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
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
