Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [7]
She shook her head. “These shapings are the only magic I have left.” Her whisper was mournful. “What have we become? Oh, El, what have we become?”
They both knew the answer.
They were husks: Storm shapely and young-seeming, yet with her rich singing voice gone and almost all of her magic with it, and Elminster still powerful in Art but hardly daring to use his spells, because sanity fled with each casting. More times since the Year of Blue Fire than they cared to remember—perhaps more than either of them could remember—Storm had guided and cared for her onetime teacher after he’d seen this or that desperate need to hurl spells … and had ended up insane for long seasons.
They shared a hunger.
A gnawing, desperate hunger for the power and skill of their youth. Thanks to a crumbling cache that had once belonged to Azuth, they knew how to take over the bodies of the young and strong. By all the vanished gods, the spell was so simple!
So Elminster was endlessly tempted. To snatch a new body and build a new life … or to die.
It was time and past time for oblivion, and they were so tired of the burdens of the Chosen, but somehow just couldn’t give in to the last, cold embrace. Not yet.
Not after they’d hung on for so long, working here, there, and everywhere to set things right in the Realms. An unending task, to be sure, but there was so much more to do.
And there was no one else they could trust to do it. No one.
Every last entity they’d met since the blue fire had cared only for his- or herself, or couldn’t even see what needed doing.
So Storm and Elminster, agents of the mightiest goddess in the world no longer, went on doing what little they still could—a rumor started here, a rescue or a slaying there … still at the tiller, still steering … the work that had kept them alive the last century.
Someone had to save the Realms.
Why? And who were they to dare such meddlings?
They were the Old Guard, the paltry handful who still saw needs and cared. More than that … even with Mystra and Azuth both gone, someone still whispered in their dreams, telling them to go on sharing their magic among the poor and powerless, and working against evil rulers and all who used magic to harm and oppress.
Yet there was no denying they were growing ever weaker and more weary. It was the fourth time they’d come to the ruins that year, and it was only—what?—the fifth of Mirtul. A warm and early spring, aye, but still—
A hawk stooped suddenly out of the sky, hurtling down at the illusory Elminster.
“Well, at least she’s not a stinking vulture this time,” Storm murmured, finding her feet with her usual swift and long-limbed grace, and ducking hastily away into the trees. “I’ll be back when you light the fire.”
She still moved as quickly as ever; El found himself turning to answer only dancing branches.
So he swallowed his words and shrugged instead. It was good of her to give him time alone with her sister—time that was in short supply these days.
The false Elminster vanished in an instant as talons tore through it.
Then the startled hawk flapped to an awkward landing and stood on the rock blinking, looking a little lost.
The real Elminster swallowed a sigh, pulled the stolen glowing dagger he’d brought with him out of its sheath in the breast of his robes, and crawled out onto the rock as he held the blade out in offering. The feel of the magic would conquer her utterly.
A little meal first, to banish her wildness. When she was herself again, there would be time enough to feed her the gorget and do her longer-lasting good.
A dreadful hunger kindled in the hawk’s golden eyes, and she sprang at him, shrieking as her wings clapped the air.
As her beak closed on the blade of the dagger, the hawk melted and flowed, an eerie swirling of flesh that spun into a filthy, naked crone, wild-eyed and wild-haired, a bony old woman sucking on the weapon like a babe single-mindedly worrying a mother’s teat.
There was a glow in her mouth as she sucked, heedless of the sharp steel—and the