But the cost had proven a temporary thing, perhaps a trial of Deneir to test Cadderly’s loyalty to the cause he professed, the cause of Deneir. After the completion of Spirit Soaring, the man had begun to grow younger physically—much younger, even younger than his actual age. He was forty-four, but appeared as a man in his young twenties, younger even than his twin children. That strange journey to physical youth, too, had subsequently stabilized, Cadderly believed, and he appeared to be aging more normally with the passage of the past several months.
“I have traveled the strangest of journeys,” Cadderly said, putting a comforting hand on Wanabrick’s shoulder. “Change is the only constant, I fear.”
“But surely not like this!” Wanabrick replied. “So we hope,” said Cadderly.
“Have you found any answers, good priest?” Dalebrentia asked.
“Only that Deneir works as I work, writing his logic, seeking reason in the chaos, applying rules to that which seems unruly.”
“And without success,” Wanabrick said, somewhat dismissively.
“Patience,” said Cadderly. “There are answers to be found, and rules that will apply. As we discern them, so too will we understand the extent of their implications, and so too will we adjust our thinking, and our spellcasting.”
The gnome at a nearby table began to clap his hands at that, and the applause spread throughout the great study, dozens of mages and priests joining in, most soon standing. They were not cheering for him, Cadderly knew, but for hope itself in the face of their most frightening trial.
“Thank you,” Dalebrentia quietly said to Cadderly. “We needed to hear that.”
Cadderly looked at Wanabrick, who stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his face tight with anxiety and anger. The wizard did manage a nod to Cadderly, however.
Cadderly patted him on the shoulder again and started away, nodding and smiling to all who silently greeted him as he passed.
Outside the hall, the priest gave a sigh full of deep concern. He hadn’t lied when he’d told Dalebrentia that Deneir was hard at work trying to unravel the unraveling, but he hadn’t relayed the whole truth, either.
Deneir, a god of knowledge and history and reason, had answered Cadderly’s prayers of communion with little more than a sensation of grave trepidation.
“Keep faith, friend,” Cadderly said to Wanabrick later that same night, when the Baldurian contingent departed Spirit Soaring. “It’s a temporary turbulence, I’m sure.”
Wanabrick didn’t agree, but he nodded anyway and headed out the door.
“Let us hope,” Dalebrentia said to Cadderly, approaching him and offering his hand in gratitude.
“Will you not stay the night at least, and leave when the sun is bright?”
“Nay, good brother, we have been away too long as it is,” Dalebrentia replied. “Several of our guild have been touched by the madness of the pure Weave. We must go to them and see if anything we have learned here might be of some assistance. Again, we thank you for the use of your library.”
“It’s not my library, good Dalebrentia. It’s the world’s library. I am merely the steward of the knowledge contained herein, and humbled by the responsibilities the great sages put upon me.”
“A steward, and an author of more than a few of the tomes, I note,” Dalebrentia said. “And truly we are all better off for your stewardship, Brother Bonaduce. In these troubled times, to find a place where great minds might congregate is comforting, even if not overly productive on this particular occasion. But we are dealing with unknowns here, and I am confident that as the unraveling of the Weave, if that is what it is, is understood, you will have many more important works to add to your collection.”
“Any that you and your peers pen would be welcome,” Cadderly assured him.
Dalebrentia nodded. “Our scribes will replicate every word spoken here today for Spirit Soaring, that in times to come when such a trouble as this visits Faerûn again, Tymora forefend, our wisdom will help the worried wizards and priests of the future.”
They held their handshake throughout the conversation, each feeding off the strength of the other, for both Cadderly—so wise, the Chosen of Deneir—and Dalebrentia—an established mage even back in the Time of Troubles some two decades before—suspected that what they’d all experienced of late was no temporary thing, that it might lead to the end of Toril as they knew it, to turmoil beyond anything they could imagine.
“I will read the words of Dalebrentia with great interest,” Cadderly assured the man as they finally broke off their handshake, and Dalebrentia moved out into the night to join his three companions.
They were a somber group as their wagon rolled slowly down Spirit Soaring’s long cobblestone entry road, but not nearly as much so as when they had first arrived. Though they had found nothing solid to help them solve the troubling puzzle that lay before them, it was hard to leave Spirit Soaring without some measure of hope. Truly the library had become as magnificent in content as it was in construction, with thousands of parchments and tomes donated from cities as far away as Waterdeep and Luskan, Silverymoon, and even from great Calimport, far to the south. The place carried an aura of lightness and hope, a measure of greatness and promise, as surely as any other structure in all the lands.
Dalebrentia had climbed into the wagon beside old Resmilitu, while Wanabrick rode the jockey box with Pearson Bluth, who drove the two ponies.
“We will find our answers,” Dalebrentia said, mostly to the fuming Wanabrick, but for the sake of all three.
Hooves clacking and wheels bouncing across the cobblestones were the only sounds that accompanied them down the lane. They reached the packed dirt of the long road that would lead them out of the Snowflakes to Carradoon.
The night grew darker as they moved under the thick canopy of overhanging tree limbs. The woods around them remained nearly silent—strangely so, they would have thought, had they bothered to notice—save for the occasional rustle of the wind through the leaves.
The lights of Spirit Soaring receded behind them, soon lost to the darkness.
“Bring up a flame,” Resmilitu bade the others.
“A light will train enemies upon us,” Wanabrick replied.
“We are four mighty wizards, young one. What enemies shall we fear this dark and chilly night?”
“Not so chilly, eh?” Pearson Bluth said, and glanced over his shoulder.
Though the driver’s statement was accurate, he and the other two noted with surprise that Resmilitu hugged his arms around his chest and shivered mightily.
“Pop a light, then,” Dalebrentia bade Wanabrick.
The younger wizard closed his eyes and waggled his fingers through a quick cantrip, conjuring a magical light atop his oaken staff. It flared to life, and Resmilitu nodded, though it shed no heat.
Dalebrentia moved to collect a blanket from the bags in the wagon bed.
Then it was dark again.
“Ah, Mystra, you tease,” said Pearson Bluth, as Wanabrick offered stronger curses to the failure.
A moment later, Pearson’s good nature turned to alarm. The darkness grew more intense than the night around them, as if Wanabrick’s dweomer had not only failed, but had transformed somehow into an opposing spell of darkness. The man pulled the team to a stop. He couldn’t see the ponies, and couldn’t even see Wanabrick sitting beside him. He had no way of knowing if they, too, were engulfed in the pitch blackness.
“Damn this madness!” Wanabrick cried.
“Oh, but you’ve erased the stars themselves,” said Dalebrentia in as light-hearted a tone as he could manage, confirming that the back of the wagon, too, had fallen victim to the apparent reversal of the dweomer.
Resmilitu cried out then through chattering teeth, “So chill!” and before the others could react to his call, they felt it too, a sudden, unnatural coldness, profound and to the bone.