Paul Kemp: Shadowrealm

His voice died as the feeling of nothingness, of endless solitude, intensified. He felt hollow, as empty as the space around him.

She was coming.

He held his ground and his nerve. The moment was foreordained. Within him, he carried all of the power he had stolen many millennia before, plus some-but not all-of the added power that he'd amassed since his ascension. And power was the coin she demanded in payment of his debts. The Cycle had turned.

"Show yourself. You owe me that, at least."

It had taken him a long while to accept that he would not be the herald who broke the Cycle of Shadows. He had stolen the power thinking he would. His hubris amused him. He found hope in the possibility that those he had chosen might break it, sever the circle.

"I see hope in your expression," she said, her voice as beautiful and cold as he remembered. "Hope is ill-suited to this place."

He swallowed and held his ground as the nothingness took on presence and he felt the regard of a vast intelligence that existed at once in multiple places, multiple times. She had seen the birth of creation. She would see it end.

"The Cycle turns," she said.

He felt her cold hands on him, felt the spark of divinity within him answer to its original owner's touch. She had taken her favorite form among many-a pale-skinned maiden with black hair that fell to her waist. The emptiness of the void yawned in her eyes. He looked at a point on her face below her eyes-he dared not look into those eyes lest he see his fate. The slash of her red lips against the paleness of her face struck him as obscene.

"I am come to pay my debt," he said, and bowed his head. He found his form quaking. In her presence he experienced the frailties he had not felt since his ascension. The experience pleased him.

She ran a hand through his hair, put her forehead to his.

"Your debt is long overdue. Mere repayment is inadequate recompense. Surely you know this, Lessinor."

He had not heard his birth name spoken in so long its pronouncement caused him to look up into his mother's eyes… and regret it.

He saw there the oblivion of non-existence, the emptiness that awaited him. He had not wished to see it. He had wished it only to happen, one moment existence, one moment nonexistence. He did not wish to know.

The frailties endemic to his one-time humanity resurfaced. His body shook. He did not wish to end. He did not wish to know what "end" meant. All that he had done, all that he had been, for nothing.

Or perhaps not. This time, he kept the hope from his face.

"Ah," his mother said, and sighed with satisfaction. "You see it now, here, at the end of things."

He nodded.

"Interest is due on your debt, my son."

He nodded once more. He had expected as much and prepared. In the millennia in which he had been worshiped the faith of his followers had made him something greater than that which he had initially stolen from her. That she knew. But she did not know its scope, and that he had hidden some.

"I am come to pay that, as well… Lady."

He could not bring himself to name her his mother. She had possessed a vessel to birth a herald, nothing more.

"I know," she said, and drew him to her in an embrace. Her arms enfolded him, cooled him, She stroked his hair, cooed. He put his head on her shoulder and wept.

Only then did he realize that he was cooling, that his power was leeching away, that the void he had seen in her eyes was coming for him. He gripped her tighter, closed his eyes, but could not dismiss the image of the end that awaited him.

"Shh," she hissed, and held him tightly.

He was sinking, disappearing in her vastness, entering the void. Non-existence yawned before him. He tried to speak, to rebel at the final moment, but could not escape her grasp.

Darkness closed in on him. He tried to enter the void with hope in his heart, recalling that he, the son of the Lady of Secrets, had kept a secret from-

9 Ches, the Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR)

The ghosts of the past haunt my mind, specters of memory that manifest in sadness. I run an alehouse in Daerlun, now. It is a small thing but small things are all I find myself suited to now. My appearance startles no one in these days; most have seen creatures more exotic than me. I fill cups, tell jokes, hire bards, and try to brighten a few spirits in otherwise dark times. I call my place The Tenth Hell and the caravaneers and hireswords who stream through Daerlun seem to like the name.

The Tenth is my personal Hell, I tell them, and they think I am making a joke, given my horns and obvious fiendish lineage. But I do not mean it as a joke.

One hundred years have passed since Erevis Cale died. There have been other landmarks in my life since then, other tragedies, but his loss remains the most painful, the point that defines the "after" in my life. He sacrificed himself to save me when I did not merit saving. For that, I owe him what I am. And I owe it to him to be worthy of what he did.

There are still days when I tap a keg and convince myself that he is not gone, not forever. How can he be? I saw him do too much, survive too much, to be gone. I stare into the shadowy corners of my place, eye the dark alleys of Daerlun, looking for him, expecting him to step from the darkness, serious as usual, and call to me:

"Mags," he will say.

But he never does.

He is gone, forever I suppose, and no one has called me Mags in over ninety years. I do not allow it to anyone but Riven, and we have not spoken since two years after the Shadowstorm retreated.

He looked different when I saw him, darker, more there. Over a tankard of stout in the alehouse that I would buy seventy years later (it was called The Red Hen, then), he told me what he had become.

I believed him. I could see it in the depths of his eye, in the way the darkness hugged his form. He sat in the alehouse for several hours and I'd wager that only one or two patrons other than me even noticed him. He had become the shadows.

"Faerun thinks Mask is dead," I said.

He took his pipe out of his mouth and exhaled a cloud of exotic smelling smoke. Shadows bled from his flesh, as they once had from Cale. He looked at me with an expression that did not belong to a mere man. His voice was a whisper, the rush of the wind through night shrouded trees.

"He is, but not forever. Let's keep that our secret, Mags."

I detected a threat in the statement, in the way the darkness around me deepened. I nodded, changed the subject.

Our conversation started with recent events and moved back through time. We spoke of Cale, Kesson Rel, Rivalen Tanthul, the Sojourner, Azriim the slaad, even our days in Westgate. I asked after his dogs, the temple. He did not touch his stout and when we parted it had the feeling of permanence.

"Take care, Mags," he had said.

I almost touched his arm but lost my nerve at the last moment. "Are we friends, Drasek?"

"Always, Mags."

I turned for a moment at the crash of a breaking tankard and the string of curses that accompanied it. When I turned back, he was gone. We spoke again only once more.

A few years later, in the Year of Blue Fire, the Spellplague ravaged Faerun. Many people measure time from that point onward. Me, I still measure it from the day Erevis Cale died.

I was making my living as a caravan guide and roadman for the wagons streaming in and out of Sembia, working with the kind of men and women I now serve in The Hell. I did not learn the full scope of the changes wrought by the Spellplague until much later but I saw its effects in the Hen, when a wizard sitting at the table next to me looked up from his tea, wild-eyed.

"What is it?" I asked.

He opened his mouth to speak, managed only to utter the word, "Something…" then froze in his chair. His blood and flesh had turned to ice. I learned later that the Spellplague had turned the Weave to poison and caused havoc with practitioners of the Art. The magical surges and vacuums changed Faerun forever.