Shadowrealm

by Paul S. Kemp

  They found no survivors but also no human bodies, though the carcasses of dogs and cats haunted doorways, curled up as if the creatures had fallen asleep and never awakened. Perhaps they had scratched at the doors for owners long departed before the life-draining storm had finally taken them.

  Riven noted each dead dog, his eye hard, and Cale imagined him keeping a count in his mind, a ledger for which he would ultimately hold Kesson Rel to account.

  The buildings of Archenbridge struck Cale in a way that the twisted plains had not, in a way that the bodies back on the Dawnpost had not. The empty structures represented not just a loss of life, but the loss of a way of life. The areas affected by the Shadowstorm would never be the same. Emerging from the wind and rain and darkness like the gravestones of titans, the buildings seemed like monuments to a lost world. By the time they reached the edge of the town and the graceful stone arch that spanned the Arkhen, Cale felt exhausted. Archenbridge was Sembia, was all of Faerûn, if they did not stop the storm. The realization weighed on him.

  They passed the bridge’s toll gate and walked the arch side by side, saying nothing. The churn from the storm had turned the Arkhen’s waters brown. They seethed under the rain’s onslaught. Hundreds of dead fish floated in the current, gathered in the shallows.

  Halfway across the bridge, a flutter in Cale’s stomach stopped him. His mouth went dry and he found it hard to breathe. The shadows around him roiled.

  “Feel that,” he said to Riven.

  Riven tried to speak but failed, and nodded instead.

  Both of them slid their blades free and sank into the darkness on one side of the bridge. With an effort of will, Cale deepened the shadows around them.

  “Kesson?” Riven asked.

  Cale shook his head. He didn’t know.

  The dread grew palpable, thicker and more oppressive than the rain. It weighed on Cale’s chest, stole his breath, and set his heart to racing. Shadows boiled from him, from Weaveshear. Beside him, Riven looked as tense as a bowstring.

  What in the Nine Hells is causing that? Riven signed with a shaking hand.

  Both of them peered out over the bridge, across the water, into the darkness. Even with his shadesight, the rain prevented Cale from seeing much on the other side of the river.

  The dread intensified, rooted in Cale’s mind. Tremors shook him. He stared across the river for the source, unable to move, unable to blink. He knew it was supernatural fear, that he had to fight it, but it overwhelmed his will.

  A barrage of lightning flashed in the distance and Cale saw the source of his feeling, saw its silhouette framed for an instant by the sickly vermillion of the lightning bolts.

  “Gods,” Cale said.

  In form it had the shape of a man, but stood as tall as three shadow giants, looming over even the tallest buildings in Archenbridge. The blackness that composed its immense body was more than mere darkness; it was a hole, the night brought to life. Cale knew it was not Kesson Rel. It was instead the embodiment of fear, terror made manifest.

  It stalked silently along the riverbank with the slow, methodical stride of a predator that had nothing to fear from other creatures. Supernatural terror leaked from it the way shadows leaked from Cale.

  Cale held his breath as the creature paused before the bridge. It turned a featureless black face toward Archendale. Its head bobbed as if it were sniffing for spoor.

  Prepare yourself, Cale signed to Riven, and the prospect of a battle helped clear his mind. His heart slowed. His breath came easier. He put both hands on Weaveshear’s hilt, and readied himself.

  The creature put a foot on the bridge, seemed to think better of it, and turned and continued its path along the riverbank. Cale and Riven watched in relieved silence until it disappeared into the darkness.

  “Dark and empty,” Riven said.

  Cale agreed. There were darker things stalking the Shadowstorm than mere shadows and giants.

  “We need to get to Ordulin,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  4 Nightal, the Year of Lightning Storms

  Following the road, avoiding shadows and an increasing number of shadow giants, they made their way east toward Ordulin. The land became bleaker as they neared the provenance of the storm. Trees, grass, and shrubs had not been merely twisted, but many of them had been transformed entirely by the planar influx. Oaks and elms had been changed to black-barked trees with fat, spade shaped leaves. In place of larch there stood thin conifers with warty trunks and black needles. Malformed animals stalked the plains. Shadows dripped from the creatures’ mangy fur and they skulked away with growls and howls when Cale and Riven materialized in their midst. Some might have once been raccoons or foxes, but Cale could not tell for certain.

  “It is like the Plane of Shadow,” Riven said, and Cale nodded.

  They passed a road marker stuck in the embankment along the Dawnpost. It told them Ordulin was two days by wagon. The marker struck Cale as ridiculous, the artifact of an ancient, lost civilization. An abandoned horse cart lay in a ditch not far from it.

  “How much farther?” Riven asked above the wind and thunder. The assassin could not read.

  Cale estimated the time, based on the speed they had been moving.

  “Two days by wagon. That puts us hours away.”

  The assassin nodded, and glanced back the way they had come. “I wonder if she got out.”

  At first Cale didn’t know what Riven was talking about. “The mare?”

  Riven nodded.

  “She got out,” Cale said, and thumped Riven on the shoulder. “Let’s move.”

  Patrols of shadow giants grew more frequent, but they avoided them as they had been, and ate up the miles until they reached their destination.

  Several bowshots away, Ordulin rose from the plains. Even from afar, Cale could see the black spike of Kesson Rel’s spire hovering over the center of the city, as if about to stab it through the heart. A continuous onslaught of green lightning bolts shot out of the churning sky and struck the top of the spire. With each strike, a tremulous line of energy raced along the spire’s length, from top to bottom, as if the spike were a conduit for the power, directing it to something or somewhere beneath it.

  “Ordulin,” Cale said.

  Even in the steady illumination from the continuous lightning, the walls and buildings of the city looked like featureless rectangles of black, shadowy tombstones marking the deaths of tens of thousands. Darting clots of black plagued the sky around the city, around Kesson’s tower.

  Shadows. Thousands of them.

  A great, swirling column of shadows spiraled around the tower for a moment, then perched on its side. A boom of thunder dislodged them, sending them spiraling into the air again.

  “He will be in the tower,” Riven said. “Has to be.”

  Cale nodded. “We need to get in and get out. Unless his death will destroy the shadows, we can’t linger.”

  “We find him. We kill him. We leave.”

  Cale drew the darkness around them, chose a tall building within Ordulin’s walls not too far from Kesson’s tower, and rode the shadows there. They materialized on the flat roof of what once had been a two story storehouse.

  The wind and rain died. Ordulin sat dry, dark, and still in the eye of the Shadowstorm. After hours in the violent weather, the calm unnerved Cale. Everything seemed too loud, even his breath.

  Energy suffused the air, drew up the hairs on his arms, and caused his skin to tingle. The lightning striking Kesson’s spire seasoned the air with the tang of acrid smoke. Calle moved forward to the edge of the building to see what was beneath the tower. Riven followed.

  “Dark,” Cale said.

  The rings of power traversing the spire fed a black void beneath its bottom. The hole yawned in the center of the plaza, a doorway into an abyss of darkness. The spire discharged the energy of the lightning into the void and with each pulse of power the void’s edges trembled, expanded incrementally. And as it grew large
r, it devoured whatever its edges touched.

  Cale looked into the hole and saw in it Shar’s will. Its emptiness made him nauseous, caused his temples to throb. Beside him, Riven heaved, vomited over the side of the building, and cursed.

  Above, the clouds turned as one in a slow maelstrom around the black, lightning-streaked hole of the planar rift. Kesson’s tower was the axle connecting the hole in the sky to the hole in the world. Shadows poured from the rift and fed the churning, expanding clouds of the Shadowstorm.

  Around them, as far as they could see, the rest of Ordulin lay in ruins, a burst pustule of stone, wood, and flesh. The energies unleashed when Kesson Rel had opened the planar rift had caused otherwise solid substances to run like candle wax. Some of the buildings, rendered unstable by their deformities, had collapsed. Piles of rubble pockmarked the city’s streets. Cale saw corpses everywhere, barely recognizable lumps of melted flesh and bone. Many bodies had run together with the stone or wood, creating grotesque amalgamations. Spheres of impenetrable darkness about the size of wagon wheels floated here and there. Several sections of the city’s stone wall had collapsed and large cracks veined them where they still stood.

  “We gear up,” Cale said softly.

  Riven spat, nodded.

  Cale cast a series of spells that increased his speed, his strength, warded both he and Riven against fire and lightning. Riven held forth his blades and asked Mask to empower them. The Shadowlord answered and the blades oozed shadows. Cale spoke the words to a spell that infused him with divine vitality, and the spell increased his size half again, making him stronger still.

  “We hit him hard and fast,” Cale said.

  “Hard and fast,” Riven echoed, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  Cale pulled the shadows around them and stepped from roof to alley to roof to roof, hopping across the city. The spire grew ever larger in their vision and they kept their eyes from the ruined bodies that dotted the streets and buildings around and below them. Cale could not see the growing void under the tower from their vantage atop a single story building, but he could feel it, a wobble in the rhythm of the world.

  As they closed on the tower, Cale noticed the handful of metal balconies and archways that opened in its sides, apertures to a deeper darkness.

  In the air above them, shadows streaked past. Cale kept the darkness close around them and they went unnoticed in Ordulin’s gloom.

  Kesson Rel felt the arrival of the Chosen of Mask, a faint tremor in the web of shadows that blanketed Ordulin. The divinity within him allowed him to feel the shadows within the city as if they were an extension of his body.

  “What is it, Divine One?” asked Gobitran. The gnome toyed with her necklace of eyes with one hand. With the other, she pawed at his leather robe, fawned in his darkness.

  “The Shadowlord’s Chosen have come,” he said.

  She hissed with anger and remembered pain. The Shadowlord’s Chosen had nearly killed her when they had entered the spire back on the Plane of Shadow, when Kesson had tricked them into freeing his essence from Furlinastis’s shroud.

  “What do we do?” she said, her voice a slightly higher pitch than usual.

  “Kill them,” he said.

  He left off his dark pondering and strode for the nearest archway, Shar’s power sizzling in his left fist, arcane energies bursting from his right.

  Crouched in the darkness, Cale and Riven saw Kesson emerge from an archway halfway up the spire and step onto a balcony. Hundreds of shadows launched themselves from the sides of the tower and swarmed toward him.

  “Do not move,” Cale said. He deepened the darkness around them.

  Kesson put his hands to the balcony’s rail and leaned over. His gaze swept the city, and stopped when it was fixed on Cale and Riven.

  Cale felt Kesson’s regard like twin dagger stabs. He stood, and let the shadows fall away.

  “He knows we’re here. Ready yourself.”

  Riven cursed, stood.

  Kesson leaped over the edge of the balcony, beat his wings, and launched himself into the air. The shadows fell in around him, a black tide swirling in his wake. The darkness around him crackled with power. A net of lightning lit the sky, struck the tower, and fed the hole. Distant thunder rumbled.

  “Use the ring,” Cale said, the shadows around him whirling. “You’re left. Hard and fast.”

  Riven understood his meaning right away, and nodded.

  “Return to this spot,” Cale said.

  Riven looked around to fix the location in his mind, whirled his blades, and said, “Go.”

  Cale and Riven leaped off the building. Cale stepped through the shadows and appeared in mid-air to one side of Kesson. Riven, using his teleportation ring, appeared on the other.

  Cale stabbed with Weaveshear as he started to fall. A ward flashed yellow around Kesson and Cale felt as if he were trying to drive the blade through iron. The recoil from the impact set Cale spinning as he plummeted to the ground.

  He heard Riven’s sabers ring, heard the assassin curse, and heard Kesson speaking words of power.

  Tumbling out of control, he plummeted through one undead shadow after another. The wards that had protected him against the life draining energy of the Shadowstorm also protected him from the negative energy of the shadows, but he felt their cold as his body passed through them. He caught alternating, disorienting glimpses of the city below, the tower, Kesson, the city again.

  He concentrated on the darkness, felt it around him, and rode it to the top of the building from which he and Riven had leaped. Riven appeared next to him in almost the same instant.

  Both looked up to see Kesson Rel streaking toward them, arms outstretched. Four fist-sized balls of flame exploded from his right hand and roared toward the building. From his left, a line of fire streaked toward them.

  Cale and Riven cursed, and dived in opposite directions. Neither the balls of fire nor the jet of flame hit either of them directly but the spells slammed into the rooftop and it exploded in flame. The power behind the flames burned through Cale’s protective ward and the inherent resistance of his body to magic, and seared his flesh. He felt it blister, char. He screamed, and heard Riven doing the same. Shadows coalesced around him as his regenerative flesh began to heal the damage.

  Meanwhile, the impact from the spells shook the already unstable building. It groaned under Cale’s feet and rumbled with the beginnings of a collapse.

  Cale jumped up, clothes smoking, and sped toward Riven while the burning building cracked apart under them. Red-eyed shadows swarmed around him, reaching for him, through him, but his wards shielded him from their touch. He channeled Mask’s divine power as he ran and it exploded outward from him, obliterated half a dozen shadows, and caused another handful to flee.

  Riven sprung to his feet, his cloak and face blackened by flames, blades and body spinning a deadly circle. His enchanted sabers sent shadows boiling away into oblivion. He saw Cale, looked past him, pointed with one of his blades behind him, his one eye wide.

  “Cale!”

  Cale whirled and looked back just in time to see Kesson hovering over the burning rooftop. A forked bolt of green lightning shot from his right palm, while he empowered himself with energy from his left. The fork of lightning split halfway to Cale and sent separate bolts at Riven and Cale.

  Cale lurched sideways while interposing Weaveshear. The bolt struck the blade but Weaveshear did not absorb the magic, merely deflected it, bleeding shadows, and drove it sizzling into the already burning rooftop. A cloud of splinters shot into the sky. The other bolt hit Riven in the thigh and sent him spinning, knocking him prone. Shadows swarmed him. If not for Cale’s ward, Riven would have been dead. The assassin recovered almost instantly and even from the ground his blades stabbed and slashed. Shadows keened and died.

  Cale ignored the shadows harassing him and intoned the words to a spell as he hurried to Riven’s side. In answer to his words, a column of flame formed in the air above
Kesson and bathed the First Chosen of Mask in searing orange fire. The heat and flame washed over Kesson to no visible effect. He beat his wings, smiled a mouthful of fangs, and rapidly intoned another spell.

  “We go at him again,” Cale said, and started to draw the darkness around them.

  Kesson completed his spell before Cale could transport them and Cale felt the magic turn Weaveshear’s hilt warm, felt the buckles on his armor and scabbard start to heat up, but the magic resistant shadowstuff that composed his form resisted the spell and the metal returned to normal temperature.

  “We need to bring him out of the air,” Riven said, sheathing his sabers. Thin streams of smoke issued from his belt, several places on his cloak, and his scabbard. He was not resistant to Kesson’s spell and his metal gear was growing hot.

  Cale took his point, and sheathed Weaveshear. He grabbed hold of Riven’s cloak and they stepped through the shadows to appear again beside Kesson Rel.

  Darkness met darkness.

  Cale grabbed Kesson around the waist and tried to bring him down with his weight. He tried to get a hand on a wing, hold it still, but could not. Riven grabbed one of Kesson’s arms, and wrapped one of Kesson’s legs with his own.

  “You have not the strength,” Kesson said, wings beating rapidly as he incanted another spell.

  “We’ll see, bastard,” Riven said, and freed one hand to retrieve one of his punch daggers. Meanwhile, Cale began his own spell.

  Shadows whirled all around them, keening, reaching for them, into them, but Cale’s ward held. Still, it would not resist the onslaught much longer.

  Kesson finished his spell first and a blast of unholy energy went out from his body in all directions. As it passed through Cale, it tore open wounds in his flesh, hammered organs, loosened teeth. Cale tasted blood but endured the pain and kept the thread of his own spell.

  Riven screamed, spraying spit, blood, and at least one tooth as the energy of Kesson’s spell tore open his skin and ripped at his body. The assassin lost the grip of his legs on Kesson but swung them back into place before he fell. He pulled a punch dagger from a sheath at his back and drove it into Kesson’s stomach, once, twice, again, again. The hilt of the dagger smoked in Riven’s hand and the assassin screamed, but whether with rage or pain Cale could not tell.