Bruce Cordell: City of Torment

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) Green Siren on the Sea of Fallen Stars

Green Siren burst from beneath the surface of the water like a leaping dolphin. The ship's prow fell back level with the horizon and the keel crashed down into the water, spawning frothy waves that raced away in all directions.

Raidon stepped clear of the ritual circle. The smeared perimeter was hardly even recognizable.

The shimmering penumbra surrounding the ship wavered, dulled, and finally collapsed. A rain of tiny, jewel — like fish dropped into the water, drained and dying after swimming so far and long away from their home.

Green Siren was a ship capable of sailing only water once more, and hardly the worse for wear despite her incredible journey.

He rubbed at his eyes until he saw sparks against blackness. Mortal exhaustion, physical and mental, tried to drag him to the planking. Out of habit, he resisted. Voices in his head screamed at him for all his sins. It disturbed Raidon that all the voices sounded like his own.

A distant rumble brought several hands to the starboard rail. Fingers pointed to the west, where a storm brewed.

Clouds boiled out of clear air over the horizon, piling one atop the next until a thunderhead towered over the sea. Exclamations rang out among the crew, who, by their chatter, had never witnessed a storm appear so suddenly: Neither had the monk. He frowned.

A wind out of the west slapped Green Siren, scattering the crew to trim the sails under the direction of the captain's harsh calls. It smelled first of salt, then rancid fish.

Raidon squinted into the wind and watched the storm build.

The water beneath the storm moved in a great circle. The Cerulean Sign on his chest cooled. The monk's frown became a scowl.

The swirling water dipped at its center. The concavity deepened until a vortex of whirling water lay across the waves, so wide that its mouth was visible even over the miles that separated it from Green Siren. The spinning walls danced with phosphorescent glimmers.

A long shape burst up from the vortex, shooting skyward in defiance of its catastrophic bulk. Gasps of dismay broke from every mouth.

Lightning sizzled down from the clouds and limned the massive obelisk in eye-searing white. The flash revealed the thing that crowned the obelisk. It was the Eldest. Unmoving and stiff as stone… but free of the rocky catacomb that had entombed it since it fell to Toril so many ages past.

Even before answering thunder boomed across Green Siren, the calamitous bulk of Xxiphu completed its skyward leap. It lodged in the thunderhead's belly.

Raidon touched the sign on his chest. The symbol wakened to blue fire.

He murmured, "As I failed Ailyn, and the child I cut down in the city, so I failed you."

Imprecations yammered in his ear as if from a hundred throats, though none of the nearby freebooters seemed to hear. The monk listened to all the voices, achieving a kind of focus by taking in the sound without concentrating on any individual voice, until their combined fury, fears, and maudlin inanities became as the sound of the surf, crashing and falling behind his thoughts.

The world would discover soon enough the depth of Raidon's failure. Then more than imaginary voices would decry the half-elf-at least until their calls for retribution against the one who failed to save them turned to cries of horror.

Xxiphu hovered above the Sea of Fallen Stars swaddled in the storm's heart.