A dretch grabbed his right leg, but Valmaxian couldn't see it. He felt another hand on his side, an arm beginning to encircle his waist. He muttered a command word, and the lighting returned to its normal dull red as he used the staff to kill the dretches that were trying to drag him down. Their brains were smooth and yellow.
With magic missiles he dropped a few more that had dared to come close under cover of the darkness. Valmaxian knew he had to face the fact that the dretches would always be more afraid of En'Sel'Dinen than they would be of him, no matter how many spells he cast or how many he killed.
The elf mage looked up and counted the dretches as they came at him. He dropped a few with magic missiles as they came too close, but he stepped back to buy himself time as well. He watched where they were coming from, how they all moved just a little bit to one side, how they congregated in the entrance to a narrow, windswept gorge. He saw them blocking his way, but only in that direction. Valmaxian was smarter than he needed to be to understand that the dretches were guarding the gorge-guarding the way to En'Sel'Dinen, and Chasianna.
Valmaxian turned that way and started walking. Some of the dretches in front were brave enough or scared enough to lunge at him. He killed some by smashing the staff into their heads. Others he killed with magic missiles. Some he killed with spells. The smell of the internal organs of the little fiends, their sweat, panic, and blood filled the stinging air along with the sand. Valmaxian didn't bother counting how many he killed. It might have been thousands.
It just went on and on.
The demon had torn off all of her clothes, and Chasianna's skin blazed red in the oppressive heat of the Abyss. Her hands were bound behind her back and she was gagged to keep her from casting spells. En'Sel'Dinen held her long hair tightly in one of his massive hands. A tear traced a path down one of her grimy cheeks, and her eyes were red and puffy. Deep cuts crisscrossed her arms, and her knees bled. Bruises blossomed all over her. She was a mess, but the fact that she was alive made her the most beautiful thing Valmaxian had ever seen.
'Demon' Valmaxian called, tensing his chest to hold back a body-racking cough.
En'Sel'Dinen smiled. The dretches surrounding him scurried into hiding among freakish stone statues that littered the wind-blasted plain. The demon's silver eyes shone red in the deep orange light that seemed to come from the sky itself. There was no sun. There was nothing so logical and steadfast as that in the chaotic depths of the endless Abyss.
'Ah, Valmaxian,' En'Sel'Dinen rumbled, 'at last. Bravo on the dretches, my old friend. It's been hours since I've seen so many dispatched so quickly.'
Valmaxian ignored the demon and looked at Chasianna. 'Are you-?' he started to ask.
'She won't be answering, elf,' the demon interrupted. 'She belongs to me now-in body if not in soul.'
Valmaxian, Chasianna's voice rang in the Gold elfs head, blink if you can hear me.
Valmaxian blinked, and Chasianna let her head fall in relief.
How are you doing this? Valmaxian thought.
'I was right about her skin, my friend,' the demon growled. 'It's soft as the guts of a dragon. But I will have to empty her willful mind.'
He'll hear soon, Chasianna answered. You can defeat him, but it will mean draining the staff.
'I know,' Valmaxian answered aloud.
En'Sel'Dinen looked down at Chasianna, the twisted smile fading quickly. 'Bitch,' the demon growled. 'That little trick will be the first to go.'
The demon opened his fang-lined mouth and leaned toward the girl at the same time he pulled her closer to him.
Valmaxian shouted a command word, and a flurry of white-hot spheres blasted from the staff and pounded into the demon with enough force to topple a keep on Toril.
The demon shrieked, more in surprise than pain, and tossed Chasianna to the burning ground.
The fiend spun on Valmaxian and screamed, 'She's mine! You were paid in full!'
'I'm ending our arrangement, demon,' Valmaxian said, 'and I'm taking her with me.'
En'Sel'Dinen lunged forward and his eyes blazed. Valmaxian felt his heart skip a beat, and a wave of pain twisted his chest and drove him to his knees. He tried to breathe in but couldn't. The skin on his face burned. His right hand tightened on the staff, causing his forearm to cramp.
'Heartstop,' the demon said, 'is what the humans on your world call it, elf. You have seconds to live.'
Valmaxian couldn't speak, couldn't even stand. He looked up at Chasianna lying on the sandy ground, her eyes wide and terrified. He could almost see himself, weak and dying, reflected in those eyes.
He broke the staff.
Retributive strike-it was a power he'd hope to gain from the demon but had always had inside him. He could have added it to the staffs many powerful enchantments himself, but it would have required such a sacrifice of magic and personal energies that it would have left him with hardly the power of a novice spellcaster. He'd traded Chasianna's freedom, her body, and his own soul for it, but he had one chance to take it all back.
The staff broke apart, and the sound was almost enough to drown out the demon's scream.
Valmaxian felt a wave of cold wash over him. The pain in his chest eased just enough for him to force a gasp of air into his lungs. He felt a rough, hot hand on his shoulder, felt himself tossed to one side to land with a scraping skid on the coarse sand. He felt the staff fall from his hand. He heard the demon scream again, and there was a shouted string of words so arcane and foul Valmaxian's ears began to bleed from the sound of them.
'Chasianna,' Valmaxian gasped, 'I'm sorry.'
The sound stopped all at once and silence fell over them like a shroud. The pain and tightness in Valmaxian's chest was gone, and he found he could breathe. The cold was gone too, replaced by the scorching dry air of the Abyss. Valmaxian spat out a mouthful of burning sand and coughed enough to make his vision blur. He blinked away the tears that filled his eyes and looked up. Chasianna struggled to a sitting position. New bruises, cuts, and scrapes covered what little of her hadn't been bruised, cut, or scraped before. She coughed too, but managed to catch Valmaxian's gaze. The gag hung off her face. She opened her mouth to speak, but it was the demon Valmaxian heard.
'That was very, very close, elf,' the monster said, its voice somehow less forceful, quieter.
Valmaxian looked over at the source of the voice and had to struggle to keep from retching. The demon had been blasted into pieces-chunks really-by the force of the staffs retributive strike. Blood so dark red it was almost black had splattered everywhere, and one of the demon's powerful legs twitched on the sand a good ten yards from the hip it had once been attached to. The demon looked at Valmaxian with only one eye, the other lost to the ruin the left half of the creature's face had become. His head, attached to only one shoulder and one arm, rolled on the gore-soaked ground. The demon's torso had been split diagonally down the middle, and his right arm was nowhere to be seen. In his left hand he held the shredded, shortened remnants of the staff.
Valmaxian struggled to his feet, but found himself falling more than walking to Chasianna's side.
'You are a fool,' the demon called after him. 'What's left of your greatest creation will make a mockery of your wasted life.'
Valmaxian ignored him. Pain flared in dozens of places around his body and he could feel a palpable sense of emptiness. Valmaxian would return to Siluvanede and his studio with less command of the Weave than any of his assistants, and no staff to show for it. He would indeed be ruined.
'Valmaxian,' Chasianna said. 'Untie my hands.'
'Ruined,' the demon muttered, with perhaps the slightest trace of regret. 'The great Staff of Valmaxian in splinters.'
Valmaxian struggled with the bonds, but Chasianna's hands soon came free. She drew in a breath and started to work a spell.
'Hold on to me,' she whispered in his ear.
'Ruined!' the demon shrieked in impotent rage, unable to stand, unable to kill the two elves who were already fading from sight. 'You have nothing!'
'Hold on to me,' Chasianna whispered again as the sound of the wind faded around them. 'We're going home.'
Valmaxian closed his eyes, held on tight, and smiled.
The last sound they heard in the Abyss was the demon En'Sel'Dinen, lying in pieces on the sand, screaming,
