Bruce Cordell: City of Torment

He blinked, trying to ignore the anticipation vibrating through his traitorous body. Tendrils of dust reached into his blood and his mind, penetrating to his very soul.

Japheth laughed. Suddenly, everything made sense.

Did gods feel this way? He threw put his arms as if to embrace the world. He wondered, not for the first time, if traveler's dust was indeed the crystallized blood of some deity killed when magic had failed. Or perhaps the ichor of some fell demon lord. Either way it was glorious-to the Nine with the repercussions!

The walls swam back into focus as the first rush of the dust swept past him. Fortunately, he hadn't been whirled onto the crimson road. His eyes found Anusha's resting form.

"Oh!" He'd taken the dust for a reason. Not for this feeling, or at least not merely for this feeling, but also so he could conclude the ritual. He grinned so fiercely his cheeks ached.

The warlock concentrated through the pulsing colors that tried to pull his attention down countless corridors of distraction. "Focus, you idiot," he muttered, and picked up the jade rod*He stepped between Anusha and the Dreamheart, directly over the intersection of the two silver circles on the floor. The smell of the powdered scales bothered him less now that traveler's dust coursed through his veins.

He laid his left palm on Anusha's forehead. Her skin was cold.

Japheth extended his right arm toward the Dreamheart, pushing the jade rod through the relic's cage so that it just brushed the orb's mottled surface.

He uttered the final words of the ritual. A jolt of energy transfixed him between Anusha and the Dreamheart as a connection was made. His body and dust-charged mind were the conduit. He cried out, and purple sparks played across his teeth.

A whirlpool opened its maw beneath the warlock's feet, and a psychic undertow pulled him down into the swirling abyss. He plunged through the flooring, then soil and crushed rock, then a gulf of dark water, and finally hard bedrock. Down. Japheth understood he wasn't really falling and that his body yet stood in the vault of his suite. Despite that, his breath became labored. Great hands seemed to squeeze him tighter and tighter as he descended, as if the world itself sought to smash him between two basalt palms.

His vantage point flashed into open space. He gasped. for breath as the pressure relented. He floated in a cavern large enough to swallow Waterdeep whole. A mountainsized obel isk filled half the space. The obelisk's base was buried in the vault's floor, and its summit plunged up through the cavern's ceiling. He flashed closer and saw that even the portion not buried in stone was hundreds of feet long. Disquieting striations crawled across the obelisk's visible face. The furrows and curling lines-were they runes of some terrible, primordial language?

Were the lines actually crawling and moving, or was that a hallucination of the dust?

The cyclopean structure sucked him inside.

Gnarled walls streaked past, some dry, others slicked with phosphorescent slime. Japheth saw vast mechanisms whose function escaped his understanding. Chambers pitted with catacomb-like hollows were numerous. Some of the hollows contained pallid lumps of unmoving flesh lying in beds of slime. The thunder of distant waters throbbed in irregular cycles, tickling the back of Japheth's throat.

Then all sense of movement ceased. Japheth hovered before an expanse of mottled glass. His sense of orientation was lost-was the glass a sheet that formed a wall, or the curving face of a much larger sphere?

He ran his fingers across the pitted surface. So cold! It wasn't glass, but ice. And in its frosted depths, figures were entombed…

The shapes were people! All shimmered with translucence, as though not wholly present. The warlock grunted.

He recognized the cues. The figures might very well have been invisible to him if not for his traveler's dust.

Japheth moved down the wall, scanning faces and forms. A gaunt woman with mottled yellow skin and an uplifted nose stared from the ice, her expression frozen in surprise. Farther back, an eyeless fellow with black skin and black hair cringed. A woman with no eyes, except for those on her palms, bent forward as if caught in the act of weeping. And… a mind flayer! But its tentacles were flaccid, and its terrible orbs did not track Japheth's passage. It was caught, just as all the others were, dreamers whose nightmares had propelled them too far.

He found Anusha.

The girl was only partially frozen. Like a drowning victim, she reached from the ice, her hands seeking some purchase. Her face was a mask of desperation, caught in the moment of her entrapment.

"I'm here!" Japheth lunged for Anusha's hand. His fingers passed through her palm and plunged into the ice face.

He and she were both mental phantoms, of course, of different origins and abilities, but neither was real.

Perhaps it would be more difficult than just grabbing and pulling.

Then he discovered his own hand was now stuck in the ice slab. "Oh, for the love of Bane!" he swore. Worry clutched at him, even through his dust-given serenity.

It took all his discipline not to brace himself against the slab with his other hand.

Whether ice or a stranger substance, the slab was acting as some sort of dream catcher. And Japheth's presence was something like a dream.

He had a sudden image of inn staff finding him slumped over Anusha's inert form, both she and he forever insensate, their minds trapped together in that nightmare tomb. Not the romantic reunion he'd hoped for.

That sad image reminded him his physical body was still engaged in a ritual, however far away. The jade rod, in particular, was so costly specifically because of its insulating qualities. His mind should be safe as long as the ritual continued and he didn't lose his grasp on the rod.

Japheth concentrated on ignoring the frigid pain in his phantom hand. Instead, he imagined himself back in the vault of his suite, one hand on Anusha's forehead, the other gripping the jade rod whose tip lightly grazed the Dreamheart.

The image of his room in the Lorious refused to solidify. The dream-catching ice failed to release him from its cold embrace.

He persisted, attempting to fix every detail of his suite at the inn into his mind's eye. Faintly at first, then more strongly, he heard a dog barking.

He suddenly perceived two realities, one superimposed over the other. In the fainter scene, he was indeed still locked in the ritual. A black dog had jumped up so its paws rested on his chest. It was Lucky, barking and wagging his tail furiously.

"Good boy," Japheth said, his voice a whisper.

He couldn't feel his body in the Lorious image, even though it was his true self. He was numb. He tried to release his grip on the jade rod. Nothing.

"By the Twin Princes!" he swore. He tried again, imagining his arm holding the rod and his vision arm in the ice as one and the same. This time, his real arm and his vision arm moved in synchrony.

The rod's tip snapped off with a crack of purple lightning. Jade shards whistled through the vault.

The ghostly image of his chambers at the inn solidified even as his perception of the ice slab and the entombed dreamers washed away. Before it completely faded, Japheth grabbed again for Anusha's outstretched arm. This time, his palm slapped into hers. He grasped her hand and pulled for all he was worth.

The collapsing ritual yanked him away from the ice face, and so he pulled Anusha in turn. An explosive crack splintered across the freezing expanse, and she was free.

He blinked.

Smoke hazed the vault, and Lucky ran around the chamber in glad circles. He stepped to the travel chest and rested his hands on the side. "Are you there?"

Anusha's dark eyes opened. She stared uncomprehendingly up at him. "What…? I dreamed I was far away…"