Paul Kemp - Shadowrealm

"Good-bye," Cale said to Riven.

Riven didn't speak, perhaps he couldn't. Eyes averted, he signed, "Farewell" in handcant.

Aril slept on his side, peaceful in his small bed. Blankets covered him to the neck. His head, with its mop of hair, poked from the bedding. Cale stared at the boy for a time, thinking of times past, friends and enemies, all of them the scar tissue of a lifetime. Aril slept peacefully, contentedly. Cale found the moment… fitting.

A boy sleeping safely in his bed, free of fear, with his whole life before him. He realized why he had needed to see Aril instead of Shamur, Tamlin, or Tazi. He wanted the last person he saw on Faerun to be innocent.

He put the back of his shadow-dusted hand on the boy's cheek and thought of Jak.

"I did what I could."

He hoped it made a difference for someone, somewhere.

He stepped through the shadows and into the darkness outside the small cottage. The quietude of the village seemed alien after the chaos of the battlefield. He had only a short while before time back in the Shadowstorm would resume.

The smell of chimney fires filled the cool air. He glanced around the village. Three score cottages sat nestled around a tree-dotted commons, quiet, peaceful, safe. The two-story temple of Yondalla, the lone stone structure among the log and mud-brick buildings of the village, sat near the common's edge and rose protectively over the whole, a shepherd to the sheep. Smoke issued from the temple's two chimneys, filling the glen with the smell of cedar, and home. The hearths burned fragrant wood and were never allowed to grow cold.

Cale inhaled deeply. He fought back tears born in realizations come too late.

He allowed that on at least one night not long ago the village owed its safety not to Yondalla, but to him. He had killed a score of trolls while he had answered to Jak's ghost, while he tried to climb into the light.

But there was no answering to the dead, and the light was not for him. Not anymore. Not ever.

He looked up into the vault of the sky, unplagued by the roiling ink of the Shadowstorm. The Sea of Stars twinkled above him, Selune and her train of glowing Tears. He fancied he could see an absence in the celestial cluster circling the silver disc of the moon, the hole out of which one of the Tears had plummeted to Faerun, the hole for which Jak had died, the hole mirrored in Cale's soul. He thought of the little man and his pipe, tried to smile, but failed. He had never filled the hole. And now he never would.

Power burned in him, cold, dark, near limitless. He could hear words spoken in the shadows on the other side of Toril, could rend mountains with his words. He knew more, sensed more, was more, than he could have imagined. His memories, Mask's memories, reached back thousands of years-before Ephyras even-recollections of deeds, people, and places long gone.

Melancholy shrouded him, wrapped him as thoroughly as the shadows. He understood Mask at last, but only now, at the end of things. He realized, too, that Mask had understood him, perhaps better than he had understood himself.

You wish to transcend, Mephistopheles had told him once.

Mask had said it to him, too, though not in words.

And Cale had wished to transcend, and so he would, though not in the way he had conceived.

He felt the connection to Riven back in Sembia, a connection that reached through time and distance. The assassin's grief, buried deeply but present, touched Cale. He swallowed the fist that formed in his throat.

They were friends, by the end. It had gone unacknowledged too long. He was glad they had said appropriate good-byes. The words had seemed small for so profound a moment. Cale would miss Riven, as he had Jak.

He reached into the pocket of his cloak and removed the small throwing stone Aril had given him. He had carried it for months, a reminder, a talisman of hope. The events involving Aril seemed ancient, something that had happened on another world, in another time. The smooth rock felt warm in his hand, solid.

"Shadowman," he whispered, recalling the name the halflings had given him.

He placed the stone on the ground in the doorway of the cottage where Aril and his mother slept, a gravestone to mark his passing. The last thing his hand touched on Faerun would be a river stone given him by a grateful halfling boy who had named him "Shadowman." He thought it fitting.

"Good-bye," he said, thinking not just of Aril.

He closed his eyes and readied himself. He did not lack for resolve but he still wanted the moment to stretch. An eternity passed between heartbeats. He savored the faint smell of pine carried by the westerly wind, the thrill of energy that permeated everything around him, all of Faerun.

He had only seen it in full in that moment. He would miss it. He took comfort in the fact that he had helped preserve it, at least for a time.

Ready, he sank into the comforting familiarity of the darkness. It saturated him, warmed him. He knew the night now the way he knew his own skin. It was part of him. It was him.

He bade it good-bye, too, and stepped through the shadows, through the planes, to Cania.

The ordinary darkness of a Faerunian night yielded to the soul-blighting darkness of the Hells. The reach of the time stop did not extend to Cania.

Cale sensed the cold of the Eighth Hell but his newfound power rendered him immune to its bite. But his enhanced senses and expanded consciousness made the horrors of the Eighth Hell more acute.

He stood on a wind-blasted plateau of cracked ice that overlooked a frozen plain cut by wide, jagged rivers of flame. Damned, agonized souls squirmed in the rivers, seethed in its heat like desperate, dying fish caught in a tidal pond. Others wandered the endless ice with empty expressions, dazed and frozen, their minds empty, their fates as cold and unforgiving as the air.

Towering, insectoid gelugons made playthings of the damned in the rivers, eviscerating, impaling, or flaying them as caprice took. Despair saturated the plane, a miasma as palpable as the cold and darkness. Shrieks of pain filled the wind, prolonged, agonized wails that Cale knew would never end. In the distance glaciers as old as the cosmos ground against each other and Cale felt in his bones the vibrations of their never-ending war.

The wind tore at his cloak, howled in his ears, and exhaled the stink of a charnel house, the reek of millions upon millions of dead who would spend eternity in pain. The suffering was eternal.

The darkness around Cale, the darkness that was Cale, swirled and churned. He felt the shadows of Cania, its deep and hidden places, its dark holes, but not as he felt them elsewhere. All shadows answered to Cale, but not to the same degree. Mephistopheles's power touched everything in Cania, tainted it, made it foreign even to Cale's divine consciousness. Cale forced Cania's darkness to answer his will and shrouded himself in its cover.

It was time to keep his promise.

Through their connection, Riven felt Cale leave Faerun and move to Cania, felt the oppressive despair and unending suffering almost as strongly as if he were standing on its ice himself. He held Weaveshear in his hand, the weapon dripping darkness. He willed his lost saber back into its scabbard and it appeared there instantly.

Around him, as still as statues, stood the company of Lathanderians, a rose-colored glow still noticeable around the edges of their shields. Several lay dead on the ground, their ears leaking lumpy red liquid.

Furlinastis's huge, dark form lay sprawled across the plains, one wing gone, countless gashes open in his scales. The shadows and wraiths that had filled the sky were gone, returned to the Plane of Shadow.

Rain hung motionless in the air. A bolt of lightning hung in the darkness, splitting the sky, caught in mid-moment by the spell. Caught so, the Shadowstorm seemed almost tranquil, beautiful.