Paul Kemp: Shadowrealm

Sakkors, too, hung in the distant sky, barely visible behind its curtain of shadows. Magadon sat in its core, lost in the Source, lost in the damage his father had done.

Rivalen eyed him, golden eyes aglow, shadows burning with the same dark power that filled Riven, that filled Cale.

"I see it, now," the Shadovar prince said, his voice hushed, pained. "It is not what I thought."

"It never is," Riven said. "Keep your promise, Rivalen."

Riven left the threat unsaid.

The shade prince nodded.

Riven looked on the faces of the Lathanderians until he found Regg. Blood and mud spattered the warrior's bearded face. Dents dotted his breastplate. Links of his mail hung loose at the shoulder. Riven reached into his beltpouch and withdrew the small pouch of Urlamspyran pipeweed. He stuffed it into one of Regg's belt pouches.

"I do not think we'll get to share that smoke."

With that, Riven drew the darkness around him, the power, and rode it to his temple on the Wayrock. He materialized on the lowered drawbridge. The night sky above him twinkled with stars instead of the oppressive ink of the Shadowstorm.

His girls slept in the entry foyer, frozen by the time stop. He went to them, petted each in turn. He enjoyed the moment. He loved his girls. They were innocence to his transgressions.

He stood, thought of his task, and hardened his will.

He set down Weaveshear, inhaled, readied himself.

The wind gusted, pushed against Cale. He held his ground, drew on his power and let it fill his voice.

"I have come to keep my promise, devil!"

His words boomed across the plain, as loud as a thunderclap. The ground cracked, split under him. Chasms opened in the ice. Great shards of soot-stained snow and rock broke off mountains and fell in roiling clouds of ice to the plains below.

A million devils looked up and answered him with a bellow. The damned, spared their tortures for a moment, sighed at the reprieve. Somewhere, the halls of Mephistar itself rang with his words.

Within three heartbeats gelugons began to materialize around Cale, their white carapaces stained with soot, their vicious hook polearms painted with the gore of ages. Wet, greasy respiration came in pants from between their clicking mandibles. The opalescent surfaces of their bulbous eyes reflected Cale in miniature.

A dozen appeared, two score, a hundred. Their eager clacks filled Cale's ears. The ice groaned under the weight of their collective mass.

Cale stared at them in turn, let them see the power lined up behind his eyes, and their eagerness turned to uncertainty. The shadows around him roiled. They encircled him, claws scrabbling in the cracked ice, but none dared advance. They sensed what he was. He was not for them and they knew it. He stood in their midst untouched, an island of shadow in an ocean of diabolism.

"Inform your master-"

Mephistopheles appeared among them in a cloud of soot and power. They bowed at his arrival, the clack of their carapaces like the breaking of a thousand bones.

"I was aware of your presence the moment you dared set foot in my domain, shadeling."

The archfiend stood as tall as a titan, towering over his minions, over Cale. His black, tattered wings cast a shadow over the assemblage, over the whole of the plane. The heat from his glowing red flesh melted the ice and snow under his feet and sent up faint clouds of steam. The wind stirred his coal-black hair, tore dark smoke from his muscular form. He held his great iron polearm in one hand and lines of unholy power danced on its tines.

Cale truly saw the archfiend for the first time. Mephistopheles was nearly as old as the multiverse, his power and presence as rooted in reality as the celestial spheres. Shar was older, but not Mask. Cale understood the archfiend's full power for the first time.

Understood, too, that he was a match for it.

Perhaps.

The archfiend's pupilless white eyes, so like Magadon's, pierced Cale, saw within him.

"You have brought only a piece of what you owe."

Cale nodded.

"A piece satisfies my promise."

Mephistopheles considered, nodded. "So it does. And so is my plan brought to fruition."

Cale summoned Riven's sneer, laughed, and the sound cracked ice. "Your plan? You have been played, the same as me, the same as him, the same as all of us."

Mephistopheles frowned and the gelugons clicked, their uncertainty manifest.

"You are mistaken."

"No," Cale said. "You are."

Mephistopheles smiled. "And yet I will have what I covet, despite the machinations of goddesses, gods, and archwizards."

"And I will have what I want," Cale said, and the pronouncement separated him from himself, split him in two. He felt outside his body, distant, an observer in events rather than a participant.

He found his mind focused not on the present, but on the past. Memories flooded him, the small, quiet moments he had shared with Thazienne, Varra, Jak, the mere hours he'd had with his mother, Tamlin, Riven, the bonds of his life born sometimes in laughter and embraces and sometimes in tears and blood.

"You are without your toy," the archfiend said, and nodded at Cale's empty scabbard.

Mephistopheles's voice seemed far away, a whisper, the faint calling of a fool in the night. Cale floated above the plain, above the devils, above himself, looking down on it all like a ghost haunting his own death. The image was blurred, as though seen through poorly-ground glass. His life, however, played out before him in clear, bright tones, the sequence of events that had brought him to this moment, here, now, when he would die.

"That is because I have not come to fight you," he heard himself say. "I have come to pay what I owe, and to collect what is due."

Riven sensed Mephistopheles's arrival, felt the sudden surge of power, malice, the eternal and unrepentant darkness. The shadows around him spun in slow spirals. Knowing what would come, what must come, Riven focused not on his sadness, not on the surprising sense of loss that turned his stomach into a hole, but on the job.

He was an assassin, as ever he had been. And he was working. He sheathed his grief, and put his hands on the hilts of his blades. He heard his heartbeat in his ears, as loud as a wardrum, each thump keeping time, counting down the moments left in Cale's life.

"To collect what is due," he said, echoing the words of his onetime enemy, now his friend, now his brother.

Mephistopheles stepped toward Cale, eyes blazing, bleeding power, malice, trailing gelugons eager to see a god's blood shed.

Cale, filled with power of his own, gave no ground, but increased his size until he stood eye to eye with the archfiend, until the gelugons were as children gathered for a story.

Dark power flared from Mephistopheles. Cale's shadows swirled in answer. The wind gusted, screamed. Glaciers groaned. The damned shrieked.

"There is only one way for it to come out of you," Mephistopheles said.

Cale knew. "I will pay what I owe."

Eagerness flashed in the archfiend's eyes, greedy hunger. He licked his lips, beat his wings once. The gelugons shifted on their clawed feet, clicked their fearsome mandibles in anticipation.

"First, what you owe," Cale said.

Mephistopheles blinked with surprise, as if he had forgotten, but recovered himself quickly. He smiled, showing pointed teeth. His eyes were as hard as adamantine. "Haggling like a Sembian to the last. Very well."

The archfiend backed up a step amidst the gelugons. He stopped, looked to Cale.

"You have what you have and yet are willing to give it up for my son, a man?"

Cale simply stared, but that was answer enough.

The archfiend shook his head. "I do not understand the minds of men. But here is the greater part of your friend."