Cale shot a concerned glance at Jak and replied to the assassin in an intense whisper. Shadows bled from his hands and exposed skin, as if his intensity was squeezing darkness from his pores. In a thoughtful tone, Magadon too said something to Riven, evidently reinforcing Cale's point.
Riven shook his head again, but less forcefully. He looked at Cale with narrowed eyes and asked a question. Cale didn't blink, and Jak heard his reply clearly over the rain:
"You already know why."
At that, Riven showed his signature sneer, but Jak saw the insincerity of it. If he hadn't known better, Jak would have sworn he saw fear in Riven's eye.
Magadon put his hand on the assassin's shoulder and offered him comforting words. Riven glared at him, brushed his hand aside, and said something in a sharp tone. Magadon frowned and took a step back.
Cale spoke to Magadon in a language Jak did not understand. Magadon answered in the same tongue, but slowly.
For a moment, Magadon, Cale, and Riven simply looked at each other. Riven said something and nodded. To Jak, the assassin's tone sounded as final as a funeral dirge.
"Do it," Cale said to the guide, loud enough for Jak to hear.
Magadon visibly gulped but nodded. He put his fingers to his temple and closed his eyes. A halo of white light formed around his head. The glow expanded, and moved to encapsulate Riven. While it glowed, Magadon spoke softly to the assassin. Then the guide nodded at Cale, who added something further, again speaking in a strange language. Throughout, Riven said nothing. Abruptly, the light flared out.
For an instant, a veiled look came over Riven's face but quickly vanished.
What in the Nine Hells just happened? Jak wondered.
Cale caught Jak's eye and smiled softly-an insincere smile-before nodding at Magadon.
Riven said, "What are you doing?"
Cale responded softly. Magadon then asked something and Cale nodded. The guide hesitated for a moment, put his fingertips to the side of his head and closed his eyes. A moment later, a nimbus of angry red energy formed around his skull. It flared brightly. Another such halo formed around Riven's head. The assassin gripped his skull in his palms, groaned, and collapsed. Cale said something in a terse manner to Magadon, and another red nimbus formed around Cale's head. He too groaned and collapsed to the ground. Magadon took a deep breath, then screamed in pain and fell to the dirt himself.
All three lay on the ground unmoving.
Jak couldn't help himself; he ran over and knelt first at Cale's side. To his relief, the tall man was breathing.
"Erevis," he said, shaking Cale gently. "Cale."
Cale's yellow eyes fluttered open and Jak forced himself to stare into them. Cale blinked and groaned, obviously disoriented. When his eyes regained their focus, he sat up, shook his head, and climbed to his feet. Magadon and Riven both were rubbing their temples, groaning, and struggling to sit up.
"What happened?" Jak asked, even though he knew he shouldn't.
A curious expression crossed Cale's face, and Jak thought he might have been struggling for words.
Finally, Cale said, "Precautions, little man. Let's leave it at that."
To that, Jak said nothing. Cale obviously wanted Jak ignorant of what had transpired. Jak hoped his friend knew what he was doing.
With nothing else to do, Jak removed his holy symbol and uttered prayers of healing over each of his companions. Even Riven, perhaps still too disoriented to protest, accepted the spell. The warm energy flowed through Jak and into his comrades. It seemed to bring each of them back to themselves, at least somewhat.
None of them spoke of what had just transpired. To Jak, each of them looked at though they had just awakened from a deep sleep.
* * * * *
When Cale had drained the last of his waterskin and recovered himself as fully as seemed possible, he looked around, eyed his friends, and said to them, "Let's leave this place."
Jak said, "We're just waiting for you to tell us how, my friend."
Cale didn't bother to explain that he had an intuitive feel for the overlap between Toril and the Plane of Shadow.
Instead, he simply said, "Watch."
He concentrated for a moment, attuning himself to the correspondence between the two planes. When he had his mental hands around the connection, he opened his eyes and traced a glowing, vertical green line in the air with his forefinger. At any moment in time, he knew, the Plane of Shadow and Toril were separated by a planar barrier as thin as the cutting edge of an elven thinblade. Cale could slice open that barrier at will.
Putting his palms together and making a knife of his hands, he poked them through the center of the glowing line and drew them apart, as though he was parting draperies from before a window in Stormweather Towers's great hall. The line expanded after his hands to become a rectangular curtain of ochre light hanging in the air-a gate back to Toril.
The appearance of the gate evoked a grin from Jak.
"After all this," the halfling said, shaking his head, "and it was just that easy."
Cale didn't bother to tell his friend that it hadn't been easy at all, that the transformation back in the Fane had changed his body, but it was only a short time ago that the place had transformed his soul.
Instead, he nodded at the portal and said to Jak, "That's home. You're the first, little man."
Jak hesitated for only an instant. He beat his hat on his thigh to free it of mud, donned it with verve, smiled broadly, and hopped through the gate.
Magadon followed.
"Well done, Cale," he said, and stepped through, bow held at his side.
Before Riven stepped into the gate, the assassin stopped and looked Cale in the face.
"I had to do it, Cale," the assassin said. "I'd seen it."
"Maybe," Cale said.
Riven frowned, then said, "You're the First, Cale." He nodded at the gate. "And that's not home anymore. Not for us."
"Go through, Riven," Cale said.
Just as the assassin was about to step through, something registered with Cale. He grabbed Riven by the arm.
"The teleportation rods," he said. "They didn't crumble to dust, did they?"
Riven looked him in the eye and replied, "We had to go through this, Cale. I know what I saw. You had to be our way out."
In his mind, Cale heard Sephris say, Two and two are four.
"We all could have died," Cale said.
Riven shrugged.