Probably.
Sometimes, he wondered.
The stricture tightened further, as if warning him that even doubt regarding the oath’s efficacy might itself be a betrayal. That time Taal couldn’t help but shudder slightly with the pain.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, Malyanna was before him.
“Don’t look too long into the void, Taal,” she said. “It is different out here than viewing it from the safety of the Edge. We are over the Edge. Even I know better. The rules are different here.”
The eladrin had misread his distress. He swallowed. Despite everything, he was buoyed by evidence that the woman was not omniscient. Her plans could still fail.
“Thank you for your concern,” he said.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” the woman replied. “I’m only worried for the potential loss of a talented servant. That, and I enjoy our little conversations.”
“Hmmph.”
Malyanna laughed, then pointed. “Look!”
Taal gazed in the direction of the eladrin’s finger.
A wide swath of void ahead wavered like a black, star-spangled curtain billowing in a breeze.
“The discontinuity?” he said.
Malyanna nodded. The grin on her face was too wide for Taal’s liking.
In the space of ten long heartbeats, Xxiphu plunged through the veil and into the pseudo-space that adhered to reality like a cyst.
Humid, briny air slapped across Taal’s face.
Xxiphu appeared over a circular plain shrouded in churning white mist. The city dived out of a pale, bruised blot of light hanging in the colorless sky like a shoddy imitation of the sun. The detritus of Faerunian seawater and flotsam pulled in the city’s wake rained down into the fog. Their impromptu halo was finally gone.
Hundreds of creatures like those he’d glimpsed in the void fluttered madly around that side of the glowing discontinuity like moths around a candle flame. They continually spiraled in, only to disappear. Their numbers were constantly replenished from curling edges of the shrouding mist below.
The fog repeatedly threw filaments of arcing white upward that fell back to create grand arches that lasted for several heartbeats. The colorless expanse pulsed and boiled, and gave up its progeny of dread to the discontinuity.
Screams echoed up from the veiling fog, savage and cruel. Mixed with those were snatches of chants, fell music, and sounds like cracking stone and shattering crystal. The cacophony bored into Taal, as if designed to compel a cry of protest. He raised his hands to his ears.
Malyanna said something. Her voice broke in easily above the ambient sounds, revealing the volume to be a chimera of his imagination. He took a relieved breath. The eladrin was looking at him expectantly.
“What?” he asked.
“Pay attention, Taal!” the eladrin said. “Do you see anything familiar?” She pointed across the expanse.
Some of the disturbances in the mist that he’d taken for prominences were actually solid structures. The tops of slender mesas peeked above the coiling white.
Something much larger loomed near the horizon, some kind of mountain perhaps, but intervening patches of mist obscured it. But in any case, Malyanna was pointing at the mesas.
“What’s their significance?” he asked.
“Can’t you tell?” she said.
He concentrated. Knowing what to look for, he saw there were hundreds, maybe more. He focused on the nearest.
The object wasn’t entirely a natural mesa, he saw. More like an … obelisk. A four-sided pillar, actually. What he’d taken for striations were actually glyphs scribed down the sides, depicting a frieze whose subject was hidden by the mist.
It looked like Xxiphu.
All the pillars looked like Xxiphu, minus a primeval aboleth crouched on top.
“I don’t understand …,” he said.
“Xxiphu is only a single seed, darling,” said Malyanna. “The first, and oldest. When I open the Far Manifold, all these will quicken, and disperse across the world and its echoes like fluffs of dandelion. Remember how beautiful a single aboleth city looked over the Sea of Fallen Stars? Imagine a thousand Xxiphus hovering over the Faerun, darkening the land with their shadows!” The eladrin laughed.
His breath caught. It was a mad vision. “The gods won’t stand for such an invasion,” he said.
“They ignored one floating city of aboleths!” Malyanna said. “But yes, you’re right, they won’t ignore an armada. But by then it’ll be too late. The Sovereignty is only a herald for the changes that await Toril.”
Taal imagined the age of horror for a land subjugated by aboleths and shuddered. “What could be worse?” he said.
Malyanna chuckled. “The Sovereignty waits for the Far Manifold to open, to quicken all the remaining seeds,” she said. “But the Sovereignty’s ascendance will be only a harbinger. When the Far Manifold gapes wide, the cosmos will be finally and fully undefended from the infinity that lies beyond it. Everything will be different then. All reality will become one with the Far Realm. And I will gain my reward.”
“You’re mad,” he said.
Pain seared his temples, and his knees buckled.
“Have a care,” Malyanna said.
Taal gasped. “What I mean is, you’re mad to believe that what lies beyond the Far Manifold will care about your efforts to open the way, or even notice you!” he said. “You’ll be … absorbed, like everything else!”
She tapped her long scarlet fingernails on the Dreamheart. “I think not,” she said. The great eye within the stone blinked.
The band of pain around Taal’s head lessened. He drew in several deep breaths. He was surprised he could still think. Though he’d explained his initial outburst as concern for the eladrin noble, he’d never before gainsaid Malyanna so bluntly.
What was wrong with him? It was as if his subconscious was finally done with servitude, and had decided to leap from the precipice of his gods-damned oath.
Malyanna drifted closer to the edge of the balcony and held up the sphere, waking new glimmers of light from its depths.
Taal’s agony faded further, but the point had apparently been made: watch it, or die. Taal got to his feet, blinking away the last slivers of pain. He joined his mistress at the balcony’s edge.
He saw Xxiphu was settling down into the mist. From a distance the fog had seemed opaque, but beneath its feathery surface, the vapor proved translucent.
A solid plain of mottled ground lay beneath the drifting white. As the city continued down, a great crater resolved. Jagged cracks burst from its periphery like streamers from a sculpture of the sun.
Xxiphu continued lower, until its foundation settled into the gaping hole. A muffled thud vibrated up through Taal’s boots.
The cries, screams, and peals of dread melody he’d heard earlier rippled across the plain. But the sound of his own breathing was louder, as was the occasional low-pitched growl of his totem.
Taal made out other obelisks, like shadows as tall as mountains, in the far distance. Odd protuberances, pools of varicolored liquids, and slick phosphorescent trails decorated the ground. Few of the creatures he’d seen above the mist apparently ventured below it. The alien threat of the scene wormed its way into Taal’s heart and cooled it to the temperature of ice.
“Come,” said Malyanna. She glanced at Taal and the shadow hound, then at the petrified form of Carnis. “Beyond these hollowed columns lies a door. And I have the Key to open it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)
Feywild
Warmth like a welcoming hearth fire drew Raidon onward. His Cerulean Sign knew the name Forever’s Edge. With every heartbeat, a pulse of familiarity tingled from his chest to suffuse the rest of his body. With every step, the connection grew stronger. His spellscar was again his guide.