone floor, and she seized the heavy plating with a telekinesis spell and hurled it headlong into another flickering portal, shattering its lintel into a spray of diamond dust.

“I will drink their hearts’ blood for my wine before I am through with the lot of them!”

“And you will, Lady Sarya,” the spymaster Vesryn Aelorothi said smoothly. He bobbed his head up and down like the vulture he so resembled. “But your just vengeance must wait for a little while. You must see to your survival first. You cannot exact satisfaction from the palebloods if you are caught now.”