Ed Greenwood - All Shadows Fled

"Bring me a seat," he said, not breaking his vision from his creation, "and something safe to drink. Someone who knows traps and castles should stand by me, too-we'll both have questions to ask each other when my creature reaches the Roost." Galath's Roost, Mistledale, Flamerule 16

Galath's Roost had been blasted apart four centuries ago by mages who knew their business. Since that day, the small keep atop its stony height had been swallowed by the forest. Massive duskwoods and cedars rent what was left of its walls and yet held them up, their trunks cupping chambers that were open to the sky and walls that ran to nowhere. Their leaves all but hid the riven keep from view… but if one stood a little way off and in just the right spot, the faint flicker of a fire glimmered through the trees.

The room whence the fire came had one wall open to the night-but the two pilgrims who'd built the fire and now huddled around it had good and prudent reasons for not choosing any of the better-preserved rooms in the Roost. They were discussing that now.

"A good job, they did," the taller one said grudgingly.

"You're certain they left this room safe?" asked the other, clutching his expensive talisman of the god under his chin. The gilded image of Tyr's warhammer and scales shone back the firelight, serene and unchanging.

"All but that door," the first one replied, pointing. "If you go out that, a very large crate of rubble will fall on you."

"Ah," said the other. "I'd best go water the gods' gardens out the way we came in, then." He sipped from a battered tin cup, making no move to get up, and added, "A good thing we found that cellar, or they'd have seen us, sure."

"That was no cellar," his tall, lean companion chuckled, scratching under his much-patched tunic. "That was the castle cesspit."

"What?" the shorter pilgrim said, staring down at his boots and then at his elbows and his cloak-but finding no foulness. "Is my nose as bad as all that, then?"

"After four hundred years," his companion told him kindly, "dung is just dust."

"Huh," the shorter pilgrim agreed, and launched into a dry chuckle that ended in a fit of coughing. "I guess the Realms're covered deep in old dung, then. Urrrgh. Auuh." These last two comments accompanied a grunting attempt to rise-an attempt that ended in a disgusted wave of one dirty hand, and a return to a more or less comfortable lounging position against a pile of moss-cloaked rubble.

In all the activity, neither devotee of Tyr noticed a dark, many-eyed bulk slithering silently out of the night, over the stones in the ruined end of the room. As they decided aloud that a prayer to the Lord of Justice might be prudent before they wandered off into the woods to relieve themselves, the thing of eyes and jaws crept unnoticed toward them.

"'Tis your turn to begin the devotion," the shorter pilgrim mumbled.

"Do it be in truth, Jarald? Or've you just forgotten the words to the Call of the Just again?"

"I've not! I remember them well!" the shorter pilgrim said heatedly. "Will you plague me with the misdeed of one night down all the years to come?" Behind him, unseen in the flickering confusion where the firelight played on a broken end of stone wall, something that swam with many eyes and hungry mouths reared up, looming darker and larger, drifting tendrils of itself across the ceiling to hang above the two oblivious pilgrims.

"I don't rightly know," his taller companion said, with a slow grin. "How long did you plan to go on living?"

From the darkness above came a sudden swift movement…

The fire was dying down; he'd have to make this swift. The taller pilgrim cleared his throat, lurched forward from a seated position to his knees, and began. "Hear us, O Great Balance, as we hear thee! From our knees we cry to theeeee!"

His words ended in a surprised cry as he raised his eyes to the firelit ceiling-and found himself staring at an oozing, descending blob of jelly that swam with jaws and eyeballs! And all of those eyeballs were staring at him!

The horrid thing lunged at him, seven or more sets of fangs biting the air hungrily as they came. The pilgrim flung himself backward and to his feet, out of reach, and the thwarted reaching thing turned with fearsome speed and struck at the other pilgrim.

The shorter man was already on his feet, watching the monster with a surprisingly calm expression of curiosity on his face. He sidestepped the attacking tendril-and found a second questing arm reaching down, almost upon him. He was trapped between them. As they reached in, he shrugged and grimaced.

An instant later, the many-fanged mouths opened wide for their first savage strike-but the pilgrims were gone. Two clouds of dark, whirling globules stood for an instant where the men had been. And then the jaws bit down. On nothing.

The globules crashed to the floor in a red rain that spattered the stones and put the hissing fire out. Amid the sudden smoke of its dying, the floor ran with small puddles that moved together with purposeful speed.

The many-fanged monster peered suspiciously around the room and came slowly free of the ceiling to gather itself into a floating sphere of questing eyes and gnashing teeth. It echoed the dumbfounded astonishment of the distant Zhentarim who'd created it; he'd never seen anything of the like before. Was this a spell? Were the two pilgrims of Tyr doppelgangers who'd learned a new trick? Or… something else?

The floating monster glared around the ruined chamber, but nothing moved except the thick, dark red fluid on the floor. Two holy symbols lay amid the moving gore, and tin cups and scabbarded swords and knives leaned where the pilgrims had left them, but their clothes were gone. The monster bent its gaze again on the moving liquid.

Slowly, as if with great effort, the red fluid was gathering, joining into two ever-widening pools. The creature watched for a long time; the pools became two rising, glistening red humps. Purposefully the fanged thing flew across the chamber to hang above one pool, and extended a forest of mouths with questing tongues, intending to suck up the pool.

With surprising speed, the pool leapt upward to meet it, roaring in a red column that plunged into all the waiting mouths. The fanged creature darkened, shuddered-and flew apart in a wet explosion of staring eyeballs and slime.

Gelatinous fragments of its riven body were flung to the far corners of the rubble-strewn room… but before they could stain the walls or floor, these wet remnants faded silently away into the air, as if they had never been.

The swordcaptains standing around Nentor Thuldoum nearly swallowed their tongues in startled fear when the wizard let out a sudden raw scream, clawed blindly and convulsively at them all, and then flung himself back in his seat, clutching at his head. The wordless wet gargle in his throat rose again into a screaming, a high keening that went on and on… and men pulled back from the reeling Zhentarim and drew their blades. They shivered.

"What should we do, Lord?" a swordcaptain asked, hurrying to where Swordlord Amglar sat watching, his back against the ancient bulk of the Standing Stone.

The commander looked up expressionlessly at the anxious officer and shrugged. "Either this passes, or it doesn't. If the latter, we'll put arrows through him from well away until he falls silent, and then burn the body." Amglar reached for the wineskin and goblet that sat on the grass beside him, and his lips curved into a mirthless grin. "Wizards are all like that, inside," he told the swordcaptain softly. "If their control is ever broken, all the screaming and wide-eyed raving bursts out, for us all to see."

The man shivered. "What does that to wizards, Lord?"