its side. A boom of thunder dislodged them, sending them spiraling into the air again.
“He will be in the tower,” Riven said. “Has to be.”
Cale nodded. “We need to get in and get out. Unless his death will destroy the shadows, we can’t linger.”
“We find him. We kill him. We leave.”
Cale drew the darkness around them, chose a tall building within Ordulin’s walls not too far from Kesson’s tower, and rode the shadows there. They materialized on the flat roof of what once had been a two story storehouse.
The wind and rain died. Ordulin sat dry, dark, and still in the eye of the Shadowstorm. After hours in the violent weather, the calm unnerved Cale. Everything seemed too loud, even his breath.
Energy suffused the air, drew up the hairs on his arms, and caused his skin to tingle. The lightning striking Kesson’s spire seasoned the air with the tang of acrid smoke. Calle moved forward to the edge of the building to see what was beneath the tower. Riven followed.
“Dark,” Cale said.
The rings of power traversing the spire fed a black void beneath its bottom. The hole yawned in the center of the plaza, a doorway into an abyss of darkness. The spire discharged the energy of the lightning into the void and with each pulse of power the void’s edges trembled, expanded incrementally. And as it grew larger, it devoured whatever its edges touched.
Cale looked into the hole and saw in it Shar’s will. Its emptiness made him nauseous, caused his temples to throb. Beside him, Riven heaved, vomited over the side of the building, and cursed.
Above, the clouds turned as one in a slow maelstrom around the black, lightning-streaked hole of the planar rift. Kesson’s tower was the axle connecting the hole in the sky to the hole in the world. Shadows poured from the rift and fed the churning, expanding clouds of the Shadowstorm.
Around them, as far as they could see, the rest of Ordulin lay in ruins, a burst pustule of stone, wood, and flesh. The energies unleashed when Kesson Rel had opened the planar rift had caused otherwise solid substances to run like candle wax. Some of the buildings, rendered unstable by their deformities, had collapsed. Piles of rubble pockmarked the city’s streets. Cale saw corpses everywhere, barely recognizable lumps of melted flesh and bone. Many bodies had run together with the stone or wood, creating grotesque amalgamations. Spheres of impenetrable darkness about the size of wagon wheels floated here and there. Several sections of the city’s stone wall had collapsed and large cracks veined them where they still stood.
“We gear up,” Cale said softly.
Riven spat, nodded.
Cale cast a series of spells that increased his speed, his strength, warded both he and Riven against fire and lightning. Riven held forth his blades and asked Mask to empower them. The Shadowlord answered and the blades oozed shadows. Cale spoke the words to a spell that infused him with divine vitality, and the spell increased his size half again, making him stronger still.
“We hit him hard and fast,” Cale said.
“Hard and fast,” Riven echoed, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
Cale pulled the shadows around them and stepped from roof to alley to roof to roof, hopping across the city. The spire grew ever larger in their vision and they kept their eyes from the ruined bodies that dotted the streets and buildings around and below them. Cale could not see the growing void under the tower from their vantage atop a single story building, but he could feel it, a wobble in the rhythm of the world.
As they closed on the tower, Cale noticed the handful of metal balconies and archways that opened in its sides, apertures to a deeper darkness.
In the air above them, shadows streaked past. Cale kept the darkness close around them and they went unnoticed in Ordulin’s gloom.
Kesson Rel felt the arrival of the Chosen of Mask, a faint tremor in the web of shadows that blanketed Ordulin. The divinity within him allowed him to feel the shadows within the city as if they were an extension of his body.
“What is it, Divine One?” asked Gobitran. The gnome toyed with her necklace of eyes with one hand. With the other, she pawed at his leather robe, fawned in his darkness.
“The Shadowlord’s Chosen have come,” he said.
She hissed with anger and remembered pain. The Shadowlord’s Chosen had nearly killed her when they had entered the spire back on the Plane of Shadow, when