Paul Kemp: Shadowstorm

"Heed its voice," Rivalen said.

Six men and women knelt, facing the black altar. Vees was among them. Ropes of shadow bound their hands behind their backs and bound their ankles together. All were nude. All looked upon Tamlin and Rivalen with terror in their wide eyes. They shook their heads, and their mouths opened to plead, but they made no sound. Rivalen must have had them magically silenced. He had allowed Vees to be heard only to test Tamlin.

Tamlin had never felt such power. "Let me hear them."

Rivalen looked at him and nodded. He raised a hand and the silencing magic ended. Tears, wails, and shouts for mercy blended together into a chorus of despair. Tamlin heard Vees's voice among the rest. "Deuce, don't do it! It's me, Vees. Deuce, please!"

"Their despair and regret we offer to you, Lady of Loss," Rivalen intoned.

He moved behind the heretics. Tamlin followed, his breath coming fast, his body tingling, weak.

All six of the heretics struggled against their bonds but to no avail. They pleaded for mercy.

"Do not, Deuce. I am your friend," Vees said.

Tamlin felt outside himself, felt embraced and nurtured by the darkness of the hall. He moved behind Vees but did not see his onetime friend. Memories flashed through his mind: his mother, Tazi, Talbot, all with love in their eyes, but love colored by disappointment, even pity. Other faces flashed, too: his father, with the ever-present stare of disapproval and the frequent, disappointed shake of his head; Mister Cale, shrouded in shadows, with the faint look of contempt and distaste in his eyes; a lifetime of faces that regarded him as a buffoon, a ne'er do well, an unaccomplished fop.

Tamlin had spent his adult life trying to efface those looks. He could do it now, at a stroke.

"Choose your path, Hulorn," Rivalen said.

Tamlin looked to the Prince and saw in his eyes no judgment, no disappointment, no quiet dislike. He saw in Rivalen a friend and mentor.

The Prince nodded and the shadows about him reached out to touch Tamlin.

Tamlin nodded.

Vees screamed. "Please, Tamlin! No! Whatever he told you is a lie! Don't, Deuce!"

Tamlin raised the blade high and drove it downward into Vees's back, into his father, into Cale, into the man he had been his entire life.

Cradling the book, hearing the voice of her goddess, Elyril flew high above Selgaunt. She decided that she would summon the Shadowstorm in the city in which she had murdered her parents and first sworn herself to the Lady of Loss. She intoned the words to a spell and the magic transported her high above Ordulin.

Lights and glowballs lit the capital's streets. A sea of tents dotted the plains around the city. Even at the late hour, soldiers milled through the camp.

Elyril thought the entire city looked like a lesion. She would excise it, and as eternal darkness fell, she would stand beside Volumvax the Divine One, Shar's Shadow, the Lord Sciagraph.

She was giddy, lightheaded with expectation, more elated than she had ever been from minddust.

The voice of the book fell silent but it began to pulse in her hands like a living thing, like a heart. Shadows coiled around it, around her.

Elyril opened its cover and looked not to the words, but to the words between the words. She gave voice to the empty spaces.

She did not understand the full meaning of the words but she spoke them with vigor. As she read, understanding dawned. Elyril was part of a plan that reached across time and worlds. Even the coming cataclysm of the Shadowstorm was but a single step in Shar's plan that had millennia still to unfold. Shar had been plotting since the cosmic war with her sister, Selune, had wrought creation from the pristine emptiness of oblivion. Shar would return to the peace of nothingness and all of existence would return with her.

Power gathered as Elyril moved through the book, pronounced the words, summoned the shadows. As she incanted, the pages from which she read dissipated into nothingness. The book was consuming itself, turning to nothingness, as she moved through the ritual.

Below her, the lights in Ordulin dimmed more and more as she progressed. The sky above her darkened. Clouds as thick and black as any thunderhead she had ever seen gathered. Wind picked up, roared in her ears. Her voice gained volume until she was shouting Shar's words into the night sky.

On the darkened streets and in the darkened camp far below her, groups of people started to gather. They pointed at the gathering clouds, the whipping wind. They looked tiny, insignificant.

And they were.

Her voice boomed across the heavens. Darkness blotted out the moon, the stars. Elyril exalted in the ritual, laughed as she cast the spell. She voiced the last words and her voice was a scream.

The wind died. Silence fell. Darkness reigned. Eldritch currents of green fire flared in the air.

Elyril could not breathe in her excitement. She awaited the coming of Volumvax the Divine One, the advent of the Shadowstorm.

A crack that sounded like the breaking of the world shook the heavens. A green line formed an arc in the sky over Ordulin and split the darkness in two. The line expanded, wider, wider, until it formed a door as large as the city.

Voices from the city below carried up into the sky. Elyril heard fear in them.

Another crack sounded and shadows and power boiled out of the doorway in a rushing wave.

Elyril could not avoid the onrush of power. She grinned as the wave struck her, turned her to flesh, drew the breath from her body, and drove her like an arrowshot toward the ground. As she plummeted toward the earth, she heard Ordulin's citizens scream as one and knew their terror and despair were sweet to the Lady.

She hit the ground outside the city walls and the impact shattered bones. Pain lit her body on fire. Her flesh changed to shadow, to flesh, back to shadow. Her eyes stared upward, fixed on the ever-growing rift in the sky, a rift between Faerun and the Adumbral Calyx.

More and more of the Calyx poured through the glowing green tear and fell onto Ordulin like a black tide. Darkness swirled over the ground like fog, saturated the air, shrouded the city, assimilated Faerun with the Calyx. Panicked screams carried through the shadows, distant and delightful. Thunder rumbled and green lightning split the sky.

The grass and trees of the plains wilted around Elyril, twisted, transformed into horrid mockeries of their normal shapes. Animals emerged from their dens, metamorphing into caricatures of themselves as they breathed the transformative darkness.

The Shadowstorm had come.

Mirabeta raced toward a balcony of her tallhouse. The servants and men-at-arms thronged the halls, panic in their eyes. "What is happening? What is happening? Are we under attack?" she screamed at everyone and no one.

They answered only with screams of terror.

"Obey me! I am the overmistress!"

No one even slowed.

Wearing a nightdress, she pushed open a door and stepped out on the balcony. The wind whipped at her and what she saw drained her of breath.

Darkness cloaked the city, swirled through the air like a fog of pitch. Screams from every quarter cut through the night. She looked up to see a glowing green portal in the sky as large as Ordulin itself. Shadows thronged the air.

At first she thought perhaps the Shadovar had attacked, but this was bigger than that. She thought she heard a voice in the wind, giggling. "Elyril?"

She realized she was suddenly cold. She looked down to see the fog of darkness clinging to her skin, her clothes. Her heart leaped in her chest. She tried to brush it away but it clung to her hands, to her face. She screamed as its cold sank further into her flesh, her bones. "Get off! Get off! Get it off!"