The Temptation of Elminster

Book One: The Lady Of Shadows
One: A Fire At Midnight

"Tempus preserve us!"

"Save the prayers, fool, and run! Tempus'll honor your bones if you don't hurry!"

Pots clanged together wildly as Larando cast them aside, rucksack and all, and sprinted away through the knee-deep ferns. A low branch took his helm off, and he didn't even pause to try to grab at it.

Panting, the priest of Tempus followed, sweat dripping from his stubbled chin. Ardelnar Trethtran was exhausted, his lungs and thighs aching from all the running…but he dared not collapse yet. The tumbled towers of Myth Drannor were still all around them … and so were the lurking fiends.

Deep, harsh laughter rolled out of the trees to Ardelnar's left…followed by a charging trio of barbazu, their beards dripping blood. They were naked, their scaled hides glistening with the gore of victims as well as the usual slime. Broad shoulders rippled, and batlike ears and long, lashing tails bobbed exultantly as they came bounding along like playful orcs, black eyes snapping with glee. They flung away the bloody limbs of some unfortunate adventurer they'd torn apart and swarmed after Larando, shouting exultant jests and boasts in a language Ardelnar was glad he couldn't understand. They waved their heavy, saw-toothed blades like toys as they hooted and snorted and hacked, and it took them only a few moments to draw blood. Larando screamed as one frantically flailing arm went flying away from him, severed cleanly by a shrewd strike.

The competing bearded fiend wasn't so deft, the warrior's other arm was left dangling from his shoulder, attached to his body by a few strips of bloody flesh. When Larando moaned and collapsed, two of the fiends used their saw-toothed blades to lift him in an improvised cradle, and run along with him so the third barbazu could have some sport involving the warrior's innards and carving openings to allow them to briefly see the wider world.

Larando's head was lolling despite the brutal slaps being dealt him, as Ardelnar fled in a different direction. The priest's last glimpse of his friend was of a beautiful winged woman…no, a fiend, an erinyes…swooping down out of the trees with a sickle in her hands.

Giant gray-feathered wings beat above a slender body that was shapely and pale wherever cruel barbed armor didn't cover it. Scowling black brows arched with glee, a pert mouth parted as the she-fiend's tongue licked her lips in anticipation, and she sliced, twisted, and flew on, waving a bloody trophy. Behind her, gore spattered all over the barbazu as they howled their disappointment, a headless corpse thrashing and convulsing in their midst.

"Tempus forgive my fear, I pray," Ardelnar managed to stammer through white and trembling lips, as he fought down nausea and ran on. It had been a mistake to come here, a mistake that looked very much like it was going to cost all of them their lives.

The City of Song was no open treasure pit, but the hunting ground of fiends. These malevolent creatures would hide, letting adventurers venture freely into their midst to wander the very ruins of the riven city. Then they'd trap the intruders and take cruel sport in slaying them as a sort of hunt-and-run game.

Tales of such cruelty were told in taverns where adventurers gather. That was why three famous and very independent companies of adventurers had uneasily joined in a pact and gone into Myth Drannor together. Surely seven mages, two of them archwizards of note, could handle a few bat-winged …

Most of those mages had been torn apart already or left to stumble around with eyes and tongues plucked out, for the fiends to tease at leisure later. When the rest of us are dead, Ardelnar thought grimly as he tripped over a fallen statuette, hopped a few awkward steps to keep his footing, and found himself stumbling through the shattered, overgrown remnants of a garden fountain.

Oh, they'd found treasure. His belt pouch was bulging right now with a generous double handful of gems…sapphires and a few rubies…torn from the chest of a mummified elf corpse as its preservative magics faded with a few last glows and sighs. There'd even been a lone erinyes in that crypt, they'd slain her…it… with confidence. With her wings hacked off in a shower of bloody feathers, she'd not lasted long against the blades of a dozen adventurers, for all her hissing and spitting. Ardelnar could still see the spurt of blood from a mouth beautiful enough to kiss, and her blood smoking as it ran along her dusky limbs.

Not long after that, the jaws of the trap had closed, with gloating fiends strolling out of every ruin, glade, and thicket on all sides. The adventurers had broken and fled in all directions to the tune of cold, cruel laughter … and the slaughter had begun.

Back in the here and now, he was seeing the erinyes again. Four of them swooping past, gliding low. Ardelnar ducked involuntarily, but found himself ignored as they banked off to his right, giggling like temple-maids…nude, beautiful, and deadly. They'd have passed for dusky-skinned women of the Tashalar without those great gray-feathered wings. They were after the mage he'd been hoping would get them both out of this fiend-haunted ruin. Klargathan Srior was a tall, spade-bearded southerner who seemed the most capable of all the mages, as well as the most arrogant.

All that hauteur was gone now, as the mage ran wearily along on Ardelnar's right, hairy legs stained with blood where he'd gashed himself while slicing off his own robes so he could flee faster. Gold earrings bobbed amid rivers of sweat, and a steady stream of mumbled curses marked the mage's flight for his life. The erinyes glided in, veering apart to come at Klargathan from different directions, razor-sharp daggers in their hands. Sport was in their laughter and their cruel eyes, not outright murder.

Gasping, the mage stopped and took his stand. "Priest!" he bellowed, as a baton from his belt grew of its own accord into a staff. "Aid me, for the love of Tempus!"

Ardelnar almost ran on, leaving the man's death to buy himself a few more breaths of flight, but he stood no chance in this deep and endless wood without Klargathan's spells, and they both knew it. They also both knew that this cold realization carried more weight than the command to serve in the name of the Foehammer. The shame of that was like a cold worm crawling in Ardelnar's heart. Not that there was time to brood or fashion denials.

He swallowed in mid-stride, then almost fell as he wheeled around without slowing and ran to the mage, stumbling over bones half-glimpsed amid the forest plants, old bones…human bones. He had a momentary glimpse of a skull rolling away from his foot, jawless and unable to grin.

Klargathan was whirling his staff over his head with desperate energy, trying to smash aside the gliding erinyes without having one of them slash open his face or pluck the weapon from his hands. They were circling him like sharks, reaching out with their blades to cut at his clothing. One shoulder was already bared…and wet with blood from the dagger cut that had left it so.

Through the desperate chaos of thudding staff and flapping wings, the mage's eyes caught those of the priest. "I need …" the southerner gasped, "some time!"

Ardelnar nodded to show he understood and plucked off his own helm to smash at one wing of an erinyes. She flapped aside and he brought his warhammer up from his belt into her beautiful face, hard. Blood sprayed and the fiend squalled. Then she was past them, flying blindly into a tumble along the ground and into a waiting tree, while her three companions descended on Ardelnar in a shrieking, clawing cloud. He jammed the helm over the face of one and ducked under her gliding body so close that her breasts grazed his shoulder, using her as cover against the blades of the others. They struck at both her and the priest, not caring who they cut open, and as Ardelnar ducked away and rolled to his feet to avoid being caught between those last two screaming, spitting she-fiends, he heard Klargathan stammering out an incantation, ignoring the gurgling erinyes who plowed into the ground beside him, her side slashed open and black, smoking blood fountaining forth.

The last two she-fiends soared up into the air to gain height enough to dive back down on this unexpectedly tough pair of humans, and Ardelnar snatched a quick glance back at the overgrown, ruined towers of Myth Drannor. More fiends were coming. Barbazu and barb-covered hamatula, far too many to outfight or outrun, loped along with tails lashing and blood-hunger in their faces. This fern-covered ground would be his grave.

"Tempus, let this last battle be to your glory!" he cried aloud, holding up his bloodied hammer. "Make me worthy of your service, swift in my striking, alert in my fighting, agile and deft!"

One of the erinyes tapped his hammer aside with her dagger, and leaned in to snicker as she swooped past his ear, "My, my…anything else?"

Her voice was low, and lush, full of lusty promise. Its mockery enraged Ardelnar more than anything else ever had in all his life. He bounded after her, almost leaving himself open to easy slaughter at the hands of the other erinyes, but instead she became the first victim of Klargathan's spell.

Black, slimy coils of what looked like a giant serpent or eel erupted from the ferns not far away, spiraling upward with incredible speed. Now they seemed more like taproots, or the boughs of a tree sprouting from nothing to full vigor in mere seconds.

One bough encircled the throat of the erinyes as she turned leisurely to slice at Ardelnar, and another looped about her ankle. The force of her frantic wing beats swung her around to where the black tree was already entwined around both of the previously grounded erinyes. Their bodies were visibly shriveling, sucked dry of blood and innards with the same unnerving speed as everything else this spell-tree did.

Still trying to fly, the snared she-fiend crashed into a tangle of thickening trunks. Her head was driven off, dangling to one side, and thereafter she moved no more.

"By the Lord of Battles, what a spell!" Ardelnar gasped, watching tendrils swarm over the body of the erinyes with that same lightning speed. More were waving in the air above them, encircling the fourth she-fiend. Despite her frightened, wildly slashing struggles, the tendrils caught at her wings, pulled, and slowly dragged her down. The priest of Tempus laughed and waved his hammer at the mage in salute.

Klargathan gave him a lopsided grin. "It won't be enough," he said sadly, "and I haven't another like that. We're going to die for the sake of a few gems and elven gewgaws."

The running fiends were almost upon them now. Ardelnar turned to flee, but the southerner shook his head. "I'm not running," he said. "At least my tree keeps them from taking us from the rear."

A sudden hope lit his features and he added, "Have you any sapphires?"

Ardelnar tore open his pouch and emptied it into the mage's hand. "There must be a dozen there," he said eagerly, no longer caring a whit when Klargathan raked through them and dumped everything that wasn't a sapphire onto the ground.

The southerner swept one arm around the priest and hugged him fiercely. "We're still going to die here," he said, bestowing a firm kiss on the startled priest's lips, "but at least we'll turn a few fiends to smoking bones around us." He grinned at Ardelnar's expression, and added, "The kiss is for my wife, tell Tempus to deliver it to her for me, if you've time left for another prayer. Hold them off again, please."

He crouched down without another word, and Ardelnar hefted his warhammer in one hand and unhooked his small belt-mace to hold ready in the other, taking a stance in front of the mage as ever-thickening black tendrils curled around and over them like a cupping hand.

The tree shivered under the blows of many barbazu blades even as it grew, and gargoyle-like spinagons, folding their wings and barbed tails flat, scuttled in along the tunnel-like opening in its branches to face the priest, who found fresh happiness…no, satisfaction… welling through him. He was going to die here, but die well. Let it befall so.

"Thank you, Tempus," he said, blowing Klargathan's kiss to the air for the god of war to take on. "Let this my last worship please thee."

His warhammer swept up and crashed down. Spinagon claws raked his arm, and he smashed them aside with his mace, being driven back by the sheer force of five charging fiends. "Hurry, mage!" he snarled, struggling to keep from being buried under clawing limbs.

"I have," Klargathan replied calmly, nudging Ardelnar with one knee as he hurled a sapphire down the tunnel of tendrils, and the world exploded in lightning.

From one gem to another held in the mage's cupped hand the lightning bolts blazed, crackling and rebounding in arcs that raced back and forth rather than striking once. Though every hair on both their bodies stood on end, neither the mage nor the priest took harm from the spell.

The biting, clawing fiend wrapped around Ardelnar was protected from the lightning, too, but Klargathan stepped forward and thrust a silver-bladed dagger hilt-deep into one of its eyes, then pulled it out and drove it into the other. It collapsed, slithering down Ardelnar's legs as the two adventurers watched fiends…even one of the tall barb-covered, point-headed hamatulas, its bristling shoulders shedding tendrils with every spasm…dance in the thrall of the lightning. Flesh darkened and eyes sizzled as the bolts flashed back and forth.

Then, as abruptly as it had erupted, the spell ended, leaving Klargathan shaking his hand and blowing on his smoking palm. "Good, large gems," he said with a tight grin, "and we've more to use yet."

"Do we run?" Ardelnar asked, eyeing a pair of erinyes who glared down at him as they swept past overhead, "or bide here?"

The next group of winged she-fiends was struggling under the weight of a broken-off elven statue larger than any of them. They let it go with deft precision. Good Myth Drannan stone crashed through tangled tree limbs, its fall numbing both men despite their dives for safety. They scrambled up to find the falling statuary had left an opening to the sky that spinagons were already circling, aloft, massing to dive into.

The southerner shrugged. "It's death either way," he said. "Moving gives both sides more fun, but tarrying here wins us more time, and we can shed more of their blood before we go down. Not quite the way I'd planned to dance in the ruins of Myth Drannor, but it'll have to do."

Ardelnar's answering laughter was a little wild. "Let's move," he suggested. "I don't want to wind up half crushed under a stone block, with them tormenting my extremities while I die slowly."

Klargathan grinned and clapped the priest on the shoulder. "So be it!" he said and shoved, hard. As the startled Ardelnar crashed headfirst into black tendrils that at least didn't claw at him, half a dozen spinagons slammed down into the space where he'd been standing, their cruel forks stabbing deep into the suddenly vacated ground, too deep to tear free in haste.

"Run!" the mage shouted, pointing up the tunnel. Ardelnar obeyed, steadying himself with his mace against the trampled ground as he stumbled over a forest root, then rushing headlong away from the conjured tree. Behind him raced the mage, a sapphire clenched in his hand and his head cocked to look back as he ran.

When the outstretched claws of the hard-flying, foremost pursuing spinagon were almost touching him, Klargathan held up the gem and said one soft word. Lightning erupted from it right down the fiend's throat.

Its struggling gray gargoyle body burst apart in the roar of bolts lashing into it from both in front and behind…for the mage had left another gem on the ground by the fallen statue, where the fiends had swooped down. As the dark, blood-wet tatters fell away behind the rushing men, Ardelnar saw the rest of the spinagons tumbling and shuddering in the grip of those snarling bolts. He followed the mage around a huge duskwood tree, onto a game trail that led more or less in the direction they wanted to go: away from the ruins, in any direction, downright swiftly.

Ardelnar saw the mage toss down another gem as they sprinted on, dodging around standing trees and leaping over fallen ones, out among the barbazu now, in the deep and endless forest now reclaiming the riven city of Myth Drannor.

In the distance they saw another fleeing adventurer cut down. Then a barbed tail swept down out of dark branches overhead to send Klargathan sprawling, and the two men were too busy for any more sightseeing. The first lash of the cornugon's whip snapped the warhammer from Ardelnar's numbed fingers, and the second laid his shoulder open to the bone, clear through the pauldron and mail shirt that should have protected it. The priest tumbled helplessly away, thrashing in his agony. This was a good thing. It took him well clear of the first howling bolt of lightning.

The bolt crashed into the huge, scale-covered cornugon and toppled it, roaring, right into the pit-of-spikes trap on the trail that it had been guarding. Impaled, it roared more desperately, its cry high and sharp, until a bleeding Klargathan leaped in on top of it, and drove his silver-bladed dagger into another pair of fiend eyes. Those sightless orbs wept streams of smoke as the mage scrambled back out of the thrashing tangle of shuddering bat-wings, long claws, and flailing tail in the pit, and shook the moaning Ardelnar to his feet.

"We'd better run beside the trail, not on it," Klargathan gasped. "I don't suppose you brought any healing-quaffs along? You need one about now."

"My thanks for confirming what a mess I must be," the priest grunted, reeling. "I'm afraid I wasn't the one carrying the potions, but if you'll guard me for a few breaths …"

The mage's baton became a staff again, and he stood guard, watching his last fading lightning bolts snap back and forth along the now empty trail as Ardelnar healed himself.

As they stumbled on, the priest felt weak and sick. Ahead, a steep hill rose, forcing them to run around it or try to climb its tree-girt slopes and somehow stay ahead of fiends who could fly. It was no surprise when Klargathan headed around the hill, panting raggedly now. Ardelnar followed, wondering just how long they'd be able to outrun half the vacationing occupants of the Lower Planes.

They came out into a clearing caused by the crashing fall of a shadowtop tree, and Ardelnar had his answer. Unfortunately, it was a very final one.

Klargathan went down under the claws of half a dozen pouncing cornugons. He hurled a handful of gems into the air with his last breath and died in the wild hail of lightning bolts that followed, sending his slayers tumbling away in all directions. The priest saw that, and managed one last, exultant shout. As fiend-talons burst through his chest and his own hot blood welled up to choke him, Ardelnar was briefly glad he'd healed himself before this final fray. It seemed somehow … tidy.

His last prayer to Mystra had been answered by a silence as deafening as all the previous ones. A year passed since he'd awakened in a tomb full of malevolent eyes with no words from the goddess Elminster so loved. He'd wept, on his knees, before wearily wrapping his cloak around himself and seeking despondent, lonely slumber out under a sky of rushing, tattered clouds, on a deserted hill out in the rolling wilderlands. He was dozing when the sign had come to him. Unbidden, a scene had swum into his drowsy mind, of him standing on a hilltop he knew … and did not know.

It was Halidae's Height, a forest-covered hilltop south and a little west of Myth Drannor that he'd stood on a time or two before, usually with a laughing elf lass on his arm and a warm, star-filled night stretching out before them. In the scene that had come to him there were no elf maidens. Moreover, something had toppled more than one tree on the Height and lit fires here and there, marring it from what he remembered.

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 raw power that he'd only ever heard before when Mystra spoke. It sounded male and somehow both familiar and wholly new and strange.

Elminster spun around. He stood alone, the Height was empty but for a few trees and the wind stirring them.

He stared hard at the empty air, but it stayed empty.

"Who are ye, who answer me? Reveal thyself," he demanded. "Philosophy comes hard when the lectures are delivered by phantoms."

The empty air chuckled. Suddenly it held two glimmering points of light, miniature stars that circled each other lazily, then whirled around with racing speed and burst into a blinding cascade of starry motes of light.

When the flood of brightness fell away, Elminster beheld a robed man standing behind it. He was white-bearded and black-browed, and his calm eyes shone very blue before they filled with all the colors of the rushing rainbow. As Elminster watched, the man's eyes darkened to black shot through with tiny, slowly moving stars.

"Impressive," Elminster granted amiably. "And ye are …?"

The chuckle came again. "I meant it not as a show, nor yet as a herald's cry of my identity … but since we seem to be speaking suchwise, why don't you have a guess?"

El looked the man up and down. Old, ancient even, and yet spry, perhaps as young as some fifty-odd winters. White-haired, save for the brows, forearms, and chest, where the hair was black. He was empty-handed, with no rings in evidence, wearing simple, spare robes with flared sleeves and no belt or purse, bare feet below…feet that could afford to be bare, because they hovered a few inches off the ground, never quite touching.

Elminster looked up from them to the wise face of their owner, and said softly, "Azuth."

"The same," the man replied, and though he did not smile, El thought he seemed somehow pleased.

Elminster took a step forward, and said, "Forgive my boldness, High One, if ye will.. but I serve Mystra in a manner both close and personal…"

"You are the dearest of her Chosen, yes," Azuth said with a smile. "She speaks often of you and of the joy you've brought her in the times she's spent playing at being mortal."

The prince of Athalantar felt joy and a vast relief. In his sigh of contentment and relaxation he almost stepped backward off the Height. At that moment a barbed whip arced around at his face, from the air off to his left, and something unseen took him around the shoulders as he swayed on the edge of oblivion then snatched him forward, away from the cornugon an instant before its reaching talons could thrust into Elminster's eyes. He found himself skimming across the scorched stones of the hilltop, Azuth receding before him so they always faced each other from the same distance.

"M-my thanks," El stammered, as they came to a gentle halt. He felt himself lowered into a comfortable, lounging position, lying on yielding but somehow solid air. Azuth was also sitting on nothing, facing him, across a fire that suddenly sprang out of nowhere. Flames danced up from air a handspan above the unmarked rock of the Height. El looked at it, then around at a sky now full of bat-winged, scaled, hissing fiends, clawing at the air with widening, many-toothed smiles as they dived nearer.

"I don't wish to seem ungrateful or critical, High One," he said, "but yon fiends can't fail but notice this light, and we'll have them visiting."

Azuth smiled, and for an instant his arms seemed to flow with slowly marching lights, winking and sparkling. "No," he replied in the calm, musical voice that was at once splendid and laced with excitement… and at the same time soothing and reassuring. "This Height, henceforth, is shielded against fiends…of all kinds…so long as my power endures. Now hearken, for there are things you should know."

Elminster nodded, bright-eyed in his eagerness. His manner brought the ghost of a smile to the lips of the Lord of Spells, who caused both of their hands to be suddenly full of goblets of wine that smoked and glowed. The god began to speak.

Over Azuth's left shoulder, a hulking red monster of a fiend flapped huge wings in a booming clap of fury, clawed at air that seemed to resist it, and burst into flames. With fire raging up and down its limbs, it gibbered, fangs spraying, green spittle, and a flash of unleashed magic burst from its taloned hands and crawled across an unseen barrier for long moments before rebounding with a flash and roar that plucked the pit fiend from its clawing perch on empty air, sending it tumbling away through the air like a tattered leaf.

The god ignored this, as well as the wails and moans of watching, circling fiends that followed, as he addressed Elminster like a gentle teacher, speaking at ease in a quiet place. "All who work magic serve Mystra whether they will or no," he said. "She is of the Weave, and every use of it strengthens her, reveres her, and exalts her. You and I both know a little of what is left of her mortal side. We've seen traces of the feelings and memories and thoughts she clings to in desperation from time to time, when the wild exultation of power coursing through the Weave…that is the Weave…threatens to overwhelm her sentience entirely. No entity, mortal or divine, can last in her position forever. There will be other Mystras, in time to come."

A hand that trailed tiny stars pointed to Elminster, then back at Azuth's own chest. "We are her treasures, lad…we are what she holds most dear, the rocks she can cling to in the storms of wild Art. She needs us to be strong, far stronger than most mortals … tempered tools for her use. Being bound to us by love and linked to us to preserve her very humanity, she finds it hard to be harsh to us…to do the tempering that must be done. She began the tempering of you long ago, you are her 'pet project,' if you will, just as the Magisters are mine. She creates her Chosen and her Magisters, but she gives the training of them to others, chiefly me, once she grows to love them too much or needs them to be distant from her. The Magisters must needs be distant, that creativity in Art be untrammeled. You, she has grown to love too much."

Elminster blushed and ran a finger around the rim of his goblet. Fiends clawed the air in the distance as he looked down…and was abashed as he might not have been at another time…to find the vessel full of wine again after he had drunk deep.

Azuth watched him with a smile and said gently, "You are now wanting to hear much more of how the Lady of Mysteries feels for you, and not daring to ask. Moreover, you are also dying to know more about what 'Magisters' are and can find tongue to say nothing for fear of deflecting me from whatever wonders I was going to reveal if left to speak freely. Wherefore you are riven and will remember but poorly what follows … unless I set you at ease."

Elminster found himself wanting to laugh, perhaps cry, and grope for words all at once. He managed a nod almost desperately, and Azuth chuckled once more. Behind him, the air roiled with sudden raging green fire that came out of nowhere, and from its heart boiled two pit fiends, reaching out mighty-thewed and sharp-clawed limbs to clutch at the Lord of Spells … limbs that caught fire for all of the time it took Elminster to gasp in alarm before they met with some invisible force that melted them away, boiling off flesh and gore like black smoke. The screams were incredible, but Azuth's gentle, kindly voice cut through them like lantern light stabbing into darkness.

"Mystra loves you as no other," the god told the mage, "but she loves many, including myself and others neither of us know about, some in ways that would astonish or even disgust you. Be content with knowing that among all who share her love, you are the bright spirit and youth she cherishes, and I am the old wise teacher, None of us is better than the other, and she needs us all. Let jealousy of other Chosen…of other mages of any race, station, or outlook…never taint your soul."

Elminster's goblet was full again. He nodded his understanding to the god through its wisps of smoke, as a score of winged she-fiends stabbed at the god with lances that blazed with red flame…and the air, with a silent lack of fuss, ate both weapons and fire.

One of the dusky-skinned fiend-women strayed a little too close to Azuth in her boldness and lost a wing to hungry empty air in a single blurred instant. Shrieking and sobbing, she tumbled away, falling to death below…a death that came rather more swiftly than the waiting ground, as other erinyes, eyes blazing with bloodlust, swooped on her and drove their lances home. Transfixed, the stricken erinyes stiffened, spurted blood in several directions, and fell like a stone.

Ignoring all of this, the god spoke serenely on. "Magisters are wizards who achieve a measure of special recognition…powers, of course, as we spell hurlers measure things…in the eyes of Mystra, by being 'the best' of her mortal worshipers in terms of magical might. Most achieve the title by defeating the incumbent Magister and lose it by the same means…a process often fatal."

As cornugons and pit fiends raged around the Height, watching their spells claw vainly at the god's unseen barrier, Azuth sipped from his own goblet and continued, "Our Lady and I are working to change the nature of the Magister right now…though not overmuch…to make the Magisters less killers-of-rivals and more creators of new spells and ways of employing magic. Only one wizard is the Magister at a time. By serving themselves, they serve to proliferate and develop magic … and there is no greater way to serve Mystra. The purpose of her clergy is more to order and instruct, so that novices of the Art don't destroy themselves and Toril many times over before they've mastered basic understandings of magic … but were this task not governing them, the priests of Mystra would bend their talents more to what we now leave to the Magister."

Azuth leaned forward, the fire brighter now, and said through the flames, "You serve Mystra differently. She watches you and learns the human side of magic in all its hues from your experiences and the doings of those you meet…foes and friends alike. Yet the time has come for you to change, and grow, to serve as she'll need you to, in the centuries ahead."

"Centuries?" Elminster murmured and discovered suddenly that he needed the contents of his goblet rather urgently. "Watches me?"

Azuth smiled. "Indiscretions with alluring ladies and all. Set all thoughts of that aside…she needs the entertainment 'you just being you' affords her more than she needs someone playacting to impress her. Now attend my words, Elminster Aumar. You are to learn and grow by using as little magic as possible in the year ahead. Use what is needful and no more."

Elminster sputtered over his goblet, opened his mouth to protest…and met Azuth's kindly, knowing, almost mocking gaze. He drew in a deep breath, smiled, and sat back without saying anything.

Azuth smiled at that, and added, "Moreover, you are not to have any deliberate contact with your own pet project, the Harpers, until Mystra advises you otherwise. They must learn to work and think for themselves, not forever looking over their shoulders for praise and guidance from Elminster."

It was Elminster's turn to smile ruefully. "Hard lessons in independent achievements and self-reliance for us all, eh?" he ventured.

"Precisely," the Lord of Spells agreed. "As for me, I shall be learning to guide and minister to the mages of all Toril without Mystra to call upon, for a time."

"She's…'going away'?" El's tone made it clear that he didn't believe a goddess truly could withdraw from contact with her world, her worshipers, and her work.

Azuth's smile deepened. "An inevitable task confronts her," he said, "that she dare not put off longer: contingencies that must be determined and ordered, for the good and stability of the Weave. Neither of us may hear from her or see any manifestation of her presence or powers for some time to come."

" 'Dare not'? Does Mystra serve the commands of something higher, or do ye speak of what the Weave requires?"

"The Weave by its very nature places constant demands on those attuned to it and who truly care for it … and the nature of all life and stability on this world it dominates. It is a delight and a craft…and something of a game…to anticipate the needs of the Weave, to address those needs, and to make the Weave something greater than it was when you found it."

T don't believe ye quite revealed the nature of the Lady's 'inevitable task,' or whom…if anything…she answers to and obeys," Elminster said with a smile of his own.

Azuth's own smile broadened. "No, I don't believe I did," he replied softly, merriment dancing in his eyes as he raised his goblet to his lips.

Elminster found himself sinking gently and being brought upright, to stand on the stony ground once more with a landing as soft as a feather landing on velvet. Once, long ago, in Hastarl, the young thief Elminster had spent several minutes watching a scrap of pigeon-down floating down onto a cushion, ever so slowly… and he still judged those minutes well spent.

Azuth was standing, too, bare feet treading an inch or so of air. It seemed their converse was at an end. Though he hadn't even looked at the raging fiends, they were suddenly tumbling away in all directions, wreathed in white flames, their bodies dwindling in struggling silence as they went. The siege of the Height, it seemed, was at an end.

The High One didn't seem to step forward, but he was suddenly nearer to Elminster. "We may not respond, but call upon us. Look to see us not, but have faith. We do see you."

He reached out a hand, wonderingly, Elminster extended his own.

The god's hand felt like a man's.. warm and solid, gripping firmly.

A moment later, Elminster roared…or tried to, the breath had been shocked right out of his lungs. Silver fire was surging through him, laced with a peculiarly vivid deep blue streak that must be Azuth's own essence or signature. El saw it clearly as jets of flame burst forth from his own nose, mouth, and ears.

It was surging through him, burning everything it found, wrenching him in spasms of utter agony as organs were consumed, blood blazed away, and skin popped as the flesh beneath boiled away … through swimming eyes, Elminster saw Azuth become an upright spindle of flame…a spindle that seemed somehow to watch him closely as it swooped nearer and murmured (despite its lack of any mouth El could see), "The fire cleanses and heals. Awaken stronger, most precious of men."

The spindle whirled nearer, touching the nimbus of magical fire around Elminster, fed by the silver jets still erupting from him…and the world suddenly leaped aloft with a silver-throated roar, whirling Elminster up into ecstasy and ragged ruin, torn apart into dark droplets spewed into a looping river of gold … gold too bright to look upon, outshining the sun.

The last Prince of Athalantar lay sprawled on the stones, senseless, with silver fires raging around him and two goblets floating nearby, a cruising spindle of flame between them. The flames touched the goblet Elminster had held, and it jumped a little and vanished into the conflagration, spewing forth fat golden sparks some moments later.

Then the spindle of flame touched the flames raging around Elminster. They rushed into it, and the reinforced, towering Azuth-flames collapsed with a roar that shook all Halidae's Height, washing over Elminster…who convulsed, but did not awaken…then gathered themselves. With sinuous grace and suddenly leisurely speed, the flames rose into a column and flowed up over the edge of Azuth's floating goblet into the steaming wine there. Length after length of roaring flame followed behind, vanishing into the liquid.

In the end, all that was left was that goblet, wisps of wine rising off its brimful contents like smoke whipped by a breeze.

It was the first thing Elminster saw…and drank… the next morning.

The goblet vanished into the air during his last swallow, leaving nothing behind. Elminster smiled at where it had been, got up, and left the Height with a lighter heart and a body that felt new and young again. He stopped at the first still pool of water he came across to peer down to look at his reflection and be sure that it was his. It was, hawk nose and all. He grimaced at his reflection, and it made the face it was supposed to make back at him. Thank Mystra.