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
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
