Paul Kemp: Shadowbred

The potion would have turned the overmaster into mist, allowing him to escape the room, probably through a tiny bolt hole. It was a simple but prudent bedside elixir for a head of state. Rivalen placed the vial where he had found it and eyed the coins, tempted. One of the fivestars was dated 1374 Dalereckoning, the year Overmaster Selkirk had died. The overmasters profile was featured on the obverse.

Rivalen could not resist. He pocketed the coin. In his pocket, he had a fivestar minted in the year of Overmaster Selkirk's ascendance and a fivestar minted in the year of his death.

Coins are history, he thought.

He waved his hand to dispel the magical silence. Placing his hands over the overmaster's nose and mouth, he softly uttered the words to a powerful spell that severed the metaphysical tie between the Sembian's body and his soul. There would be no resurrection for Kendrick Selkirk.

He evaluated the room to ensure that nothing betrayed his presence, then took some time to cast several masking spells that would make his presence undetectable. Under the best of circumstances, Weave users had difficulty detecting spells cast through the Shadow Weave. Riven's masking spells made it nigh impossible.

His plan was almost complete. He had but one final spell to cast.

He stepped before the limestone hearth that filled nearly half of one wall of the chamber. The night embers glowed red. Crossed sabers and a shield featuring a coat of arms, a silver raven on a blue field, hung over the mantle.

Rivalen turned his back to the fire and the light from the embers stretched his shadow out before him on the carpeted floor. He held his holy symbol in his hand and intoned a prayer to Shar. As the spell progressed, it drew off some of his essence-he gasped as part of him drained away-and funneled it into his shadow, giving it rudimentary life.

The moment the shadow animated, it began to squirm free of the floor. Rivalen took it by the armpits-it felt slippery in his grasp, as if coated in oil-and helped draw it forth. He turned it and held it before him like a cloak-it had no weight-and looked into its face. A duller version of his own golden eyes looked back at him. He smiled. His shadow self was as much a construct as his brother's homunculi.

"You know what you are to do?" Rivalen whispered.

"I am you," the shadow self hissed.

"Then do it."

Rivalen released the shadow and it floated to the overmaster. It hovered over the bed for a moment, leering, then stretched itself into little more than a ribbon and wormed its way into the Sembian's body through one of the nostrils.

When it was gone, Rivalen cast another concealment spell on the body and surveyed the chamber one final time. The chamberlain would find the overmaster dead in his bed of a failed heart, his personal wards and the alarm spell still intact. Perfunctory divinations would be cast but would reveal nothing. Resurrection would fail, if tried, and the customary attempts to speak with the dead would reveal only what Rivalen wished.

Satisfied, he thanked Shar, drew the shadows about him, and rode them in an instant back to Brennus's scrying room. The homunculi greeted his return with applause.

"Well done," Brennus said.

Rivalen did not acknowledge the praise. Events would move quickly. He needed to contact Elyril.

The Lord Sciagraph entered her dream, dwarfed her consciousness. The proximity of the Divine One hollowed out Elyril, reduced her to an empty rind of flesh. Her dream-self trembled with awed anticipation. It had been two decades since she had last felt the oblivion of the Lord Sciagraph's presence.

Then, she had been a mere adolescent, the daughter of a Sembian noble family. The Lord Sciagraph had entered her dreams for the seven consecutive nights of the new moon and ordered her on the last night to do Shar's will by murdering her parents and older brother in their sleep.

Awed by the magisterial void of Volumvax, the Divine One, the Lord Sciagraph, the Voice and Shadow of Shar, Elyril had obeyed. Her parents had been planning to murder her anyway. She knew that for certain.

The memory of that blood-spattered winter night in Uktar still pleased her. The murders became her Own Secret, an event known only to Elyril, Volumvax, and Shar, and as reward for the deed Shar had granted her a secret name: Nightbringer.

The murder had resulted in Elyril being fostered in the house of her aunt, the Countess Mirabeta Selkirk. Elyril assumed her fostering to be Shar's plan all along, so she wasted no time worming her way into the confidence of her aunt, a dark-hearted, petty woman whose only virtue was unbridled ambition. Over the years, Elyril became the daughter Mirabeta wished she'd had, so much so that the countess sent her own sons away from the capital and paid for Elyril's tutors. By the time Elyril reached womanhood, she had become the countess's chief advisor and confidante. Elyril made it a point to dismiss all suitors, which only pleased her aunt further.

"I serve only the Countess Mirabeta," Elyril always told them.

So positioned, Elyril had bided her time and waited for word from the Lord Sciagraph to learn what Shar wanted next. The wait had been long, but it appeared to be over.

Elyril let her dream-mind careen into the cold, empty abyss of Volumvax's manifesting eminence. She tumbled downward toward infinity, and the metaphorical fall went on for a time that felt like years. Her body smashed flat as her fall was arrested on a bleak gray dreamscape, as level and featureless as a board of slate. The abrupt stop elicited a gasp but otherwise left her unharmed. Naked, small, and merely human, she rose to her knees and waited for her lord and intercessor to reveal himself fully.

Within moments a heaviness suffused the air, its presence more tactile than visible. An oiliness formed on Elyril's skin, black, thick, and viscous. From her earlier experience, she knew it to be the precursor to the manifestation of Volumvax. She waited, eager, awed, shaking with anticipation.

Slowly, like sweat squeezed from pores, darkness oozed from the slate of the dreamscape. She kept still as it formed an expanding pool at her feet. The touch of the shadowstuff elicited shivers. She sensed her physical body, still asleep in her bedchamber, trembling with the ecstasy and exquisite terror that accompanied contact with the divine.

Her heart thumped like a war drum, her flesh tingled, and blood pulsed in her pelvis. She knew that she would awaken with the flushed skin and weak legs that always afflicted her after sexual release, but she did not care. She was in the presence of Volumvax, the highest servant of her goddess, himself a demigod, and she trembled.

The shadowstuff rose up and began to take shape before her, solidifying, twisting itself into a form that Elyril's mind could not fully comprehend, whose dark borders reached into the secret corners of the world, whose presence murdered light.

Elyril averted her gaze and abased herself before her manifesting lord, pressing her forehead into the slate of the dreamscape. She knew that she was unworthy to look upon Volumvax, even in a dream. The Divine One was too beautiful in his darkness for a human to see unveiled.

A palpable wave of bitterness went forth from the forming demigod and washed over Elyril. Primal emotion pressed against her mind until she screamed. The sound died the moment the scream left her lips, absorbed by the nothingness around her. Terror and excitement drew her breath forth in gasps.

After a timeless moment, she felt a presence before her, so heavy, so substantial that it surely must shroud the world.

Elyril knew when Volumvax's gaze fell upon her trembling form. She felt his eyes on her back like the stabs of twin spears. The weight drove her chest flat against the floor and she lay there, pinioned by his might, impaled by his eyes.