The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [162]
Her warm, yearning eagerness and hope, her delight… Elminster reached for Immeira, a broad smile growing on his own face…a smile that froze as the thought struck him: was this spirited young woman to be some sort of reward for him, to mark his retirement from Mystra's service?
He snatched back his hands from the approaching woman and told the darkness fiercely, "No. Long ago I made my choice… to walk the long road, the darker way, and know the sweep of danger and adventure and doom. I cannot turn back from it now, for even as I need Mystra, Mystra needs me."
At his words, Immeira and the sun-dappled room behind her melted away into falling motes of dwindling light that plunged down far below him in the great dark void he hung within, until his eyes could see them no more.
Abruptly fresh sunlight washed in from his right. Elminster turned toward it, and found himself gazing into a long chamber lined with rows of bookshelves that reached up to touch its high ceiling. Sunlit dust-motes hung thick in the air, and through their luster Elminster could see that the shelves were crammed with spell tomes, with not an inch of shelf left empty. Ribbons protruded from some of the spines, others glowed with mysterious runes.
A comfortable-looking armchair, footstool, and side table beckoned from the right-hand end of this library. The side table was piled high with books, El took a step forward to get a better look at them and found himself striding hungrily into the room.
Spells of Athalantar, gilt lettering on one spine said clearly. El extended an eager hand and let it fall back to his side, muttering, "No. It breaks my soul to refuse such knowledge, but… where's the fun of finding new magic, mastering it phrase by guess, and deduction by spell trial?"
The room didn't fall away into darkness as all the previous apparitions had done. El blinked around at more spellbooks than he could hope to collect in a century or more of doing nothing but hunting down and seizing books of magic, and swallowed. Then, as if in a dream, he took a step toward the nearest shelf, reaching for a particularly fat volume that bore the title Galagard's Compendium of Spells Netherese. It was… inches from his fingertips when El whirled around and snarled, "No!"
In the echoes of that exclamation his world went dark and empty again, the dusty room swept away in an instant, and he was standing in darkness and on darkness, alone once more.
A light approached out of black velvet nothingness, and became a man in ornate, high-collared robes, standing on a floor of stone slabs with a spell staff winking and humming in his hand. Not seeing Elminster, the man was staring grimly down at a dead woman sprawled on the stones before him, gentle smokes rising from her body, her face frozen in an eternal scream of fear.
"No," the man said wearily. "No more. I find that 'First among Her Chosen' has become an empty boast. Find another fool to be your slave down the centuries, lady. Everyone I loved…everyone I knew…is dead and gone, my work is swept away by each new grasping generation of spell hurlers, Faerun fades into a pale shadow of the glory I saw in my youth…and most of all, I'm… so… damned… tired…"
The man broke his staff with a sudden surge of strength, the muscles of his arms rippling. Blue light flared from the broken ends, swirling in the instant before a mighty explosion of released magic coalesced into a rushing wave. The despairing Chosen thrust one spearlike broken shaft end into his chest. He threw back his head in a soundless gasp or scream…and fell away into swirling dust, that convulsing jaw last, an instant before the outward rush of magic became blinding.
El turned his gaze away from that flash…only to find it mirrored in miniature elsewhere, in a hand-sized scrying