Paul Kemp: Shadowrealm

"Tremble in your fortress, Asmodeus," the archfiend said, his voice heavy with the promise of things to come.

Having seen the debt paid in full, Riven unmasked himself. The dark fire of divine wrath boiled from his blades, streamed from his flesh, his fury made manifest. In a heartbeat he grew in size to match the archfiend.

Mephistopheles sensed him and started to turn, but too late.

"Let's dance," Riven said, as he drove his sabers into Mephistopheles's back. Power poured from the steel, coursed through the fiend's form. Mephistopheles howled with surprise, rage, agony. He arched backward, his wings flapping reflexively. Shadows swirled around them both.

Riven leaned into his blades, drove them through Mephistopheles's body until the tips of both sabers burst from the archfiend's chest in a spray of power and fiendish ichor. Mephistopheles fell to his knees and his impact caused the ice upon which they stood to vein, crack.

"You cannot kill me," the archfiend gurgled through a mouthful of ichor and bile.

Riven knew it to be true. He was perhaps a match for Mephistopheles, but only until the archfiend fully assimilated the power he had taken from Cale. Then, Riven would be vulnerable. He had little time.

He put a boot on Mephistopheles's back and kicked the archfiend flat to the ice while jerking his blades free. The heat from Mephistopheles's flesh sent a cloud of steam into the air. Riven willed a binding on the archfiend, preventing him from teleporting to safety.

"I cannot kill you," he conceded. "But I will hurt you. Hurt you so you remember it."

Mephistopheles roared, the wind gusted, and Riven slashed his empowered saber into the archfiend's head, cleaving one of his horns and sinking deeply into the skull. Thick, greasy fluid sprayed from the chasm in the devil's head. Riven funneled his rage through his blade, lit the archfiend afire with pain.

Mephistopheles screamed and tried to stand. Riven kept a foot on his back, and drove him face down into the ice of his own realm.

Somewhere in the distance, glaciers crumbled. Mountains fell.

"Those three, those are for the three you gave Cale." Riven eyed his friend's body, nearly covered in ice.

Mephistopheles groaned, said something indecipherable. The wounds Riven had given him were already closing.

He rocked his saber free from the archfiend's skull. "This one is for me."

Grabbing a fistful of Mephistopheles's blood- and brain-spattered black hair, he jerked back the fiend's head, exposing his throat. The archfiend grimaced, showing a mouthful of fangs stained black with blood. Riven put his saber edge on Mephistopheles's neck and opened his throat. Blood that smelled like rot gouted from the gash. Riven held the flopping head in his hand for a moment before dropping it contemptuously to the ice.

Though not yet perfectly alloyed with the divine essence, Riven still sensed the arrival of two score gelugons as they teleported to the aid of their master. Their wet breathing was as a bellows in his divinely-enhanced hearing, the sound of their sudden weight on the ice like the crack of a whip.

He spun, and unleashed a cloud of viscous shadows that engulfed them all, binding them. They clicked and grunted with surprise and he sent a surge of power through the cloud to prevent any of them from teleporting out. With a minor exertion of will, he turned the thick cloud acidic.

The gelugons shrieked as the acid ate holes through their carapaces. They struggled against their bonds, hacked with their hooked polearms at the shadows that bound them, but to no avail. Foul, greasy black smoke and agonized clicks and screams rose from the slaughter. Riven put them from his mind and turned to face their master.

The gash in the archfiend's head was closing. So, too, the opening in his throat. Riven put a knee between his wings, leaned forward, and whispered in his ear.

"Step out of the Hells and I will be waiting. Everywhere other than here, I am your better."

Mephistopheles started to speak, gagged on blood, coughed, spit. He nodded toward Cale. "You will be back for him. And when you come, I will be waiting."

Riven looked over to Cale but could not see his friend's body. Perhaps the ice already had buried him, or perhaps…

For a moment, hope rose in him. But then he remembered that the archfiend was a liar, ever and always.

No, Cale was dead forever, his body encased in ice, and Riven could not spare the time to recover him. He figured Cale would understand.

"He is gone," Riven said, trying to believe his own words. "And I will not be back."

Mephistopheles smiled a mouthful of bloody fangs. "We will see."

Rivalen saw the glow around Sakkors dim, saw the city right itself as the mindmage released the Source and its power once more turned to keeping the city aloft. The echo of the mindmage's rage still rattled around his brain. His body ached, bled, but his regenerative flesh worked at closing the wounds and healing his bones. He would be able to regrow his arm in time.

It is over, the mindmage said, exhaustion and despair leaking through the mental emanation.

Rivalen shook his head and said softly, "No. It has just begun."

He pictured in his mind oblivion, the end of all, and pulled the shadows around him. He felt the rush of instantaneous movement and materialized among the shattered ruins of Ordulin.

Darkness shrouded the dead city. Long streaks of sickly blue and dull yellow vapor floated lazily through the polluted, stale air, the bruises left on Ordulin's corpse. Rivalen knew the acrid vapors to be poisonous but his new nature defied the weaknesses of a purely mortal form.

Walls of churning dark clouds surrounded the city, Shar's perpetual darkness taken root in Faerun's Heartlands. Jagged streaks of vermilion lightning split the clouds. Ominous thunder rumbled.

But within the city, in the center of the storm, was stillness, vacuity. Only the wind stirred. It spiraled around him in insistent gusts, irritated breezes, and pushed at his back, driving him toward the core of the city and truth of Shar's plan.

He let his consciousness, divinely expansive, reach across the breadth of the city. It was entirely devoid of life. He knew the darkness outside the city proper teemed with twisted forms of life and unlife that fed on death and fear, but the city itself was a hole.

And he knew why.

Kesson Rel had failed; Shar had not.

But Rivalen had to see it for himself. He had to know.

He could have walked the shadows to the pit he would find in Ordulin's center but chose instead to walk through the destruction. He thought that someone living should bear witness to it.

The beat of his boots off the cracked and uneven streets were the moments recorded by a Neverwinter waterclock, dripping away the time left to Toril. He felt more and more lightheaded with each step.

Around him deformed buildings sagged on their foundations, drooped from the sides as if their stone and brick had run like melting candle wax, rounding edges, stretching shapes. The buildings leaned like drunks toward the center of the city, toward the hole in the world.

Thousands of corpses littered the city, lay in doorways, on balconies, flesh pale and drooping, twisted mouths open in dying screams. The wind tore at the rags of their clothing, Shar's victory pennons.

As he neared his goal, the deformation of the world increased. Eventually separation of melted flesh from melted stone was lost. Parts of bodies jutted from the sagging rocks and bricks. Torsos, heads, and limbs stabbed accusatory appendages at the black sky, the bodies trapped in the wreckage of crumbling reality, insects caught imperfectly in drops of amber. He did not avert his gaze at the grisliness. He took it in, tried to comprehend it, the shadows around him swirling.