anarchy and madness, a word sprung from the depths of the primordial chaos that had existed before the Realms had ever known light. Even as the moisture evaporated from his body, his flesh withered, and the blood running from his lips hardened before it touched the ground, Gestal uttered the word of chaos.
To Twilight, it was merely a discordant cacophony of sound and fury in a set of twisting syllables. It signified nothing more than a crude limerick, a foul jest, or a random distortion of a tale told by an idiot.
To Ruukthalmuramaxamin, cursed as it was, it was doom.
Had any mortal spoken a parallel word of dictum in the presence of a sane sharn, it might have shrugged off the effects. But the curse that the High Arcanist Nega had left Ruuk, which chained its alien soul tightly within the bonds of law and order, had caused a single weakness: pure, unadulterated chaos.
The sharn screamed, bubbled, and shifted colors. It became a tree; a three-limbed dog; a tiny elf girl with angelic features; a shattered, crackling sword; an apple; and a hangman's scaffold. Then it exploded in a burst of burning power and brackish gore.
The room was silent for a heartbeat. Twilight gaped at the remnants of Ruuk drenching her body and at Gestal, staring with murder in his mad gaze.
'You,' he said, voice like weathered rock, stealing Twilight's focus.
The spell had ravaged his body, sucking the blood and juices from it like a century in the desert condensed in a single heartbeat. The flesh on his bones lay withered and black, drier than white sand. He coughed and gagged, though nothing would come, and struggled to his knees.
'You,' he cursed.
Though he looked weak, Twilight made no move toward him. The power she had just witnessed rendered her speechless and paralyzed with fear, more firmly than any compulsion Gestal could have cast. If he had struck down a sharn-mad as it might be-with a single word, Twilight could do nothing.
What a fool she was to face him. Gestal was far beyond her-far beyond anyone.
Then he raised his hands, intoning the words to a new, fouler ritual, demanding Demogorgon to strike down this hateful traitor who knelt before him.
Twilight tried to lever herself up, but she slipped on the sharn's blood and went down hard. Wincing with agony from her wounds, Twilight climbed to her feet and took up her sword, shakily. Betrayal hardly seemed hers any longer, not with its gray surface burned away to white. The handle was slick and scalding; she dropped it with a curse.
She tried to pick it up again, but when she bent down, her legs crumpled, her feet lost their grip, and she fell, face first, to the floor.
Gestal continued his long, complex invocation to Demogorgon, and Twilight knew beyond a doubt that its conclusion would mean her death. From the flames of his scrying bowl and the twin pits, his shadow loomed out, long and fierce.
'What do I do?' she sobbed, calling upon Erevan, demanding that he help her, cursing his name when he was silent. She could shadowjump away, but not far. She was in no position to flee-she could hardly walk. 'How do I-?'
Then her right hand brushed something hard on the floor and her heart almost stopped. The answer had come to her. Not from Erevan, not from experience or instinct, but from her own mind. She rose slowly, her fingers white-knuckled.
'No,' she cried. 'No!'
She ran, limping, toward Gestal, trying to get to him as fast as she could.
The demon priest pronounced the final syllables of his spell just as Twilight ran, brokenly, toward him. Burning, fiendish power filled the room as the magic took hold, and black fire burned between Gestal's hands. It shot forth in a line of red toward her heart, and Twilight felt more than heard the very air vanishing, destroyed, and the surrounding humidity rushing into the blast's wake. Briefly, Gestal's shadow vanished, but reappeared when the flame came at her.
Running at approaching death, Twilight did not even attempt to dodge.
Instead, she danced into the disintegrating shadows barely a pace from the roaring, slaying spell and reappeared in Gestal's own shadow. She threw herself into his arms, hideous and desiccated as his demonfleshed body had become, caught his face in her left hand, and locked her lips to his. His spell tore into the cavern wall, boring a hole more than two paces wide and ten deep.
His hands, warped and withered into claws, flexed impotently for a heartbeat, then closed, tenderly, around her waist. Twilight clung to him and kissed with all her strength, spending herself entirely in that exchange, as though her existence would cease the instant she broke away.
The stillness stretched. They stood in the eye of a magical storm, the wrath of the Abyss raging about them, but neither looked away. Gestal's power faltered and faded, and they heard two dimly audible hisses echoing around them-hisses that became roars.
Liet pulled away from Twilight's lips then, and his blue eye shone like the rising sun in the sky after a storm at dawn, the green like the seas of the west. His flesh might have been blasted, his health stripped and torn away, but there was more love in those eyes than Twilight had ever known or dreamed. And when he reached up and caressed her face, his touch was soft despite his petrified skin.
Twilight knew she had saved him-that he was free of Gestal forever-that he understood, and more than that, accepted all. And for a heartbeat, all was perfect.
For a heartbeat.
His eyes shifted to confusion, then to pain. He looked at Twilight, his lips forming a question that would never come. He coughed, and blood splashed from his desiccated lips to strike Twilight's face. Then, with a sigh, he staggered and fell, his fingers whispering down her cheek and leaving a scarlet trail.
'Daltyrex,' he murmured as he slumped to the floor. 'Why?'
Twilight could not move her left hand, which had been touching his face, nor her right, until the man she had known alternately as Liet and Gestal lay crumpled at her feet.
Then, as though a bolt of lightning struck her, the elf raised her scarlet-drenched right hand. Holding Davoren's stiletto up to her face, she collapsed to her knees.
She smeared Liet's blood across her cheek and sobbed. Then she hurled the deadly blade aside, cradled his body in her arms, and wept into his chest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
She sat there for a long time. Then, after what seemed days, or years, a shadow loomed at the door, making panting and wheezing sounds.
If the elf heard the shadow, she made no sign. She merely sat there, cradling her friend in silence. The blood had ceased to flow, and the places where it had drenched the elf's garments had hardened into a firm hold. They might have been bound together, she and the corpse, their blood and flesh and hearts linked.
Not that it would matter to the creature stalking her.
It was ravaged: battered, bruised, broken in arm, leg, and rib. A withered left arm, formerly muscular and sleek, flopped uselessly at its side. The cracked and poorly mended legs propelled it at a ponderous gait, half- limping, half-sliding. The once smooth body had been ruined beyond repair.
The thing loomed over Twilight where she sat, near the pit full of dying flames and beneath menacing, stained spikes. It reached for her shoulder with one arm.
'Gargan…' she murmured.
It growled low. She turned her head and looked up without comprehension.
'Kill you! Kill you, pretty elf!' the troll spat, showering the elf's face with ribbons of bile and spittle. His mad eyes streamed tears and blood in equal measure. The troll raised the splintered warhammer high in his spindly arm. 'You no kill Tlork! Tlork kill you! Tlork kill you!'
A black blade burst from his chest and Tlork froze. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then blood and acid leaked from the wound, hissing down to the ground, where they spattered only a thumb's breadth from the elf's bare feet. She seemed not to notice.
