R.A. Salvatore - Maestro

Vierna thought it an amusing game.

Briza would beat him for it.

At one point, Drizzt almost broke off along a side passage, one that would put them farther from their goal. It led to a training room where the ghosts of the past haunted Drizzt still.

“Why have you stopped?” Entreri demanded. “Are you lost?”

“Double-cross down,” Drizzt whispered, though it didn’t seem as if he had heard Entreri at all.

With a sigh, Drizzt pressed on.

They came into a larger room, the war room of House Do’Urden, the room in which a lavender-eyed child had been born to Matron Mother Malice …

The sound of battle from somewhere beyond the walls kept Drizzt focused then. Across the way, separated by small partitions, loomed three doorways. But which led to the battle, they could not immediately determine. Drizzt broke off to the door on the far right of the opposite wall, Entreri to the left, and Jarlaxle to the center, and while the latter two pressed their ears to their respective doors, Drizzt didn’t even wait, and simply kicked his open, eager for a fight.

His next step failed him, though. There in front of him stood a most beautiful drow, a woman whose beauty gave him pause.

He couldn’t tell dream from reality then. The woman became Catti-brie-she was Catti-brie!

“My love, they have captured me,” she said. “Help me …” She reached out.

Before he could even register the strangeness of the moment, the entranced Drizzt slid Icingdeath away and reached for his beloved with his empty hand.

But the woman laughed at him, and became a drow again-the most beautiful drow he could imagine-and the hand he reached to take became a serpent, floating in the air.

Floating and biting, so fast!

A shock, like lightning, cascaded through Drizzt’s body. He tightened his other hand upon Twinkle, trying to use that tangible item to keep him from melting to the floor. He stumbled backward, beyond the partition, but he wasn’t even aware of his surroundings at that moment.

Except for the drow woman. That one he saw clearly, smiling, beckoning, inviting him to a journey he wanted to take. She stepped backward down the corridor beyond the opened door and her form wavered. As it did, Drizzt saw past her.

He saw Vierna. She knelt and sobbed, clutching at her chest, at a bloody wound.

“Drizzt?” Jarlaxle called, but Drizzt did not hear. He sheathed his other blade and leaped forward through the door, running for Vierna, rushing to his sobbing sister, whom he had slain.

“By the Gods,” Entreri growled when he noted Drizzt’s charge. He started that way, joining Jarlaxle’s pursuit of their confused companion, but both stopped, both lifted an arm to bar the other, and both fell back suddenly when a strange wave of energy rocked the war room and a violet glow, a great ray that went from the opened doorway to the opposite wall, appeared in front of them.

“What?” Entreri demanded, and tentatively started forward.

“Do not!’ Jarlaxle warned. “Prismatic!”

“What?” Entreri asked again, turning to face the mercenary.

Jarlaxle shook his head, his face a mask of fear-and that alone kept Entreri back. The mercenary rushed to grab one of the room’s chairs, then sent it skidding into the purple glow.

The chair’s form waved, as if a ripple of water were suddenly above it, and then it vanished, and was simply gone.

“Prismatic magic,” Jarlaxle said, barely able to get the words out. “Purple … a plane shift.”

“Drizzt has traveled to another plane?”

“Demons,” Jarlaxle reminded him, and both of them could only assume that their friend had been lost to the Abyss.

“Come and be quick,” Jarlaxle said. “To Dahlia … then we must be out of this place.”

“Drizzt!” Entreri growled, motioning to the glow.

“We cannot help him. Not here. Not now.”

Jarlaxle steadied himself and led the way out the central door.

Entreri followed, but more hesitantly, glancing back with every step. “Drizzt?” he whispered, and the word pained him more than he would have ever believed, or admitted.

Drizzt hadn’t felt the purple ray. He was beyond it, into the corridor, before Yvonnel enacted the magic.

Drizzt didn’t know of it, and didn’t look back. He was with Vierna then, his sister kneeling and crying. She reached up a bloody hand and grasped his arm.

“Dinin, the drider,” she whispered, and Drizzt flinched at the reminder of his doomed brother.

“How are you here?” he asked.

She seemed not to hear him.

“Atone!” she warned. “We are given a chance, all of us! Our fates are not sealed. The river of time moves all around, and flows back upon itself.”

“This is madness!”

“Madness? Or a dream? Your dream, your perception, your creation. You destroyed us, my young brother. Oh, worthless honor! And you would kill me. And I loved you.”

“No,” Drizzt cried, falling to his knees in front of her and holding her closer-and trying to stem the flowing blood with his hands. “No!”

“You cannot save me with your hands,” she whispered. “Swim upstream, brother. Unwind your heresy. Accept your fate …”

And she slumped to the floor, face down in front of him, and he knew she was dead before he looked into her lifeless eyes.

But was she? Was anyone truly dead?

“I died on Kelvin’s Cairn,” he whispered, certain that this, all of this, was a grand deception. Still, there had to be a strand of truth somewhere in the midst of these illusions and warped designs.

Was it Vierna?

Was this all, after all, a backflow of the river of time itself?

That was not more irrational than the appearance of his dead friends, after all.

“Have I chosen wrong?”

Drizzt rose to his feet and stumbled along the corridor, muttering to himself, trying to make sense of the nonsense, trying to see truth when all around him was surely a lie. He thought of Wulfgar, and replayed the lesson.

“Errtu ate those children in front of Wulfgar, and murdered Catti-brie … the demon created reality within a beautiful deception, then destroyed that desired reality right in front of the helpless victim,” Drizzt whispered. “It broke him, and so it breaks me.”

He stumbled against the wall and needed it for support, else he would have surely crumbled to the ground and lay helpless.

“… every unguarded moment … the awful truth of my life. Dead on Kelvin’s Cairn. Lolth found me and took me.”

He stumbled along again, kicked through another door. “A century-I saw them die! I am a fool!” He imitated Bruenor’s voice, “I found it, elf!”

Then he growled and drew his blades and went into a dance, swinging with ferocious control, striking at imaginary foes.

“No miracle, nay! A deception! Not the blessing of Mielikki, nay! This is the curse of Lolth, the grand deception!”

“What is deception?” a sharp female voice intoned. “Idiot child.”

Drizzt swung around, scimitars at the ready, and there he froze in place, held by overwhelming and debilitating shock.

There stood Matron Mother Malice Do’Urden, his mother, the woman who had used the moment of his birth to send powerful magical energy into her war on a rival House. The woman, his mother, who should have loved him, but had never shown him any interest at all except what he might do to improve the status and situation of herself and her House.

She stood there, staring down at him imperiously, and Drizzt felt small indeed.

“What is not?” he answered, trying to summon enough anger so that he could turn away from her penetrating and judging stare.

“Perhaps nothing,” she said. “You call it deception, but is it not merely altered reality?”