Finder laughed. “Because I’m not your servant, Darkbringer! I’m your doom.” The bard sang out a shrill note, dispelling the enchantment about the para-elemental ice, leaving it completely exposed to the air. Cold shot out from tip of Finder’s dagger in a blast of icy wind.
The mouths shrieked as the tendrils supporting them froze and turned as brittle as glass. Finder slashed at the constricting vines with his dagger, and they shattered into pieces.
Moander realized immediately it had made a mistake. The god had instructed its minions to channel most of its power into protecting it from fire, leaving it vulnerable to freezing. The para-elemental cold emanating from the tip of the bard’s dagger was a dangerous threat. The god abandoned the idea of capturing the bard. Survival had higher priority.
As Finder hovered above the god’s body, holding out half of his magical stone, he thought of Akabar Bel Akash. The arguments the two of them had had over the finder’s stone brought the Turmish mage’s face readily to the bard’s mind. A beam of bright light sprang out from the piece of the stone, aimed at the center of the the pile of rotting vegetation.
The eyes at the end of the tendrils blinked shut in the light. Without warning, a whole tree shot out from the god’s body, aimed right at Finder. The bard dodged to one side—right into an ambush.
Finder suddenly found himself pelted with spears fashioned from the trunks of sapling trees. Several struck him glancing blows, then bounced away, but one pierced his thigh. The bard eased the spear out of his flesh. It was time to stop being a target. With his dagger held out before him, Finder plunged toward Moander, following the beacon light from the piece of magical stone.
The vegetation on the surface of the god’s body shriveled as the bard approached it and crackled like glass as he shot straight through it into Moander’s interior. The bard could hear the mouths of the god’s body shrieking in pain. As the pile shifted and tumbled, Finder was slammed about like a die rattling in a cup. With every tumble, he crashed through frozen branches and vines and corpses of wild animals.
Suddenly the tumbling stopped. Finder pulled himself together and began to follow the light from the finder’s stone once again. The deeper he moved into the god’s body, the warmer it became, so the cold from the para-elemental ice took longer to freeze the vines that tried to choke and entangle the bard. Finder was forced to expend more and more energy slashing and hacking with his dagger to clear his path.
The bard began to feel weak from exhaustion and the blood he’d lost from the wound in his leg. Just as he began to consider abandoning his quest, the beam from the piece of the finder’s stone struck a patch of darkness it couldn’t penetrate. Finder halted in surprise and fear.
The patch of darkness was shaped like a doorway, and Finder recognized it immediately. It was the gate between the Lost Vale and the plane of Tarterus, the gate that Moander had used to transport its saurial minions to the Realms. The entire body of the god had been built around the gate.
Moander’s normal abode was the Abyss, but one could reach the Abyss from Tarterus. Moander must have sucked Akabar through the gate, through Tarterus, to its abode in the Abyss.
A small, brilliant gem near the base of the gate caught the bard’s eye. He picked it up to examine it more closely. It was the shape and color of a drop of blood, and it felt warm in his hand. Very warm. It seemed to throb with great power. Could it be the seed that had resurrected Moander? Finder wondered. What would happen to the god’s new body if it was separated from the seed by a gate?
The bard tried to toss the gem through the gate, but it bounced back. It would have to be carried through by a living person, he realized. Finder retrieved the gem and slipped it inside his boot. He approached the gate, but he hesitated before stepping through it.
In his youth, the bard had visited the ethereal and astral planes a number of times. As an older man, he’d investigated several of the elemental and para-elemental planes. As a prisoner of the Harpers, he’d been exiled to the region between the positive energy plane and a quasi-elemental plane. The thought of stepping through a gate leading to an outer plane, though, filled him with horror—especially so fell a region as Tarterus, where, the sages said, creatures from the Abyss and from Hades constantly fought one another for control of the land, foul and poisonous as it was, and enslaved any beings they discovered.
Dragonbait had leaped through such a gate into Tarterus to stalk evil creatures; that was how the paladin had come to be captured by the fiend Phalse and brought to the Realms. The paladin had suffered greatly at Phalse’s hands, but he had emerged from Tarterus alive. Moander’s saurial minions had survived their forced march through the plane, as well. The bard chided himself aloud for his trepidity. “Surely Finder Wyvernspur can brave its dangers.” It would be easier than facing Alias without Akabar at his side, he decided.
Finder took a deep breath and flew through the dark hole, following the light of the piece of finder’s stone.
As Alias, Olive, Dragonbait, and Grypht watched Finder dive into Moander’s body, they were filled with hope. The god cried out in agony and lost its balance on the mountain slope, tumbling down the slope into the vale, shedding great chunks of its body. Then it lay still. The adventurers emerged from the cave and for a long time continued their vigil over the god’s fallen body, but neither Finder nor Akabar emerged from the mass of greenery.
Alias was beginning to consider climbing into the vale to do battle with the god herself, when suddenly she felt as if a burning brand had touched her sword arm. She looked down at her arm and shouted with joy, “It’s gone! Moander’s sigil is gone! The god is dead!”
Dragonbait clutched at his chest from the pain the disappearing sigil had caused him, then embraced the swordswoman.
“Finder’s destroyed Moander!” Olive shouted with glee.
“No … he has only destroyed the body Moander occupied in this world,” Grypht reminded the others, and his words cast a shadow of foreboding on their elation.
20
Finder in the
Underworld
Once he’d passed through the dark gate inside Moander’s Realmsian body, Finder found himself hovering a few feet over a bog bordering a river. The soil from the bog glowed a dull red, bathing the surface of the plane about him in a hellish light. The plants of the bog lay on their sides, withered and brown. He was grateful his flying spell hadn’t worn off yet, for he would just as soon not touch the soil or the plants. The river was as black as night and flowed fast and smooth. Although the bard had never been to Tarterus, he knew enough about the plane to realize that the river was the Styx, and that to touch or drink from it would bring complete oblivion.
The air of the plane might have been warm before he arrived, but around his freezing dagger it remained chill. In the sky overhead, he could see a line of receding spheres, like pearls spread out on an invisible string, all glowing a dull red. There was a different sphere of Tarterus for every world in the prime material plane. He was on the sphere connected to the Realms, and somewhere out there was the sphere of Tarterus that was linked to the saurial’s home world. There was air between the spheres, and he could fly from this sphere of Tarterus to the saurials’ sphere of Tarterus, but that was not his destination.