He again looked down on Toril, saw the broad outline of Faerun, and located the Inner Sea. There, below the cottony clouds, he fancied he could see the island that he had chosen to house the focus for the greatest spell he would ever cast.
Thousands would die, he knew. Perhaps tens of thousands.
So be it, he thought.
He willed what he willed, and so it would be. With that, he decided that it was time to cross the threshold, to begin the after. The before was boring him.
With a thought, he dispelled his projected image and returned his consciousness to his body. The universe instantly fell away and darkness enshrouded him. As always, it took a moment to overcome the physical and mental torpidity caused by the projection spell. He sat cross-legged on a plush rug. His flesh felt thick and clumsy compared to the lightness of his soaring soul. He imagined he would feel something akin to that lightness when he set foot again on Toril's surface, when he possessed the Crown of Flame and looked into the dark sky with his own gaze.
Inhaling as deeply as his failing lungs would allow, he opened his eyes. The darkness of his pocket plane contrasted markedly with the light of the outer cosmos but he could see clearly nevertheless. His vision extended simultaneously into several spectra, several planes, but his smooth, stone-walled sanctuary looked the same in all of them-unremarkable. He had grown weary long ago of living under the earth. Millennia before, he had pinched off an area of Faerun's Underdark, essentially creating a pocket plane of his own-a part of Faerun, but still separate from it. It felt more a prison every decade, not unlike his body.
Several magical gems orbited his head, whirring around at a distance of a few handspans. It was in observing those gems that he had found the inspiration for his plan. Still, he found their incessant hum irritating at the moment. Floating in each corner of the chamber, iridescent glowballs lit the square meditation room, their dim green light an order of magnitude dimmer than starlight and barely perceptible by most beings.
He braced himself, unfolded his legs, and started to rise. His body was weaker than usual. As always, pain wracked his bones the moment he put weight on them.
Refusing to surrender to the wasting disease that plagued his skeleton down to the marrow, he forced himself to stand without magical assistance. That small victory brought him satisfaction. For centuries, his magic had held age and disease at bay. But time was a relentless opponent, and even the most powerful of his magic was losing its battle with the passing years. He had considered lichdom of course, but had dismissed it. He relished the pleasures of the flesh too much even in his old age, though in recent years those pleasures were few. The sensory emptiness of undeath was not for him.
Besides, he had lived a full life in his ten thousand years. He had but one thing left to do. Once it was done he would be fulfilled. With the Weave Tap in his possession he could do it.
He raised his hand to cast a spell but stopped before uttering the arcane words. He stared for a moment at his outstretched hand. The appearance of his flesh disturbed him-bone white, parchment thin, speckled with dark age spots and threads of black veins. His nearly translucent skin wrapped his fingers and hands so tightly that he could distinguish individual bones.
I am almost a lich already, he thought with a touch of sadness.
He had lived too long, and spent too much time underground. The latter problem soon would be resolved. As for the former, well. . . time would claim him when it would.
He fought down a bout of melancholy, admonishing himself for indulging in such weakness. With exaggerated dignity, he straightened his magical gray robes and composed himself. It would not do for his brood of slaadi to see him dismayed. He regarded them as his children; they should not see their father in distress.
Decades ago, needing loyal servants to implement the plan he had conceptualized even then, he had removed the slaads' eggs from the chaos of their native plane of Limbo. Afterward, he had magically altered them in the egg, instilling the raw essence of magic into their still-forming bodies. After their emergence from their shells, he had nurtured them as a father, rearing them on the rarefied nutriment of raw magic and the brains of sentient creatures. They still had a taste for the latter, and a thorough understanding of the former.
Being creatures of chaos, each of his brood had responded differently to the process. Vhostym took a father's pride in their multifarious personalities-Azriim, the intelligent but willful son; Dolgan, incredibly strong and loyal but also somewhat servile; Serrin, fast and merciless; Elura the . . .
Elura the dead, he reminded himself without sadness. Had the brood been able to return her body to him, he might have resurrected her. But divinations had revealed that the priest of Mask and his comrades had reduced Elura to ash. He missed her, in his way. He would have called her the most adventurous of the brood. She had taken pleasure in the males of many species, including Vhostym himself, centuries ago....
Without further waste of sentiment, he put her out of his mind.
In the end, the pre-birth process to which he had subjected the brood had transmogrified them into more than ordinary slaadi. Their magical natures had been enhanced to various degrees. But despite the differences from their ordinary kin, their slaadi biological heritage still ran strong: each felt a compulsion to change from the caterpillar of their current form-that of a green slaad- into the butterfly of the more powerful gray. To do so, they required an influx of arcane power, an admixture of magic known to Vhostym and few others. Vhostym would provide that to his sons upon the consummation of his plan, recompense for their success in retrieving the Weave Tap and serving him for so many years.
Had it been possible, he would have retrieved the Tap himself. But even his power could not have pierced Shar's Fane of Shadows. Only a shadow adept could have done so. So his brood had manipulated the shadow mage Vraggen into gaining them entry. The plot had taken months to unfold, but at last they had succeeded and the time was nigh to move forward.
He spoke a word of power and held his open palm before one of the blank walls of his sanctuary. The magic warped space. The stone wavered, vanished, and was replaced by a door-shaped aperture. Vhostym levitated a few handsbreadths off the smooth floor-to ease the strain on his body-and floated through the portal. It sealed shut behind him the moment he cleared it.
In contrast to the austerity of the meditation chamber, the lounge beyond was stuffed with luxuries. Piles of silks, soft cushions, furs, divans, and chairs from many worlds lay strewn haphazardly around the room. As a young man, when he had sought sensation in mistleaf, potent liquors, and the pleasures of the flesh, such things had seemed important to him. No longer. Only one thing was important to him.
Of the hundreds of chambers and rooms that existed in the honeycombed rock of his Underdark pocket plane, that room alone he allowed to remain in such disarray. The chaos of the decor and the decadence of the furnishings appealed to his slaadi. It was their favorite chamber.
Azriim and Dolgan awaited him there.
Azriim sat on a divan on the far side of the lounge in the form of a half-drow, stylishly dressed. Vhostym thought his son enjoyed that body better than his own-a human form was perhaps a more suitable tool for enjoying sensation, he supposed. And what Azriim enjoyed, Azriim did. Vhostym admired that about his son. Of the four slaadi of the brood, Vhostym thought Azriim had taken after him the most.