Bruce Cordell: City of Torment

The ring was an integral ingredient required to wreck the aboleth's waking ritual so violently that the Eldest would not only fail to rouse, but be snuffed out while it was at its most vulnerable.

In order to complete his counterritual circle, Raidon killed aboleths. All of which were simultaneously trying to kill him.

Every few moments, five or six tried to seize Raidon's mind with formless psychic clamps. Angul and the Sign shattered each domination attempt without the monk being aware of them.

It required a larger fraction of his attention to dodge the constant barrage of slime, lightning, and whoknew what else. He spun beyond the periphery of an exploding sphere of green energy, flipped over a bolt of another as he skewered an aboleth, and ducked a tentacle slap. All was wild motion as he whittled away at the press of nonstop attacks.

When a lucky tentacle or body slam hit him, or a ravening bolt of energy, he staggered and sometimes even fell down. But Angul's balm instantly turned flaring pain into so much fading warmth, and his own trained reflexes righted him after each fall. Those lucky hits required only a minuscule portion of his awareness, but he had to reset his position each time he was pushed or knocked over. It was important he not lose his place on the floor.

Were he facing nearly any other enemy in such a multitude, Raidon would have long since been pulled under.

Neither Angul nor the Sign promised unending vitality. However, these creatures were the nemesis of the Keepers and their implements. Both sword and seal sapped some portion of their permanent strength to feed the monk what he required to keep standing amid the storm of death that struggled to pull him under. But the energy Angul and the Sign used to heal him was dwarfed by the power he channeled in a brief burst toward the floor every time he stepped forward.

Raidon wondered if all three of them-sword, seal, and himself-would be drained to their final end as they finished. If providence were kind, it would be so.

A muscled, boneless arm smashed Raidon in the face, bursting some sort of cyst encrusting its end. The smelly, fatty material that sprayed across Raidon burned like acid. Even before he could grit his teeth to endure the pain, Angul purged the damaged tissue and grew new skin cross his face, neck, and left shoulder. Raidon bit his lip against the agony of the healing wave.

The Blade Cerulean's repair was nearly as painful as the attack that caused the damage.

My reserves falter, the blade warned.

Raidon grunted and moved another step.

He swept the sword through an advancing aboleth, then pointed Angul down to scribe another quick sigil in cerulean fire on the floor.

He weaved beneath a blast of green energy, whirled, and leaned forward to thrust Angul up through the mouth of an encroaching aboleth. This put his left leg in position to snap a devastating back kick at another foe. He advanced another step into the momentary clearing he'd created, and dashed off the next symbol with Angul.

If not for the press of lashing aboleths, Raidon's curving path across the floor would have been far more apparent. He realized he'd completed more than half the circuit mirroring the route of the chanting aboleths swimming through the air overhead, counter-current to their direction. Ironic, the monk reflected, that the mass of squalid bodies trying to smother him obscured what he was doing.

A tentacle grabbed his leg and pulled him facedown onto the stone. He felt bones in his face break. The Blade Cerulean roughly set the bones an instant later. But not completely.

Angul's healing surges were no longer completely erasing his wounds. The pain of each wound was eased, true, but blood ran down one of his arms, and now from his nose as well. Each alone wasn't enough to slow him, but the incomplete recoveries were adding up. It would be a close thing, whether he could finish his circle of binding before the swarm finished him.

It didn't matter. He would finish the circle, or he would fail.

If he failed, the Eldest would fully wake.

If he succeeded, then the aboleth's ritual would fail instead. One or the other. The fate of Faerun depended on what happened. Not that he cared. Even as he fought forward another step to draw the next sigil in the sequence, he wondered at his persistence. Faerun hadn't been particularly kind to Raidon over the last dozen years. Or, now that he thought about it, for most of his life. Yet there he was, striving for all he was worth, to save the world.

Perhaps some shred of honor yet motivated him, finding one last opportunity to shine amid the fused jumble of his personality.

Or perhaps it was merely Angul.

Raidon noticed that the number of attacks he had defended against over the last span of heartbeats had dropped off. He spared a moment to glance up from his last scribed glyph.

He was astounded to see that, indeed, only about a dozen aboleths-at least of the original number that had sleeted down the walls of the throne chamber-remained to contest him. And half of those were receiving attacks on their flanks, even as they tried to squirm toward Raidon. Some unseen force was alternately carving into and dazzling these outlier aboleths, even as wizard fire rained down upon the creatures from afar.

It was Seren! And… Captain Thoster too. The wizard unleashed a volley of fire into one of the aboleths advancing upon Raidon. By the spread of smoking, twitching, and nearly cleaved in twain aboleth bodies that spread out from the wizard and pirate, they had obviously been at it for some time. The two had achieved quite a tally, nearly equal to his own. It was almost as if they'd received help-

An acidic slime wave buffeted him, drawing his face into a rictus. Angul burned off the excess goo even as Raidon leaped into the air. As he reached the zenith of his jump, he pulled his elbow up next to his face, then slashed down with it in tandem with his own descending weight, channeling all the force of his body into an aboleth's brow. The creature stopped moving. It was dazed, stunned, or dead, it didn't matter. He scribed another glyph.

But curiosity made him scan the room again before he pressed ahead. Japheth was nowhere to be seen. Good.

Seren and Thoster must have stopped the warlock and his tainted cargo after all.

In another few moments, his binding circle would be complete. A Seal of Slaying would lance the Eldest, strong enough to end its stony vigil forever.

*****

Japheth uttered the final words of the ceremony. A jolt of energy transfixed him. Purple sparks burst from the Dreamheart, traveled along the rod, and grounded themselves in his drugged brain.

His vantage literally flashed upward, as he was bodily snatched into the air. Like a rag doll yanked by an angry toddler, he was borne to the chamber's zenith. The sudden acceleration followed by the jerking stop nearly snapped his neck.

He'd avoided meeting the Eldest's many-eyed gaze before. Now his ritual and the immediacy of the ancient aboleth compelled him to do so.

His proximity and drug-addled perspective showed the Eldest's skin to be something other than stone. It was a luminous expanse of chaos that churned and seethed. Indescribable forms entwined within that inconstant flesh, surging, billowing, and changing their shape. It was as if the skin was an interface between the world and something terrible. So close, awful sounds scraped at Japheth's ears too. Keening, bleating, and altogether atrocious.

But the eyes were what dazed Japheth and nearly struck him dead before he could conclude his purpose.

Though most were shuttered, the few that caught him in their alien regard burned him with a cosmic malignancy that brought gorge to his throat. The star pact, that terrible oath he'd sworn in Xxiphu's spawning halls, was the only thing that saved his mind from being instantly blasted. The pact had inoculated him. Though he might later gouge out his eyes in a fit of lunacy, for the moment he retained the barest ability to think.