Key of Stars

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

Feywild

Taal strode across a vista of bare rock, jagged boulders, and the occasional stunted tree. Malyanna went before him, silhouetted by the golden illumination that rimmed the approaching horizon. The black hound Tamur slipped in and out of the shadows at the periphery of his vision.

They were leaving the Watch on Forever’s Edge behind. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be giddy at the prospect.

A thought occurred to him.

“My lady,” he said, “Why do we travel by long roads when your shadow beast could whisk us through shadow to our destination in an instant?”

“The roads we must ultimately travel are broken, and lie tangled in half-meshed demiplanes,” the eladrin noble said. “Even routes through shadow would prove laborious, since Tamur has never physically visited the site we seek.”

“I see,” said Taal, even though he didn’t, really. What did it matter? The Edge dropped farther and farther into the darkness behind them, while ahead, the trees grew thicker, the light more glorious, and the sense of desolation lighter.

Finally they topped a rise, and looked down into a valley verdant with growth, ringing with bird song, and brightened by slanting beams of sunlight. Tears welled in his eyes.

Fireflylike motes of brilliance darted on gusts of cool wind. Falls in the far distance were a thread of silver that plunged down from majestic cliffs. The land was effervescent and alive, filled with a vigor that burned in every blade of grass, every tree leaf, and even in the towering white clouds that loomed above in the sky.

“Faerie,” he said, his throat tight.

“Just so,” Malyanna replied.

“Where do we go from here?” he asked.

“From here-Oh!” she cried.

Malyanna clutched her temple. “Something’s happening. Tamur!” she said.

The hound looked up from the root tangle of a large tree it was sniffing. Its ears twitched. Its tail was curled down and its ears laid back. The dog did not like the Feywild. It slunk over to Malyanna.

“To the observation balcony, Tamur,” the woman said. “The last one we visited. As quick as you can!”

The great dog lifted its head in the air, sniffed, then padded down the slope to where the ground was broken with several jutting rocks. Malyanna and Taal followed.

“What is it?” asked Taal.

The eladrin noble ignored him.

As Tamur drew closer to the stones, their shadows lengthened and deepened. The mastiff passed into the dimness.

Taal followed Malyanna into the stone’s murky shade.

Cold whispered against his neck.

From within the boulder’s shadow, the stone seemed like a hole in the Feywild itself. Tamur stepped through, and they followed.

Beyond lay a shifting corridor of gloom.

Taal’s boots sunk a few inches with each step into the floor. The air was as cold and as still as a winter’s night. Taal’s breath steamed, though Tamur’s and Malyanna’s did not.

He’d wondered, having seen Malyanna and the mastiff fade into shadow on more occasions than he could count, what they experienced. And he knew it for what it was: a bleak, cold path with nothing to recommend it except speed of travel.

They followed the sniffing hound down the interminable corridor for what must have been at least a bell, maybe two. So much for speed …

When the cold threatened to become unbearable, he called upon the power of his totem. A layer of warmth, like invisible tiger fur, formed around him.

When the corridor ended, Taal was unprepared. One moment he trudged through shadow. The next, he was standing on a roofed stone balcony overlooking a stormy seascape from a staggering height. His totem yowled in sudden, tense warning. Wherever they were, it wasn’t a safe place.

At least it wasn’t as cold … though the tang of brine and rotting fish wrinkled his nose.

Malyanna rushed to the curblike railing and looked over. He joined her. The moment he did so, he knew why his totem had cried warning. He was standing on a balcony of what could only be the aboleth city of Xxiphu.

His gaze fell down the side of a clifflike drop: Xxiphu’s exterior face. Terrible images were carved on the age-worn exterior, depicting thousands of interconnected images he couldn’t quite comprehend. Some inscriptions flowed and changed their shape.

The city’s base was lodged in the foot of a snow-topped mountain. No … that wasn’t what he was really seeing. It was a cloud top! Xxiphu rode the storm face like an observation tower. And miles lower yet stretched the dappled surface of the Sea of Fallen Stars.

Taal’s head threatened to spin, but iron discipline proved his anchor. He avoided showing any visible reaction.

Malyanna stabbed a finger down toward the water. “It’s that ship, Green Siren! Always meddling!”

Taal narrowed his eyes, searching. He saw a dot trailing a hair-thin wake almost lost in the glare off the sea. Was that it? The speck didn’t seem especially threatening from their position.

“I divined no one would have the stomach to continue opposing me,” the eladrin noble continued, “but they found determination somewhere. Fools. I should have made a greater effort to destroy them instead of letting them flee.”

“What, they think to enter Xxiphu again now that it’s partly roused?” he said.

She swung around to glare at him. “Who knows?” she replied. “I hope they do; they’ll find many more aboleths awake this time! But they’ve disrupted the Calling.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Ancient bloodlines, touched ages ago by the aboleths, yet live and breed on Faerun,” Malyanna explained. “Xxiphu can command their loyalty by calling in the debts of their dead ancestors. Somehow, someone on that craft severed what I set in motion days ago. Japheth, I expect. I wonder …”

“Yes?” Taal said.

“Why hasn’t the Lord of Bats slain him yet?”

Taal had no answer.

Malyanna leaned farther over the curb and studied the point, her eyes narrowed with concentration. Taal asked for sharpness of eyesight from his totem. The dot instantly enlarged, becoming a ship in truth. He saw figures on deck, but they were too far away to make out as individuals. None had the dark clothing and milk-colored skin he associated with the Lord of Bats.

“Perhaps he grew tired of the chase?” Taal said.

“Or they slew him,” she said, shrugging. “Anyhow, if Green Siren is here, I can leave to retrieve the Key of Stars unopposed. The pretend Keeper who sought to bind the Eldest in the crown chamber, or Japheth with his Dreamheart-sworn pact, will count for nothing once I have the Key.”

Before Taal could ask what Malyanna meant by “pretend Keeper,” his attention was drawn to a shadow on a nearby cloud. He shifted his gaze and couldn’t restrain a gasp.

A kraken writhed through the air, no more then a hundred yards from the balcony. One dinner-plate eye fixed on Taal as it passed. He shuddered and looked away.

The eladrin paid the swooping horror only a passing glance. “Tamur! Take us to the Forest of Moths,” she said.

A lane of shadow whisked them away from the hovering atrocity called Xxiphu.

The darkling road deposited them in the middle of a thousand birdsongs. Trills, coos, and shrill whistles resounded through the living, bark-wrapped pillars enclosing them, all of which glowed with a silver radiance. The trees supported layer upon layer of mounting canopy. Breaks in the canopy revealed stars in a vast darkness. They were at least as grand as the stars of Taal’s long vanished youth.

Moths, each glowing with the same light as the tree bark, flittered and danced through the trees on all sides. Their wingspans easily measured three hands across.

Taal breathed in air thick with the perfume of night flowers. His mind whirled … not with the heady scent, but with the rapid transition of locations. He’d spent too long at Forever’s Edge to suddenly be jerked hither and yon and not suffer pangs of displacement. If he was forced down one more path of shadow to discover another fascinating, extraordinary, utterly unique vista, the contents of his stomach would join the tableau.

He swallowed. “We are back in the Feywild?” he managed to say.

“An imperfectly connected portion,” murmured the eladrin noble. She was studying the movements of the moths. “The Spellplague restitched Sildeyuir, a fragment of Faerie broken off long ago, back with its parent. But Sildeyuir was in pieces before the rejoining, thus the process remains ongoing, and the seams where the two sibling planes meet are unstable. Some pieces are hardly reconnected at all.”

“Is it dangerous here?” Taal asked.

“Of course,” Malyanna replied. “And home to creatures stirred from wherever they lurked before, like these moths. They are fey spirits of flux and instability.”

“Undead?”

“No. Spirits of the land itself, of Faerie’s pain. They are manifestations of the disruption.”

“And they’re dangerous?”

“Yes, I just said that. But they will also guide us to the ruins of Stardeep. As spirits of the tumult and reconnection, they possess a link to the shattered geography that would require Tamur weeks to learn.”

Malyanna lifted one hand to her mouth and bit her palm. A spurt of cold air preceded the ruby red blood that welled from the wound.

She lifted her arm and whistled. Blood trickled down her ivory limb in ragged lines.

The closest flux moth twisted in the air and arrowed toward the eladrin noble. Taal’s tiger tattoo snarled.

The moth all righted on Malyanna’s palm and unfurled a proboscis half a foot long. It sipped the red fluid like dew from a flower. Its wide, glowing wings shimmered from white to red.

The insect jerked up and fluttered in the air for a moment, then darted away, streaking the night with crimson radiance.

Malyanna made a fist with her bleeding hand and followed the creature. Taal and Tamur darted after her.

“I’ve temporarily bound it,” the eladrin threw over her shoulder. “While the binding remains active, its fellows will not harm us. Do nothing to provoke them!”

Taal made no answer as he followed.

He lost track of time as they rushed through a fey wood of dreamy radiance. Only he and Tamur did not glow; Malyanna began to leak a radiance similar to the trees as she stalked after the spirit moth. A sickly purple undertone gave her skin a diseased aspect.

The forest boundary was knife sharp. When the moth broke out into open space, Malyanna followed without comment. Taal realized that what he’d taken for a bank of mist beyond the tree’s edge was a thrashing swarm of flux moths. The mass extended off into a hazed gloom to the left and right, and dozens of feet into the air.

“There must be thousands,” he said.

“Thousands, or perhaps just one, iterated many, many times over,” said Malyanna.

“Ah. And our route is through the press of wings?” Taal said.

She nodded. “Though it’s different elsewhere,” she said, “in the Forest of Moths, the flux spirits guard weak points and serve as the agents of reconnection.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Malyanna,” he said.

“Think of them as needles and stitches that, before they are drawn tight in torn flesh, can draw blood,” she replied. “Just follow, and guard me.”

Malyanna whistled, producing a hollow, low-pitched hum. The bound flux moth returned to her hand and sipped again. But before it could flutter away, the eladrin noble closed her fist, catching the creature tight.

The moth flapped madly, buffeting Malyanna. New lines of blood appeared on her face and arms where the wing edges caught her. Taal realized the insect’s wings were sharp as razors.

Ignoring her fresh wounds, Malyanna approached the greater mass of spirits. She thrust the captive moth out before her like a brand set to ward off gathering dark, and chanted in a low, steady voice.

The bank of moths parted before her. A causeway of clear air formed ahead. She walked down the constricted way, careful to keep to the exact center.

Taal followed her into the lane. It wasn’t so narrow their shoulders risked brushing the edges, but if they were to swing their arms, their fingers might well graze the moth wing walls. Dead grass crumbled beneath his feet. The stars overhead wheeled in the sky, and he had to look away. The open air churned with the movement of thousands of flapping musky membranes. He resisted the urge to sneeze.

A totem growl drew his attention up.

A mote of glowing white fell from the left wall and stopped at Malyanna’s head. Taal leaped, snatched the thing out of the air with his right hand, and smashed its body into his left elbow. One of the trailing wings brushed his forearm. Blood welled instantly, and a line of pain stitched his skin. He dropped the unmoving body to the grass, careful to avoid the flaccid wing membranes. The body dissolved into dust.

The eladrin noble continued her steady progress forward.

Then they were through.

They stood before a massive gate, tumbled and broken beneath a darkling sky suddenly bereft of stars. The gate was mounted in the side of a great tor that rose up out of a “lake” of flux moths. The visible portion of the massive hill featured dead grass and tumbled stones.

Granite fragments of the ruined gate were half-buried in loose soil. The throat of the opening was completely collapsed and filled with rubble. One section of the fallen stone was chiseled with the stylized sign of a white tree. A great crack split the symbol nearly in two.

Nearly every other piece of stone was etched with lines of script. A few used letters familiar to Taal. He squinted, reading:

This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here … Nothing valued is here.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive. This message is a warning about danger.

… And more of the same. Taal looked up. “The warning written on these stones; it is scribed in many tongues,” he said.

“For all the good it did,” replied Malyanna. “The Traitor fled when this pocket plane lurched back into conjunction with Sildeyuir, and Sildeyuir with Faerie. But with the Spellplague raging he obviously didn’t get far, for he never returned again to the Spire of Winter’s Peace …”

Malyanna studied the collapsed gate a moment longer, then turned and ascended the slope. She and Taal picked a path between tumbled stones that looked as if they had extruded from the earth as slender rocky splinters, only to fall and shatter on the hillside.

Tamur bounded ahead, sniffing at every surface.

The summit resolved in the gloom as they drew closer. On it grew a single tree, larger than any tree Taal had ever before seen-and he’d seen his share of woody giants. But the one on the hilltop was bare of leaf. Its many branches clenched into a tight fistlike cyst.

“A Forest Monarch!” said Malyanna, her voice surprised.

“A dead one, if you mean the tree,” said Taal. “See-it’s petrified.”

“So it is.”

They approached until they stood beneath the mineralized growth. It was even larger than Taal had first surmised. Its trunk was easily more than a hundred feet in diameter!

“Forest Monarchs,” said Malyanna, her voice soft, “were primeval trees. But they were more than mere plants; they were emblems of the Feywild itself, vigorous beyond measure, and vessels of pure life force.”

“You sound melancholy,” Taal said. Was the eladrin actually showing sentiment?

“I grew up on stories of the Forest Monarchs,” she said. “Like the Golden Tree of Dawn that clutched the sun in its boughs and whose leaves split the light into creation’s prism …”

“Sounds beautiful,” he replied.

“Yes …”

She shrugged and shook her head. “But that was before I found the strength the Far Manifold offers,” she said. Her face lost the softness of reminiscence. Had it been there at all?

The great dog brushed her flank, then bounded away back down the slope, its nose to the ground. Taal doubted it’d flush any game in the dead and decaying pocket world.

Malyanna reached for the tree. Before her fingers could touch it, a spark of cerulean fire leaped the distance, like static discharge. She cried out as a wave of ice materialized from the air and pushed her away from the tree’s rigid surface.

Taal dropped into his ready stance, his oath tugging him to protect the Lady of Winter’s Peace. But how could he defend her from a petrified tree?

Malyanna examined her hand.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded. The ice shield she’d reflexively conjured steamed away. “Residual charge of Keeper warding fire,” she said. “This Monarch was an embodiment of it, most likely … but its energies are spent.”

“Spent on what?” Taal said.

“Unless I miss my guess, capturing that which attempted to flee Stardeep,” she replied.

They traced the periphery of the gnarled tree until they came to a place where the contorted, squeezed branches offered a gap wide enough to serve as passage inward, toward the heart of the cyst the tree clutched.

Malyanna bowed her head and muttered a few words whose meaning evaded Taal’s understanding like fish darting away from questing hands. When she finished, she stood straighter and nodded at him.

He preceded her into the opening. The fissure tapered, constricting more and more as he went. Finally he was forced to crawl. The stone-hard bark abraded his knees.

The faintest glimmer of blue light danced somewhere ahead. It was enough for Taal to see that the gap narrowed even further. Dropping to his stomach, he squirmed forward. He was relieved to finally emerge into a larger space.

The curling branches of the petrified Monarch formed a cathedral-like cavity of stone: the heart of the cyst. A figure hung above Taal, caught at the apex of the cavity. It was the source of the blue light. A male elf or perhaps an eladrin … at least from the waist up. A forest of sinuous tentacles splayed from where the man’s hips should have been. Most were dozens of feet long. Grasping tree branches and reaching tentacles were an interwoven mess. He could well imagine how the Monarch’s woody limbs had snatched the horror out of the air and wrapped it within the tree’s confining embrace.

And, then, apparently, it had sacrificed its own life by petrifying itself and its captive, ensuring the Traitor would never break the trust of the Keepers.

Malyanna squirmed into the cyst. Her eyes fastened on the hybrid horror held above them.

“Poor Carnis,” she said.

“It’s really him?” Taal asked.

“After all these years, I never thought to see him again.”

“Do … you mean to free him?”

“No!” she said, laughing. “He had his time, and failed. Besides, look at him. He allowed the influence to have its way with him, warping his body in return for easy power. Do not doubt that his mind was similarly twisted. Moreover, he is dead.”

“You could bring him back, in some form, if you wanted,” Taal said, knowing he was baiting her, but his oath allowed him that much.

“From this,” she said, waving her hands to encompass the entirety of the stone cyst, “there is no coming back.”

“Then what use was our trip to this dead-end dimension?” asked Taal.

“Carnis’s spirit may be fled or shattered, but his remains can still be persuaded to give up his secrets.”

“What shall I do?”

“Join Tamur outside and defend the Monarch’s corpse.”

Before he could ask from what, his totem growled. Something from the world had followed them.

“Very well, my lady,” Taal said. “I sense someone has come calling. I’ll deal with them.”