There are still days when I tap a keg and convince myself that he is not gone, not forever. How can he be? I saw him do too much, survive too much, to be gone. I stare into the shadowy corners of my place, eye the dark alleys of Daerlun, looking for him, expecting him to step from the darkness, serious as usual, and call to me:
“Mags,” he will say.
But he never does.
He is gone, forever I suppose, and no one has called me Mags in over ninety years. I do not allow it to anyone but Riven, and we have not spoken since two years after the Shadowstorm retreated.
He looked different when I saw him, darker, more there. Over a tankard of stout in the alehouse that I would buy seventy years later (it was called The Red Hen, then), he told me what he had become.
I believed him. I could see it in the depths of his eye, in the way the darkness hugged his form. He sat in the alehouse for several hours and I’d wager that only one or two patrons other than me even noticed him. He had become the shadows.
“Faerûn thinks Mask is dead,” I said.
He took his pipe out of his mouth and exhaled a cloud of exotic smelling smoke. Shadows bled from his flesh, as they once had from Cale. He looked at me with an expression that did not belong to a mere man. His voice was a whisper, the rush of the wind through night shrouded trees.
“He is, but not forever. Let’s keep that our secret, Mags.”
I detected a threat in the statement, in the way the darkness around me deepened. I nodded, changed the subject.
Our conversation started with recent events and moved back through time. We spoke of Cale, Kesson Rel, Rivalen Tanthul, the Sojourner, Azriim the slaad, even our days in Westgate. I asked after his dogs, the temple. He did not touch his stout and when we parted it had the feeling of permanence.
“Take care, Mags,” he had said.
I almost touched his arm but lost my nerve at the last moment. “Are we friends, Drasek?”
“Always, Mags.”
I turned for a moment at the crash of a breaking tankard and the string of curses that accompanied it. When I turned back, he was gone. We spoke again only once more.
A few years later, in the Year of Blue Fire, the Spellplague ravaged Faerûn. Many people measure time from that point onward. Me, I still measure it from the day Erevis Cale died.
I was making my living as a caravan guide and roadman for the wagons streaming in and out of Sembia, working with the kind of men and women I now serve in The Hell. I did not learn the full scope of the changes wrought by the Spellplague until much later but I saw its effects in the Hen, when a wizard sitting at the table next to me looked up from his tea, wild-eyed.
“What is it?” I asked.
He opened his mouth to speak, managed only to utter the word, “Something …” then froze in his chair. His blood and flesh had turned to ice. I learned later that the Spellplague had turned the Weave to poison and caused havoc with practitioners of the Art. The magical surges and vacuums changed Faerûn forever.
I continued to work as a guide. Travelers from abroad told alarming tales around the campfires—some areas of Faerûn had sunk into the ground, replaced by chasms and lakes filled with dire, loathsome creatures from below. Seas had drained. Whole chunks of the world had simply disappeared, effaced from history and memory, replaced by parts of some other world that had bled in to fill the void. Thousands died, millions perhaps, including gods, and the world was transformed.
I found the tales hard to believe, and wanted to see for myself. Journeying across central Faerûn, I saw chunks of the world floating free in the air, eerie echoes of the Shadovar’s floating cities. I saw twisted creatures rise from steaming pits to pollute nature with their presence.
And everywhere I saw fear and uncertainty in the eyes of Faerûn’s people. Men and women of every profession and station gathered together in alehouses and taverns after night fell and shared whatever dark news they had heard that day. I saw the comfort they took in one another’s presence, the importance of a common meeting place, and decided then that I would run an alehouse one day.