words were delivered.
'The gods walk the Realms, dear Midnight! Tymora herself can be seen between highsunfeast and eveningfeast in fair Arabel. Of course, there is a slight donation to the church that must be made for the privilege. Still, isn't the sight of a god worth a few gold pieces? And her temple must be rebuilt, you see.'
'Of course,' Midnight said. 'Gods… and gold… and two weeks gone…' She saw that the room had started spinning again.
Suddenly there was a noise from outside the window. Midnight looked out and saw that Annalee was leading a horse across the clearing. The horse looked to the window, and Midnight gasped. The creature in Annalee's care had two heads.
'Of course, there have been a few changes since the gods came to the Realms,' Brehnan said. Then his tone became reproachful. 'You haven't tried to use any magic yet, have you?'
'Why?'
'Magic has become… unstable, since the gods came to the Realms. You'd best not throw any spells unless your life depends on it.'
Midnight heard Annalee call each of the horse's heads by a different name, and almost laughed. The room was spinning wildly now, and the magic-user knew why — it was the spell she had thrown. She tried to stand, and fell back onto the bed. Startled, Brehnan called Midnight's name and tried to grab her arm.
'Wait. You aren't well enough to go anywhere. Besides, the roads aren't safe.'
But Midnight had already stumbled to her feet and was heading for the door. 'I'm sorry. I have to get to Arabel,' the magic-user said as she rushed out of the room. 'Perhaps someone there can tell me what's been going on in Faerun these past few days!'
Brehnan watched as Midnight headed toward the road and shook his head. 'No, milady, I doubt that anyone — short of perhaps the great sage Elminster himself — could explain the happenings in the Realms to you these days.'
II
Kelemvor walked through the streets of Arabel, the great walls that protected it from invasions time and again somehow always in view. Although he would never admit it, the walls made him edgy, their vaunted promise of security little more than the bars of a cage to the warrior.
The sounds of the hustle and bustle of a typical day in the merchant city as highsun approached filled his ears, and Kelemvor studied the faces of those he passed. The people had survived recent hardships, but survival was not enough if the spirit of a people had been shattered.
Kelemvor heard the sounds of a brawl, though he could not see the fight. The warrior could hear shouting and the sound of blows falling against mail — a common enough occurrence these days. Yet perhaps the display was nothing more than a carefully laid trap to gain the attention of a lone traveler for the purpose of laying open his head and taking his purse.
Such occurrences were also common these days.
The sounds died down, as presumably did their makers. Kelemvor surveyed the street and saw that no one else was responding to the brawl. It seemed that he was the only one who heard it. That meant the sounds could have come from anywhere. Kelemvor's senses were marvelously acute, and this was not always for the best.
Still, the robbery, if it had been that at all, was nothing unusual. In some ways, Kelemvor was relieved by the fact that the fight was only a mundane occurrence, for little in Arabel — or the entire Realms — seemed commonplace anymore. Everything was unusual, and even magic was untrustworthy since the time of Arrival, as that day was becoming known. Kelemvor thought of the changes to the Realms he had personally witnessed in the past two weeks.
On the night the gods entered the Realms, a close ally of Kelemvor lay wounded in his quarters after a skirmish with a wandering band of goblins. The soldier — and the cleric who attended the soldier — perished in the flames of a fireball that erupted from nowhere when the cleric attempted to ply his healing magic. Kelemvor and the other onlookers were shocked; never before had they seen such a bizarre occurrence. Days later, after the survivors of the destruction of Tymora's temple regrouped, the goddess herself leading them, the church officially disavowed any responsibility for the actions of the cleric, and branded him a heretic for bringing forth the wrath of the gods.
Yet this incident was only the first of many strange happenings that would plague Arabel.
The local butcher had run screaming from his shop one morning, as the carcasses he had kept on ice were now suddenly alive, and hungry for revenge against their slayers.
Kelemvor himself stood by as a mage, attempting a simple spell of levitation, found that the spell was no longer under his control. His assent went unchecked, and the fighter watched as the dwindling form of the screaming magic-user vanished into the clouds. The mage was never seen again.
Over a week ago, Kelemvor and two other members of the guard had been summoned to attempt to free a magic-user who had called a blinding sphere of light into existence and then found himself trapped within the globe. Whether he had summoned the sphere by accident or design was not known. The incident took place in front of the Black Mask Tavern, and the members of the guard had been called to control the crowds of people who had gathered to watch as yet another pair of magic-users attempted to help their brother. The sphere did not falter until a week later, when the trapped mage died of thirst.
Kelemvor noted sourly that business at the Black Mask Tavern had never been better than it was for that week. And, from all Kelemvor had heard from the travelers who sought the great walled city for protection, it seemed that all the Realms — not just Arabel — were in chaos. He turned his thoughts away from that path and set his sights instead on the here and now.
The warrior's right shoulder ached, and despite the ointments and salves that had been applied to his wounds, the pain had not lessened in days. Usually, his condition could have been cured by a few healing spells, but Kelemvor did not trust any magic after what he had seen. Still, despite the common mistrust of magic, many prophets, clerics, and sages proclaimed a new age, a time of miracles. Many would-be prophets suddenly climbed out from beneath an avalanche of well-deserved anonymity, all claiming personal contact with the gods who walked the Realms.
A particularly fervent old man had sworn that Oghma, God of Knowledge and Invention, had assumed the form of Pretti, his cat, and spoke with him on matters of the greatest urgency.
And while no one believed the old man, it was commonly accepted that the woman who had walked out of flames left in the wake of the destruction of Arabel's own Temple of Tymora was indeed the goddess in human form. Standing in the midst of the flames, the woman had displayed the power to unite the minds of hundreds of her followers for the briefest of instants, allowing them to share insights only a god could have witnessed.
Kelemvor had paid the price of admission to look upon the face of the goddess, and had seen nothing remarkable. As he was not a follower of Tymora, he did not bother to ask the goddess to heal his wound. He was fairly certain she would have charged extra if he had.
Besides, the pain would make it difficult for Kelemvor to forget that Ronglath Knightsbridge had wounded his pride more than his body when he buried a spiked mace deep in his flesh. They had battled high atop the main lookout tower, where Knightsbridge had been posted. During the battle, Kelemvor had been sent hurtling over the walls of the city toward certain death.
But he did not die.
Kelemvor was not even seriously injured by the fall.
The warrior paused in his contemplations and caught his reflection in the glass of the House of Gelzunduth, a merchant of questionable repute. Kelemvor looked past his image, to the odd collection of items displayed in the window. It was rumored that behind the carefully maintained facade of buying and selling hand-crafted jewelry, costume weapons, and rare volumes of forgotten lore, Gelzunduth trafficked in forged charters and other false documents, as well as information concerning the movements of the guard throughout the city. Numerous attempts
