as the first blow tore into his flesh. Instead, he smelled the welcome, familiar scent of pipeweed, Jak’s pipeweed.
He fell to the ice, fell into his past, and realized that he had been mistaken.
He was not all darkness. There was light in him after all.
“Cale,” said a voice.
“Jak?”
“There are so many things I want to show you …”
Riven winced, felt each blow of the archfiend’s weapon, felt Cale’s pain, thankfully distant, and counted them all.
One, two, three.
He shouted his rage as the blows fell. Darkness poured from him, covered Faerûn for a mile. His girls darted into the temple.
Riven would exact payment for each blow. He owed Cale as much. He owed Mephistopheles as much.
The shadows carried Riven between worlds. He materialized in Cania, a curtain around his new power, invisible to even the Lord of the Eighth. He felt but was untroubled by the blistering wind, the swirl of ice flakes as sharp as knives, the biting cold. The frigidity of the Eighth Hell could not diminish the heat of his rage. The wails of the damned burning in Cania’s fiery rivers mingled with the howl of the wind but Riven paid them no heed. He focused only on the back of the archfiend who stood before him, the archfiend who had murdered his friend, perhaps the only friend he’d ever had.
Cale’s bloody, crumpled form lay on the ice at the archdevil’s feet. A few stray ribbons of shadow lingered over his body before surrendering to the wind. Ice was already covering him, entombing him in the stuff of Cania. His eyes were closed, his arms thrown wide, his body torn open by the power of the archfiend’s three-tined polearm. Cale’s blood had turned the snow and ice near him to crimson slush. A few strings of shadow clung to the blood as if reluctant to abandon their maker, and held on despite the wind.
Mephistopheles slammed his polearm into the ice, impaling the plane itself. He shouted in ecstasy and held out his arms as a glistening, vaguely man-shaped cloud of black power exploded upward from Cale’s ruined body—a portion of Mask’s divine essence. It swirled around the archfiend, wrapping him in a shadowy helix. One end of the helix drove into his chest, eliciting a grunt, and the power of the rest poured in behind it.
“Yes!” Mephistopheles boomed, his voice a thunderhead.
He grew in size as the power merged with him. The red of his flesh darkened, the halo of unholy power shrouding him churned wildly. He roared with ecstasy and Cania trembled. The added power in his voice shattered glaciers, sent avalanches of ancient snow and ice sliding down the side of mountains as old as the cosmos, caused devils and doomed souls alike to wonder and cower. All of the Nine Hells rang with his victory.
“Tremble in your fortress, Asmodeus,” the archfiend said, his voice heavy with the promise of things to come.
Having seen the debt paid in full, Riven unmasked himself. The dark fire of divine wrath boiled from his blades, streamed from his flesh, his fury made manifest. In a heartbeat he grew in size to match the archfiend.
Mephistopheles sensed him and started to turn, but too late.
“Let’s dance,” Riven said, as he drove his sabers into Mephistopheles’s back. Power poured from the steel, coursed through the fiend’s form. Mephistopheles howled with surprise, rage, agony. He arched backward, his wings flapping reflexively. Shadows swirled around them both.
Riven leaned into his blades, drove them through Mephistopheles’s body until the tips of both sabers burst from the archfiend’s chest in a spray of power and fiendish ichor. Mephistopheles fell to his knees and his impact caused the ice upon which they stood to vein, crack.
“You cannot kill me,” the archfiend gurgled through a mouthful of ichor and bile.
Riven knew it to be true. He was perhaps a match for Mephistopheles, but only until the archfiend fully assimilated the power he had taken from Cale. Then, Riven would be vulnerable. He had little time.
He put a boot on Mephistopheles’s back and kicked the archfiend flat to the ice while jerking his blades free. The heat from Mephistopheles’s flesh sent a cloud of steam into the air. Riven willed a binding on the archfiend, preventing him from teleporting to safety.
“I cannot kill you,” he conceded. “But I will hurt you. Hurt you so you remember it.”
Mephistopheles roared, the wind gusted, and Riven slashed his empowered saber into the archfiend’s head, cleaving one of his horns and sinking deeply