Prince of Ravens

its chisel-like point through the mail covering Dresimil’s chest.

Myrkyssa Jelan rolled to her feet and stood. “And you supposed that magic made you invulnerable,” she said. “Give your dark goddess my regards.” She looked for another foe, just as one of Dresimil’s bodyguards nearly killed her with a sword-slash across the ribs. Jelan cried out and staggered back, a hand clapped across her wound, but before the dark elf could finish her, a small crossbow quarrel appeared in his left cheek, and he sagged to the ground unconscious. Arlith bared her teeth in a fierce grin from her place at the edge of the plaza and drew back her string for another shot.

Emerald fire crackled around Jack, mere inches from consuming him. He felt his strength beginning to give out … but Myrkyssa’s ploy suggested a desperate gambit. Rather than directly resisting Jaeren’s power, he abruptly shifted the nature of his defense, throwing his effort into deflecting Jaeren’s attack toward the mythal itself and recklessly drawing as much power as he could to aid the effort. The mythal’s magic was caught, absorbed, and magnified to be returned an instant later. With each heartbeat the magical conflagration doubled and redoubled in strength.

Jaeren sensed the danger. “You fool, stop!” he shouted at Jack. “You will destroy us all!” He tried to arrest the mythal’s power and regain control of its energy, but Jezzryd was slower to perceive the danger and worked to shield his brother with ever more determination. Now Jack and Jezzryd worked together to stoke the fires of the mythal, while Jaeren frantically tried to rein in the mounting power. Before Jack the mythal stone grew completely transparent, the stone only a hint of dark glass encasing a blazing emerald fire that was too bright to look at. Bolts of green incandescence escaped from the blaze, lancing randomly across the plaza to pulverize ancient ruins or strike down unlucky warriors. Drow and surface adventurers alike retreated from the fierce blaze. Half-blinded by the day-like brilliance and fighting without the leadership of Dresimil, the dark elves wavered and began to break.

The others standing near felt the mythal’s strain, too. Halamar turned a stricken look on the rogue and shouted, “Flee, Jack! It’s going to shatter!” But Jack hardly heard him; his blood sang with the mythal’s unquenchable fire, and for one dizzy instant he teetered on the brink of the precipice. Then, suddenly, he felt the crumbling of the last wards and checks designed long ago to preserve the mighty device from being consumed by the magic it controlled. He released his grasp on the mythal and staggered back; Jaeren and Jezzryd could not spare even the eyeblink of attention it would take to destroy him, as the drow sorcerers tried to bring under control something that had slipped all bounds of mortal magic.

Shimmering cracks appeared in the mythal stone, and everyone still fighting in the plaza, drow and non-drow alike, abandoned their duels to distance themselves from the incipient disaster. Jack staggered away, suddenly exhausted beyond all measure. He had no idea what would happen when the mythal failed, but whatever it was, there could surely be no harm in being as far from the stone as possible. He decided on a sturdy old wall that looked like it might offer some shelter … but then he found his feet rooted to the ground. He looked back in horror, and saw Dresimil Chumavh-lying on the ground, blood bubbling from her lips-holding a fist clenched in front of her, her eyes fixed on him. “Not so fast, Jack,” she rasped. “You can die where you stand, or you can help my brothers contain the mythal.”

Jack strained to escape the spell of holding, but it was useless-he was unable to take another step. He glanced once more at the mythal, now turning black with the virulence of its power, and averted his face. Just then, Myrkyssa Jelan ran back onto the plaza, and moved to shield him from the mythal with her body. “You are insane!” he shouted against the howling of the unrestrained magic.

“On the contrary, I have confidence in my curse,” she replied. The mythal gave one final tortured blast of energy toward the cavern ceiling, and Jelan suddenly hugged Jack as tightly as she could, shielding him. Then the mythal exploded. Wild magic lashed and flailed the ancient ruins, shattering buildings and bringing huge falls of rock and dust from the cavern ceiling far overhead. Jack felt the mythal’s end as if someone had reached into the very core of his being and severed some taut cord with a sharp knife. Jaeren and Jezzryd, standing only ten feet away, simply disintegrated in the wash of arcane power. Dresimil was blasted into an unyielding stone wall with enough force to break every bone in her dying body; drow and adventurers a hundred yards away were thrown from their feet. But the raving emerald streams passed around Myrkyssa Jelan … and Jack as well, guarded by her antimagic.

Echoes of thunder rolled through the cavern as blackness descended once more. Jack blinked away bright green after-images that dotted his vision and found his feet free to move. He pulled away from Jelan with a simple nod of thanks, and then looked around the plaza. Slowly, his surviving comrades were standing up and checking themselves for injury. Halamar and Kurzen appeared unharmed; Narm lay unconscious, apparently knocked out by a chunk of flying masonry, and the priest Wulfrad had been crushed under a cart-sized stalactite that lay broken around his body.

“Jack! Jack!” The rogue looked up and saw Seila and her father hurrying down the avenue leading to the plaza, columns of armsmen flanking them on each side. “Are you hurt?”

“Seila?” Jack called. He picked his way through the wreckage, and then ran over to catch her in his arms.

Jelan stood staring at the wreckage of the wild mythal. She held up her hand and, with a small frown of concentration, evoked a small green flame from her fingertip. “Remarkable,” she breathed. “I can feel the substance of magic. I can feel it!”

“Is that it, then?” Norwood wondered aloud. “Are they truly beaten?”

Jack looked around for more dark elves, anticipating that they might be regrouping in the shadows-but there were no conscious drow in sight. He’d seen Jaeren, Jezzryd, and Dresimil killed outright, and even if some cousin or another survived to claim leadership of House Chumavh, most of their warriors and slave monsters had been wiped out in Norwood’s assault. Fetterfist, Cailek Balathorp, was dead under Jack’s own blade … but there were certainly any number of slaves to rescue.

A small, wiry figure groaned and stirred quite close to the mythal’s resting place, then slowly pushed himself to his feet. Jack frowned, wondering who it was … and found himself staring at his own visage, although somewhat burned and disheveled from the force of the explosion. The shadow-double met Jack’s eyes, smirking in silence, and then darted off into the smoke and gloom of the ruined city. Jack took two quick steps and seized a drow crossbow to bring down the creature before he got away, but it was too late-by the time he had the weapon in hand, the simulacrum was nowhere in sight.

“What was that, Jack?” Seila asked.

“No one of consequence,” Jack said slowly. Apparently the simulacrum was disheveled enough that Seila hadn’t noticed the resemblance. Tarandor must have indeed found his way down to Chumavhraele and interred his double in the wild mythal sometime in the last few days before the attack on Blackwood Manor and Norwood’s attack. He wondered if the abjurer would discover that the imprisoned Jack was now free, and decided it didn’t matter. Whatever Tarandor feared, the ancient mythal stone was a smoking heap of rubble, and even Jack, dabbler and dilettante that he was, could see that there was no magic that could ever make it whole again.

Halamar and Kurzen limped up, joined a moment later by Jelan. “Well, I expect that bounced every wizard within a thousand miles out of his bed,” Halamar remarked. “Did you have to destroy the thing, Jack? Great magics like that are rare wonders indeed, you know.”

“It was that, or let the drow have it for their own. I don’t want to think about what Dresimil and her brothers would have done with the wild mythal; it was too powerful a weapon to leave in anyone’s hands,” Jack answered. “In fact, Mystra herself told me as much once upon a time. I only hope there is not too great an area of dead magic left behind. Raven’s Bluff without magic would be little fun.”

Halamar frowned. “Dead magic? The arcane currents flow unconstrained, Jack.”

Jack blinked. “I do not sense them,” he said. He glanced at Jelan, and a sudden suspicion came to him. His magic was born of the wild mythal, in its way. Had he just deprived himself of his own sorcery? Or had Myrkyssa Jelan’s curse been transferred to him when the overwhelming power of the mythal’s destruction had washed over them both? He tried a minor cantrip, summoning up a light spell … but absolutely nothing happened. Quickly he tried several more spells; he might as well have been making up nonsense. “My magic’s gone,” he groaned.

Myrkyssa Jelan bowed her head. “If I caused it, Jack, then I am sincerely sorry; I only meant to see you spared if I could manage it.” Then she looked up with a wry smile. “And yet irony is again served; you once deprived me of my magic, and now perhaps I have deprived you of yours. However, look at it like this: You may find there are certain advantages to learning to rely on wits, character, and hard work alone.”