knew I could scorch the fields across half a farm or freeze the Nentir River solid. It was terrifying. It was incredible.”
He swallowed. “I still feel it. I know that if I’m not careful, it could overwhelm me. Part of me wants to just give in and use the magic to its fullest potential. That’s why I’ve been so cautious with my spells.” He glanced at Roghar. “That’s why I resisted when you told me to set fire to the inn. And why I screamed after I cast the spell. You were right, Tempest. I was resisting something.”
The tiefling nodded and a corner of her mouth twitched into a smile. “I thought the way the inn exploded was a little too spectacular for a half-trained wizard.”
She was baiting him, trying to lighten the mood. Another time Albanon might have risen to her taunt. Not now. He shook his head. “So much has been happening,” he said. “Vestapalk almost turned me into a plague demon-I still wake up sometimes feeling like the Voidharrow is in me, reshaping my flesh and bones. Then Kri made me a thrall of Tharizdun. Sometimes I think I’m not quite right anymore.” He swallowed again and looked around at them once more. “Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m still a little bit mad.”
The others were still and silent for a moment longer-just long enough for Albanon to wonder if his confession had truly frightened them. Then Roghar stood up. “I’d be more worried if you weren’t afraid.” He smiled warmly and held out open arms. “If you’re wounded, we’re here to help you heal. This is why you’ve been delaying going after Vestapalk? You could have told us any time.”
Albanon stepped back from the paladin’s embrace. “It’s not the only reason. There’s something else.” He looked at Belen and spoke the words he hadn’t dared speak aloud before. “If we go west after Vestapalk, we’re heading the wrong way.”
Roghar froze, a confused look on his face. Belen’s eyes opened wide, then narrowed. “What do you mean? Vestapalk is west. The Plaguedeep is west. I see it in the memories Nu Alin left in my head. I described the volcano to hunters and scouts who know the land west of the Ogrefist Hills. They recognize the place. They gave me directions.”
“I know,” Albanon said quickly. “I know. I trust you. I’m sure that’s where Vestapalk is. But we need to go north.”
“Why?” asked Tempest.
He pressed his lips together for a moment before answering. “The morning after the attack on Fallcrest, I woke up with a strange feeling right here.” Albanon touched fingers to his chest, just below his breastbone. “I thought it was just my imagination or maybe a bruise, but it’s nothing physical and it’s not imaginary. It’s like being homesick. Somewhere up there”-he pointed and knew in his gut that he pointed absolutely unerringly-“is a place I’ve never been, but somehow I feel like I need to go back there.” He grimaced. “ We need to go back there. All of us.”
“Before we go looking for Vestapalk,” said Roghar. Albanon nodded. “How do you know that?” the dragonborn asked.
“It’s like a splinter in your finger. When you first look, all you see is the end of it, but if you poke and squeeze it, you see more.” Albanon abandoned his attempts to stand still. His nerves were twitching inside him and he started to pace back and forth in front of the fireplace. “I focused on it as if it was a spell I was trying to master. Whenever I thought about confronting Vestapalk, it got so intense I felt sick. But if I thought about going north, especially if I thought about all of us going north, it was easier.” He glanced up at the others. “I think that whatever’s out there is something that will help us defeat Vestapalk and the Voidharrow.”
“You said that’s what you were looking for in your books!” Belen growled.
“Because I’d rather have reliable guidance than some weird feeling I can’t explain,” Albanon snapped back at her. The fragment of the gate was still in his hand. He clenched his fist around it, finding something reliable in its hard shape. The others fell silent again. Albanon could hear his own rasping breath.
After a long moment, Uldane raised his voice for the first time. “Halflings have a saying: when the river takes your barge pole, there’s nothing to do but ride the current until you find a new one. Maybe we should follow Albanon’s feeling and see where it leads.”
“But you know where a river goes,” said Tempest. “We don’t know where Albanon’s feeling goes. Or where it comes from.” She met Albanon’s gaze. “Don’t you find it odd,” she said, “that this feeling came on after Kri used Tharizdun’s power against you?”
“No,” said Albanon quietly. “I don’t find it odd at all. That’s the other reason I didn’t mention it to anyone.” He shoved the gate fragment deep into his pouch and took a chunk of half-burned wood from the fireplace. With the charred end, he drew on the wall of the sitting room. “When I search my feeling for understanding, this is what I see.”
He stepped back so that everyone could see what he’d drawn; a jagged spiral spinning into an empty circle. Roghar recognized it before anyone else and hissed.
“The sign of Tharizdun. The eye of the Chained God.”
“Yes.” Albanon dropped the stick back into the fireplace and wiped his hand. “Kri told me something about the origin of the Voidharrow. It’s connected to Tharizdun’s previous attempts to escape his imprisonment-but it sounds as if Tharizdun has lost control of the Voidharrow since then. Maybe helping us defeat Vestapalk is Tharizdun’s attempt to regain control.” He turned to face his friends.
“I know where my feeling comes from,” he said. “The question is whether we follow it north.”
“Do you have any idea what’s waiting for us?” Tempest asked.
Albanon shook his head. “None at all.”
He floated in darkness. There was no sound. No sensation. No hot, no cold. No up or down. If it were not for the feeling of his own hands touching his face and body, there would have been no way of telling where he ended and the darkness began.
Is this what it is like for you, Chained God? He couldn’t tell if he thought the question or spoke it out loud. There seemed to be no difference. Is this what it was like when the other gods shut you away from creation?
Another idea occurred to him, one that sent a thrill of possibility from his head to his unseen toes. Am I with you now?
The answer came upon him in a burst of brilliant light that dazzled him yet somehow did not penetrate the darkness. By its radiance, he saw entities of vast and perfect power come together in judgment against one whose only crime was marring their perfection. He cried out at the majesty of the scene. Or maybe he cried out because he knew it was only a dim reflection of true events and that if he had seen the entities in their full glory, his eyes would have burned in their sockets because he was just a man. Or maybe he cried out at the injustice committed by those too blinded by their own vision to recognize the strength a seed of imperfection might bring to the world.
In any case, he cried out, then cried out again as the one entity that had dared defy all the others was shut away, his vast power chained. And the place where the Chained God was imprisoned was much like the darkness in which the man floated, but with one important difference: the Chained God was not alone. Tharizdun shared his prison with the very source of the imperfection he had planted in the world.
It called itself the Progenitor. Once there had been other things in that imprisoning darkness, an entire world and more. But soon there was only the Progenitor, infinite in scope, assimilator of what had been before, the sum of all things.
He passed eons in the blink of an eye. Both Tharizdun and the Progenitor hungered for release, but the gods had crafted well. The walls of the prison were unbreachable, the prison itself all but forgotten. Tharizdun could only cast his gaze upon the world to which he had given the gift of change and where he was remembered as nothing more than the god of madmen.
But mad is not powerless, murmured the man in the darkness.
No, it was not. The light that wasn’t light shifted and changed and the man saw more. Tharizdun accepted the worship that was offered to him by those who rejected the perfect lies of the gods’ creation. Tharizdun whispered truths to them in their dreams and under his guidance they scoured the world and beyond for the means to break the chains that bound their lord.
They found it in a forgotten fragment of the Living Gate, long shattered, through which Tharizdun had first brought the seed of imperfection into the world.
The man in the darkness shuddered as he felt the excitement of a god. If his mind was not already broken, such eagerness would have shattered it. The fragment was not large enough to permit the escape of Tharizdun and
