Sword of the Gods - Bruce R. Cordell [66]
But before they could embark on cosmic obliteration, and to the Hells with the bound, powerless Elder Elemental Eye—disaster struck.
They failed.
Murmur lost all its siblings, except for Scour. Murmur saw Scour fall, preceding Murmur to what it assumed would be their final obliteration.
It had known nothing for a long time. Until a blackened, burned portion of Murmur was discovered by Firestorm Cabal salvagers and brought to the Motherhouse.
Murmur blinked the eyelids of the flesh it wore. Crusts broke and rubbed like gravel against the lids. Murmur understood it had stared too long without blinking, absorbed in thought. Its host’s sight-giving orbs had dried and everything was blurry.
What a nuisance. It rubbed at its eyes, moving with measured spasms so as not to poke the soft spheres completely out of its host’s head. Its fine control was improving, but the body’s strength was increasing in equal measure, which meant Murmur had to pay attention lest it damage itself. Overall, it was a good sign.
The molting was imminent. It needed to suffer through just a few more insensible periods while its host’s mind was awake. After that, Murmur would be complete, and its host would be gone forever, subsumed in the change.
It would be stronger after the molting, and that strength couldn’t come soon enough. In this new world, separated from its siblings, Murmur’s abilities were diminished. At first, it could barely call forth alarming shadows.
Feral instinct allowed Murmur to enhance its enervated strength.
It sniffed out sites that echoed with thaumaturgic history, where magic cast long ago had left an imprint. Better yet, it discovered locations where spiritual energy still waxed and waned, where reality’s fabric was stretched. In such places, the rules were constantly in flux. In such places, Murmur found its powers magnified, allowing it to summon fiends of the subconscious into the world almost as potent as those it had once birthed, despite occasional accidents from which none returned save itself.
Murmur had known frustration, which was nearly more than a demonic entity such as itself could bear. Despite its slow progress, the fact remained that while it remained alone, it could never reclaim all it should be. Its chances at achieving anything like the grandeur of the original vision shared by Murmur and its siblings had seemed unlikely.
Then Murmur had recalled the Elder Elemental Eye. Murmur’s original host had revered that entity so fully and without question that he and his fellows had blithely given themselves to Murmur and the other plague demons.
There was power to be had in that kind of unthinking devotion.
Thus Murmur resurrected the Cult of the Elder Elemental Eye in Toril.
In return for power and cultists, Murmur promised to devise a plan to free the Elder Elemental Eye and release it on the continent of Faerûn.
So it swore each of its mortal servitors and birthed nightmares to the Elder Elemental Eye. It presented itself as the Eye’s incredibly capable cult leader, from whom all the great one’s commandments would flow.
And its strength had swelled thereby …
Murmur plodded through the vault beneath the shattered Motherhouse, until it reached a great subterranean space. Cells lined the roughly circular space.
Quiet sobs, whispered prayers, desperate oaths, and even a few titters of insane laughter issued from behind the rusty iron bars, but that was difficult to hear over the underlying buzzing, clicking drone.
The cells were arranged so all of them had a bird’s-eye view of the chamber’s center, which held the pit.
The constant, hungry drone emanated from the central cavity.
The pit was Murmur’s second chance.
The demon dream lumbered to the seething edge of the crater and recalled how, not long after beginning its “cult” project, it had sensed a faint stirring. A familiar presence, away south of Airspur. As if a gift from the Elder Elemental Eye itself for initiating worship of the banned deity!
Murmur recognized signs that could only be from one of its siblings. Murmur