“Hold my hand, Rivalen,” she said, her voice a whispered gasp. Brennus saw that her other hand held the necklace Brennus now held.
Rivalen’s voice answered her, his voice from the time when he had been a young man, before he’d become a shade, before he’d become a god.
“We all die alone, mother.”
She closed her eyes and wept. Tears fell down Brennus’s cheeks in answer. He stood next to Rivalen, his hate a wall between them.
“Your father will learn of this,” Mother said.
“No. This will be known only to us. And to Shar.”
“And to me,” Brennus said through clenched teeth, as he watched the scene.
She stared at where Rivalen must have been standing, then closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.
“What did you wish for, mother?” Rivalen asked.
When she opened her eyes, Brennus was pleased to see that the hurt in her eyes was gone, replaced by anger.
“To be the instrument of your downfall.”
“Goodnight, mother. I answer to another mistress, now.”
Rivalen removed his hand from the scrying cube and the image faded.
“No,” Brennus said. “No.” He put his hands on the cube, tried to reactivate it with his own power but it remained dark, a void, a hole. Tears streamed down his face but he did not care. “Show me the rest.”
“You know the rest.”
Brennus stared at the cube, his mother’s face floating at the forefront of his memory.
“Bastard. You thrice-damned bastard. Why did you show me that?”
Rivalen, taller than Brennus by a head, stared down at him. “I thought it was time you saw what I was capable of.”
“I always knew what you were capable of.”
“I also thought it was time to remind you that my patience is not infinite.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Brennus said, wiping stupidly at his tears. “I’ll find a way.”
Rivalen put a hand on Brennus’s shoulder. “Your bitterness is sweet to the Lady, Brennus.”
Brennus slapped his brother’s hand away. “Get out of here.”
Rivalen turned away. “You see nothing, Brennus. You understand so little. I’m unmatched in power here on the Prime, but what use is my power?”
Brennus did not understand. The Lords of Shade had traveled the planes freely, always had. “You’re bound here?”
Rivalen shook his head. His left fist clenched, a small gesture of frustration. “Not bound, no. Hunted. My power protects me here. But elsewhere. . there are those who want what I possess.”
Brennus’s mind latched onto the import of the sentence. His brother feared someone, or something. Brennus could use that, perhaps. “The divinity you stole?”
Rivalen whirled on him, shadows swirling. “The divinity I took.”
“You, and Erevis Cale, and Drasek Riven.”
“Cale is gone. Mephistopheles holds his power now.”
Comprehension dawned. “Mephistopheles wants your power. He’s hunting you. He needs it for his war with Asmodeus.”
Rivalen shrugged. “No matter. I can’t safely leave this world, even as it marches to its inevitable end. I’ll be the last living thing on this planet, Brennus, screaming into the void as everything dies.”
“You’ll be dead before that,” Brennus said.
Rivalen smiled. “I could kill you easily.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. But I won’t. At least, not yet. Do you know why?”
Brennus refused to respond, but Rivalen spoke as if he did.
“Because we’re all already dead. And my bitterness, too, is sweet to the Lady.”
“Wallow in it, then,” Brennus spat. “Suffer with it.”
The shadows gathered around Rivalen. “I will. And because I do, so will everyone else.”
The darkness took him and Brennus stood alone in the scrying chamber. Sweat and shadows poured from his flesh. His heart thumped against his ribs. The homunculi emerged tentatively from the blanket of his cowl, exhaling audibly when they saw that Rivalen was gone.
“Lady was pretty,” one of them said.
“Yes,” Brennus said, turning back to the dark scrying cube where he had seen the image of his mother. He put his hand on the silver face of the cube, replaying the images in his mind, her words. They made him smile.
“You would have made her laugh,” he said to the homunculi.
His mother had encouraged Brennus’s skill with constructs and shaping magic. She’d always loved the little creatures and moving objects he’d create for her. His father, the Most High, had forced him to turn from the “frivolity” of shaping to the serious study of divination.
Something about the image Rivalen had shown him stuck in his mind, something odd.
“What did you wish for, mother?” Rivalen had asked her.
Realization struck. The meadow had been a magical place, perhaps powerful enough to grant wishes. Such places had existed in ancient Faerun. Varra had vanished from the same meadow as undead shadows had closed in on her. Brennus had seen her curl up in the flowers, had seen a flash, had visited the meadow and found the flowers gone, as if consumed.
“Gods,” he breathed, and shadows swirled around him in an angry storm.
Varra had wished herself away from there.
And the meadow had granted her wish.
“Where would she go?” he mused aloud. And then it struck him. “When would she go?”
Hope swelled in him, the antipode of Shar’s despair. He hurried to his library to renew his search.
Rivalen rode the darkness back to Ordulin, back to his haunt among the cracked stones of the plaza. Upon arrival, his expanded consciousness took in every shadow in the maelstrom. The darkness was an extension of his mind and will. In the emptiness of the ruins he heard the voice of his goddess, who whispered dooms in his ears.
Wind gusted, tore at his cloak and hair. Forks of green lightning flashed again and again across the inky vault of the sky, dividing it into a shifting matrix of jagged angles, the bursts of light painting deeper shadows on the ruined landscape.
The hole of Shar’s eye hung in the air before him, slowly rotating, imperceptibly expanding year by year, a void that would in time consume the world. Even Rivalen could not stare at it for long without feeling dizzy, nauseated. The hole took up space, but seemed apart from space, not a thing that existed but a thing that was the absence of existence.
Its depth seemed to go on forever, a hole that tunneled through the multiverse, a hole that would pull him and everything and everyone into its emptiness and stretch them across its length until all of existence was so thin that it simply ceased to be.
He felt her in there, Shar, or at least felt her essence. Her regard radiated out of the hole, like a poisonous annihilating cloud. The Shadowstorm had begun the Cycle of Night and heralded her arrival on Faerun, and The Leaves of One Night, a singular tome sacred to Shar, held her here. Rivalen had recovered the tome from the ruins of the Shadowstorm. But she was trapped now, stuck in the middle of her incarnation.
Small pieces of The Leaves of One Night, bits of parchment, whipped in the wind around the hole like wounded birds, orbiting it the way the Tears orbited Selune, darting in and out of the void, as if Shar were reading them page by page.
But she wasn’t reading them. She was writing them, writing them for Rivalen, so that he could read them and finish the Cycle of Night.
“Write the story,” he whispered to himself.
Once, long ago, he’d possessed The Leaves of One Night. When he tried to read it then, he’d found the pages empty. He’d thought the emptiness profound, meaningful somehow. How wrong he’d been. They’d merely been incomplete. They’d merely been waiting.
He watched them flutter around Shar’s eye, moths to the flame of her spite. He could see the black ink on the pages, characters, words, but the language was nothing he’d ever seen before. He needed a mortal filter to translate it, a despairing soul to serve as the lens. And that mortal filter would suffer in the process.