The pressure in his mind mounted.
Die! Die! Magadon railed.
Rivalen and Riven recognized Cale's intent and their voices joined his.
Ignoring the screams of Regg and his company, the shadowwalkers, Magadon's rage, they drew on their shared godhead and stopped time.
When they completed the casting, raindrops hung suspended in mid-air. A lightning bolt split the sky, frozen in place. Sakkors hung atilt in the air, still glowing, perhaps two bowshots from a collision with the ground. The Lathanderians and the shadowwalkers, light and shadow, were frozen in the moment on the wet ground, faces contorted with pain, blood pouring from eyes, ears, noses.
Cale had only a short time before time would resume, before Magadon would die. While the spell was in effect, they could affect no mortal beings, not directly. With no time to waste, Cale wasted none. He had already made up his mind.
"I am saving Magadon," he said to Riven and let the words register.
Riven nodded, missing his point. "Agreed, but how? We have only moments."
Cale looked him in the face. "There's only one way."
Riven looked up sharply. "You can't pay, Cale. It doesn't come out, except…"
His eye widened.
Cale nodded. The divinity could come out of him only when he died.
Riven's face fell. He shook his head, began to pace. "No, no, no. There's another way."
"This is the only way."
Riven stopped pacing and glared him. "We have this power, we can do something else. There's another way."
Cale knew better. Even if they could defeat Mephistopheles, they could not do so before he destroyed what he had taken from Magadon. "Riven, it's the only way. Riven-"
Riven held up his hands, as if trying to stop Cale's words from charging toward him.
"Just give me a damned moment, Cale. A moment."
Cale waited, felt the power of the spell draining away. He shifted on his feet.
Riven looked up, his expression hard. "No, you're giving up again, Cale."
Emotion flooded Cale but he could not determine if it was anger or something else. He stepped forward and grabbed Riven by the cloak. The shadows around him engulfed them both, spun and whirled.
"I'm not! I'm fighting all the way." He calmed himself, spoke in a softer voice, releasing Riven. "I'm fighting all the way, Riven."
Maybe Riven understood, maybe he didn't.
They stared at one another a long moment. Riven's face fell.
"How can it be the only way, Cale? After all this?"
Cale shook his head, smiling softly. "How can it not? How else could it end?"
Riven looked away, down. "You're doing this for him?"
"There's nothing else," Cale said. "Just us. That's the reason for everything. Understand?"
Riven looked up, his face stricken.
Cale held out a hand. "You've been my friend, Riven."
Riven's lower lip trembled. He clasped Cale's hand, pulled him close for an embrace.
Cale took Weaveshear by the blade, handed it hilt first to Riven. The reality of his decision started to settle on him. His legs felt soft under him. His hand shook. Riven pretended not to notice.
"The fiend doesn't get this," Cale said.
Riven took it, nodded.
"I will keep my promise," Cale said. "You keep ours to him. You remember it?"
Riven's face hardened. He nodded again. "I remember it."
Cale turned to Rivalen. "Keep your word, too, Shadovar."
Rivalen's face was expressionless, his eyes aglow.
Faces and memories poured through Cale's mind but he pushed them aside and pictured Cania. He drew the darkness around him.
At the last moment, he changed his mind and pictured not the icy wastes of the Eighth Hell but the face of a grateful boy, the boy who had once invited him into the light. It suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world that Cale see Aril, a boy he had met only once.
"Good-bye," Cale said to Riven.
Riven didn't speak, perhaps he couldn't. Eyes averted, he signed, "Farewell" in handcant.
Aril slept on his side, peaceful in his small bed. Blankets covered him to the neck. His head, with its mop of hair, poked from the bedding. Cale stared at the boy for a time, thinking of times past, friends and enemies, all of them the scar tissue of a lifetime. Aril slept peacefully, contentedly. Cale found the moment… fitting.
A boy sleeping safely in his bed, free of fear, with his whole life before him. He realized why he had needed to see Aril instead of Shamur, Tamlin, or Tazi. He wanted the last person he saw on Faerun to be innocent.
He put the back of his shadow-dusted hand on the boy's cheek and thought of Jak.
"I did what I could."
He hoped it made a difference for someone, somewhere.
He stepped through the shadows and into the darkness outside the small cottage. The quietude of the village seemed alien after the chaos of the battlefield. He had only a short while before time back in the Shadowstorm would resume.
The smell of chimney fires filled the cool air. He glanced around the village. Three score cottages sat nestled around a tree-dotted commons, quiet, peaceful, safe. The two-story temple of Yondalla, the lone stone structure among the log and mud-brick buildings of the village, sat near the common's edge and rose protectively over the whole, a shepherd to the sheep. Smoke issued from the temple's two chimneys, filling the glen with the smell of cedar, and home. The hearths burned fragrant wood and were never allowed to grow cold.
Cale inhaled deeply. He fought back tears born in realizations come too late.
He allowed that on at least one night not long ago the village owed its safety not to Yondalla, but to him. He had killed a score of trolls while he had answered to Jak's ghost, while he tried to climb into the light.
But there was no answering to the dead, and the light was not for him. Not anymore. Not ever.
He looked up into the vault of the sky, unplagued by the roiling ink of the Shadowstorm. The Sea of Stars twinkled above him, Selune and her train of glowing Tears. He fancied he could see an absence in the celestial cluster circling the silver disc of the moon, the hole out of which one of the Tears had plummeted to Faerun, the hole for which Jak had died, the hole mirrored in Cale's soul. He thought of the little man and his pipe, tried to smile, but failed. He had never filled the hole. And now he never would.
Power burned in him, cold, dark, near limitless. He could hear words spoken in the shadows on the other side of Toril, could rend mountains with his words. He knew more, sensed more, was more, than he could have imagined. His memories, Mask's memories, reached back thousands of years-before Ephyras even-recollections of deeds, people, and places long gone.
Melancholy shrouded him, wrapped him as thoroughly as the shadows. He understood Mask at last, but only now, at the end of things. He realized, too, that Mask had understood him, perhaps better than he had understood himself.
You wish to transcend, Mephistopheles had told him once.
Mask had said it to him, too, though not in words.
And Cale had wished to transcend, and so he would, though not in the way he had conceived.
He felt the connection to Riven back in Sembia, a connection that reached through time and distance. The assassin's grief, buried deeply but present, touched Cale. He swallowed the fist that formed in his throat.
They were friends, by the end. It had gone unacknowledged too long. He was glad they had said appropriate good-byes. The words had seemed small for so profound a moment. Cale would miss Riven, as he had Jak.
He reached into the pocket of his cloak and removed the small throwing stone Aril had given him. He had carried it for months, a reminder, a talisman of hope. The events involving Aril seemed ancient, something that had happened on another world, in another time. The smooth rock felt warm in his hand, solid.