The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [163]
That mad shout was still ringing in Elminster's ears as that scene winked out, and a circle of light occurred right beside the last prince of Athalantar. Floating with it was a dagger…and as he recognized it, it slowly turned and rose, offering its hilt to his hand.
El looked down at it, smiled, and shook his head. "No. That's a way out I'll never take," he said.
The dagger winked out of existence…and promptly reappeared off to Elminster's left, in the hand of a robed man, his back to El, who promptly drove it into the back of another robed man. The victim stiffened as his wound spat forth a blue radiance, and the blade of the murderer's dagger flared up into a blue flame that swiftly consumed it. The dying man turned, his wound leaking a trail of tiny stars, and El saw that it was Azuth. Face convulsed in pain, the god clawed with his bare hands at the face of the man who stabbed him… and the radiance leaking out of him showed El the face of the recoiling murderer. The slayer of Azuth was… Elminster.
"No!" El shouted, raking at the vision with his hands. "Away! Awaaay!" The two figures struggled with each other in the heart of a spreading cloud of blue stars, oblivious to him.
"Such ambitions are not mine," El snarled, "and shall never be, if Mystra grant it so. I am content to walk Faerun, and know its ways more than I know the deep mysteries… for how can I truly appreciate the one without the other?"
The dying Azuth swirled away, and out of the stars that had been his blood strode a man El knew from memories not his own, spell-shared with him once in Myth Drannor. It was Raumark, a sorcerer-king of Netheril who'd survived the fall of that decadent realm to become one of the founders of Halruaa. Raumark the Mighty stood alone in a hall of stout white pillars and vast echoing spaces, at the top of a high dais, and his face was both pale and grim.
Carefully he cast a spinning whorl of disintegration, testing it by dragging it through one of the giant pillars. The ceiling sagged as the top of the sheered-off pillar fell away into heavy crashing shards to the unseen floor below. Raumark watched the collapse, stone-faced, and brought the whorl back to spin in front of him, just beyond the lip of the dais.
He nodded down at it, as if satisfied…and jumped through it.
The scene died with Raumark, to be replaced by a view of a dusty tomb. A man El did not recognize but somehow knew was a Chosen of Mystra was taking an old and tattered grimoire out of a shoulder sack and placing it into an opened casket, the same task El had done so often for the Lady of Mysteries.
This Chosen, however, was in the grip of a seething fury, his eyes blazing with near madness. He plucked a cobwebbed skull up out of the casket, gazed into its sightless eye sockets, and snarled at it, "Spell after spell I just give away, while my body crumbles and grows deaf and stumbling. I'll end up like you in a few winters! Why should others taste the rewards I dole out, while I do not? Eh?"
He flung the skull back into its resting place and shoved the stone lid closed violently, the stony grating so loud that El winced. The Chosen strode forward with red fire in his eyes and said, "To live forever…why not? Seize a healthy body, snuff out its mind, ride it to ruin, then take the next. I've had the spells for a long time… why not use them?"
He resumed his determined walk, fading like a ghost through Elminster…but when the Athalantan turned his head to watch what happened to the Chosen, the man was gone, and the tomb he'd left fast fading behind him.
"Such a waste," El murmured, unshed tears glimmering