remembered she was his current mistress, though even then, her name escaped him. 'I can show you better sport than this.'
He picked up his foot and stamped her to paste.
For an instant, he was appalled at himself, then a wave of elation swept the previous feeling away. He licked up what remained of an arm and gobbled it, tasting human flesh for the first time. It was savory enough to make him shudder with pleasure.
But even so, it couldn't long distract from the even greater ecstasy of slaughter. He killed another human, and another, until he lost count.
Indeed, he lost nearly all sense of himself. He only vaguely comprehended and cared not at all that he was laying waste to his own palace. And once he ran out of prey there, he went on destroying his way across his own city.
Nor did he consider the implications when he smashed his way into the fortress where he'd quartered much of his army. Or register the pain of the wounds he suffered when the men-at-arms and war wizards, trapped and desperate, started fighting back.
Until the strength spilled out of him all at once, and he flopped forward onto his belly. Then a measure of clarity returned.
He tried and failed to stand. Struggled to muster another blast of flame and couldn't manage that, either. His sight dimmed.
Meanwhile, warriors stabbed and chopped at him. It shouldn't be happening. If he'd fought as he was accustomed to, using his intellect and magic, he could have crushed a dozen armies. But he'd engaged them like a rabid beast, and here was the result.
'The red star murdered me,' he whispered.
Conceivably, someone heard. For in the days that followed, as all the wyrms in Faerun ran mad at once, slaughtering those closest to them, their loyal lieutenants and warlords, first of all, destroying all that they themselves had built, people began to name the comet the King-Killer.
THE STAFF OF VALMAXIAN
The 23rd Year of the Sapphire (-7628 DR)
The heat from the explosion seared Valmaxian's unsuspecting lungs from precisely five hundred ninety-eight feet, seven inches away. It burst into a perfect sphere of orange fire, traced with veins of red and flashes of yellow, and a painful white at its heart. It rolled out of its central point to a diameter of forty feet in the time it took for Valmaxian to close his eyes against the blast. He put his hands to his face and felt the Shockwave tousle his long blue-green hair and whip his plain white satin robe around him.
'Oh, no,' he breathed, then coughed once, trying to hold the rest of the coughs in.
The Shockwave passed, but residual heat washed over him and drew sweat out of every pore in his trembling body to plaster the silk robe tightly to him.
'Well,' his mentor said over a sharp exhale, 'that was… less than successful.'
Valmaxian let his hands fall to his side, his fingers balled into tight fists. He blinked open his eyes and waited for the spots to clear, listening to his mentor's footsteps approach. The spots cleared, and Valmaxian could see the fine gold inlays in the green marble floor. The gold traced a series of precise lines and arcs that marked the distance from the center of the room and defined various angles. It was how he knew with such precision how far away from the center of the blast he stood.
Valmaxian looked up, ignoring the scope of the enormous chamber. The domed ceiling soared twelve hundred feet above his head, the inside of the dome likewise marked with radii and calibrations. The round casting chamber-his mentor's private studio-was exactly two thousand feet in diameter, the centerpiece of the fifth largest building in the Western Provinces of Siluvanede, the kingdom of the Gold elves and all that remained of the past glory of mighty Aryvandaar.
Valmaxian's almond eyes settled on the thin form of his mentor, who stood at the lip of a bowl-shaped depression in the center of the room. The green marble there had been scorched black.
'Is it…?' Valmaxian asked his mentor's still back.
'Your precision is improving, at least,' Kelaerede said, his voice echoing a thousandfold in the columned vastness of the casting chamber. 'You've centered the fireball in a rather precise manner.'
'The wand?' Valmaxian asked, knowing the answer.
Kelaerede stood, turned around, but didn't look at his student. 'You're young,' he said, his voice devoid of accusation.
Valmaxian sighed and walked forward. His boot heels tapped out what sounded to Valmaxian like a funeral march. He came to the edge of the central bowl and looked across at a raised column that rose from the center to the height of the floor. On its eighteen-inch round surface lay a thin strip of molten silver, maybe a foot long. The metal still bubbled around the edges.
'Damn it,' Valmaxian breathed.
'There will be other wands,' Kelaerede said.
Valmaxian turned and saw Kelaerede standing next to a small table, pouring a glass of water from a sweating crystal decanter.
'It took the artisans of Guirolen House three years to craft that from silver mined from Selune herself,' Valmaxian reminded his teacher. 'It cost a king's ransom.'
Kelaerede shrugged in that entirely too-forgiving way he had of shrugging and said, 'Then it's fortunate that our own beloved king is not being held for ransom.'
Valmaxian let a breath hiss out through his nose and said, 'My failures amuse you.'
Kelaerede looked up, his face serious, and a cold chill ran down Valmaxian's still sweating back.
'Not at all,' the older elf said, his quiet voice carrying well in the still air. 'It is not the simplest thing, Valmaxian, though you seem to think it ought to be.'
'It took the staff a tenday to prepare the bat guano alone,' Valmaxian reminded him. 'It was a waste.'
'Yes, it was,' Kelaerede answered.
They looked at each other for a long second before Valmaxian turned back to the blackened central bowl of the casting chamber.
'I can't do it,' he said. 'Not this way.'
'You can't learn from me?' the teacher asked. 'You can't try, fail, try again, then-'
'What?' Valmaxian interrupted. 'Then what? Fail again, try again, fail again, try again, fail again, and again and again until all the silver has been mined from the moon to the western continents and back again and I still haven't finished a single, simple, ridiculous little wand of fire?'
'The fact that you don't allow for the possibility that you might succeed is at the heart of why you fail, my son,' Kelaerede answered. 'You've always been harder on yourself than I have been on you, and I'm known as a difficult teacher. You're quick to punish yourself, but like everything else you keep that punishment inside. I've been trying to show you that in order to create an item of true power, you'll need to give something of yourself, you'll need to open up and let some of what is-'
'There are other ways,' Valmaxian interrupted again. 'There's another way.'
'My students and teachers alike consider it rude for a student to interrupt his mentor,' Kelaerede replied. 'We've discussed that, Val, and I've made my feelings on the matter clear.'
'I know,' Valmaxian said, still looking down at the scorched marble.
The spell wasn't supposed to actually go off. It should have been absorbed into the rare silver wand. It was a simple task, but one he found himself unable to complete. Valmaxian, in his own eyes if not in Kelaerede's, was a dismal failure. But he didn't have to be.
'Valmaxian,' Kelaerede warned, 'you have promised me that you will not pursue that path-that you'll never
