• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Lolth, coming to gloat at what her Champion had just done.

Eilistraee, Cavatina pleaded silently, wishing she had the strength to speak the words aloud. Save me. Her fingers twitched slightly as she struggled against the paralysis that gripped her, tried to grope for the Crescent Blade. Spiders scuttled across her hand, a mocking tickle on her skin. Send me … a miracle.

A finger prodded her in the side. A muffled voice, speaking urgent words, came from above—Halisstra, also coming to gloat, taking a closer look at what her betrayal had wrought.

Her vision dimly returning, Cavatina could see the blurry figure of Halisstra, who gingerly lifted the Crescent Blade. She held the hilt between finger and thumb, as if picking up a disgusting piece of offal.

“Abyss take you,” Cavatina groaned, finding her voice at last.

Above her, Selvetarm gave a booming laugh. “It already has,” he hissed.

Then he lowered his head to deliver the killing bite.

CHAPTER TWELVE

So this is it, Q’arlynd thought.

He floated in a featureless gray void that was neither hot nor cold, damp nor dry, soft nor hard. It just … was. Endless. Eternal. Still.

“I’m dead.”

The sound of his own voice startled him. So did something that materialized, suddenly, under his feet. Ground. Gray as the void he’d been floating in, and smooth as glass, it neither gave under his feet nor resisted them. Like the void, it just … was. Something to stand on.

He could sense his arms and hands, even though he couldn’t see or feel them. He moved them against himself, trying to touch his body. They passed through where it should have been. It was like trying to grasp smoke, except that his hands, too, were made of smoke, gray smoke, without a ripple or an end point.

His body was gone. He was dead.

Panic nibbled at the corners of his mind like a ravenous mouse. If he allowed it to, it would consume his awareness, what little of him there was. He steeled himself, forcing himself to remain calm. He was dead, but he still was. His soul continued.

His mind, such as it was, held the logical facts that explained his situation. His soul, like those of all who died, had entered the Fugue Plain. He could see it starting to take shape around him. There: a distant horizon, a line of gray on gray. And there: the jagged spires of the City of Judgment. Restless forms—mere dots, from a vast distance—surrounded its soaring walls. Demons herded the shapeless gray forms before them, driving unclaimed souls into the city where they would be consumed.

Other presences hovered closer to Q’arlynd—the souls of others who, like him, had just died.

“Can you hear me?” he asked as one drifted by.

It made no reply, just sighed past him, leaving a sheen of tears in its wake.

Q’arlynd realized then that he was slowly drifting toward the city. The thought sent a chill through him, colder than any he had ever experienced. He looked wildly around for the moonbeam that Rowaan had described, listened intently for a scrap of song.

Nothing.

“Eilistraee!” he called. “Aren’t you going to claim me? I took the sword oath. I’m one of yours, now. You’re my patron deity!”

No reply.

Something prickled where Q’arlynd’s forehead should have been. If he’d still had a body, he would have sworn it was nervous sweat. He drifted more rapidly toward the city, and already it was half again as close as it had been.

“Eilistraee!” he screamed.

Nothing.

The city walls drew nearer. He could make out individual demons, scourges in hand, arms raising and snapping forward as they drove the dead. Souls wailed as they streamed in through the gates of the City of Judgment.

Q’arlynd shuddered—a ripple that passed through him like an icy wind. Panic once again crowded in at his awareness. He looked wildly around for the servant of a deity—any deity—to claim him.

“Mystra?” he pleaded, desperately hoping that Qilué’s other deity might have taken notice of him, even though he hadn’t pledged himself to her.

Nothing.

The walls had