Neither monk nor hound managed an elegant landing. Raidon’s elbow smashed straight down on the stone with a sickening jolt, but at least his arm jerked free of the dog’s clenched teeth.
Everything was spinning. His body felt like a bundle of twigs whose tie was pulled loose. Part of him wondered at his flailing ineffectualness. What had become of the Raidon of old? He mentally groped for his focus.
Instead, his hand found Angul.
What a stupid dog, thought Raidon, to disarm him, only to drag him back within reach of his weapon. The Blade Cerulean’s influence blasted through him like a forge furnace. It lifted him to his feet as a mother might right a fallen child.
Raidon whirled, searching for his quarry.
He saw Neifion’s swarm of flickering motes follow the hound down a lane of shadow exiting the chamber in a direction that didn’t exist in the world.
The half-elf sprinted to close the gap, but the darkness fled in a candle’s flicker.
Rage burned suddenly from the sword, following the conduit of his arm. The emotion pulsed through the buffer of his Cerulean Sign. It was rage, white-hot and righteous in its certainty. Raidon shifted his grip, so that he wielded the blade like an axe, and began to hack at the catacomb’s stone wall where the Lord of Bats, the hound, and the aberrant rune had seemed to flee.
When a minor avalanche of loose masonry rained across him, Raidon continued to swing Angul. With each blow, he liberated a sizeable chunk of raw stone.
“In the name of Nine,” Japheth said. “Have you lost your mind?”
Raidon glanced back. The warlock had come down from the balcony. He stood only a few paces from him. The monk was also peripherally aware that Thoster and Seren stood in an entranceway free of water. And there was Anusha too, visible as a faintly translucent figure in a sun-bright panoply.
But Japheth captured his attention.
The warlock had thieved the Dreamheart. He had sworn a star pact. Both Angul and his Sign could discern the thread of aberration in the man like an apple hiding a worm; fell energies trickled through him. Japheth stood near his enigmatic iron sculpture, glaring at Raidon as if the monk were the one who had transgressed the laws of the natural world. As if …
The blade lashed out.
The metallic sculpture lurched into Angul’s path. The Blade Cerulean glanced off the suddenly animate shape in a shower of blue sparks.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)
Watch on Forever’s Edge, Feywild
The watchtower shuddered. Taal swayed with the quaking structure, unconsciously canceling out the motion of the rolling flagstones with well-honed reflexes. He’d become used to the relentless tremors during the centuries of his servitude.
Taal reached into a pocket of his shirt and carefully pulled out a tiny bird. It fluttered its wings, releasing a splendid rush of iridescent purple and green. The colors were too vivid for the watchtower. It was a creature of Faerie, and the watchtower lay beyond Faerie’s edge.
How it had found its way into the tower with one hurt wing, Taal couldn’t guess. But the innocent beating heart had brought him a bit of joy when he’d looked at its dazzling plumage. Taal had spent part of the last month tending to the wing and feeding the bird from his rations.
Taal judged the creature was fit to fly once more.
He lifted it in one hand. Its tiny feet clamped tight around his forefinger.
“You’ve got your strength back,” he said. “Now, fly away toward the light. Return to Faerie, and never again look into this dark corner.”
The bird cocked its head at him, but made no move to take wing.
He gave his finger a little shake. “Go!” he said. But the creature clung.
Then the tower quaked again, and with that unsettling jolt, the bird took to the air.
Taal walked to the tower’s edge and followed the creature’s progress as long as he could make it out. The bird winged above the darkling landscape. Boulders, bare rock, and the occasional stunted tree poked up below it. Light glowed along the far horizon, and the flash of color flittered toward that promise.
Even after he lost the bird in the glow, Taal continued to stare at the distant light. The illumination waxed and waned over a period of hours that were several shy of twenty-four, as if time moved slightly more quickly there.
Or, as was actually the case, slightly more slowly at the tower along the void.
The light was the Feywild border, and beyond that, the world, and all the other planes of existence too. All those landscapes, mundane and fantastic alike, were peopled with creatures of every description, creed, and philosophy.
Taal reflected that among those billions, perhaps only a handful were aware of the watchtowers erected thousands of years before by ancient eladrin nobles. Those ancients had determined that reality required defending against a madness that lay beyond all things.
He would miss the tiny bird. He buried the pang of regret beneath his oath, as he buried so many other feelings.
Finally, the bout of shaking subsided. Another would take its place, all too soon; the tower shivered more often than ever.
Taal turned away from the side of the tower that looked toward the light, and shuffled to the other side.
His gaze traced the watchtower’s silvery span, all the way down to the raw stone on which the sentinel tower was built. Beyond the structure’s imposing foundation, a cliff dropped away into a void of darkness. Dim specks of light glimmered out in that nothingness, like lonely stars.
They might have been stars in truth, but if so, they were weak, old, and nearly spent. They were nothing like what Taal recalled from his youth. He could sometimes still summon the memory of true stars when he meditated.
The cliff top stretched away to the north and the south. The pale stone ridge marked the border between substance and inchoate madness.
Beacon fires glittered from the tops of all the other eladrin watchtowers built along existence’s raw edge. A long time before, the forces of creation had made a terrible mistake. They had left an imperfection in reality, rendering a forgotten corner of the Feywild vulnerable to the emptiness that stretched away forever beyond it.
If only the void were truly mere nothingness.
The tower trembled again.
A mote of raw earth peeled away from the cliff face directly beneath the tower and sailed out into the void. Along the cliff, similar motes disengaged from the stone face and dispersed out into the dark, like seedlings blowing from tree branches in a slight breeze.
He’d seen the launch of countless such impromptu “armadas.”
The darkness engulfed each free-floating earthmote in turn. He waited patiently, until he saw distant flashes of green, red, and sky blue flower in the darkness. He presumed the light bursts heralded the moment a mote found a squirming monstrosity gliding inward from the discontinuity. When mote found horror, one annihilated the other. He fancied he could hear the detonations, though he knew the watchtowers were too far from the zone of engagement for sound to make the return trip.
The earthmotes were the natural world’s defense against the aberrations.
Taal peered into the abyss, past the flashes of light, into the eye-searing darkness. Despite never having seen it from the watchtower, Taal knew the name of the malign beachhead that existence defended itself from: the Citadel of the Outer Void.
A wild cat’s growl jerked him from his reverie.
The growl came from a tattoo on Taal’s upper right arm. The image, a tiger with a scorpion’s tail, was his personal totem, one he’d paid handsomely to have magically inked on his flesh.
He’d only enjoyed its power a few tendays before he was plucked from Faerun to swear his oath. But even in the stark realm where he served as castellan for one of the Twelve Towers, his totem warned him when potential enemies were drawing near.