Elminster in Myth Drannor - Ed Greenwood [120]
His hands darted here and there among the jars and vessels that littered it. "Remain still and quiet until I bid you stir again," he ordered, turning around again with a mottled purple egg and a silver key in his hand. The spells I am about to cast will not appear to have any affect; they will take hold about the sphere, and reach you only when I cause the field that now encloses you to vanish."
Elminster nodded, and The Masked began to work magic, laying three small but completely unfamiliar enchantments upon the sphere before embarking on the first magic that El could guess the purpose of. Spheres like the one El was floating in seemed to be the form in which elven mages combined magics to work together upon a single target or focus.
The Masked calmly uttered a single unfamiliar word, and the sphere caught fire.
El wriggled just a little as the heat struck him. The elven sorcerer was already Grafting another magic as the flames slowed, faltered, and then abruptly went out, leaving a single rope of smoke climbing into the darkness overhead.
When the Masked turned to face the sphere again, he crooked his finger like a harpist plucking a string, and the smoke abruptly bent toward him. He rotated that hand slowly, as if conducting invisible musicians, and the line of smoke snaked around the sphere, settling into the familiar curves of the helix.
El watched, fascinated, as the masked elf danced and swayed in the working of yet another magic-something that caused a faint music to arise out of nowhere and accompany the tall, graceful body as it swung this way and that.
"Nassabrath," the Masked said suddenly, coming to a halt and kneeling. He drew his left hand, fingers uppermost and palm inwards, vertically down in front of his face as he did so. From the tip of each finger tiny lightnings flared.
They curled and spat toward the sphere with almost aimless sloth; as Elminster watched their slow progress, he called on Mystra once more.
A vision appeared in his mind, as bright and as sudden as if someone had snatched aside a curtain. He was standing naked in the forest, face lined with pain, and covered with scrapes and thorn-scratches. Or rather, he was almost naked: at his wrists and ankles were glowing manacles, attached to chains that rose into the air to fade into invisibility a few feet from his limbs. Their links blazed with the same tiny lightnings as were crawling toward the sphere that held him, right now. The Masked suddenly strode through the background of the scene, making an impatient beckoning gesture almost absently as he hurried on his way.
Elminster was jerked around by the chains and forced to follow his master. They went through the trees for quite some distance, stumbling and scraping along, until El fetched up against a jutting rock with bruising force. The elf left him there as he bent down to examine a certain plant, and the vision swept in to show Elminster laying his hand flat on the stone, whispering Mystra's name, and concentrating on a particular symbol-an unfamiliar and complex character of shining golden curves that hung in El's mind and caught fire, as if it was was being branded into his memory.
In the scene, Elminster's bare body changed, arching away from the rock as it flowed into the smooth, full curves of a woman, a form he'd worn before in Mystra's service. 'Elmara,' he'd been then, and it was Elmara who stepped away from the stone, chains gone, and began a swift casting even as The Masked straightened up and spun around, his face sharp with astonishment and fear. That face that promptly vanished in the bolt of emerald fire Elmara flung through it. The green flames flowed and splashed through his head, and the scene was gone.
El found himself shaking his head to clear his dazed vision. Through the sudden glimmer of tears, he saw the lightnings, back in the here and now, touch the sphere around him at last, and awaken it to fresh fire.
He tried to recall the symbol he'd seen, and it swept back into his