Elminster_ The Making of a Mage - Ed Greenwood [71]
Elminster took a pace back, lifting his hands in an unconscious warding gesture.
Mystra halted, eyes suddenly stern. "I ask again: will you kneel to me?"
Eyes locked on hers, he knelt slowly. "Lady, I confess I am awed," he said slowly, "but if I serve thee… I'd rather do it with my eyes open."
Mystra laughed, eyes sparkling. "Ah, but it is long since I've met such a one as you!"
Then her face was again solemn, and her voice low. "Extend your hand, freely and in trust, or go unharmed; choose."
Elminster extended his hand without hesitation. Mystra smiled and touched it. Fire consumed him, spun him down helplessly into nothing and beyond, and whirled him away into golden depths… as a thousand lightning bolts struck through his heart and roared back out of him as consuming flame…
Elminster screamed, or tried to, as he was flung away into many-hued madness, a place of blinding light and blazing pain.
He roared, and when darkness rushed up to meet him, he plunged headlong into it, striking it as if it were a stone wall. Dashed against it, he was… gone…
* * * * *
It was the cold, again, that awakened him. Elminster sat up, half expecting to see the burial-ground slumbering around him, and found instead the temple, still and dark. Power yet flowed in it, though, in a silent, invisible web of stirrings all around him, from the bare altar to the armsmen and the magelord who stood motionless all around the circular chancel.
Now he could feel magic as well as see it!
Awed, Elminster looked all around. He was naked; everything had been burned away to lie in ashes around him except for the Lion Sword, which lay beside him, unchanged from its ruined state. Taking it up with a smile-the Mistress of Magic knew his duty, too, it seemed-he got to his feet. The blue glow of magic was everywhere in this vast chamber, but brightest of all behind him. He turned and beheld the altar.
Mystra was gone, and her scepter with her, but as he looked, words flamed out brightly on the altar. He hurried forward to read them. "Teach thyself magic, and see the Realms. You will know when to come back to Athalantar. Worship me always with that keen mind and that lack of pride, and you will please me well. Serve me first by touching my altar."
As he finished reading, the words faded. When the altar was bare and dark again, he reached forward tentatively-paused in sudden, trembling fear-and then laid a hand firmly on the cold stone.
He thought he heard a faint chuckle, somewhere nearby… and then darkness claimed him again.
Eight
TO SERVE MYSTRA
Did I ever tell thee how I first came to serve Mystra? No? Ye won't believe a word of it naetheless. The way of the Lady seems strange to most men-but then, most men are sane. Well, more or less.
Sundral Morthyn
The Way of a Wizard
Year of Singing Shards
The world was drifting white mists. Elminster shook his head to be free of them and heard a bird calling. A bird? In the depths of the dark, empty temple? He shook his head again, and realized with a start that his bare feet stood on moss and earth, not cold stone. Where was he?
El found himself struggling now to break free of the mists… clouds in his mind, not the world around. Shaking his head, he heard bird calls again, and a soft rustling, a sound he remembered from long-ago Heldon: breezes blowing through leaves.
He was in a forest somewhere. As the last of the mists fell away, El looked around and caught his breath. He stood in the heart of a deep wood, with duskwoods and shadowtops and blueleaf trees standing all crowded together around him, the ground beneath them a dim and mushroom-studded place stretching off into gloomy, rolling distances.
He stood in sunlight on a little knoll where several old giants of the forest had toppled, leaving a clearing into which the sun could reach. It was a small patch of sunlit moss where a large flat stone lay, and beyond