Richard Baker - Farthest Reach

Sarya weighed the devil’s words, comparing them with what she thought she knew.

“I will not betray you, Malkizid. I only seek to protect myself.” She indicated the mythal stone with a flick of her wing and asked, “Now, how do we proceed?”

“First,” said Malkizid, “I will show you how to inspect the mythal’s very structure and identify the properties that are useful, those that are dangerous, and those that you can modify with some work. Then, we will make you the mistress of this mythal, so that no one else can contest your mastery of the device or sever you from it in the way Myth Glaurach’s mythal was taken from you. Now that we have learned that your enemies can do such a thing, I see no reason to allow it to happen again.”

19 Mirtul, the Year of Lightning Storms

The first portal led to a ruined chamber high on the shoulders of an icy, windswept mountain. The bitter cold struck Araevin the instant he stepped through the magical gate, and the sting of wind-driven snow and the roar of the storm left him barely able to see or hear at all in the first moments after he arrived. He threw up one arm to shield his eyes, and peered at the old stonework around him.

“Araevin!” Ilsevele shouted to make herself heard above the wind. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know!” he called back.

Araevin finally blinked his eyes clear. The others stood around him, backs to the wind, holding cloaks close around their throats as the garments flapped and fluttered. Narrow window slits looked out over a scene of magnificent desolation, a cloud-wracked sea of black peaks and deep valleys. The chamber-and presumably, whatever structure it was a part of-actually stood well above the cloud layer. Sunlight streamed into the room, painfully bright.

About the same time of day as before, Araevin noted. We haven’t moved terribly far to the east or the west. What mountains of such size stand near Myth Glaurach? The Nether Mountains, but they are not so tall. The Spine of the World, or maybe…?

“I think these are the Ice Mountains,” he told his companions. “Two hundred miles north of Myth Glaurach, perhaps? It’s only a guess, though.”

“We can’t stay here long,” Starbrow replied. “Can we return through the portal?”

Araevin turned to examine the blank stone face of a gateway, framed by a similar rellana vine device.

“Yes,” he replied, “but we’ll need rellana again. I’ve got the rest of the blossoms if we need to go back.”

“It’s not so bad here,” Maresa observed. The genasi seemed more at home in the frigid air and howling wind than Araevin could believe. Her cloak hung from her shoulders, ruffling gently in the wind that streamed the others’ cloaks like pennants behind them, and her long white hair drifted gently. She was a creature of the elemental air, and she was well suited for high places and strong winds. “So what do we do now?”

“Explore,” said Araevin. “See if we can find any other portals the daemonfey might have used, or a trail or path leading away from this place.”

Starbrow shifted Keryvian so that the heavy sword’s hilt was close to his hand. He looked out the window slit at the steep slopes beyond.

“There might not be a road, Araevin. All the daemonfey have wings-maybe they just flew off from here.”

“We’ll consider that possibility when we have to.” Araevin looked around the tower. The row of windows overlooking the mountain slope below stood to his left. To his right a broad swath of the chamber’s wall was simply gone, as if something had cleaved the old building with a titanic axe stroke. The stonework had an elven look to it-somewhat heavier than elves might normally build, but given the evident remoteness and difficulty of the location, he could hardly blame the builders for using whatever materials were close at hand.

Was the place a watchpost of some kind? he wondered.

They made their way through an empty archway in the intact wall to another room, this one a large rectangular hall or banquet room, also brightly lit by the dazzling sunlight on the snow. Most of the roof was absent, lying in piles of rubble and debris on the floor of the chamber. Deep snowdrifts clung to the corners of the room.

It could have been a watchtower, Araevin decided. The elves of ancient Eaerlann would have wanted to keep an eye on the Spine of the World for dragon flights or armies of orcs and giants.

“What a miserable post this must have been,” he muttered.

“Yes, but the view would have been worth it,” Ilsevele replied. A gust of wind slammed into the stonework hall, kicking up high plumes of blowing ice and snow. She shivered and pulled her cloak as tight as she could. “For an hour, anyway.”

At the far end of the hall, they found a stairway leading down into a dim chamber below. Filsaelene spoke a brief prayer to Corellon and imbued a slender wooden rod with magical light, and they followed her down into the rooms below. There they found a set of chambers with thicker, sturdier walls, broken only by a couple of thin arrow slits less than a handspan wide. The roar of the ever-present wind diminished to an eerie moaning as they descended into the shelter of the lower floor.

Filsaelene raised her light rod higher then took a step back.

“There’s a body,” she said.

“Undead?” Starbrow demanded, unsheathing Keryvian. The sun elf cleric hesitated then replied, “No, simply dead.”

Araevin and Ilsevele moved up to stand on either side of Filsaelene, looking down on the corpse. The fellow had died sitting with his back to the wall, and had remained more or less in that position, his chin slumped down to his chest as if he had dozed off. The cold or the dry air had preserved him remarkably. He was human, dressed in the robes of a wizard, with a wooden staff clasped in his icy fingers. His eyes, dark and half-lidded, stared blankly into his lap.

“He just froze like that?” Ilsevele asked. “Who was he? How did he get here? Did the daemonfey kill him?”

Starbrow glanced at the dead mage and said, “Look at him. He might have been here for a hundred years, just like that. I doubt the daemonfey had much to do with it.”

“I can try to question his spirit,” Filsaelene said. “But I must prepare the proper invocations to Corellon Larethian first, and that I cannot do until moonrise tonight.” The sun elf girl frowned then added, “On the other hand, if he’s been here for a long time, this husk will hold no memory of the spirit. He might have been dead too long for my spell to work.”

“We’ll try to question him if we find nothing else here,” Araevin decided. “He isn’t going anywhere for now.”

From the chamber at the bottom of the stairs, an archway led into a long, barrel-vaulted gallery or redoubt of some kind that was illuminated by a row of shuttered arrow slits looking out over the steep mountainside. Araevin wondered who the builders regarded as enemies. The place was in such a lofty locale that it seemed hard to believe that any conventional army, the sort of enemy who might be stopped by stonework and arrow slits, would be able to reach the watchpost, let alone attack it. Then, along the back wall of the room, they discovered no less than five portals, each framed in its own stone archway, the lintels worked in the designs of various flowering plants and vines. Araevin recognized felsul and holly; the others he could not name.

“What is this place?” Ilsevele asked as the wind moaned eerily in the ruins above them.

“A portal nexus,” Araevin said. “Many portals are simple two-way devices, but sometimes portal builders wanted to link several destinations together in a network of portals. This is clearly such a place. You could step through one of those portals, and in a few moments use any of the others, choosing from a number of destinations.”