A voice issued from the obscured clearing. “I’ve taken possession of this exit,” the archfey said. “To go through, you must defeat me.”
“We beat you before, Neifion!” Japheth yelled over the sound of flapping bat wings.
“You’re in the land of my power, fool,” the archfey called. “You chased me out of your dreary catacombs with the aid of all your friends, but in the Feywild, I command the very earth and air.”
Raidon came up beside the warlock and yelled, “Neifion, forget your revenge. Your hate blinds you to the true nature of your ally. Malyanna may be eladrin, distant kin to you perhaps. But she serves creatures of abomination, who would wreak ruin not only on Faerun, but Faerie too, and beyond. Is your revenge so important that you’d destroy your home?”
Silence met the monk’s entreaty for several heartbeats.
“She is an ally of convenience,” Neifion said. “Once Japheth is blooded and rendered, and serves as one of my homunculi, she can rot. Until then, I find her gifts useful.”
“He’s insane,” Japheth said to Raidon, shaking his head. “Reason isn’t going to work on the Lord of Bats.”
“Insanity is something I’ve come to understand,” Raidon said. “Sometimes, even the crazed can come to see reality.”
The swarm of bats obscuring the hollow expanded. Suddenly, scratching, chittering darkness tore at Raidon’s face, the back of his hands and forearms, and his chest.
He slapped his palm onto his Cerulean Sign. A blaze of blue light swept from him. Where it touched, the press of bats faded like shadows fleeing a sunrise.
Raidon allowed the influence of his Sign to wax, until its boundary washed away the last bit of darkness in the hollow, revealing the platform and its occupant.
Neifion’s smile soured. “I suppose I’ll have to kill you too, monk,” he said.
Raidon charged the archfey. His initial front kick knocked the Lord of Bats to the edge of the platform, but didn’t push him off the dais as Raidon had expected.
The monk closed with his foe again, his hands ready to block or strike.
Neifion’s cape flared outward, transforming into great wings. His limbs lengthened, and his pale skin sprouted ratty fur. His body expanded in size fourfold. His horrid leathery wings stretched from one end of the hollow to the other.
The hybrid creature swept one enormous wing at the monk. Raidon ducked beneath the edge, and came up on its trailing side. Something blurred in the corner of his vision, and Raidon dived sideways off the platform. A gargantuan fist wound with holly vines smashed down where he’d been standing.
With groans of straining roots, the trees surrounding the hollow woke to animation. They raised clenched fists of branch and bark. Each was kin to the creature that had almost killed Raidon below the Marhana mansion-and that had only appeared for the space of a single attack.
The skyline surrounding the clearing was transformed into a jagged, closing circle of leaning treants. Raidon was surrounded. Again, worry threaded his mind.
The Lord of Bats laughed. Another gnarled fist the size of a boulder crashed down, but Raidon evaded it on light feet. The impact sent the ground cover of leaves swirling away. Several earth-shaking booms told the tale of a series of narrow escapes.
Angul vibrated in its sheath, humming with impatience to be pulled. Thankfully, it didn’t jump around so violently it threw off Raidon’s dance of evasion. How long would the blade behave itself?
Points of light flared into existence around Japheth’s head. The warlock gestured, and one blue-white orb leapt upward in a halo of choking smoke. It transfixed a treant and burst with a miniature detonation of blinding illumination. The creature straightened and clapped twiggy hands to its eyes.
Three more points of light sped away from Japheth, each dazzling another of the awakened trees. Only two treants continued to lean over the hollow, scrabbling after the darting monk with hands the size of bazaar carts.
“You are ever my nemesis,” Neifion said, and gestured at Japheth with a winged claw. A whirlwind of writhing vines attempted to wrap around the warlock, but Japheth vanished into his cloak before the verdant strands could tighten.
Raidon dodged a treant fist, feinting as if to dash out of the hollow. Instead he threw himself into a backward roll, covering the distance to the still chuckling Lord of Bats in half a heartbeat. He flipped out of the roll and channeled his backward momentum to twist his body around, clenching his fists tight even as it took fire from his cerulean spellscar.
The spinning backfist caught the Lord of Bats beneath his pointy, ratlike chin. The sound of the contact boomed across the fey forest. Neifion’s winged body arced through the air, off the platform, and across the clearing. It smashed into the knee of a blind treant.
Raidon leaped after his foe. The monk realized his error even as he committed himself to the attack-the awakened tree that had inadvertantly stopped the Lord of Bats’s progress through the air was no longer blind.
The monk twisted his body, trying to alter his trajectory in the air. A treant fist the size of a boulder clipped him, and broke Raidon’s course toward Neifion with a sharp correction directly down.
Raidon managed to twist one final time, orienting himself so he could slap his arms out on either side to break his fall. But the tree creature’s fist continued downward too, and like a hammer, pounded him into the anvil that was the ground.
Japheth stepped from his cloak. The thunder of massive fists flailing the ground shuddered through the earth, nearly making him stumble, even though the clearing lay several dozen paces away through a screen of obscuring trees. The warlock saw Raidon darting about, avoiding one bone-crushing blow after another. Each dodge seemed a minor miracle.
Why hadn’t Raidon drawn Angul? Raidon was exceptional, but the blade in the monk’s hand made him nearly unbeatable, at least against most foes.
But Neifion was in a different category. Their chances against the archfey, even with Angul in play, were poor. The Lord of Bats was simply too powerful on his home turf, as the creature had rightly boasted.
The only way he and Raidon were going to escape was to convince Neifion to give up his vengeance. Which meant Raidon’s earlier diplomatic tack was correct. Japheth either had to try that again, or just turn and run away into the forest …
Japheth stepped around the bole of a tree into the clearing, just in time to see Raidon’s string of successes end beneath a treant fist. The sound of the impact was awful.
But Neifion was on his back, and had reverted to his humanoid form. By the way the archfey was shaking his head and groaning, it was obvious the monk had landed a telling blow before his fall.
Perfect!
Japheth called on his pact, incanting the apocalypses over which a star named Khirad had burned over the ages. Akin to the light of the star itself, a pale blue flame sprang from the warlock’s brow. The light washed over the supine Lord of Bats. Though still adjusting to the lore of his new pact, Japheth knew that Khirad’s radiance sometimes revealed secrets and gruesome insights. With its gleam in his eyes, perhaps the Lord of Bats would forget his vengeance for a time.
“Neifion, listen!” called Japheth. “Recall what the half-elf said; what do you really know about Malyanna’s ultimate intentions?”
The bald head of his old master wavered around to look at Japheth. The creature’s pupils were huge, and glowed pale blue.
“She serves ancient powers,” Neifion said. “She’s no different than any fervent cleric of forgotten gods. She’s dangerous, but all her actions are ultimately futile. Whatever entities she serves, their time is over. It is the way of the worlds.”
“Lord of Bats, search your heart, and your memories,” said Japheth. “Do you really, truly believe Malyanna’s actions are futile? She has found her ‘Key of Stars’ and even now likely presents it to the Eldest aboleth in Xxiphu. Trust me when I tell you this: she could unlock an age of horror, one so overwhelming that it could completely wipe away Toril and its echoes. If the world dies, so dies the Feywild.”