The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [12]
He knew he'd journey thence without delay, come morning. He had to know what Mystra desired him to do…and this at least was something. For the thousandth time El lamented Mystra's silence and wondered what he'd done to earn it. Surely not getting caught in a trap for a few generations because he'd followed her dictates to seek out ever more magic, in old places and hidden ones.
Yet he retained his powers, some even more vigorous than before…so there must be a Mystra, with her own powers intact and the governance of magic still in her hands. Why was she silent, keeping her face hidden from him?
And just who was he to question what she might do, or not do?
A man, challenging the gods as other men did…and with about as much success. El fell asleep thinking of stars moving about in the heavens as part of a gigantic chess game played among the gods. The last thing he remembered was seeing the sudden, tremulous trail of a shooting star…probably a real one, not a dream's whim…dying, off to the east.
Halidae's Height was as scarred as the vision had shown him. He teleported in to stand beside a duskwood tree that didn't seem to have changed one whit between his memory and the vision. A gentle breeze was blowing, and he was alone on the hilltop. Elminster had barely glanced over its ravaged slope and started to swing his gaze toward Myth Drannor, knowing, by now, the sadness he'd see, when the breeze brought cries to his ears. Shouts of battle.
He sprang to the edge of the Height, where in happier days one could look out and down over the city. Tiny figures were leaping and dying in the thinned-out forest below. Humans and…fiends, monsters from the Lower Planes…were running about, the humans fleeing. Winged she-fiends were swooping here and there. Lightning bolts suddenly stabbed out in all directions from one knot of creatures, in a deadly star of death that sent fiends staggering and screaming. Other devils were slaying humans down there, disemboweling one last adventurer as he watched. Just in case any of the fleeing men escaped, a door in the air…a magical gate…had opened at the foot of the Height, and a steady stream of fiends was pouring forth from it.
El stared at the gate grimly, and raised his hands. "Gates," he told the air softly, "I can handle." He worked a magic that Mystra herself had given him and sent it splashing down on the maw that was still releasing hordes of fiends.
It washed over the gate with a menacing crackle of spell energy, and there were screams and roars from the fiends emerging from it. Yet when the raging fires of the spell fell away, long moments later, the gate stood unchanged.
Elminster gaped at it. How could…?
A moment later, he had an answer… of sorts. The last flickering, floating motes of light caused by his spell brightened, rose up to face him, and shaped themselves into letters in one of the elder elvish tongues he'd learned to read in Myth Drannor, it was a language only he and several hundred elf elders could read. Floating in the air, the letters spelled out a blunt message: "Leave alone."
As El stared at them in utter bewilderment, they fell into shapeless tatters of light then faded away, trailing down into wisps of smoke to join the chaos and death below. Fiends looked up, snarling. This could only be from Mystra… couldn't it?
Well, if not her, who else?
The last prince of Athalantar looked down at the fiends capering in the ruins of Myth Drannor and asked the world bitterly, "What good is it to be a mage, if ye don't use thy power to do good, by shaping the world around ye?"
The answer came from the air behind Elminster: "What good can it be, save by blind mischance, if you try but lack eyes and wits powerful enough to see the shape you're sculpting?"
The voice was low and calm but filled with a musical hum of