carried it to a table, unrolling it enough to read the writing at the top.
“A research into the Living Gate,” he read aloud. “By Sherinna, naturally.” He closed his eyes and whispered, “Thank you,” confident that Ioun had led him to the knowledge he sought.
“Three gods approached the Living Gate,” he read aloud, “desiring to know what lay behind its gleaming scarlet surface. Pelor, whose light shines into all darkness, first discovered the Living Gate, though he later wished he had not. Ioun, whose mind ever hungers to learn all things, awoke the sleeping gate. And a third, nameless god, who feared no danger and doubted all authority, distracted the guardian of the Living Gate so all three gods could glimpse the madness beyond.”
“The Chained God,” a voice repeated. Kri looked around, but the library was deserted. A chill went down his spine. Did the voice belong to Ioun, rewarding his decades of faithful service by deigning to speak to him? Or one of her angels? Or perhaps Sherinna’s shade, speaking from beyond the realm of death? He felt the weight of the moment as time seemed to stretch out, each passing second laden with significance.
“The gods were changed by what they had seen,” Kri continued reading, “and they departed, swearing a solemn oath never to seek the gate again or speak of what they had seen beyond it. And for many long ages they kept their oath, even as the Dawn War raged throughout the cosmos, reshaping the world, the Astral Sea, and its dominions. But as the war raged on, one of the three gods returned to the gate, killed its guardian, and awakened the Living Gate from its eons of slumber. Madness burst forth through the gate and threatened to consume all that the gods were fighting for. Eventually, Ioun and Pelor cooperated to seal the gate once more, stemming the tide of madness.”
“Something is not right here,” a voice said. Kri jumped, startled, and looked around again.
“Something is not right,” he echoed. He went back and reread the paragraph.
“Seek the Chained God,” the voice repeated. Kri started reading again from the beginning, moving his lips with the words but no longer giving them voice.
“Everyone believes the Chained God was the one who returned and opened the Living Gate,” Kri said at last. “But the Chained God was already in his prison, before the Dawn War even began.”
“Who opened the Living Gate?” a new voice said. Kri didn’t look up from the scroll.
“Either the legend is wrong in reporting that the Dawn War had already begun,” Kri said, “or it was not the Chained God who opened the gate. Or else the Chained God was not imprisoned until later-I don’t know. And I don’t understand why it matters. What does the Living Gate have to do with Vestapalk and the demons?”
“Why don’t you ask it?”
“Ask it?” He looked around helplessly, and his eyes fell on the crystal shard he’d brought up from the workshop. “Yes, of course. Ask it.” He seized the fragment, bundled up the scroll, and carried both back downstairs.
“What did the three gods see behind the Living Gate?” a voice asked on the stairs.
“Was it the same thing that burst forth when the gate was opened?” another voice asked.
“What did Ioun see?” Still a different voice, and this one made him stop.
“Who are you?” Kri asked, his voice wavering. “I sought guidance from Ioun.”
No voice came in answer. Suddenly filled with fear, Kri hurried down the stairs until he reached the workshop and looked around for something he could use to seal the archway. He tried to drag a tall bookcase in front of the arch, but loaded with books it was too heavy for him to move alone. He threw books and scrolls onto the floor until one landed open on the floor beside him and he looked down to see a jagged spiral symbol on the scroll like an eye staring up at him.
He dropped to his knees beside the book and started reading about the Chained God. Sherinna had penned this scroll as well, and recorded her search, along with Brendis and Nowhere, for the cultists whose trail they had discovered in Nera-cultists of Tharizdun, the Elder Elemental Eye … the Dark God.
“The cultists were trying to free the Chained God,” he breathed. “I never knew.”
“You have much to learn,” a voice said over his shoulder.
Kri spun around and let his eyes range over the empty workshop.
“You must understand your enemies if you wish to defeat them,” came another voice.
He nodded. “Ask it ask it ask it-I’ll ask it.” He placed the crystal fragment on a table and rooted through the materials stored in flasks and boxes around the workshop until he found a tiny vial filled with a glittering silvery powder. “Residuum,” he said. “Excellent.”
He carefully opened the vial, the powder left behind from a broken enchantment, like crystallized magic, and tapped out just enough of it to trace a circle around the shard on the table’s smooth surface. As the circle took shape, he began chanting syllables of power, inserting occasional pleas to Ioun into the fabric of the ritual. The voices around him spoke a few times, but he blocked them out, forcing his mind to focus on the words of the ritual. So ignored, the voices left him in disgust, withdrawing to plan their next assault on his mind.
“Reveal your secrets to me!” he commanded, gripping the shard to complete the ritual.
The room around him disappeared, and he stood in a dusty ruin. A long wooden staff was held in two wooden braces in the wall beside him, and his hand clenched the head of the staff-the shard-suspended in the crook by a network of woven gut strands. Suddenly the wall opposite him burst open and a man stepped through, a man he recognized as the cult leader depicted in the mural at the top of the tower.
The man seized the staff, wrenching Kri’s perception as the world turned around him so his perspective on the crystal remained unchanged. He cut the strings holding the crystal in place and cradled the shard in his own hands, oblivious to Kri’s presence and his own hand on the shard.
And then Kri was the cult leader. “Albric,” he said. “My name is Albric.”
With his own hands, he killed one of his acolytes for impertinence, obeying the will of the Elder Elemental Eye. Then he used the crystal fragment to trace a circle on the wall where the staff had stood, opening a portal to a crowded city some part of his mind knew as Sigil, the City of Doors. He led his acolytes through the city until they were confronted by three robbers. One of the robbers was seized by the Eye, caught up in an ecstatic trance, revealing the presence and the name of Tharizdun, the Chained God.
Kri experienced Albric’s thrill of excitement, his religious awe in the presence of his god. It was a perfect expression of what he longed to feel from Ioun but found increasingly difficult to claim.
And Kri experienced Albric’s madness. He walked through a nightmare vista of liquid flesh and purple flame, and emerged in front of a ring of green flame. He howled in his madness, breaking the minds of those who heard him. And he stepped through a portal into Pandemonium.
Kri felt his pulse quicken as Albric began his ritual in the heart of the Chained God’s abandoned dominion. He chanted invocations to Tharizdun, the Patient One and the Black Sun. He watched the shard of the Living Gate rise into the air and open the tiniest of portals, a narrow wormhole leading to the prison that held the Chained God bound. And he watched with a mixture of Albric’s elation and his own dawning horror as a red crystalline liquid seeped out through the portal.
You must understand your enemies if you wish to defeat them, Kri reminded himself.
Then the vision became more confusing. Kri felt the tug of two different desires. The Chained God wanted him to fuse the red liquid-the Progenitor, he called it-with the shard of the Living Gate, and thereby create the Vast Gate. The red liquid itself, the Voidharrow, wanted him to fuse itself with him. He-or, rather, Albric-tried to follow the Chained God’s will, and he guided the fusion of the Voidharrow and the Living Gate until it grew into the archway depicted in Sherinna’s mural. His acolytes, though, obeyed the Voidharrow, and he saw them transform into demons.
The Chained God, he realized, had been betrayed. He felt the distant echo of the god’s fury as he-as Albric- fought to carry out Tharizdun’s will … and failed.
He felt what Albric did as the Voidharrow claimed his body, transforming him from the legs up into a creature of liquid crystal. He felt the tiefling’s dagger slip into his side and end his body’s life.
But Albric was no longer just his body. His will had fused with the Voidharrow as much as his body had, and he became something else. He became the creature that Albanon had described, a serpentine creature of red liquid.
“I am Nu Alin,” Kri said aloud.
“Who are you talking to?” asked a voice in the room.
Kri’s mind was jolted out of the vision, but he grasped at one last fragment of knowledge and experience. “I am in the Tower of Waiting,” he said.
