The mage turned again, and there Selydra hovered in the air, her black eyes blazing with cold fury. A spectral wind sent her robes wildly streaming around her body, and a corona of frigid white fire enveloped her. “I am not so easily defeated, Araevin Teshurr!” she snarled. “The souls of dead Lorosfyr hunger for living flesh to consume. I have promised them yours!”
Jorin raised his bow and shot, but his arrow glanced from an unseen barrier ringing Selydra. She laughed in dark scorn, and raised her arms. From all sides the streaming waves of mangled souls gabbled in hunger and rushed forward, leaping out at Araevin and his companions. Then Selydra began to chant a terrible spell, forming a spiderlike blot of inky nothingness between her hands.
“Donnor! Light!” Araevin cried. He readied himself for the Pale Sybil’s spell.
She hurled the living blot straight at him, but the sun elf managed to bark out a counter charm and interpose a flickering wall of tangible magic, angling the sinister missile away from it. The thing shattered his shielding spell on the instant it made contact, but it deflected away from him and plowed into the wall of the vault. A shock of outraged stone jarred the entire chamber, shattering the mosaic floor and starting a net of jagged black cracks in the ceiling above. Araevin reeled and almost fell.
“Swordwights are coming!” shouted Maresa. Araevin risked a glance over his shoulder and saw her back by the archway leading into the vault, side by side with Jorin as they held the gap against Selydra’s undead servants. “We’re surrounded!”
Araevin looked back just in time to see a wall of whirling black soul-stuff reaching out for him with ethereal talons, plucking at his breast. Dozens of contorted faces leered and hissed at him, a visage of pure madness. He threw up his arm to ward off the fearsome apparition-and the chamber exploded with brilliant daylight.
Donnor stood behind him, legs thrown out shoulder-wide, his cupped hands high over his helmed head. Above his outstretched arms spun a blazing orb of molten gold too bright to look at.
“Part this eternal night, Lord of Morning!” the cleric shouted. “Drive away the shadows that beset us, and shield us with your holy radiance!”
The dead souls of Lorosfyr wailed in anguish and shied away, repelled by the blistering light. The looming apparitions simply dissolved into streamers of dark mist, recoiling from the cleric. Selydra threw up an arm to shield her eyes, even as she reached out with one hand to wrench her blot of destruction out of the wall. More brick and stone disintegrated as the small manifestation of nothingness worked its way free.
“Your conjured sun will not avail you, priest!” Selydra hissed. The enchantress threw out her hand in Donnor’s direction, and the bubble of twisting, tortured space jumped forward in answer to her command.
“Aillesel Seldarie! ” Araevin watched the deadly missile advancing on his friend, frozen in helplessness. He had no more spells that could counter or parry Selydra’s annihilating sphere. Furiously he cast around for something, anything, to defeat the Pale Sybil’s magic.
Donnor Kerth grimaced and shifted his shield from his shoulder, interposing the warboard. “Araevin, what do I do?” the cleric shouted.
“Keep away from it!” Araevin answered. It was not a good answer.
Selydra’s sphere was much quicker and more agile than the armored cleric, and even if Donnor did stay away from the damned thing, she would turn it against another of his companions.
Selydra smiled in cold satisfaction, amused by Araevin’s dilemma. “You have no answer to my spell, High Mage?” she taunted him.
Araevin wheeled back to face her, beginning to summon the power for a fierce attack if he could not find a way to banish her deadly orb. Many spells vanished with the death of their creator, after all. But then his eye fell on the slender black scepter hanging from the Pale Sybil’s hip.
In a lightning-swift flash of inspiration, he changed the spell he was casting and instead shouted the words of a straightforward telekinesis spell. He snatched the Pale Sybil’s magical scepter-the scepter with which Selydra had absorbed or deflected some of his best spells-from her belt in one quick move, summoning the device to his hand. Then, before Selydra could begin to even frame a protest, he turned his back on her and used the telekinesis spell to hurl the slender rod of black platinum right at the spinning sphere of nothing.
“You fool!” Selydra screeched.
The sphere’s fearsome touch destroyed the rod, and the rod’s potent negation magic dispelled the sphere. Two powerful forces that were never meant to meet struggled with each other for one impossible heartbeat, and sphere and rod together exploded in a tremendous blast of raving purple energy. Jagged rifts of fractured reality flailed out from the site of the concussion. One grazed the Pale Sybil’s left side, and in the blink of an eye she was wrenched away and hurled into some distant plane.
“Araevin! What did you do?” Maresa cried. She leaped aside from one sharp-edged rift that swept past her. “How in the Nine Hells does this make things better?”
The sun elf shook his head, trying to brush off the ringing metaphysical concussion that still echoed between his ears. He finally managed to steady himself on his feet. “Stay by me!” he called to his companions. “If we are caught in a rift, we all must be caught together!”
Jorin and Nesterin exchanged dubious looks, but they quickly backstepped from the warriors of Lorosfyr-many of whom had already been scythed to pieces in the blast, or who stood around stupefied without the Pale Sybil’s direction. Araevin’s companions gathered close, warily watching for any reality-shards that might come their way, while the mage searched for a warding spell to deflect the rifts.
“Araevin, the chest!” Jorin called.
Araevin looked back at the pedestal on which the iron coffer rested. To his horror, a flickering discontinuity drifted down toward it, spinning lazily end over end like a piece of a broken mirror. He was out of time.
“Get ready! We will teleport away from here!” he snapped.
“I thought you said you couldn’t teleport in the Underdark,” Maresa protested.
But Araevin did not answer. Instead he hurled himself at the pedestal, ignoring the fraying spell wards that surrounded it. Recklessly he scooped up the small iron coffer from its resting place and leaped back. The powerful conjuration he had sensed on the shard unleashed itself all at once. Above the pedestal a great and terrible monster began to take shape, a thing of fiery tentacles and clustered eyes-some sort of demon dragged into the vault of Lorosfyr by Selydra’s spells. But broken pieces of discontinuity scythed toward the monster.
In a distant part of his mind, the mage in Araevin wondered what would happen when a monster in the process of transitioning itself from the netherworlds encountered a drifting planar rift. He chose not to find out. Praying to the Seldarine that he did not fumble his words, he barked out his teleport spell and pulled himself and his companions out of the disintegrating vault and into a maelstrom of waiting blackness.
Hundreds of campfires flickered faintly along the wooded hillsides on each side of the dusty cart-track the humans called Rauthauvyr’s Road. The Sembian army had chosen to pass the hours of darkness three miles south of Essembra, the only town of any size at all in the broad land of Battledale. Most of the townsfolk had fled south to Tasseldale several tendays ago, unwilling to become Sarya Dlardrageth’s subjects. For her own part, the daemonfey queen could not have cared less what the folk of Battledale thought of her dominion. They were simply irrelevant to her calculations.
On the other hand, the army of Sembia was not. She ground her teeth, galled at the thought that she had to account for the interference of a human realm in her affairs. But that was the simple truth of the diminished age in which she now found herself, wasn’t it? She had humbled Hillsfar and enticed Zhentil Keep away from the board, but despite her best efforts, Sembia was still a force to reckon with.
“How strong are they?” Sarya asked her warmaster. Mardeiym Reithel stood nearby in the darkness, along with half a dozen more of her fey’ri captains and lords. The daemonfey watched the humans from a circle of standing stones half a mile from the Sembian camp.
“A little more than seven thousand, my lady,” Mardeiym said quietly.
Sarya scowled and returned her attention to the foe that worried her far more than any army of human sellswords-the army of Seiveril Miritar. In the forests a short distance from the human camp gleamed the soft light of scores upon scores of elven lanterns. The two armies marched only a mile or two apart, ready to come to each other’s support should one come under attack.
“What of Miritar’s army?” Sarya asked.
“Four thousand elves, including many elite warriors and champions. Another fifteen hundred Dalesfolk march under Miritar’s banner. We do not know much about the Dalesfolk, though.”
“The palebloods are weak, and the humans are mercenary rabble,” muttered Xhalph. “We could break the
