twisted forms of life and unlife that fed on death and fear, but the city itself was a hole.
And he knew why.
Kesson Rel had failed; Shar had not.
But Rivalen had to see it for himself. He had to know.
He could have walked the shadows to the pit he would find in Ordulin’s center but chose instead to walk through the destruction. He thought that someone living should bear witness to it.
The beat of his boots off the cracked and uneven streets were the moments recorded by a Neverwinter waterclock, dripping away the time left to Toril. He felt more and more lightheaded with each step.
Around him deformed buildings sagged on their foundations, drooped from the sides as if their stone and brick had run like melting candle wax, rounding edges, stretching shapes. The buildings leaned like drunks toward the center of the city, toward the hole in the world.
Thousands of corpses littered the city, lay in doorways, on balconies, flesh pale and drooping, twisted mouths open in dying screams. The wind tore at the rags of their clothing, Shar’s victory pennons.
As he neared his goal, the deformation of the world increased. Eventually separation of melted flesh from melted stone was lost. Parts of bodies jutted from the sagging rocks and bricks. Torsos, heads, and limbs stabbed accusatory appendages at the black sky, the bodies trapped in the wreckage of crumbling reality, insects caught imperfectly in drops of amber. He did not avert his gaze at the grisliness. He took it in, tried to comprehend it, the shadows around him swirling.
“Your bitterness was sweet to the Lady,” he said to the dead.
He felt reality, unreality, pulling at his form, trying to turn him first malleable, then unmake him all together. Only the divine power within him allowed him to remain physically and mentally coherent. He felt detached, as if watching himself in a dream.
Ahead, the street ended in a cobblestone paved plaza surrounded by a low stone wall. A bronze statue stood on a pedestal near the wall, a warrior with sword and shield. His features had flowed away, as if tears had melted his expression.
Rivalen walked past the statue and into the plaza. Kesson Rel’s spire hung over the city, feeding the rift between planes that manifested as a gash in the sky. Rivalen put out his hand and a shadowy tendril extended from his palm to the spire, wrapping around its circumference again and again again. He let power surge through the tendril and Kesson’s tower crumbled, fell to earth in huge chunks, each of them a monument to his failure. Then he intoned a stanza of power, and closed the rift. The Shadowstorm would retreat in time. Only Ordulin would remain in its shadows. Sembia would recover, mostly, and the Shadovar would rule it.
Rivalen picked his way through the rubble and there, in the center of Kesson Rel’s ruin, he found Shar’s victory.
A disc of nothingness, perhaps the size of a shield, hovered at eye height. It did not move but the border between it and the surrounding plaza blurred. Reality seemed to sag under the weight of its presence, as if the world were draining away in a wash basin.
Stillness reigned. Rivalen stared, awed, humbled.
The wind blew a ribbon of shadow into the hole and the shadow disappeared. Not consumed, Rivalen knew. Not disintegrated, but obliterated entirely, as would anything that fell into it, just as he had seen on Ephyras.
Rivalen held out his hand, his fingertips nearly touching the hole, his body the bridge between substance and nothingness. He looked into the hole, the lens through which he saw the end of all time and all things. He was looking at the end of the world, the unmaking of the universe. From an inner pocket, he withdrew the black coin he had taken from the ruins of Ephyras. It was cool in his hand, dead.
For the first time he understood, truly understood, the nature of his goddess, of her goals, of her needs.
She would end all things. He would be her instrument. He had murdered his mother, lost his brother, his father, his entire family, made a sacrifice of his soul, traded his faith for his humanity, and all of it for nothing. He closed his fingers over the coin, stared into the hole in the world, and wept.
Thamalon heard news of Rivalen’s return to Selgaunt and awaited him in the map room of his palace. His gaze went again and again to the chess pieces