“Before we go looking for Vestapalk,” said Roghar. Albanon nodded. “How do you know that?” the dragonborn asked.
“It’s like a splinter in your finger. When you first look, all you see is the end of it, but if you poke and squeeze it, you see more.” Albanon abandoned his attempts to stand still. His nerves were twitching inside him and he started to pace back and forth in front of the fireplace. “I focused on it as if it was a spell I was trying to master. Whenever I thought about confronting Vestapalk, it got so intense I felt sick. But if I thought about going north, especially if I thought about all of us going north, it was easier.” He glanced up at the others. “I think that whatever’s out there is something that will help us defeat Vestapalk and the Voidharrow.”
“You said that’s what you were looking for in your books!” Belen growled.
“Because I’d rather have reliable guidance than some weird feeling I can’t explain,” Albanon snapped back at her. The fragment of the gate was still in his hand. He clenched his fist around it, finding something reliable in its hard shape. The others fell silent again. Albanon could hear his own rasping breath.
After a long moment, Uldane raised his voice for the first time. “Halflings have a saying: when the river takes your barge pole, there’s nothing to do but ride the current until you find a new one. Maybe we should follow Albanon’s feeling and see where it leads.”
“But you know where a river goes,” said Tempest. “We don’t know where Albanon’s feeling goes. Or where it comes from.” She met Albanon’s gaze. “Don’t you find it odd,” she said, “that this feeling came on after Kri used Tharizdun’s power against you?”
“No,” said Albanon quietly. “I don’t find it odd at all. That’s the other reason I didn’t mention it to anyone.” He shoved the gate fragment deep into his pouch and took a chunk of half-burned wood from the fireplace. With the charred end, he drew on the wall of the sitting room. “When I search my feeling for understanding, this is what I see.”
He stepped back so that everyone could see what he’d drawn; a jagged spiral spinning into an empty circle. Roghar recognized it before anyone else and hissed.
“The sign of Tharizdun. The eye of the Chained God.”
“Yes.” Albanon dropped the stick back into the fireplace and wiped his hand. “Kri told me something about the origin of the Voidharrow. It’s connected to Tharizdun’s previous attempts to escape his imprisonment-but it sounds as if Tharizdun has lost control of the Voidharrow since then. Maybe helping us defeat Vestapalk is Tharizdun’s attempt to regain control.” He turned to face his friends.
“I know where my feeling comes from,” he said. “The question is whether we follow it north.”
“Do you have any idea what’s waiting for us?” Tempest asked.
Albanon shook his head. “None at all.”
He floated in darkness. There was no sound. No sensation. No hot, no cold. No up or down. If it were not for the feeling of his own hands touching his face and body, there would have been no way of telling where he ended and the darkness began.
Is this what it is like for you, Chained God? He couldn’t tell if he thought the question or spoke it out loud. There seemed to be no difference. Is this what it was like when the other gods shut you away from creation?
Another idea occurred to him, one that sent a thrill of possibility from his head to his unseen toes. Am I with you now?
The answer came upon him in a burst of brilliant light that dazzled him yet somehow did not penetrate the darkness. By its radiance, he saw entities of vast and perfect power come together in judgment against one whose only crime was marring their perfection. He cried out at the majesty of the scene. Or maybe he cried out because he knew it was only a dim reflection of true events and that if he had seen the entities in their full glory, his eyes would have burned in their sockets because he was just a man. Or maybe he cried out at the injustice committed by those too blinded by their own vision to recognize the strength a seed of imperfection might bring to the world.
In any case, he cried out, then cried out again as the one entity that had dared defy all the others was shut away, his vast power chained. And the place where the Chained God was imprisoned was much like the darkness in which the man floated, but with one important difference: the Chained God was not alone. Tharizdun shared his prison with the very source of the imperfection he had planted in the world.
It called itself the Progenitor. Once there had been other things in that imprisoning darkness, an entire world and more. But soon there was only the Progenitor, infinite in scope, assimilator of what had been before, the sum of all things.
He passed eons in the blink of an eye. Both Tharizdun and the Progenitor hungered for release, but the gods had crafted well. The walls of the prison were unbreachable, the prison itself all but forgotten. Tharizdun could only cast his gaze upon the world to which he had given the gift of change and where he was remembered as nothing more than the god of madmen.
But mad is not powerless, murmured the man in the darkness.
No, it was not. The light that wasn’t light shifted and changed and the man saw more. Tharizdun accepted the worship that was offered to him by those who rejected the perfect lies of the gods’ creation. Tharizdun whispered truths to them in their dreams and under his guidance they scoured the world and beyond for the means to break the chains that bound their lord.
They found it in a forgotten fragment of the Living Gate, long shattered, through which Tharizdun had first brought the seed of imperfection into the world.
The man in the darkness shuddered as he felt the excitement of a god. If his mind was not already broken, such eagerness would have shattered it. The fragment was not large enough to permit the escape of Tharizdun and the Progenitor, but the Chained God saw that it might be empowered. He and the Progenitor joined a portion of their beings to create something that might be a vehicle for them both.
When the human priest Albric used the fragment of the Living Gate, the Voidharrow slipped from the Chained God’s prison into the world. But even the schemes of the most patient of gods do not always go as planned. As the product of the union of Tharizdun and the Progenitor, the Voidharrow shared the qualities of both. It had Tharizdun’s desire for escape, but also the Progenitor’s rapacious need for assimilation and dominance. Albric attempted to use the Voidharrow as it was meant to be used-to create a new gate with a reach vast enough to cross all existence and pierce the borders of Tharizdun’s prison-but the Voidharrow rebelled. It took Albric and his followers and made them a part of it. They became the first plague demons.
The Abyssal Plague would have started its spread that day if slaves of the other gods had not intervened. Of the newly created demons, only Albric, now called Nu Alin, survived. The Voidharrow was destroyed except for three small vials. But the other gods still kept their secrets. They would not reveal the nature of the Voidharrow and so their slaves stood guard over it, trying to find their own way over the centuries to the truth of its nature.
They could have asked you.
The Chained God didn’t answer the man in the darkness except with another shift of the lightless light. In his prison, Tharizdun meditated on the mistakes that had been made with the Voidharrow and decided a stronger servant was needed, one who might master the Voidharrow before it mastered him. He fashioned one with dreams and whispers, guiding a dragon along the paths of madness. When the time was right, he brought the dragon and the Voidharrow together. The slaves of the gods tried to stop the union again. They could not. Tharizdun’s plans were subtle, woven in layers upon layers of deception. A seemingly chance sword thrust was actually guided by the Chained God’s intent. The Voidharrow was joined with Vestapalk. He compelled the dragon to a source of greater power and once more the gods’ slaves tried and failed to stop his plans.