Darkvision - Bruce R. Cordell [101]
The elemental lord's silence felt like further condemnation. She swore, "Blood and fire!" She opened her eyes. Prince Monolith was gone. She'd constructed the entire exchange. Was it guilt? Disgusted, she threw the enchanted flask as hard as she could. It clanged against the opposite wall and toppled to the floor. A thin stream of whisky poured into the corridor. She felt shame at how far she'd tumbled, at how much she depended on that flask. There had been too many drunken nights. And days. Had she held too tightly to the Cerulean Blade? Angul should have remained where he was forged.
She shook away the phantoms and asked, "Where has that rock gotten to?"
Xet, thinking she commanded it, launched into the air and shot up the corridor in the direction they'd been traveling.
Kiril snatched up the leaking verdigris god and screwed on the top before Xet's light was completely gone. The inexhaustible contents could easily be the genesis of another deluge in the ancient corridor, and she preferred to keep the spirits for herself. She dashed after the retreating light and carefully clipped the flask to her belt as she jogged.
Ahead, Xet's light paled before a new source of illumination. A dim gray glow leaked down the corridor. Kiril pulled Sadrul from its sheath and chased Xet to the corridor's end.
She entered a chamber whose dimensions measured at least a hundred paces in all directions. Slender five-story windows punctured the wall to her right. The wan, gray light pushed into the tower through them. She supposed the windows pierced the tower's exterior, and therefore looked out over the Raurin, but a gauzy haze filled each narrow enclosure, smothering most of the light.
Pillars scribed with glyphs, unfamiliar to Kiril, held up the beamed ceiling. Great slabs of stone made up the walls opposite the windows, each bearing line after line of unreadable script. A massive humanoid sculpture stood on the left side of the chamber, near the wall glyphs. Its arms were extended so that its hands rested against a convex glass wall perhaps as high as an ancient oak. Its posture suggested that it sought to push the circle of glass farther into the wall-or to hold back the wide circle from moving into the chamber. Whatever its intention, the threat of action was proved hollow by the centuries it had stood. Kiril could make out some sort of fluid languidly churning and turning behind the dusty glass.
The sculpture was three times as tall as Prince Monolith, but the earth elemental ignored his stony kin. He gazed with some agitation at the glass wall. The tiny dragonet lit on Monolith's shoulder.
"Thanks for leaving me in the dark," said Kiril as she reached the elemental lord.
"Xet was with you," replied Monolith, distracted. "I heard something… splashing… and moved to investigate while you rested. Kiril, look at this barrier-can you sense what lies behind it?"
"I can see that it-"
"It is a terrible threat. It is water, elemental and potent! Something beyond even my power, perhaps, caught here in a vast glass globe. This stone sculpture holds it in place, else it would roll forth. Even outside the glass, I can feel its enmity, its will to drown, dissolve, and erode all that it encounters. I don't think I've ever experienced such raw hatred before. The animating spirit that suffuses it-it is asleep! Perhaps I should vanquish this aqueous insult…" The elemental lord ran its great hand across the glassy wall, as if feeling for a seam.
"Monolith!" yelled Kiril. "You really irk me sometimes, you know? Who told me to leave off prying into things that don't concern us? Leave it alone, unless this sphere is the evil influence that Thormud tracked across half of Faerun."
The crystal dragonet chimed.
The earth elemental paused, then lowered its massive limb. "No, it has nothing to do with what we seek. Xet says we must ascend still higher."
"Then step away."
Prince Monolith complied, but said, "When we finish, I will return to determine the nature of the