Depths of Madness - Erik Scott De Bie [125]
"Twi-!" Liet screamed. His voice, halfway through her name, was suddenly that of Gestal once more. "-light," it finished. The change swept through him almost instantly, the demonflesh hissing across his skin like blood. His eyes were bathed, once more, in chaos.
Ruuk's swords cut into Gestal and blood flew. The demon thrall cursed and sputtered and dodged back. A slaying spell came from the sharn, bearing down upon the demon thrall, and struck him solidly in the chest. In a heartbeat, he started to fall apart.
But even as the sham's spell ruined him, Gestal screamed a single word of power. It was a word of absolute anarchy and madness, a word sprung from the depths of the primordial chaos that had existed before the Realms had ever known light. Even as the moisture evaporated from his body, his flesh withered, and the blood running from his lips hardened before it touched the ground, Gestal uttered the word of chaos.
To Twilight, it was merely a discordant cacophony of sound and fury in a set of twisting syllables. It signified nothing more than a crude limerick, a foul jest, or a random distortion of a tale told by an idiot.
To Ruukthalmuramaxamin, cursed as it was, it was doom.
Had any mortal spoken a parallel word of dictum in the presence of a sane sharn, it might have shrugged off the effects. But the curse that the High Arcanist Nega had left Ruuk, which chained its alien soul tightly within the bonds of law and order, had caused a single weakness: pure, unadulterated chaos.
The sharn screamed, bubbled, and shifted colors. It became a tree; a three-limbed dog; a tiny elf girl with angelic features; a shattered, crackling sword; an apple; and a hangman's scaffold. Then it exploded in a burst of burning power and brackish gore.
The room was silent for a heartbeat. Twilight gaped at the remnants of Ruuk drenching her body and at Gestal, staring with murder in his mad gaze.
"You," he said, voice like weathered rock, stealing Twilight's focus.
The spell had ravaged his body, sucking the blood and juices from it like a century in the desert condensed in a single heartbeat. The flesh on his bones lay withered and black, drier than white sand. He coughed and gagged, though nothing would come, and struggled to his knees.
"You" he cursed.
Though he looked weak, Twilight made no move toward him. The power she had just witnessed rendered her speechless and paralyzed with fear, more firmly than any compulsion Gestal could have cast. If he had struck down a sharn-mad as it might be-with a single word, Twilight could do nothing.
What a fool she was to face him. Gestal was far beyond her-far beyond anyone.
Thenhe raised his hands, intoning the words to a new, fouler ritual, demanding Demogorgon to strike down this hateful traitor who knelt before him.
Twilight tried to lever herself up, but she slipped on the sham's blood and went down hard. Wincing with agony from her wounds, Twilight climbed to her feet and took up her sword, shakily. Betrayal hardly seemed hers any longer, not with its gray surface burned away to white. The handle was slick and scalding; she dropped it with a curse.
She tried to pick it up again, but when she bent down, her legs crumpled, her feet lost their grip, and she fell, face first, to the floor.
Gestal continued his long, complex invocation to Demogorgon, and Twilight knew beyond a doubt that its conclusion would mean her death. From the flames of his scrying bowl and the twin pits, his shadow loomed out, long and fierce.
"What do I do?" she sobbed, calling upon Erevan, demanding that he help her, cursing his name when he was silent. She could shadowjump away, but not far. She was in no position to flee-she could hardly walk. "How do I-?"
Then her right hand brushed something hard on the floor and her-heart almost stopped. The answer had come to her. Not from Erevan, not from experience or instinct, but from her own mind. She rose slowly, her fingers white-knuckled.
"No," she cried. "No!"
She ran, limping, toward