Brennus stood in the doorway of his scrying chamber. A tarnished, solid silver scrying cube, two paces wide on each side, sat in the center of the round vaulted room. Shadows curled around the cube in thin wisps. The dim points of stars, their light diffused by the shadowed air of Sakkors enclave, gleamed feebly through the vaulted, glassteel roof.
His homunculi, tiny twin constructs made from dead flesh and Brennus’s own blood, pelted across the chamber ahead of him. They took turns tripping each other, clambering over one another in their haste, a chaotic ball of leathery gray skin, thin limbs, high-pitched expletives and squeals of outrage.
Smiling, Brennus followed them until he stood before the scrying cube. In his hand he held his dead mother’s platinum necklace. Her ghost haunted his thoughts, her voice whispering two words in his mind over and over.
“Avenge me.”
Again and again he returned to his scrying cube, his divinations, seeking a way, any way, to make his brother, Rivalen, pay for the murder of their mother. But always the exercise ended in frustration. Decades earlier he had deciphered and read the informational currents in the Hells and learned that Mask’s divinity had been split in parts, that Mephistopheles possessed some of the power after taking it from Erevis Cale, that Drasek Riven possessed some, and that his brother – his murderous, faithless brother – also possessed some. He knew, too, that Erevis Cale had a son with the woman Varra. But Brennus had watched Varra disappear from Faerun almost a hundred years ago, as if she had been plucked out of the multiverse.
Mask had done something to the son, altered him somehow, before the god had been destroyed and his remaining power divided into thirds. There was a plot there, the scheme of a god, Brennus was certain of that. He could see many of the pieces, but he could not yet solve the puzzle.
The son was the key. Or would have been the key. Brennus had never been able to locate either Varra or her son and now, over a hundred years after Varra had disappeared, both the mother and the son would be long dead.
And with them had died whatever hope for revenge the son represented for Brennus. Whatever plan Mask had hatched had failed. The son of Erevis Cale had not done what Mask had intended.
So Brennus was reduced to compulsively spying on his brother, waiting for an opportunity that he suspected would never come.
“Look now?” asked his homunculi, their two voices synchronous.
“Yes.”
The homunculi squeaked with delight and clambered up his cloak, their tiny claws snagging the fabric. They took their usual station, one on each of his shoulders, bookends to his head.
“Show, show,” they said.
Brennus put a hand on the smooth, cool face of the scrying cube and uttered the words to a divination. Goaded by the magic, the smears of tarnish began a slow swirl. Abruptly the face of the cube took on dimension, depth. The swirls and whorls of black constituted themselves into recognizable shapes.
“The dark city,” the homunculi said, their tones hushed.
“Ordulin,” Brennus said. “But it hasn’t been a city for a long time.”
Maps called it the Maelstrom, and not even the Lords of Shade set foot within it. Save one.
The scrying cube showed Ordulin from high above. The dark, miasmic air around the ruined city made everything look dull, diffuse, smeared pigments on a surreal painting. Once-grand buildings lay in shattered heaps, the broken bones of a broken city. Streaks of green lightning split the sky from time to time, ghastly veins of light that cast the ruins in veridian. Shadows formed and dissipated in the air, wisps of reified darkness.
Undead flitted among the bleak darkness: spectres, living shadows, ghosts, wraiths, hundreds of them, thousands, the glow of their eyes like a sky of baleful stars. The hole in the center of the maelstrom – the hole his brother and his brother’s goddess, Shar, had created – drew undead the way a corpse drew flies. Ordulin was a graveyard, haunted by its past, and ruled by Brennus’s brother, who had murdered their mother.
He held up a hand and intoned a refinement to the scrying ritual. The homunculi mimed his gesture, murmuring nonsense syllables.
The perspective in the face of the cube changed and the arcane eye of the divination streaked toward the blasted ground, wheeled through the shattered stone and wood, and stopped in the center of the ruins, at the edge of what once was a large, open plaza. Chunks of weathered statuary and jagged blocks of a fallen citadel lay scattered across the cracked flagstones, monuments to destruction.
A shield-sized hole hung in the air in the center of the plaza, a colorless distortion in reality that opened onto…nothing, an emptiness so profound that looking at it for more than a moment made Brennus nauseated. The homunculi squealed and pulled the loose folds of his robes before their eyes. It seemed slowly to swirl but Brennus was never certain. What he was certain about was that the hole represented the end to everything. It grew over time, a miniscule amount each year, the mouth of Shar that would eventually devour the world. He hated it, hated Shar, hated his brother, who was her Nightseer and a godling in his own right.
Rivalen sat at the edge of the hole on the cracked face of a once-enormous statue. He stared into the maelstrom, his hands in his lap, unmoving. As always, Brennus wondered what Rivalen thought of when he looked into the work he’d wrought, the apocalypse he’d sown. Did he welcome it? Regret it? Did he even think like a man anymore?
The wind stirred Rivalen’s cloak and his long, dark hair. Shadows leaked from him in long tendrils, pennons of night.
“The Nightseer,” the homunculi said, and covered their faces with their clawed hands.
Brennus said nothing, merely watched his brother a long while. He had no purpose in it anymore, other than to fuel his hate and remind himself of his mother. He relaxed his grip on the necklace he held.
“I’m going to kill you,” he promised his brother. Shadows oozed from his skin, swirled around him, marked his anger with their churn. “For her. I’m going to kill you for her. I’ll find a way.”
The homunculi, sensing his frustration and sadness, patted his head with their tiny hands and made cooing noises.
A cascade of green lightning veined the sky above Ordulin. Brennus blinked in the sudden glare and when the spots cleared from his eyes he saw that his brother was gone. He saw only the hole, the ruins.
“Nightseer gone,” the homunculi said.
Before Brennus could acknowledge them, a voice spoke from behind him.
“Gone,” said Rivalen’s deep voice, as the power of his presence filled the room and put pressure on Brennus’s ears. “Because I’ve come here.”
The homunculi squealed in terror and curled up in the cowl of Brennus’s cloak, trembling. Brennus swallowed and turned to face his brother.
Rivalen’s golden eyes glowed in the dusky crags of his angled face. The darkness in the room coalesced around him, as if drawn to his form. The weight of his regard threatened to buckle Brennus’s knees, but he thought of his mother and held his ground.
“Every day I feel your eyes on me, Brennus.”
Brennus felt his back bump up against the still-warm metal of the scrying cube. He relied on his hate to gave him courage.
“Then perhaps you’ve felt my hate, too.”
His words caused the homunculi to squeal with alarm and try to burrow more deeply into his cowl, but Rivalen’s neutral expression did not change. .
“Yes, I’ve felt it,” Rivalen said. He glided over the floor toward Brennus, his form lost at the edges, merged with the darkness. He seemed to displace space as he moved, causing the room to shrink, sucking up the air.
Brennus tried to steady his breathing, his heart, tried to slow his rapidly blinking eyes. He knew he looked a fool and it only made him angrier.
“What do you want?” Brennus asked, and was pleased to hear the steadiness in his voice. The shadows leaking from his body merged with those swirling around Rivalen and were overwhelmed by them.
“That’s my question to you,” Rivalen answered. His golden eyes drifted to Brennus’s hand, to the jacinth necklace he held there.
“Ah,” Rivalen said. “Still that.”
Brennus dared take a step closer to his taller brother. He knew Rivalen could kill him easily, but he did not care. “Always that.”
The darkness around Rivalen intensified. His eyes stayed on the necklace.
“That damned necklace.
Brennus clenched his fist around the necklace. “The one our mother wore the day you murdered her.”
Rivalen’s eyes came up, met Brennus’s, flared in the black hole of his face. “You never told me how you found it.”
“You’re not all-knowing? Ask the whore you worship, or the hole you stare into everyday.”
Rivalen held out his hand. Shadows rose from his palm, wound around his fingers. “Give it to me.”
Shadows stormed around Brennus and words leaped out of his throat before he could stop it. “No! Never!”
“I can take it if I wish.”
Rage boiled in Brennus, the steam of his anger leaking around the lid of his control. He uttered a guttural cry of hate, extended a hand, shouted a word of power, and unleashed a blast of life-draining energy that would have shriveled a mortal to a husk.
But Rivalen was not mortal, not anymore, and the beam of energy slammed into his chest, split, and ricocheted off in several directions, all to no effect.
Rivalen’s eyes narrowed. Power coalesced in him as the darkness about him deepened. He stepped toward Brennus and his form seemed to grow, to fill the room. His hands closed on Brennus’s robes and lifted him into the air. The homuculi squealed with terror.
Imminent death steeled Brennus’s courage. He glared into his brother’s impassive golden eyes, squeezed his mother’s necklace so hard the metal pierced his skin. Blood ran warm and soaked his fist before his regenerative flesh closed the wound.
Rivalen pulled Brennus close until they were nose to nose. “Give it to me.”
Brennus spat in his brother’s face, the face of a god, the globule running down Rivalen’s cheek.
“You’ll have to kill me first,” he said through clenched teeth.
Rivalen’s eyes flared. He studied Brennus’s face, perhaps measuring his resolve, then threw him across the length of the scrying chamber.
Brennus hit the far stone wall hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs and crack ribs. His body began immediately to regenerate itself and he winced as shadowstuff reknit his broken ribs.
“A hole, Rivalen!” Brennus shouted, grimacing with pain has he stood. “You’ve had a hole in you since murdered our mother for your bitch goddess! Now the hole is all you have! How does it feel? How does it feel?”
“Mother died thousands of years ago, Brennus.”
The impassivity in Rivalen’s voice drove Brennus to distraction. Shadows swirled and he pointed his finger at his brother.
“You don’t get to call her ‘mother.’ You call her Alashar or don’t speak of her at all. And she did not just die. You murdered her.”
Rivalen did not deny it, did not apologize for it, said nothing at all. He stepped forward to the scrying cube, his expression thoughtful, and put his palm to its face. The entire cube turned black as onyx. In a moment the darkness lightened and an image began to resolve in the cube’s face.
Brennus’s breath left him in a rush.
“Is this? This cannot be. Don’t do this.”
His mother’s face formed on the cube. She was lying on her back amidst a meadow festooned with purple flowers. Her long dark hair haloed her head. The wind stirred her clothes, caused the flowers to sway.
Brennus recognized the meadow. It was the same meadow where he had found her necklace, the same meadow from which Erevis Cale’s love, Varra, pregnant with Cale’s child, had disappeared.
More pieces to the puzzle. But still no solutions.
Her pale face looked pained, but Brennus did not think the pain physical. Her breathing was rapid, too rapid.
Brennus found himself walking slowly toward the cube.
His mother reached out a hand, her arm visibly shaking.
Brennus felt as if he could almost reach out and touch her. His own hand went up to take hers into his.
“Mother,” he said softly, but her eyes were not on him. He was seeing an image of events that had occurred thousands of years before.
“Hold my hand, Rivalen,” she said, her voice a whispered gasp. Brennus saw that her other hand held the necklace Brennus now held.
Rivalen’s voice answered her, his voice from the time when he had been a young man, before he’d been become a shade, before he’d become a god.
“We all die alone, mother.”
She closed her eyes and the tears leaked down her cheeks. Tears leaked down Brennus’s cheeks in answer.
“Your father will learn of this,” mother said.
“No. This will be known only to us. And to Shar.”
And to me, Brennus thought.
She stared at where Rivalen must have been standing, then closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.
“What did you wish for, mother?” Rivalen asked.
When she opened her eyes, Brennus was pleased to see the hurt in her eyes was gone, replaced by anger.
“To be the instrument of your downfall.”
“Goodnight, mother. I answer to another mistress, now.”
Rivalen removed his hand from the scrying cube and the image faded.
