'And I will search through Philaerin's tomes and journals to see if he makes any mention of it.' Quastarte rose as well. 'Come. Before you leave, we must summon the other mages and tell them what has been taken from the Tower.'
Nurthel Floshin stretched wide his black, leathery wings, and dropped closer to the snow-covered ground. He was in a hurry, and he beat his powerful wings tirelessly against the winter sky. Nurthel cut a striking figure, a demonic elf with scarlet-scaled skin and large batlike wings, clad in armor of enchanted golden scales, one eye covered by a rune-scribed patch.
Miles behind him, the rest of his raiding party proceeded on foot, too heavily burdened with their plunder to fly. It was not a particularly good day for flying, anyway. The clouds were low and thick, and freezing rain was falling all across the rugged hills and thick forests of the Delimbiyr Vale.
Nurthel allowed himself a smile of pleasure. The Gatekeeper's Crystal gave him the perfect excuse to hurry on ahead of the other fey'ri. He carried the artifact inside his golden scale shirt, wrapped tightly in a leather pouch. He started gaining altitude again, as the foothills of the Nether Mountains began to mount skyward from the river vale. His mistress had chosen her stronghold with an eye toward remoteness and isolation. None but the most determined-or foolhardy-of travelers passed that way. There the Delimbiyr turned east, fed by numerous streams known as the Talons-swift, racing rivers that descended from the snow-covered mountains to the north.
Nurthel followed the Starsilver, the second of those streams, and after a few miles found a round hilltop rising up before him. Its slopes were shaped in graceful terraces inundated by the forest, and old white ramparts green with moss and vines climbed across the hillside. Glaurachyndaar, a great city of fallen Eaerlann, had once been known as Myth Glaurach, City of Scrolls. Crumbling colonnades and empty buildings choked with rubble were all that remained of the elven city, but deep catacombs led to hidden armories and jagged chasms beneath the hill.
He wheeled once and dived down through the snow-clad fir trees, alighting in a ruined old courtyard. He shook his wings vigorously, ignoring the quiver of fatigue from his rapid flight, and folded them behind his back. Nurthel made his way through an old archway into the palace proper. A thin crust of snow lay on the uneven ground within the white walls, and most of the halls and corridors were open to the sky above. It struck Nurthel as supremely ironic that the very palace of Myth Glaurach's grand mage should serve as the hidden citadel of she who had once been the most dangerous enemy of the realm of Eaerlann.
He came to a broken white tower and entered. That place at least still had intact floors above, so the ceiling kept out the rain and the snow, but its broad windows were blank and empty, the old theurglass that once covered them long since gone. The chamber possessed a magnificent view of forest-covered hills and snowy mountain peaks beyond. Comfortable furnishings-elegant divans, credenzas, and bookshelves, with a gorgeous tapestry secured on one wall-stood carefully placed in the room's interior so as not to be exposed to the weather.
'My lady!' he cried. 'I have returned!'
'So I see, Nurthel.' A sinuously graceful figure turned from the wide, empty window. 'You took care to conceal your retreat?'
'Yes, my lady. We used the ring gate to return to the ruins of Ascalhorn.'
Ascalhorn, the city later known as Hellgate Keep, and later still nothing but a windswept ruin, was almost thirty miles away. The fey'ri lord went to one knee, bowing in the presence of his mistress.
Like the fey'ri who served her, Sarya Dlardrageth possessed both demon and elf blood. But in her case, she was a true daemonfey, and her demonic bloodline was pronounced indeed. The demonspawned sun elves known as fey'ri were descended through several generations from the mating of elf and demon, but Sarya was a princess of House Dlardrageth. Her father was a balor, a great and terrible demon lord. Sarya's skin was deep red and her hair a blazing orange-gold as bright as a flame. She favored gold-embroidered robes of black that overlapped like plates of dark armor, carefully crafted to incorporate powerful defensive enchantments and leave her adequate room to flex her wings in flight or wield the sinister spells at her command.
'You may rise.' Sarya said.
She turned her back on the windows and came closer, moving with the restless grace of a predatory animal kept in a space too small for her. Nurthel knew that she used the tower for her own quarters because of the numerous windows and open spaces beyond, since she strongly disliked confining spaces.
'Well, Lord Floshin, let me see my prize,' she said.
Nurthel lifted his eyes to his queen's face and stood. Despite her fiendish heritage, she was seductively beautiful, with classic elf features and the figure of a winsome girl. At a glance one might think her no more than twenty years of age… but her eyes were cold and malevolent with an ageless evil. Sarya Dlardrageth had first walked the world more than five thousand years past.
'As you command, my lady,' he said. He reached beneath his tunic of scale mail and drew out the broken crystal in its pouch, offering it to her. 'The paleblood elves and their rabble were careless, as you said they would be. They were not expecting an attack, and we slew dozens before they remembered how to fight.'
'No one remembers how to fight, in this diminished age,' Sarya replied. 'How many did you lose?'
She did not place any great value on her servants' lives, but she didn't have many fey'ri at her command. Each life was a resource not to be wasted lightly.
'Five fey'ri fell to the Tower defenders, my lady. We were careful to carry off the dead. Most of the yugoloths and demons died too, but of course they were summoned and bound for that purpose, and we expected to spend them in battle.'
'You have done well, Nurthel. Very well indeed.'
Sarya took the bundle from his hand and quickly unwrapped the crystal, discarding the cover. She caressed the device with her taloned hands. The stone was a pale, milky white, perhaps six inches long and triangular in shape, with a curiously beveled base and a long, tapering point. A glimmer of violet fire seemed to dance in its depths. Swirls of phosphorescence drifted in the wake of Sarya's fingertips as she touched the crystal.
'For over five thousand years I dreamed of holding the key to my prison in my hand,' she mused, admiring the stone. 'Fifty-eight centuries crawled by while I waited and watched. Sharrven and Siluvanede passed away, and I waited. Eaerlann-hated Eaerlann-grew old and decrepit and forgot the ancient enemies her lords had imprisoned beneath their fortresses, and still I waited and watched. The city of Ascalhorn was raised up over my living tomb, and I watched when demons and devils warred in the streets, driving out the simpering humans and their paleblooded friends. Fifty centuries I dreamed of this, Nurthel, and now only five short years after gaining my freedom, the crystal is mine. The irony of it!'
'You are free now, my lady. The ancient treachery of your foes has been undone.'
Sarya's eyes narrowed and she said, 'Only through the ignorance of foolish adventurers, who thought to cleanse Ascalhorn with no less a weapon than the Gatekeeper's Crystal.'
They succeeded in throwing down Hellgate Keep-dying heroically in the process, of course-but they had also managed to crack the deeply buried magical prison in which
Sarya and her daemonfey sons had been interred thousands of years before the city of Ascalhorn had been raised.
At once Sarya had set about exploring the new world that had grown over the ruins of the one she had known five millennia earlier. In the five years since the Harpers had unknowingly set her free, she had gathered together the remnants of the fey'ri, demonspawned elves who had served House Dlardrageth in the days of her glory. Some, such as Nurthel himself, she had liberated from lesser prisons similar to her own. Others she had found hiding in distant planes, and a handful had survived unimpris-oned, hiding amid the cities of her enemies. And she had also turned her attention to unraveling the mystery of her freedom, employing all of her formidable sorcery to learn how and why she had come to be freed.
'I wonder how the palebloods of Evermeet found the third piece,' he said.
The daemonfey princess shrugged.
'Most likely it was found by some human mageling or tomb-plunderer,' she said, 'who recognized it as elf-work and sold it to someone who understood its true worth. My divinations informed me of the crystal's location, but did not suffice to solve the mystery of its travels.'
She turned to a golden coffer that stood on one table, and spoke a charm of opening. Inside gleamed two crystals virtually identical to the one she held in her hand. The first segment Sarya had found in the rubble of Hell-gate Keep, soon after gaining her freedom. It took her four years, but she eventually found the second piece in a volcano in Avernus, first of the Nine Hells.
