'Is this how it felt to you?' she asked.
'Yes. You now bear the smalljammers ultimate helm.' Her mouth hung open. 'You are now the First Pilot of your smalljammer,' Teldin said, 'and you must go where the winds of destiny take you.'
And you, Teldin? Estriss inquired. What will happen to you?
'My destiny has been written. I brought to the Spelljammer the Cloak of the First Pilot. I am the Spelljammer's last.'
'I don't understand what that means,' Djan said.
'You must go. I have a duty to perform, one that has waited for a thousand centuries. You… you must live.'
Teldin placed his hands around Gaye's astral form, and she glowed fiercer, more brightly than ever before. 'I will need your help,' he said.
'Does it have to happen this way?' Cwelanas asked. Her eyes pleaded with him. 'Teldin, we need you. I need you.'
'You know what you must do,' the Cloakmaster said gently. ' Verenthestae.'
She nodded reluctantly. 'But you…?'
The Cloakmaster looked up and smiled at each of his friends in turn. 'You have all been great friends. Djan, Chaladar, Na'Shee, go in peace, and learn. CassaRoc, be well. You are a great warrior for good, though you may not know it. And Estriss… may you find your answers, as I have found mine.'
He looked down into Cwelanas's eyes. Slowly he bent to kiss her. Their lips met. Cwelanas tasted her own tears on her tongue. She knew it was the last kiss that she and Teldin would share.
The Cloakmaster pulled away and stepped onto the dais. 'Go now. Live.' He lifted Stardawn's body with one hand and threw it to them. 'Cast it from the roof of the Armory. Let the races know that the new captain has come.' He sat upon the throne.
Gaye floated over to wait beside the Cloakmaster's shoulder. The warriors filed slowly out of the chamber, Stardawn's body hefted over CassaRoc's shoulder, and they disappeared down the entrance hall. Cwelanas was the last to go. She nodded once, wept silently, then ran from the room.
Behind her, in the adytum, the eyes of the Cloakmaster glowed with an inner light, and the mark of the Compass burned fiercely inside his flesh. The opening to the chamber closed in upon itself.
— We are done, he said, and his body slowly began to fade away.
— My friends will survive. Many humans will be saved.
— That is good.
— Gaye will help.
— That is good.
— But the unhumans…
— Perhaps… that is also good.
— But we were destined to preserve, not destroy.
— The children of the Sh'tarrgh are the antithesis of life. To preserve, we must destroy.
Teldin thought quietly, then decided.
— That is good.
Gaye began to fade, following the Cloakmaster's unspoken commands. In a few moments, the only thing left in the adytum was the captain's throne. Smoke curled up from the back of the chair, where the pattern of the Compass had been seared into the stone.
Chapter Thirty-Two
'… The One Egg shattered from the inside, and its shell was cast out upon the flow like seeds in the wind. 'Only one thing survived, that which bears its curse even today, and will one day be punished for its sins against the gods and man…'
The flow was a battleground, a sea of fighting.
Ships swooped past the Spelljammer, grappled together in their thick ropes and firing ballistae at each other mercilessly. A hammership banked just outside the Spelljammer's air envelope and fired its catapults toward the ship. Most of the boulders missed completely, passing harmlessly though the air bubble to fall toward the Broken Sphere on the other side of the ship, but one load of boulders hurtled toward the Spelljammer and thundered into the Elven High Command, sending heavy chunks of stone to the deck far below. The top floors of the command stood shattered, like a broken chimney, and the golden dragon standard that had flown at the pinnacle of the tower lay in a hundred twisted pieces across the roofs of the dwarven citadel and the Communal Church of Wildspace. Rubble littered the streets, and the elves unlucky enough to have been stationed on the roof fell to their deaths and splattered on the deck.
The warring between the races had stopped suddenly, as soon as the intercepting ships had begun firing at the Spelljammer. The warring factions on the ship had realized that the Spelljammer needed to be defended. The fighters had all disengaged and raced to their respective communities, where weapons such as catapults and ballistae were armed and readied for retaliation against the newcomers from the flow.
The streets of the Spelljammer lay empty, save for debris and the bodies of the dead and slowly dying. Blood was spattered on the walls of the ship's towers and collected in wide puddles in the uneven streets. The warring now went on high above the towers and would soon be joined by the natural defenses of the legendary Spelljammer.
Deep within the entity, the Cloakmaster felt all and saw all through the Spelljammer's, magical senses. It was as though his arms were the Spelljammer's wings; his feet, its tail; its eyes, his eyes. As they slowly circled the Broken Sphere and swept aside the debris of broken ships, he felt splintered wood and cracked shell brush harmlessly along his wings like minuscule insects. He shuddered as the giff's bombard rang out upon the Spelljammer's back. He blinked as a wasp ship exploded in front of his eyes. He felt warmth as the peoples spread out across his back came together in his defense, almost becoming one with the purpose of the ship.
He watched and heard and felt the other ships around him. Their movement through the phlogiston was like wind rushing between his fingers. Boulders hurtled by catapults felt to him like gentle rain, and the missiles that rushed past him were less than a light breeze. The ships that exploded, or were destroyed by spells, were nothing more than gusts of heat upon his face.
So many races were represented: Shou, elves, illithids, neogi, humans, giff, halflings, dwarves, ores and scro, beholders, minotaurs
… He felt them all, from B'Laath'a, the cunning neogi that had tortured Cwelanas, to the asteroid of dwarves who had allied themselves with the halflings. They were ready to die, either in defense of themselves or their friends, or in a futile attempt to take the Spelljammer. The Cloakmaster realized that, to them, it just did not matter. It was the beginning of a war that had been long in coming, and the unhumans would not stop until they overran the universe with their war machines and humanity was enslaved or extinguished.
— How many more must die? Teldin asked.
— Only those whose deaths are decreed by destiny, and by their own twisted desires.
— How many?
The Spelljammer paused. -Most.
— Must we…?
— It has been ordained. The cycle must begin anew. What was, will be again.
The Cloakmaster watched as the universe around him seemed to run black with death, like the rats that had attacked him in the Tower of Thought.
A tradesman and a nautiloid seemed to join as the nautiloid swung close enough to scrape the tradesman's side in a shearing attack that ripped off its starboard wings and shaved its mainmast into a mere splinter. Then the
