“I think it’s time for you to go, Rivalen.”
Rivalen’s lips curled in a sardonic smile. “You’re right, father. And I don’t think we’ll meet again.”
“You don’t collect coins anymore, do you, Rivalen?”
Rivalen took his hands from his cloak and showed his father empty palms. “Why would I? What are coins to me? What is anything to me?”
“Indeed,” Telemont said, and felt a deep sadness. He’d lost his son. His son had lost himself.
Rivalen bowed, the gesture half-hearted, almost mocking. “Goodbye, Most High.”
The darkness shrouded Rivalen, and then he was gone, returned to Ordulin, to the thoughts and plans that plagued him, to the ideas that had, it seemed, driven him mad.
Telemont stood alone in the center of the room, his thoughts on the past, his wife, his sons as they’d been thousands of years before. He remembered his sons as children: Brennus’s laugh, Rivalen’s contagious chuckle. He remembered his wife’s smile, what it felt like to hold her in his arms every night.
“My lord?” Hadrhune said.
Lost in his thoughts, Telemont had not heard Hadrhune re-enter the room.
“You never met Alashar, Hadrhune.”
“Most High?”
“Never mind,” Telemont said, and smiled softly.
“Most High, what of Prince Rivalen? Will he aid us in capturing the Chosen?”
“No,” Telemont said, his thoughts hardening. “Rivalen is lost to us.”
“I. . don’t understand. What will he do, then?”
Telemont faced his most trusted counselor. “What won’t he do is the appropriate question.”
Hadrhune licked his lips, dug his thumbnail into the damaged darkstaff he still held. “I’m not following, Most High.”
Telemont walked to the glassteel window and stared out at Thultanthar.
“Rivalen wants to die, Hadrhune, but he wants to kill the world first.”
Brennus stood at his ebonwood lectern in the three-story library of his manse in Sakkors. In the past he’d spent most of his time in Shade Enclave, but the capital city of New Netheril held small appeal for him anymore.
Books and scrolls from the various ages of Faerunian history lined shelves that extended floor to ceiling on three of the library’s walls-spellbooks, treatises on magical theory, histories from all over the continent, catalogs of arcane devices, lexicons of demonic and diabolical entities. The knowledge contained in the materials he’d gathered over the centuries could keep a sage occupied for a lifetime.
A highly detailed globe of Toril hung in the air in the center of the room, suspended only by magic. Its slow rotation mirrored that of Toril’s. At Brennus’s command, the globe could show Toril’s terrain, its political borders and cities, or the lay of magic across the planet-where it was concentrated, where it was dead, the locations of various places of power.
Spicy, pungent smoke spiraled from a block of incense burning in a platinum censer atop a table near the globe. His homunculi perched on the table to either side of the censer like tiny gargoyles, clawing at the smoke and giggling as their hands split the streams of black smoke into finer ribbons. One jumped at the smoke as it rose, lost his footing, and tumbled off the table and onto the floor. The other laughed hysterically at his sibling’s misfortune. Brennus watched them with a half-smile, wondering how constructs crafted of his own blood and essence could be so filled with humor and simple joy. Would he have been more prone to such things had his life taken a different turn? He remembered laughing often with his mother before she died.
Before she was murdered.
He’d changed after that. He’d obeyed the Most High’s wishes and turned to divination rather than shaping. He would have been an entirely different man, with an entirely different life, had his mother lived. Strange how one vacancy could so change a life. Rivalen had not just murdered their mother. He’d murdered what Brennus could have been.
He eyed the books and scrolls piled high on the lectern before him, all of them connected in some way to the dead god Mask, his worshipers, Erevis Cale, the faith of Amaunator, Kesson Rel, and the Cycle of Night. He felt that he had all the pieces of the puzzle before him, but he could not quite form them into a coherent image.
He was missing something.
He was missing the son, Erevis Cale’s son. The son had to be the key.
“Subject: Mephistopheles,” he said, and charged the words with magic.
The shadows coalesced in several dozen places around the room and took the form of tenebrous hands. The homunculi looked up at the hands, eyes wide at the simple spell. Each of the magical hands lifted a book or scroll from a shelf and whisked it to Brennus’s lectern. After setting down its burden, a hand would dissipate back into the air.
The homunculi watched the books float through the air and clapped with delight.
Brennus spent the next several hours learning all he could. He supplemented his mundane study with magical queries directed at entities in the Outer Planes. He used spells to pull knowledge from the informational currents that floated in the ether, learning what he could. More and more pieces formed.
Mask had been Shar’s herald on Toril, and possibly her son. Shar existed on many worlds, in many planes, and always her goal was the same-the annihilation of worlds. The process, The Cycle of Night, had run its course on many worlds, leaving voids in its wake, and had begun on Toril. The hole in the center of Ordulin, the hole that Rivalen spent long hours pondering, was the cycle’s seed.
But its growth appeared to have been slowed, or stopped.
In all his inquiries, Brennus could find not a single instance of the cycle ending on a world without that world’s annihilation. Not one. The Lady of Loss had murdered billions with her nihilism. And his brother embraced it now.
We’re all already dead, Rivalen had said.
His brother was murdering the world.
Brennus wanted Rivalen dead more than ever.
The guardian constructs flanking the door to the library-suits of archaic plate armor animated and given a rudimentary sentience by Brennus’s spellcasting-lurched into motion and took offensive stances, halberds held before them.
At first Brennus thought his brother might have returned, but the alarm spell that pinged in his mind told him otherwise. In a few moments the library’s door opened to reveal the thin, shadow-shrouded form of his longtime majordomo, Lhaaril.
The shield guardians moved before him, threatening him with their polearms.
Lhaaril’s eyes flashed with surprise. The shadows drew closely about his finely tailored, elaborately embroidered robe.
“An experiment,” Brennus explained. “I linked the shield guardians’ perception to various alarm spells within the manse,” Brennus explained. “They sensed you coming when your passage took you through the foyer. What is it, Lhaaril? I’m in the middle of things.”
Brennus uttered a command word that returned the shield guardians to their neutral stance flanking the door.
“I have news, my lord,” Lhaaril said. “One of the scouts has returned.
Brennus did not miss Lhaaril’s emphasis on one. “One? Something happened to the other?”
Lhaaril shifted on his feet. The shadows around him swirled, betraying his discomfort. “It appears so. I think it best that the story come from the remaining scout.”
The homunculi, no doubt sensing Brennus’s piqued interest, sprinted across the library, clambered up his cloak, and took station on his shoulders.
Lhaaril dutifully ignored them, even when they stuck their tongues out at him.
“Shall I have him brought to you, Prince?”
“Yes, and right away.”
Brennus deactivated the shield guardians before Lhaaril returned with the scout. Brennus searched his memory for the scout’s name, found it-Ovith. The scout stood a head taller than Lhaaril, perhaps a hand shorter than Brennus. Plated armor, dented from many battles, encased his broad frame. His scabbard, however, hung empty from his belt. He put his arm across his chest and lowered himself to one knee.