The Herald

CHAPTER 19

The door banged open.

Manarlume and Lelavdra whirled from their table of maps and tomes and rune tiles, hands rising to hurl dread magic.

The arcanist Gwelt stood panting on the threshold.

“Madness!” he gasped, “sheer madness! And the Most High is paying for it right now!”

“What madness?” Lelavdra snapped.

“T-the draining spell! Of hundreds of arcanists, working in concert with the High Prince, together seeking to draw the power of the elf city’s mythal to us, and so master the Weave, for the greater glory of Shar! He-”

“Yes, yes, we’ve heard the grand and glorious plan,” Manarlume said dismissively. “Mythal down, Weave our servant, hot suppers for everyone with a snap of our fingers, new gowns whenever we turn around, yes. What ‘madness’ is involved, and High Prince Tanthul is ‘paying for it’ how, exactly?”

“The one called Larloch-the archlich served by many liches-got to the mythal first. And blocked the shielding, sending deadly magic along it that’s felled many arcanists, mind-ruining them or worse! He’s calling himself the Shadow King, and he taunted the Most High, and said he prevented us all by himself, and could stop anything we tried. Called us fools, presumptuous fools who know nothing of real power.”

“Oh? And how fared you against Larloch’s attack?”

“I … I was not touched. I was there, but not part of the meshed minds of the spell.”

Manarlume stared at the arcanist coldly. “So you played traitor, when the Most High most needed your loyalty and service.”

“No! No, I am no traitor! I foresaw the folly and tried to warn Prince Aglarel; he told me he’d hear me out when the spell was done.”

“So you are now the judge of folly and best policy in Thultanthar?” Manarlume flung at him, eyes flashing as she strode at him.

Gwelt stood his ground. “No! That is to say …”

“Gwelt, I am enraged. I am disgusted. Stand aside! I’m off to report your treachery to the Most High right now!”

“No! No, hear me! Whatever you think of me and want to say about me, tarry for a day-please!”

“Why?” Lelavdra asked bluntly. “Why should my sister delay on your say-so, when our city’s safeguarding and bright future are at stake?”

“For her own safety! He suffered mind-wounding and a terrible humiliation; when last I saw him, he was kicking Prince Aglarel! Stay away from him right now, I beg you! It’s not safe!”

“And why do you care what happens to me?” Manarlume flared.

Tense silence fell, as they all stared at each other.

“Well?” she snapped. Lelavdra stepped to her side, folding her arms across her chest and adding her glare to that of her sister’s.

Gwelt flushed a deep crimson under the hard weight of their regard, and muttered, “I … I love you, Ladies Tanthul. Both of you.”

Manarlume and Lelavdra stared at him.

Then, slowly, they both grew the same catlike smile.

Larloch was talking to himself. Again.

“For a long time I contented myself with studying the Art, taking it further than any one entity had done before,” he purred, “and letting Toril attend to itself. I cared for no realm nor ruler nor cabal, and was content to be left alone. And the world grew no better, and petty tyrants meddled ever more recklessly with magic, from the dupes of Shar to those fools in Zhentil Keep and Thay, and now these arrogant returned bumblers of Thultanthar. It is time, and long past time, to intervene. Not to rule the high and the low, trying to make laws and enforce them in matters ever so petty-but to slap down the worst parasites and vandals, and let commoners and oxen alike breathe once more! A city should have a ruler pitted against guilds and street gangs and the wealthiest families-but above that, there should be no one but the gods, and their priesthoods locked ever in opposition. Let there be an end to kings. Let there be only … Larloch.”

Elminster rolled his eyes. Alustriel and Laeral both wagged fingers at him in mock reproof.

The Weave anchor between them hummed on, intact. A mythal anchor had been entwined around it, like a thriving vine, and when they’d trudged up to the Weave anchor, amid the moss-carpeted roots of a thriving duskwood, they’d felt the mythal anchor, and heard Larloch’s voice thrumming along it. He must be somewhere near.

Or perhaps not. He could be anywhere else that the mythal of the city extended. Far beyond the few buildings the elves still held against the tightening ring of Shadovar besiegers.

They could see him through the anchor, as well as hear him; a flickering, translucent, miniature image of the tall, gaunt archlich in his robes. He was gloating, head thrown back, concentration turned inward, bent on drawing the mythal’s power into himself-and as they watched, he was growing larger, and larger, and starting to glow …

Elminster beckoned Alustriel and Laeral close. When they bent their heads to his, he whispered, “Anchor me.”

Frowning-what was the Old Mage up to now? — they nodded and wrapped their arms around him from either side. He sat down, drawing them down with him onto the forest moss, and closed his eyes, waiting for their minds to settle into full and calm contact with his. When that happened, El called on the connection to the mythal Larloch had inadvertently shown him back in Candlekeep when the death of the Guide had wrenched him out of the monks’ minds.

He called on that connection ever so gently, not wanting Larloch to sense him doing so.

The mythal was flowing into the archlich’s vast, dark, and starless mind, slowly but ever faster, draining away from the City of Song.

El didn’t try to fight that flow, nor divert it. Not yet. Not until he had need of its power. First, he called on his command of the Weave, that far greater web of magical might, wrapping himself in all the thrumming power he could stand-his body shuddering and then shaking violently in the firm grip of the sisters-and then reaching up and out with that gathered power.

Power that stretched out like so many soft and unseen tentacles to nestle among the enchantments that knit together the stones of the flying city of Thultanthar, and held it aloft, and controlled the moisture that reached it, and governed the temperature within and around its buildings. Making those contacts into bindings, knitting them into the very fabric of all those thousandfold enchantments; turning them into so many hooks for him to pull on.

Then, tentatively at first, and then insistently, Elminster set about pulling the floating city of Thultanthar down out of the sky.

Alustriel and Laeral, their faces almost touching his, stared at him in dawning awe, feeling what he was doing through their link with him.

Then, each of them accepted what must be, and bolstered him with their will.

And silently, through the clouds, the great floating city started to descend.

Arclath looked up at the great dark bulk of the Netherese city, floating so large overhead. It was blotting out most of the sun, and it was getting larger.

“It’s definitely getting lower,” he reported, and then added inevitably, “Are you sure it was wise to come here?”

“Wise?” His lady’s eyes flashed. “Of course it wasn’t wise, Lord Delcastle!”

Arclath winced. Uh-oh. And me without a shield.

“It was, however,” Rune snapped, “the right thing to do! And the gods take all wisdom and prudence if riding under their banner means a life of renouncing or shirking what is right!”

And perhaps, just perhaps, a life of longer duration.

Arclath was careful to think that, but say no word nor hint of it. If he was going to get killed or maimed this day, let it not be by the lady he loved.

Who was now tugging at his arm and pointing. “There! Elves, more than a dozen of them!”

“With what looks to be several thousand mercenary warriors trying to slaughter them,” Arclath pointed out.

“Yes, those elves!” Rune said fiercely. “We go to reinforce them!”

“Of course we do,” Lord Delcastle replied. Lifting his chin, he hefted his sword and started running, his beloved right beside him.

The flows of power were thunderously obvious, and Larloch looked along them at their commander.

And saw what Elminster was doing.

The archlich smirked, smiled broadly, then burst into laughter. “You amuse me with your strivings, petty meddler!” he told the Old Mage. “Destroy all the architecture you want! Soon you shall have a new master, and your dances will be to my command-you and every last archmage and hedge wizard, from one end of this world to the other!”

“Oooh,” Elminster replied mildly. “Won’t that be nice?”

The lights of Larloch’s eyes blazed up. “Man, do you mock me?”

“Archlich, I mock everyone. Myself, most of all. It’s how I guard my heart against the flailing lashings of life. And you?”

The archlich regarded him in still silence for an uncomfortably long time. And then sighed and said, “You do understand. I need such as you. I have all too few friends.”

Elminster looked steadily back along the flows, into Larloch’s distant face.

“Me too,” he said.

The doors of the audience chamber were barred and spell-sealed, and one man sat alone on that high seat.

All around him, things of beauty and power summoned from all over Thultanthar floated in the air, drifting in slow orbits around the throne. Staves, rods, scepters, crowns, rings, keys, wands, pairs of boots, and many smaller, odder things, from tiny pouch coffers to ornate lamp statuettes, hundreds of them were slowly circling the throne.

And as they drifted on their unhurried journeys, they darkened and crumbled as their magic was drained from them, and the vivid and crackling blue-white auras surrounding the slumping items and becoming bright lines of force that stabbed at the arms of the throne. And as those arms shone an ominous blue beneath the clenched fingers of the man seated on the throne, and stray bolts and tendrils of unleashed force snarled up his arms, item after item became drifting black ashes … that then tumbled into powder, and in time became finer dust.

The Most High of Thultanthar sat on his throne like a statue; stone faced, his eyes closed, patiently brooding. Letting the magic build within him.

When all the circling items were gone, Telamont Tanthul opened his eyes. They had become two blue-white stars.

He crooked a finger, and the air before him came alive with the bright and moving hues of a scrying scene that filled the room from wall to wall, reflecting off the polished marble.

The air above a vast green forest was filled with crisscrossing, shifting, racing lines of bright force that formed an impossibly complex and ever changing weaving-the Weave, made visible, and beneath it …

A panorama of a few desperate elves in shining armor, battling to protect the flickering blue upright oval of a portal on a terrace between two tall, fair, slender-towered buildings. All around them were their foes, human mercenaries in motley armor who pressed inexorably forward over their own dead, a dozen of them to replace each of their fellows who fell, a score to drag aside the limp dead to keep them from becoming walls the elves could defend.

Myth Drannor had all but fallen-and now this.

“No!” Telamont Tanthul spat suddenly, bringing one hand down on the arm of the throne in a fist. “Never, lich! No Tanthul shall serve the likes of you!”

He sprang to his feet and flung his arms wide, exulting in the power now surging through him. “I shall destroy you, dead wizard!”

The doors of the room boomed open, and magic howled through them, summoned from all over the city.

Draining wards and craftings that should not be drained, but … there comes a time for strong measures, and it was here.

The High Prince of Thultanthar laughed wildly as more and more power flooded into him.

The shadow of the descending city loomed larger and larger above the dwindling section of central Myth Drannor the elves still commanded, blotting out the sunlight.

Storm saw something flying like a vengeful arrow. It plunged into the mercenaries waiting to get at her and the rest of the surviving elves, opening a great furrow through the startled warriors. It was an elf whose sapphire-blue hair trailed behind her like a comet as she flashed through mercenaries, slicing as she went.

All the way to Storm, where she hissed, “Get all the Tel’Quess out of here! Now!”

And she was gone, racing away through clanging steel and more reeling, falling warriors.

Storm felled four foes with as many vicious slashes, then turned and sprinted to the coronal.

“Get them out!” she screamed. “Every last one of your people! Now!”

And she lunged forward to strike down the mercenaries hacking at the coronal and at Fflar beside her, to give them both time to think. They looked at her, then up at Thultanthar darkening the sky-and started shouting orders, directing a fighting withdrawal through the portal.

Storm whirled away from them, thrust an elbow into the thrumming magic that outlined the portal, and called on the Weave.

It flung her through the forest in the direction she desired, over the heads of the mercenaries, to land in a corpse-strewn courtyard that the elves had yielded a day ago. Where a spell had just sent lightning lashing through the rearmost mercenaries.

Storm ran for its source.

Amarune Whitewave, with Lord Arclath Delcastle standing like a bodyguard in front of her, sword ready. They both gaped at her.

“Well met!” she greeted them, still sprinting hard. “You two are as blithely disobedient as I expected you to be. What? Why the astonishment? Haven’t you ever seen a Chosen of Mystra who’s been bathing all day in blood before?”

“Storm!” Rune’s stare was anxious. “Where are you headed?”

“This way, and I need you both with me! Come!”

Some of the rearmost mercenaries were turning now, and running toward them.

Amarune and Arclath glanced at them, then back at Storm. Who spread her arms and gathered them in. “Come on!”

More of the besiegers were running now, and the sky was growing dimmer overhead, the floating city lower and nearer.

“Where’re we headed?” Rune gasped. “A portal?”

“No!” Storm panted. “No magic! Want to be far away from all magic, when-”

The flash of blinding, deep blue light from behind them came with a shock wave that lifted every last running being-not to mention shrubs and sapling-and flung them onward.

“Noooo!” everyone heard two voices shout, out of different directions in the empty air: Telamont Tanthul and the archlich Larloch, united in dismay.

Yes, another voice replied fiercely, out of the heart of the light. I, the Srinshee, have made my choice, so that my people shall live. In a Realms not bound to tyrants of darkness. So whenever you smile into the fresh winds of freedom, remember me.

In a dark corner of the exclusive upper room in the Memories of Queen Fee, the most fashionable and expensive club of the clubs that overlooked the great Promenade in Suzail, a tall and darkly handsome man suddenly stood bolt upright. His surge upset goblets and tallglasses in profusion, not to mention a side table bristling with expensively filled decanters. Nobles exclaimed in exasperated irritation.

“Dolt!”

“What’s got into you? Have a care, man!”

“Such a waste! Sirrah, I’m talking to you!”

Manshoon ignored them all. His eyes were wide, not seeing the room around him, but struggling to far scry an elf city far away across a mountain range-and failing. His magic was failing him.

“Something’s happening,” he snapped, still struggling. “Great power-”

As everyone stared, he cried out in pain, blue light flashed from his eyes in actual spurts of flame, and he collapsed across the table.

Mirt deftly whisked his own drink safely out of the way, regarded the senseless man almost in his lap, and muttered, “Never liked wizards. Damned excitable idiots. Swords now, and sly tongues … with them, I know where I stand.”

There were suddenly armed and uniformed men in the room, peering around, hands on sword hilts. A Purple Dragon patrol.

Noble lords of Cormyr looked up from their drinks to regard the Dragons sourly. “Even here?” one of them rumbled. “Aren’t there murders you could be solving? Thieves to catch?”

“We got a report that the wanted wizard called Manshoon was here,” the leader of the patrol snapped.

“A man claiming to be Manshoon, aye,” another noble replied, pointing at the senseless man draped across the table. “Me, I think he was just trying to get out of paying for his drinks.”

The Dragon officer looked at Mirt, who growled, “I’ll cover his owing. And stand all of you yer favorite slake too. Now go put yer love of country to better use.”

Out of the blue light, a face swam. The Srinshee.

She blew Elminster a kiss and said tenderly into his mind Farewell, old friend.

Then the face exploded into a racing blue flame that stabbed across the air between them and coursed into El, imparting such raging power that it lifted him a few feet into the air-sitting on nothing, Alustriel and Laeral clinging to him and elevated with him-and made every hair on his body stand out stiffly, his eyes become spitting blue flames.

Alustriel and Laeral were flung away from him, shocked and numbed, and landed hard. They stared at him, aghast, as he rose, standing on nothing, now about the height of a tall man off the ground, trembling. Small blue flames spurted from his stiffly spread fingertips.

The Old Mage hung in the air, helpless, as all of the Srinshee’s magical might and life-force flooded through him-and through the linking flows of power, to stab into Larloch.

Whose shrieks, as he burned, clawed the ears of everyone in Myth Drannor and Thultanthar.

It took a long time for those screams to dwindle as the archlich was whirled away, his hold on power lost.

The mythal collapsed into Elminster, and exploded out of him in all directions, flooding the Weave nearby with its energy.

The air shone brightly, and sang, loud and bright.

As the city of Thultanthar crushed elven spires as if they were made of sand and came inexorably down, down atop Myth Drannor.

The Most High of Thultanthar looked around wildly. The city was heading for the ground, faster and faster, the very stones around and beneath him groaning deep and awful with the strain-and there was nothing, nothing he could do to stop it.

He’d flung all of his gathered power to tug against the downward pull, in utter vain, then turned it to trying to twist what few spells he could see in the minds of nearby Thultanthans-for there was no time at all to craft a new magic-into a severing force, to slice free of that pull … and failed.

His city was doomed.

Telamont snarled a heartfelt curse, and gathered all his newfound power to flee-but the empty air in front of his throne fell away like a curtain, to reveal a bearded and weathered face staring at him with eyes that held no shred of mercy.

Force flooded out of those eyes in a torrent, slamming Telamont Tanthul back on his throne and pinning him there.

They gazed at each other, High Prince and Old Mage, while the tyrant of Thultanthar tried a dozen swift spells of escape or destruction, and Elminster casually shattered them all in the instant of their forming, one after another. Until Telamont Tanthul ran out of ideas and relevant magic. As he racked his wits desperately, trying to think of how to escape, Elminster said flatly, “Enough, Tanthul. Ye’ve misused thine Art for centuries, and grown more arrogant rather than wiser. The Realms are far better off without ye. Reap now the reward that should have been thine long, long ago.”

And the almighty crash that came then shattered bones and toppled walls and pillars, even before the Most High of Thultanthar was flung up at the ceiling and his upthrust throne pinned him there and then drove him through it, in broken pulped pieces that leaked magic in all directions.

The floating city and hapless Myth Drannor beneath it smashed and ground together and were both destroyed, ancient elven magics exploding here, there, and everywhere amid the roiling field of tumbling stone.

And Telamont Tanthul died, already in bodily agony, shrieking in terror as his mind broke like a toppled wineglass. Elminster Aumar held the shade’s cracking and disintegrating body on his cracking and disintegrating throne throughout, and the Shadovar’s mind clamped tightly with his own, to make very sure.

So it was that he tasted Telamont’s destruction, and very nearly shared it.

Lost in tears, reeling, mentally exposed and exhausted, Elminster swam in and out of consciousness … and lay helpless beneath the coming of the Mistress of the Night.

Shar raged, vast and dark and terrible in the sky above the broken cities, glaring down out of her own nightfall at the floating, slumped Elminster, her darkness rolling down, down, reaching out with great dark tentacles …

That vanished in a flood of silver light, a sloping wall of silver fire like an impossibly tall tidal wave, sweeping up into the sky and growing a face.

Mystra, bright and powerful and whole, smilingly defying the dark goddess.

“Let us, for once, not go too far, Goddess of Night,” Mystra said gently, her eyes two silver flames of understanding, warning, and grim promise.

Shar snarled in rage and turned away in a swirling of shadows, and the day came back again.

One moment the coronal was fighting desperately against too many mercenaries to count, in deepening darkness as the floating city came down on all their heads, fighting to guard Fflar’s back and keep him alive as he worked miracles of deft bladework to hold back hireswords beyond counting, and helping elf knight after wounded elf knight through the portal-

And the next, she was somewhere else.

Somewhere green and forested and familiar, that lacked tall spires and human butchers-for-coin beyond number and fallen Tel’Quess everywhere.

She blinked. Semberholme, that’s where she was.

There were elves everywhere around her, in bloody armor, swords in their hands, weeping and embracing. Her people, the last Myth Drannans who’d fought beside her, she who was now coronal of nowhere.

Through the sobbing, hugging crowd, she saw Fflar, her Fflar, in his hacked and rent armor, sword still in hand, stalking wearily toward her.

“The Srinshee,” he said hoarsely. “She saved every one of us.” And burst into tears.

They plunged into each other’s arms.

The breeze was icy, up on so high a ledge of the Thunder Peaks, but it afforded them the view they needed-once augmented by their spells, of course-and they simply had to see.

It’s not every day you watch your home and most of your kin and people destroyed, all at one stroke.

Gwelt, Manarlume, and Lelavdra stood together in stunned silence as the debacle unfolded.

It was a long time before Gwelt stirred.

“Your grandsire was a mighty man, but a proud one,” he said grimly. “Too proud, in the end.”

“He was a proud fool,” Lelavdra replied scornfully.

“There are worse things to be,” said Manarlume, “but yes, let us strive not to be so proud.”

“Or foolish,” Gwelt added.

“And keep far from the company of those who are,” Lelavdra said bitterly.

Manarlume sighed. “So shall we shiver on some mountaintop? Shrivel dry at the heart of some vast desert? Or drown on a rock far out in the trackless seas?”

The three Shadovar looked at each other-and then burst into rueful laughter.

It was so late on this night of the thirteenth of Marpenoth that it had really become early on the fourteenth, and outside was chill darkness and glittering stars.

Yet Storm’s kitchen was a warm welter of noise, delightful aromas, and dancing candlelight from a dozen lanterns. It was hot and getting hotter, and Amarune and Arclath were trying their best to help their whirlwind of a host prepare a feast. Storm preferred to stir and sample the soups herself, but there were roasts to be wrestled onto spits and then turned by someone who could kick fresh logs into the hearth beneath them without having all the flaming firewood roll right back out (Arclath’s job, and he was learning mastery of it fast, though his boots would never be the same), and bread to be hauled out of ovens (Amarune’s task).

She blew clinging hair off her forehead with a mighty puff, slid her hands into the padded gloves Storm had tossed her way, and picked up a pry bar to do battle with the bread-oven doors.

“How do you know they’re done?” Arclath asked her.

“See that line of bread dough all around the edge of the door, sealing it?” Rune asked tartly. “It’s done, yes? Well, then, so are the loaves inside.”

“And you became an expert on baking bread when?”

“When Storm told me about that trick, while you were raiding the pantry,” Amarune admitted, and when Arclath looked over his shoulder, he saw Storm watching them with a broad grin.

“You’re a couple, all right,” she murmured happily.

“We’re cooking enough for an army,” Rune pointed out, chipping baked bread away from one door. “How can you be sure they’ll come?”

“I know them,” Storm replied. “Saving the world makes you hungry.”

And it was only one dropped loaf and one slopped soup cauldron later that the kitchen door opened without knock or warning, and two tall silver-haired women arrived.

“Luse! Laer! Wine yonder!” Storm greeted them, not leaving her pots.

Alustriel and Laeral smiled and waved at her, and Alustriel asked, “Anything we can help with?”

“Eating and drinking,” Storm told them, “and settling your behinds down in the chairs that end of the table, out of the way.”

“Fair enough. Oh, we’ve brought along some friends,” Laeral announced, and stood aside to introduce, with a flourish that would have done credit to any herald, a bewildered-looking Lady Glathra Barcantle of Cormyr, with a spiderlike, human-headed thing-the former Royal Magician Vangerdahast-riding on her shoulder.

“Well,” it was telling Glathra rather testily, “I think the Rune Lords are-oh.” It stared at everyone in the room, and blinked in surprise.

“Welcome!” Storm said with a smile, and then looked at Vangerdahast and added, “You should have come visiting more often down the years, Vangey. Affairs of state make more sense when discussed over broth-or something stronger-in a farmhouse kitchen.”

Vangerdahast bowed his head, looking a little abashed, but whatever reply he might have made was lost in the banging of the door.

It flew open with force enough to make Storm lay hand on the fireplace poker beside the cauldron she was paying most attention to, ready to hurl it-but through it lurched no foe, but a familiar bedraggled wizard.

Looking more exhausted than usual, if that was possible.

“Elminster!” Amarune exclaimed delightedly.

He gave her a smile that twinkled. “Well, now, that’s a pleasant change! Well met, dearest!”

The Old Mage blew Storm a kiss, gave Arclath a cheery wave, then nodded to Vangey and said, “Ao’s finished toying with us all, Abeir and Toril are apart and getting more so, the Sundering is done-and I believe I need a drink! Oh, and here’s a lady ’tis high time I spoke cordially with, rather than sparring over the safety and good governance of Cormyr with!”

Glathra, who’d said nothing at all and looked like she intended to go right on doing so, ducked her head and blushed.

Then Elminster turned to the two women who stood down at the far end of the table, flagons in their hands.

“El?” Alustriel asked tentatively.

“Luse! Laer!” Elminster rushed to them, spreading his arms wide, and they hastily set their flagons down and fell into his arms.

They rocked together for a few moments, murmuring things and chuckling, before El said briskly, “I perceive I seem to have arrived at the right time!”

“As usual,” Storm commented archly, waving a ladle at him.

“Lady fair,” he said gravely, “point ye not that thing at me!”

“Or you’ll … what?” she challenged him, hands on hips and a mock glower settling onto her face.

“Or I’ll eat one last feast at thy board, burst of a surfeit of everything, and expire at last!” he replied, crossing the kitchen and sweeping her into his arms. “After all, I have a successor now!”

And he pointed at Amarune, who blinked back sudden tears as she reached out an imploring hand to him, fingers far too short to touch him from clear across the room. “Don’t say that! I’m not ready for-for any of it. Yet … you’ve been meddling and fighting and striving for centuries! As those you love are born, live their lives, grow old, and die, again and again, leaving you alone at sunset, time after time. You must be so tired of it all!”

Storm and Elminster looked at her, their arms around each other. Then they regarded each other, nose to nose-and with a smile and a squeeze, Storm silently bade the last living prince of vanished Athalantar to make reply.

And he smiled back at his too-many-greats-granddaughter with a touch of sadness and a much larger measure of pride, and said, “Yes, dearest, oh yes, but don’t ye see? ’Tis what ye haven’t done that torments ye, in life. And it’s always been the love given me that sustains me-and ye still give it, all of ye. So I cannot stop, until I drop.”

“If you get any more poetic,” Alustriel murmured, “I’m going to gag.”

El chuckled. “Ye see? The love never ends.”

At that moment, there came a knock on the door. Two raps, gentle and widely spaced. “Now who might that be?” Arclath asked, drawing his sword.

El spun something swift and unseen from the Weave that anyone watching might have suspected was some sort of magical shield, and beat the young noble to the door, mainly because he was closest.

“Duth Braerogan from the next farm, quite likely,” Storm told them, looking up from a pot that was right at the stage where it shouldn’t be left alone, with no one to stir it. “He keeps a fairly good watch over the place, and I-”

Elminster opened the door, ready for anything.

And the room silently flooded with deep blue light shot through with a thousand thousand tiny, twinkling silver stars.

Those stars were coming from the eyes of a dark-haired, slender woman who stood almost shyly on the threshold.

“May I come in?” she whispered, but her voice held a deep thunder that set Arclath’s blood thrumming in his veins. He lowered his sword-it seemed to be shrouded in countless swarming stars-and stared.

“Well met,” the woman said to him, and as their eyes met something happened to Arclath. His heart sang, yes, but was he-? He was! He was floating, drifting gently back from her, the soles of his boots no longer touching the ground.

“Oh, yes! Be welcome, Mother,” Storm said in a tremulous voice, as if she was on the verge of tears. “You are always welcome here.”

“Mother?” Amarune asked, bewildered.

Arclath looked back at her and saw happy tears streaming down the faces of all five Chosen in the room. Among them, Vangerdahast was frozen, openmouthed in dumbfounded awe-suddenly a spider-thing no longer, but a man again, dark robes and all, and looking down at himself and back up at the woman in the doorway and back down at himself again, in utter disbelief-and beside him, Glathra was out of her chair and on her knees, cowering.

It occurred to Arclath Delcastle that he should be kneeling too, if this was who he thought it was, but he was still drifting, unable to go to the floor. That didn’t stop him trying.

“An inherited title I still feel unworthy of,” the woman answered Rune, and seemed to flow into the room rather than walking. “I am Mystra. Yes, that Mystra. And I’ve come to give my deepest thanks to all of you-and to be who I used to be for a little while, if you’ll let me.”

Her eyes twinkled as she looked at Storm. “You see, I’ve never forgotten your cooking.”

“So You’ll be wanting me to stick around and cook a meal or two for You every century or so?” the Bard of Shadowdale asked, her silver tresses stirring around her shoulders like the tails of so many contented cats.

“Please,” the goddess of magic said simply, and the room fairly crackled with benevolent power.

“Not without my El,” Storm replied gently, staring into Mystra’s eyes.

Whereupon the goddess turned to Elminster, who still stood by the door, his hand raised and surrounded by the faint shimmering of his shield. In sudden silence, everyone else looked at him too.

The Old Mage smiled back at them all.

“Well, look ye, I’ve wanted to die for a long time now. But no longer. Now, I want to stay and see the Realms healed.”