"No, we do not normally feel such things...nor have the violence of feeling anything strike us so hard that our own spells collapse into wildfire," Rauntlavon's master told her. "The reason we did this time was the target of this unleashing: the High One. I saw him, standing at the bottom of a shaft with three mortal mages, while magic seeking to destroy him rained down...and his attention was elsewhere."
"Azuth? Who was crazed enough to use magic to try to blast down a god of magic?" The ladylord looked surprised.
"That I did not see," Iyriklaunavan replied. "I did, however, see what Azuth was regarding. A ghostly sorceress, who was trying to slay a Chosen of Mystra."
"What's that?" the Great Lady asked. "Some sort of servant of the goddess?"
"Yes," the elf mage said grimly, "and he was someone you might remember. Cast your thoughts back to a day when we fled from a tomb...a tomb furnished with pillars that erupted in eyes. A mage was hanging above us there, asleep or trapped, and came out after we fled. He asked you what year it was."
"Oh, yesss," the ladylord murmured, her eyes far away, "and I told him."
"And thereby we earned the favor of the goddess Mystra," Iyriklaunavan told her, "who delivered this castle into our hands."
The Lady Nuressa frowned. "I thought Amandarn won title to these lands while dicing with some merchant lords...hazarding all our coins in the process," she said.
Rauntlavon stood very still, not wanting to be ejected again now. Surely this was an even more dangerous secret than...
"Amandarn lost all our coins, Nessa. Folossan nearly killed him for it...and they had to flee when he stole a few bits back to buy a meal that night and got caught at it. The two of them hid in a shrine to Mystra...rolled right in under the altar and hid under its fine cloth. There they slept, though both of them swear magic must have dragged them into slumber, for they'd had little to drink and were all excited from their flight and the danger. When they awoke, all of our coins were back in Amandarn's pouch...along with the title to the castle."
The Great Lady's brow arched and she asked, "And you believe this tale?"
"Nessa, I used spells to glean every last detail of it out of both their heads, after they told me. It happened."
"I see," the Great Lady said calmly. "Rauntlavon, be aware that this is another secret shared between us here...and only us here, or you'll have to flee four Lords of the Castle, not merely one."
"Yes, Great Lady," the apprentice said, then swallowed and faced them both. "There's something I should say, now. If something happens to Great Azuth...or Most Holy Mystra...and magic keeps crumbling, we all share a grave problem."
"And what is that, Rauntlavon?" The Lady Nuressa asked, in almost kindly tones, her fingers caressing the pommel of her long sword.
Rauntlavon's eyes dropped to those fingers...whose fabled strength was one of the rocks upon which his world stood...then back up to meet her smoky eyes.
"I think we must pray for Azuth or find some way to aid him. The castle was built with much magic," he told the two lords, the words coming out in a rush. "If its spells fall, it will fall...and us with it."
The Great Lady's expression did not change. Her eyes turned to meet those of the Lord Iyriklaunavan. "Is this true?"
The elf merely nodded. Nuressa stared at him for a moment, her face still calm, but Rauntlavon saw that her hand was now closed around the hilt of the long sword and gripping so tightly that the knuckles were white. Her eyes swung back to his.
"Well, Rauntlavon...have you any plan for preventing such doom?"
Rauntlavon spread empty hands, wishing wildly that he could be the hero, and see love for him awaken in her eyes ... wishing he could give her more than his despair. "No, Nuressa," he was astonished to hear himself calmly whispering. "I'm only an apprentice. But I will die for you, if you ask me."
He drew his blade out of the swaying sorceress with savage glee, to thrust it into the Great Foe he'd pursued for so long, the grasping, stinking human who'd dared to stain bright Cormanthyr with his presence and doom the House of Starym, now helpless before him, able to move just his eyes...fittingly...to see whence his doom came.
"Know as you die, human worm," Ilbryn hissed, "that the Starym aven..."
And those were the last words he ever spoke, as all the magic that the ancient sorceress had drawn into herself rushed out again, in a fiery flood of raw magical energy that consumed the blade that had spilled it and the elf whose hand held that blade, all in one raging wave that crashed against the far wall of the cavern and ate through solid rock as if it was soft cheese, thrusting onward until it found daylight on a slope beyond, and the groan of toppling trees and falling stones began in earnest.
Saeraede wailed, flames streaming from her mouth, and fell away from Elminster, her mists receding into a standing cloud whose dark and despairing eyes pleaded with his for a few fleeting moments before it collapsed and dwindled away to whirling dust.
El was still staggering and coughing, his hands at his ravaged throat, when Azuth strode forward and unleashed a magic whose eerie green glow flooded the runes and the dust that had been Saeraede alike.
Like a gentle wave rolling up a beach, the god's spell spread out to the crevice Ilbryn had hidden in and every other last corner of the ravaged cavern. Then it flickered, turned a lustrous golden hue that made Beldrune gasp, and rose from the floor, leaving scoured emptiness behind.
Azuth strode through the rising magic without pause, caught hold of the reeling Elminster by the shoulders, and marched him one step farther. In mid-stride they vanished together...leaving three old mages gaping at a fallen throne in a shaft of sunlight in a pit in the forest that was suddenly silent and empty.
They took a few steps toward the place where so much death and sorcery had swirled...far enough to see that the runes were now an arc of seven pits of shivered stone...then stopped and looked at each other.
"They're gone an' all, eh?" Beldrune said suddenly. That's it...all that fury and struggle and in the space of a few breaths ... that's it. All done, and us left behind an' forgotten."
Tabarast of the Three Sung Curses raised elegantly white tufted eyebrows and asked, "You expected things to be different, this once?"
"We were worthy of a god's personal protection," Caladaster almost whispered. "He walked with us and shielded us when we were endangered...danger he did not share, or he'd never have been able to deal with that fireball as he did."
"That was something, wasn't it?" Beldrune chuckled. "Ah, I can see myself telling the younglings that... a little more pepper, indeed."
"I believe that's why he did it," Tabarast told him. "Yes, we were honored...and we're still alive, unlike that ghost sorceress and the elf … that's an achievement, right there."
They looked at each other again, and Beldrune scratched at his chin, cleared his throat and said, "Yes... ahem. Well. I think we can just walk out, there at the end where the fire burst out of the cavern, that way."
"I don't want to leave here just yet," Caladaster replied, kicking at the cracked edge of one of the pits where a rune had been. "I've never stood with folk of real power before, at a spot where important things happen … and I guess I never will again. While I'm here, I feel … alive."
"Huh," Beldrune grunted, "she said that, an' look what happened to her."
Tabarast stumped forward and put his arms around Caladaster in a rough embrace, muttering, "I know just how you feel. We've got to go before dark, mind, and I'll want a tankard by then."
"A lot of tankards," Beldrune agreed.
"But somewhere quiet to sit and think, just us three," Tabarast added, almost fiercely. "I don't want to be sitting telling all the drunken farmers how we walked with a god this night, and have them laugh at us."
"Agreed," Caladaster said calmly, and turned away.
Beldrune stared at his back. "Where are you going?"
The old wizard reached the rubble-strewn bottom of the shaft and peered down at the stones. "I stood just here," he murmured, "and the god was … there." Though his voice was steady, even gruff, his cheeks were suddenly wet with tears.
"He protected us," he whispered. "He held back more magic than I've ever seen hurled before, in all my life, magic that turned the very rocks to empty air ... for us, that we might live."
"Gods have to do that, y'see," Beldrune told him. "Someone has to see what they do and live to tell others. What's the good of all that power, otherwise?"
Caladaster looked at him with scorn, anger rising in his eyes, and stepped back from Beldrune. "Do you dare to laugh at divine..."
"Yes," Beldrune told him simply. "What's the good of being human, elsewise?"
Caladaster stared at him, mouth hanging open, for what seemed like a very long time. Then the old wizard swallowed deliberately, shook his head, and chuckled feebly. "I never saw things that way before," he said, almost admiringly. "Do you laugh at gods often?"
"One or twice a tenday," Beldrune said solemnly. "Thrice on high holy days, if someone reminds us when they are."