by Paul S. Kemp
Around him, as still as statues, stood the company of Lathanderians, a rose-colored glow still noticeable around the edges of their shields. Several lay dead on the ground, their ears leaking lumpy red liquid.
Furlinastis’s huge, dark form lay sprawled across the plains, one wing gone, countless gashes open in his scales. The shadows and wraiths that had filled the sky were gone, returned to the Plane of Shadow.
Rain hung motionless in the air. A bolt of lightning hung in the darkness, splitting the sky, caught in mid-moment by the spell. Caught so, the Shadowstorm seemed almost tranquil, beautiful.
Sakkors, too, hung in the distant sky, barely visible behind its curtain of shadows. Magadon sat in its core, lost in the Source, lost in the damage his father had done.
Rivalen eyed him, golden eyes aglow, shadows burning with the same dark power that filled Riven, that filled Cale.
“I see it, now,” the Shadovar prince said, his voice hushed, pained. “It is not what I thought.”
“It never is,” Riven said. “Keep your promise, Rivalen.”
Riven left the threat unsaid.
The shade prince nodded.
Riven looked on the faces of the Lathanderians until he found Regg. Blood and mud spattered the warrior’s bearded face. Dents dotted his breastplace. Links of his mail hung loose at the shoulder. Riven reached into his beltpouch and withdrew the small pouch of Urlampsyran pipeweed. He stuffed it into one of Regg’s belt pouches.
“I do not think we’ll get to share that smoke.”
With that, Riven drew the darkness around him, the power, and rode it to his temple on the Wayrock. He materialized on the lowered drawbridge. The night sky above him twinkled with stars instead of the oppressive ink of the Shadowstorm.
His girls slept in the entry foyer, frozen by the time stop. He went to them, petted each in turn. He enjoyed the moment. He loved his girls. They were innocence to his transgressions.
He stood, thought of his task, and hardened his will.
He set down Weaveshear, inhaled, readied himself.
The wind gusted, pushed against Cale. He held his ground, drew on his power and let it fill his voice.
“I have come to keep my promise, devil!”
His words boomed across the plain, as loud as a thunderclap. The ground cracked, split under him. Chasms opened in the ice. Great shards of soot-stained snow and rock broke off mountains and fell in roiling clouds of ice to the plains below.
A million devils looked up and answered him with a bellow. The damned, spared their tortures for a moment, sighed at the reprieve. Somewhere, the halls of Mephistar itself rang with his words.
Within three heartbeats gelugons began to materialize around Cale, their white carapaces stained with soot, their vicious hook polearms painted with the gore of ages. Wet, greasy respiration came in pants from between their clicking mandibles. The opalescent surfaces of their bulbous eyes reflected Cale in miniature.
A dozen appeared, two score, a hundred. Their eager clacks filled Cale’s ears. The ice groaned under the weight of their collective mass.
Cale stared at them in turn, let them see the power lined up behind his eyes, and their eagerness turned to uncertainty. The shadows around him roiled. They encircled him, claws scrabbling in the cracked ice, but none dared advance. They sensed what he was. He was not for them and they knew it. He stood in their midst untouched, an island of shadow in an ocean of diabolism.
“Inform your master—”
Mephistopheles appeared among them in a cloud of soot and power. They bowed at his arrival, the clack of their carapaces like the breaking of a thousand bones.
“I was aware of your presence the moment you dared set foot in my domain, shadeling.”
The archfiend stood as tall as a titan, towering over his minions, over Cale. His black, tattered wings cast a shadow over the assemblage, over the whole of the plane. The heat from his glowing red flesh melted the ice and snow under his feet and sent up faint clouds of steam. The wind stirred his coal-black hair, tore dark smoke from his muscular form. He held his great iron polearm in one hand and lines of unholy power danced on its tines.
Cale truly saw the archfiend for the first time. Mephistopheles was nearly as old as the multiverse, his power and presence as rooted in reality as the celestial spheres. Shar was older, but not Mask. Cale understood the archfiend’s full power for the first time.
Understood, too, that he was a match for it.
Perhaps.
The archfiend’s pupilless white eyes, so like Magadon’s, pierced Cale, saw within him.
“You have brought only a piece of what you owe.”
Cale nodded.
“A piece satisfies my promise.”
Mephistopheles considered, nodded. “So it does. And so is my plan brought to fruition.”
Cale summoned Riven’s sneer, laughed, and the sound cracked ice. “Your plan? You have been played, the same as me, the same as him, the same as all of us.”
Mephistopheles frowned and the gelugons clicked, their uncertainty manifest.
“You are mistaken.”
“No,” Cale said. “You are.”
Mephistopheles smiled. “And yet I will have what I covet, despite the machinations of godesses, gods, and archwizards.”
“And I will have what I want,” Cale said, and the pronouncement separated him from himself, split him in two. He felt outside his body, distant, an observer in events rather than a participant.
He found his mind focused not on the present, but on the past. Memories flooded him, the small, quiet moments he had shared with Thazienne, Varra, Jak, the mere hours he’d had with his mother, Tamlin, Riven, the bonds of his life born sometimes in laughter and embraces and sometimes in tears and blood.
“You are without your toy,” the archfiend said, and nodded at Cale’s empty scabbard.
Mephistopheles’s voice seemed far away, a whisper, the faint calling of a fool in the night. Cale floated above the plain, above the devils, above himself, looking down on it all like a ghost haunting his own death. The image was blurred, as though seen through poorly-ground glass. His life, however, played out before him in clear, bright tones, the sequence of events that had brought him to this moment, here, now, when he would die.
“That is because I have not come to fight you,” he heard himself say. “I have come to pay what I owe, and to collect what is due.”
Riven sensed Mephistopheles’s arrival, felt the sudden surge of power, malice, the eternal and unrepentant darkness. The shadows around him spun in slow spirals. Knowing what would come, what must come, Riven focused not on his sadness, not on the surprising sense of loss that turned his stomach into a hole, but on the job.
He was an assassin, as ever he had been. And he was working. He sheathed his grief, and put his hands on the hilts of his blades. He heard his heartbeat in his ears, as loud as a wardrum, each thump keeping time, counting down the moments left in Cale’s life.
“To collect what is due,” he said, echoing the words of his onetime enemy, now his friend, now his brother.
Mephistopheles stepped toward Cale, eyes blazing, bleeding power, malice, trailing gelugons eager to see a god’s blood shed.
Cale, filled with power of his own, gave no ground, but increased his size until he stood eye to eye with the archfiend, until the gelugons were as children gathered for a story.
Dark power flared from Mephistopheles. Cale’s shadows swirled in answer. The wind gusted, screamed. Glaciers groaned. The damned shrieked.
“There is only one way for it to come out of you,” Mephistopheles said.
Cale knew. “I will pay what I owe.”
Eagerness flashed in the archfiend’s eyes, greedy hunger. He licked his lips, beat his wings once. The gelugons shifted on their clawed feet, clicked their fearsome mandibles in anticipation.
“First, what you owe,” Cale said.
Mephistopheles blinked with surprise, as if he had forgotten, but recovered him
self quickly. He smiled, showing pointed teeth. His eyes were as hard as adamantine. “Haggling like a Sembian to the last. Very well.”
The archfiend backed up a step amidst the gelugons. He stopped, looked to Cale.
“You have what you have and yet are willing to give it up for my son, a man?”
Cale simply stared, but that was answer enough.
The archfiend shook his head. “I do not understand the minds of men. But here is the greater part of your friend.”
The archfiend bent at the waste, put his hands on his knees, and began to gag, heave. Presently he vomited a gout of steaming blood and other unidentified lumps of gore onto the ice, turning it into a soup of carnage that smelled of tenday-old corpses.
Cale gagged and swallowed bile. The gelugons clicked in amusement.
In the center of the gore, slick with blood, lay the translucent remnant of Magadon’s soul. It did not move.
“What did you do?” Cale said and took a step forward. The shadows around him whirled, ice cracked.
Mephistopheles eyed Cale sidelong, exhaled a breath of power on the soul. The delicate form quickened, stirred, turned, opened its eyes. When it saw the archfiend, its face twisted in despair, terror.
Cale ached for the suffering of his friend. He thought Magadon could be repaired, but never made whole. He would always have a crack, scars.
“But he is not broken,” Cale said, and smiled.
Mephistopheles took the soul by the throat, lifted it high, and eyed Cale, the threat implicit. The soul squirmed and writhed, reaching desperately for Cale.
The power in Cale allowed him to see for the first time the power in the human soul, a power that transcended the trivial conventions of men, gods, and planes. Its beauty, its light, caused tears to well.
The archfiend sneered at his tears, spit, and wiped the gore from his mouth with the back of his hand.
“He is freed when I get what is mine.”
Cale shook his head, let power leak from his form. “No. Free him first.”
The gelugons crept closer but Cale had eyes only for Mephistopheles. Magadon’s soul twisted in the archdevil’s grasp, opened its mouth in silent pleading.
The devil’s eyes flared. Power danced on the pointed tips of his polearm.
“Simultaneously.”
Cale considered, nodded. There was no other way.
“There will be a moment after I release the half-breed’s soul when I can snatch it back still,” the archfiend said. “Should you renege, I will draw him back and destroy him utterly. Devour him before your eyes. Then I will find the rest of my son and cause him to suffer.”
Cale was unmoved. “Should you attempt to take payment without releasing him, I will have a moment before it is done. I will fight you.”
“You would lose.”
“Perhaps,” Cale acknowledged, “but you and everything in this plane would suffer a long while for the battle. Your rivals would know of it and come for you.”
Mephistopheles smiled at Cale’s point, though he showed no teeth, and there was nothing in it but malice.
“When I have what I want, my son will be of no matter to me ever again.”
Cale believed him. “Let us conclude this business, then.”
“Yes, let us.”
The archfiend raised a hand in dismissal and the gelugons blinked out, teleporting away.
Cale held his hands at his side and let the power within him go dormant. The shadows subsided. Cale stood before the archfiend, alone, vulnerable.
“Do it,” he said.
Riven calmed his heart, balanced his blades, and let the full scope of the power he had received manifest in his form. Darkness clotted the small room, as cold and unforgiving as his intentions. He stood in its midst, bouncing on the balls of his feet, hands fixed like vices around the hilts of his steel. He could not slow his heart, could not stop the clouds of shadow pulsing from his flesh.
Mephistopheles released Magadon’s soul and it began immediately to disincorporate into sparkling motes of silver. The archfiend whirled on Cale, his weapon raised for a killing strike.
Shadows leaked from Riven’s flesh, from his sabers, and coiled around him. He heard the exchange between Cale and the archfiend, sensed when Mephistopheles released Magadon’s soul, knew when the archfiend raised his weapon to claim Cale’s payment.
Riven released the time stop spell and reached out his consciousness for Magadon’s mind.
Magadon? he projected.
Riven? Magadon answered in the groggy tone of a man who has just awakened. Riven, what have I done?
Riven heard gratitude in the tone, shame, and above all, grief.
He understood the feelings.
Stop Sakkors’s descent and get clear of there. That is the deal.
What deal? What are you saying? Where is Erevis?
Do it, Mags. Then get away from the Source.
Cale stood his ground before Mephistopheles, eyes open, shadows swirling around him. He saw the hunger in the archfiend’s eyes, knew it would blind him to everything else.
Like Magadon’s soul, he, too, disincorporated, watched it all from afar. He felt light, free. For the first time in a long while he thought that he had done something out of love. For the first time since Jak’s death, he felt like the hero he had promised he would be.
He felt a tickling under his scalp, behind his eyes—Magadon.
Erevis, do not!
I must, Mags. Know that you saved me. You and Jak.
Magadon’s mental voice hit Riven like a punch.
Riven, don’t let him do it. Riven! Don’t let him!
But it was already done.
Mephistopheles’s vicious weapon descended in a killing arc, the full force of an archfiend’s power on its blades. Cale felt nothing as the first blow tore into his flesh. Instead, he smelled the welcome, familiar scent of pipeweed, Jak’s pipeweed.
He fell to the ice, fell into his past, and realized that he had been mistaken.
He was not all darkness. There was light in him after all.
“Cale,” said a voice.
“Jak?”
“There are so many things I want to show you …”
Riven winced, felt each blow of the archfiend’s weapon, felt Cale’s pain, thankfully distant, and counted them all.
One, two, three.
He shouted his rage as the blows fell. Darkness poured from him, covered Faerûn for a mile. His girls darted into the temple.
Riven would exact payment for each blow. He owed Cale as much. He owed Mephistopheles as much.
The shadows carried Riven between worlds. He materialized in Cania, a curtain around his new power, invisible to even the Lord of the Eighth. He felt but was untroubled by the blistering wind, the swirl of ice flakes as sharp as knives, the biting cold. The frigidity of the Eighth Hell could not diminish the heat of his rage. The wails of the damned burning in Cania’s fiery rivers mingled with the howl of the wind but Riven paid them no heed. He focused only on the back of the archfiend who stood before him, the archfiend who had murdered his friend, perhaps the only friend he’d ever had.
Cale’s bloody, crumpled form lay on the ice at the archdevil’s feet. A few stray ribbons of shadow lingered over his body before surrendering to the wind. Ice was already covering him, entombing him in the stuff of Cania. His eyes were closed, his arms thrown wide, his body torn open by the power of the archfiend’s three-tined polearm. Cale’s blood had turned the snow and ice near him to crimson slush. A few strings of shadow clung to the blood as if reluctant to abandon their maker, and held on despite the wind.
Mephistopheles slammed his polearm into the ice, impaling the plane itself. He shouted in ecstasy and held out his arms as a glistening, vaguely man-shaped cloud of black power exploded upward from Cale’s ruined body—a portion of Mask’s divine essence. It swirled around the archfiend, wrapping him in a shadowy helix. One end of the helix drove into his chest, eliciting a grunt, and the power of
the rest poured in behind it.
“Yes!” Mephistopheles boomed, his voice a thunderhead.
He grew in size as the power merged with him. The red of his flesh darkened, the halo of unholy power shrouding him churned wildly. He roared with ecstasy and Cania trembled. The added power in his voice shattered glaciers, sent avalanches of ancient snow and ice sliding down the side of mountains as old as the cosmos, caused devils and doomed souls alike to wonder and cower. All of the Nine Hells rang with his victory.
“Tremble in your fortress, Asmodeus,” the archfiend said, his voice heavy with the promise of things to come.
Having seen the debt paid in full, Riven unmasked himself. The dark fire of divine wrath boiled from his blades, streamed from his flesh, his fury made manifest. In a heartbeat he grew in size to match the archfiend.
Mephistopheles sensed him and started to turn, but too late.
“Let’s dance,” Riven said, as he drove his sabers into Mephistopheles’s back. Power poured from the steel, coursed through the fiend’s form. Mephistopheles howled with surprise, rage, agony. He arched backward, his wings flapping reflexively. Shadows swirled around them both.
Riven leaned into his blades, drove them through Mephistopheles’s body until the tips of both sabers burst from the archfiend’s chest in a spray of power and fiendish ichor. Mephistopheles fell to his knees and his impact caused the ice upon which they stood to vein, crack.
“You cannot kill me,” the archfiend gurgled through a mouthful of ichor and bile.
Riven knew it to be true. He was perhaps a match for Mephistopheles, but only until the archfiend fully assimilated the power he had taken from Cale. Then, Riven would be vulnerable. He had little time.
He put a boot on Mephistopheles’s back and kicked the archfiend flat to the ice while jerking his blades free. The heat from Mephistopheles’s flesh sent a cloud of steam into the air. Riven willed a binding on the archfiend, preventing him from teleporting to safety.
“I cannot kill you,” he conceded. “But I will hurt you. Hurt you so you remember it.”
