Richard Baker - Farthest Reach

He staggered to his feet and pointed his wand at the first nilshai he could see, barking out the command word for the device. A terrible shriek of tortured air split the darkness as the frightful blue bolt of disruption ripped the ancient hall, bursting one of the nilshai asunder and tearing the wing from another one behind the first. Araevin whipped around to blast at another one of the aerial sorcerers, but he missed the creature-in the blink of an eye it simply vanished from sight, teleporting away.

All around him, the sounds of battle slowly faded. He looked around, and realized that the nilshai had broken off the fight, fleeing back into the black depths of the old tower. Half a dozen of the monsters lay crumpled on the dark flagstones around the party, some burned, some riddled with arrows and bolts, one hacked into pieces.

“They ran off!” Maresa cried. “Come on back whenever you’re ready, you foul flying slugs!”

“Is everybody all right?” Ilsevele asked. She straightened up, still searching the dark galleries overhead for any sign of the flying monsters.

Araevin glanced around. Nesterin bled freely from the ugly sucker bites on his legs and arms, and Jorin was hunched over, his clothes smoking from the lightning bolts the nilshai had thrown. But they all seemed alive, and no one terribly hurt. He looked down at his left arm. His hand trembled and ached when he tried to close his fist.

“I think I broke my arm,” he said.

Donnor Kerth sheathed his sword and came over to examine his hand. “So it seems,” the Lathanderian agreed. He chanted a healing prayer, setting one big hand firmly over Araevin’s injured arm, and the hot ache faded somewhat. “It will trouble you some for a day or two, but you should be able to use it now,” Kerth said.

“Thank you,” said Araevin. He flexed his arm and made a fist. It hurt, but not as badly as before.

“Now what, Araevin?” asked Ilsevele. “Where do we go from here?”

“Morthil’s Door,” Araevin replied. He spoke a few arcane words, and revealed the floating aura for his companions to see. Nesterin’s eyes widened in wonder. “What I’m looking for is in there.”

“Do what you came here to do, and do it quickly,” Jorin advised. “The damned nilshai might return at any time.”

“Go ahead, Araevin,” Ilsevele said. Her bow was still in her hand, and she shook the hair out of her eyes. “We will stand watch.”

“I will be as quick as I can,” Araevin promised. He turned to face the revolving cloud of silver lights in the room’s center. It, too, was a portal of sorts. He whispered the words of an opening spell. The nimbus of magic slowed its turning, and grew brighter, so bright that his companions could make it out even without Araevin’s help.

Without waiting, Araevin stepped into the gleaming spiral of magic. At once he felt himself carried away, lifted up into a marvelous chamber of streaming mist and translucent walls, a ghostly room that hovered in the air above the black courtyard. His companions stared at him in amazement, but they were dim and indistinct. He suspected that he’d become nothing more than a spectral blur of himself when he entered Morthil’s Door, at least to the eyes of any who waited outside. But within the ghostly chamber, he felt completely solid. He glanced down at his hands, and found that his body had indeed grown somewhat translucent. He could see the lightless hall outside through his own garments and flesh.

Some sort of extradimensional space, he decided. Araevin was familiar with spells of the sort, though he had never studied any of them at length, and hadn’t heard of any that endured as long or as perfectly as Morthil’s evidently had. He turned his attention to the chamber’s contents, and as he did so he felt himself drift farther into the ghostly walls. The world outside faded to a dull dark smear obscured by misty walls beneath his feet, and the ghostly chamber grew more substantial. Spectral shelves and tomes began to appear all around him, the secret library Morthil had preserved in the ethereal matrix so long ago.

Morthil did not want that knowledge to be lost, Araevin realized. He created a place where his books and tomes would be preserved forever, safe from harm or theft, yet accessible to anyone who entered without deceit. Even though Mooncrescent Tower had been swallowed entirely by the nilshai plane, Morthil’s library survived unspoiled.

I have to find a way to bring this out of darkness. I cannot leave it here like this.

He glanced up, at the higher and better-defined floors overhead, and his eye fell on a great dome above him. Centered beneath the streaming mists stood a reading stand carved in the shape of two entwined silver dragons. In their outstretched claws they held a large, heavy tome of burnished copper plate, its pale vellum pages shining brightly in the muted light.

It was the tome he had seen in his vision, the tome in which Morthil had inscribed the words of the telmiirkara neshyrr, the Rite of Binding.

He approached the massive tome on its ornate stand. He could feel the magical power contained in the book. Golden glyphs crawled across its burnished pages, glowing softly in the sourceless light of Morthil’s vault. He could no longer see or hear his companions in the black hall outside, but he paid that no mind. The tome absorbed his attention completely.

He touched the pages, and sigils of molten gold lifted from the tome and began to swirl around him. An eldritch melody of ancient notes thrummed in the air, as if the book itself spoke to him.

Eyes shining in wonder, Araevin began to read.

1 Flamerule, the Year of Lightning Storms

Curnil looked ahead into the thick green woods, dark and damp with the second straight day of rain, and shook the raindrops from his hair. All around him rode the cavalry of the elven-host, a column of gray-clad riders moving quietly alongside the Ashaba like so many ghosts. The battle at the Zhentish camp was six days behind Evermeet’s army. The elves and all the Dalesfolk who could be spared marched hard, retracing their steps back toward Ashabenford. Curnil was no strategist, but it was plain enough to him that Lord Miritar had no choice but to march the army back to Mistledale as fast as he could.

Since the skirmish at the farmhouse, Ingra and Curnil had stayed with Storm Silverhand, riding in a small company made up of all sorts of odds and ends. Some were plain-looking Grimmar who turned out to be former adventurers, murderously deliberate in the thickest of fights. Others were freebooters and travelers from all corners of Faerun who had simply showed up to ride at Storm Silverhand’s side. None of the twenty-odd riders who followed the Bard of Shadowdale wore a uniform or held a commission, but Curnil guessed that half of them at least wore the silver pin of the Harpers under their dirty jerkins and worn hauberks. They’d all fought like lions on the earthworks of the Zhentish camp.

Curnil glanced toward the head of their small company, where Storm Silverhand rode, her long white hair plastered to her back. She was laughing and speaking with one of the other riders in their odd little company, when she whipped her head up and to the left, searching the treetops overshadowing the narrow track alongside the river. He glanced that way, wondering what had caught her eye, when realization dawned.

“Ambush,” he hissed.

From the treetops a dozen brilliant bolts of fire streaked down, exploding among the elven cavalry all around Storm’s small company. Horses whinnied and screamed, fair voices cried out in pain or fear, and the dull gray drizzle of the day flashed into heat, steam, and mayhem. A fire-bolt blasted into a rider near Curnil, incinerating man and mount in one terrible, glaring blast that hurled gobbets of liquid fire throughout the small company. One thick gout splattered across his horse’s face and clung to the animal’s flesh, blazing fiendishly. The animal bolted off at once, fleeing in blind panic.