Stardeep_ The Dungeons - Bruce R. Cordell [6]
He rolled to his stomach and pushed himself to his feet. Muscles in his legs shook from having clenched too long without ease. The scabbard of his new blade knocked awkwardly against his thigh. He wasn't used to carrying such a thing. But desperate times were the mother of desperate strategies.
Telarian walked the circle's exterior and carefully pinched off each burning stick of incense. With each glowing ember doused, he spoke a mental syllable designed to calm the mind and moor the spirit. When it came to the art of divination, ritual was important. Not so much for its own sake, but as a way to condition the mind against the rigors of peeling away the present to reveal the future. Most diviners could
"see heartbeats or moments ahead with relatively little effort, but days and years… few could match Telarian's skill. He'd pushed the art forward by centuries during his time in Stardeep. But he wasn't vain about his accomplishments.
As a Keeper of the Cerulean Sign in the heart of the dungeon constructed to hold the Traitor, unmatched resources were available to Telarian for his research. He had tapped those resources, especially the singulatly potent construct Cynosure. His interactions with Delphe, his co-Keeper, were few and far between. Her duties monitoring the Well were substantial, and thus her relative absence granted Telarian free reign in the Outer Bastion. Not that she had any direct authority over him, nor could he command her. Still, best to keep Delphe mollified. Delphe's problem was she didn't quite know what to make of his ability for prophecy, and thus often failed to appreciate the personal costs true visions of the future demanded. In the end, when he labored to pierce the veil of the far future, he kindly refrained from telling her, and she did not complain.
Of course, his lapse in telling Delphe of his construction of the Epoch Chamber, the chamber wherein he stood at that moment, might one day make her doubt him. Nor would she look kindly upon him should she discover that he often directed Cynosure to lie about his location. It was a risk he was willing to take.
The Epoch Chamber was smoothly spherical. Its lower portion sloshed with mystical fluid he'd distilled from years of dream-wandering. A disk, scribed with a twelve-pointed star, floated immovably on the surface of the fluid, and when Telarian reclined in its center, his divinatory ability was enhanced by orders of magnitude. He'd predicted fires, earthquakes, the deaths of kings, and the initiation of wars years prior to their occurrences. He'd never been wrong.
Was there anything he couldn't foresee?
Perhaps, but he cared to preview only a single event. He obsessed over it, and each time the vision thundered through his mind's eye, his despair grew.
Despair wasn't an emotion a Keeper could afford, so he converted melancholy to a desperate plan. He disavowed the future he saw. He would prevent it from occurring. If he did less, could he honestly claim to be a guardian of the Cerulean Sign?
And so, his arrangements proceeded-daring, appalling arrangements that, if successful, might prevent the horrid soaring ciry of his vision from ascending.
The city he had seen in the thundercloud was Xxiphu, and it was inhabited by aberrations of the ancient world, creatures known as aboleths that were old when the sun was yet young. While aboleth splinter populations persisted in the world, Xxiphu was the seat of the Abolethic Sovereignty, possessed of a malignancy inconceivable. If it rose from Faerun's core, shorn of its supposed dependency on the depths… could an age of terror and slavery be far behind?
CHAPTER THREE
City of Laothkund, Shadow Tongue Lair
Aman in soot-blackened clothes balanced on a ledge thtee stories above the winter-chilled street. A gaggle of sentries on its way to Sal's Tavern for warm buttered rum passed beneath him. The lamplight from their shuttered lanterns receded, once again plunging