"Shadowman," he whispered, recalling the name the halflings had given him.
He placed the stone on the ground in the doorway of the cottage where Aril and his mother slept, a gravestone to mark his passing. The last thing his hand touched on Faerun would be a river stone given him by a grateful halfling boy who had named him "Shadowman." He thought it fitting.
"Good-bye," he said, thinking not just of Aril.
He closed his eyes and readied himself. He did not lack for resolve but he still wanted the moment to stretch. An eternity passed between heartbeats. He savored the faint smell of pine carried by the westerly wind, the thrill of energy that permeated everything around him, all of Faerun.
He had only seen it in full in that moment. He would miss it. He took comfort in the fact that he had helped preserve it, at least for a time.
Ready, he sank into the comforting familiarity of the darkness. It saturated him, warmed him. He knew the night now the way he knew his own skin. It was part of him. It was him.
He bade it good-bye, too, and stepped through the shadows, through the planes, to Cania.
The ordinary darkness of a Faerunian night yielded to the soul-blighting darkness of the Hells. The reach of the time stop did not extend to Cania.
Cale sensed the cold of the Eighth Hell but his newfound power rendered him immune to its bite. But his enhanced senses and expanded consciousness made the horrors of the Eighth Hell more acute.
He stood on a wind-blasted plateau of cracked ice that overlooked a frozen plain cut by wide, jagged rivers of flame. Damned, agonized souls squirmed in the rivers, seethed in its heat like desperate, dying fish caught in a tidal pond. Others wandered the endless ice with empty expressions, dazed and frozen, their minds empty, their fates as cold and unforgiving as the air.
Towering, insectoid gelugons made playthings of the damned in the rivers, eviscerating, impaling, or flaying them as caprice took. Despair saturated the plane, a miasma as palpable as the cold and darkness. Shrieks of pain filled the wind, prolonged, agonized wails that Cale knew would never end. In the distance glaciers as old as the cosmos ground against each other and Cale felt in his bones the vibrations of their never-ending war.
The wind tore at his cloak, howled in his ears, and exhaled the stink of a charnel house, the reek of millions upon millions of dead who would spend eternity in pain. The suffering was eternal.
The darkness around Cale, the darkness that was Cale, swirled and churned. He felt the shadows of Cania, its deep and hidden places, its dark holes, but not as he felt them elsewhere. All shadows answered to Cale, but not to the same degree. Mephistopheles's power touched everything in Cania, tainted it, made it foreign even to Cale's divine consciousness. Cale forced Cania's darkness to answer his will and shrouded himself in its cover.
It was time to keep his promise.
Through their connection, Riven felt Cale leave Faerun and move to Cania, felt the oppressive despair and unending suffering almost as strongly as if he were standing on its ice himself. He held Weaveshear in his hand, the weapon dripping darkness. He willed his lost saber back into its scabbard and it appeared there instantly.
Around him, as still as statues, stood the company of Lathanderians, a rose-colored glow still noticeable around the edges of their shields. Several lay dead on the ground, their ears leaking lumpy red liquid.
Furlinastis's huge, dark form lay sprawled across the plains, one wing gone, countless gashes open in his scales. The shadows and wraiths that had filled the sky were gone, returned to the Plane of Shadow.
Rain hung motionless in the air. A bolt of lightning hung in the darkness, splitting the sky, caught in mid-moment by the spell. Caught so, the Shadowstorm seemed almost tranquil, beautiful.
Sakkors, too, hung in the distant sky, barely visible behind its curtain of shadows. Magadon sat in its core, lost in the Source, lost in the damage his father had done.
Rivalen eyed him, golden eyes aglow, shadows burning with the same dark power that filled Riven, that filled Cale.
"I see it, now," the Shadovar prince said, his voice hushed, pained. "It is not what I thought."
"It never is," Riven said. "Keep your promise, Rivalen."
Riven left the threat unsaid.
The shade prince nodded.
Riven looked on the faces of the Lathanderians until he found Regg. Blood and mud spattered the warrior's bearded face. Dents dotted his breastplate. Links of his mail hung loose at the shoulder. Riven reached into his beltpouch and withdrew the small pouch of Urlamspyran pipeweed. He stuffed it into one of Regg's belt pouches.
"I do not think we'll get to share that smoke."
With that, Riven drew the darkness around him, the power, and rode it to his temple on the Wayrock. He materialized on the lowered drawbridge. The night sky above him twinkled with stars instead of the oppressive ink of the Shadowstorm.
His girls slept in the entry foyer, frozen by the time stop. He went to them, petted each in turn. He enjoyed the moment. He loved his girls. They were innocence to his transgressions.
He stood, thought of his task, and hardened his will.
He set down Weaveshear, inhaled, readied himself.
The wind gusted, pushed against Cale. He held his ground, drew on his power and let it fill his voice.
"I have come to keep my promise, devil!"
His words boomed across the plain, as loud as a thunderclap. The ground cracked, split under him. Chasms opened in the ice. Great shards of soot-stained snow and rock broke off mountains and fell in roiling clouds of ice to the plains below.
A million devils looked up and answered him with a bellow. The damned, spared their tortures for a moment, sighed at the reprieve. Somewhere, the halls of Mephistar itself rang with his words.
Within three heartbeats gelugons began to materialize around Cale, their white carapaces stained with soot, their vicious hook polearms painted with the gore of ages. Wet, greasy respiration came in pants from between their clicking mandibles. The opalescent surfaces of their bulbous eyes reflected Cale in miniature.
A dozen appeared, two score, a hundred. Their eager clacks filled Cale's ears. The ice groaned under the weight of their collective mass.
Cale stared at them in turn, let them see the power lined up behind his eyes, and their eagerness turned to uncertainty. The shadows around him roiled. They encircled him, claws scrabbling in the cracked ice, but none dared advance. They sensed what he was. He was not for them and they knew it. He stood in their midst untouched, an island of shadow in an ocean of diabolism.
"Inform your master-"
Mephistopheles appeared among them in a cloud of soot and power. They bowed at his arrival, the clack of their carapaces like the breaking of a thousand bones.
"I was aware of your presence the moment you dared set foot in my domain, shadeling."
The archfiend stood as tall as a titan, towering over his minions, over Cale. His black, tattered wings cast a shadow over the assemblage, over the whole of the plane. The heat from his glowing red flesh melted the ice and snow under his feet and sent up faint clouds of steam. The wind stirred his coal-black hair, tore dark smoke from his muscular form. He held his great iron polearm in one hand and lines of unholy power danced on its tines.
Cale truly saw the archfiend for the first time. Mephistopheles was nearly as old as the multiverse, his power and presence as rooted in reality as the celestial spheres. Shar was older, but not Mask. Cale understood the archfiend's full power for the first time.
Understood, too, that he was a match for it.