No more complaints were shouted Uncle Pikel’s way.

Jarlaxle slid his wand away, shouting to Athrogate, “Just his face!”

The drow leaped from his mount to the back of the wagon, charging right past Bruenor, who was down on one knee, his right hand grasping his left shoulder in an attempt to stem the flow of spraying blood.

Twinkle had cut right through the dwarf’s fine armor and dug deeply into the flesh beneath.

Jarlaxle seized Catti-brie just as she floated over the back of the wagon, having been jostled hard by the thrashing and running Drizzt. Jarlaxle pulled her in and hugged her closely, as Drizzt had done, and started that same journey to insanity.

Jarlaxle knew the distortions for what they were, the magic of his eye patch fighting back the deception. So he held Catti-brie and whispered softly to her as she sobbed. Gradually, he was able to ease her down to the floorboards of the wagon, moving her to a sitting position against the side wall.

He turned away, shaking his head, to find Thibbledorf Pwent hard at work tearing off Bruenor’s blood-soaked sleeve.

“Ah, me king,” the battlerager lamented.

“He’s breathing,” Athrogate called from the side of the trail, where Drizzt remained stuck fast by the viscous glob Jarlaxle’s wand had launched at him. “And seethin’, thrashing and slashin’, not moving at all but wantin’ to be bashin’!”

“Don’t ask,” Jarlaxle said as both Bruenor and Pwent looked Athrogate’s way, then questioningly back at Jarlaxle.

“What just happened?” Bruenor demanded.

“To your daughter, I do not know,” Jarlaxle admitted. “But when I went to her, I was drawn through her into a dark place.” He glanced furtively at Drizzt. “A place where our friend remains, I fear.”

“Regis,” Bruenor muttered. He looked at Jarlaxle, but the drow was staring into the distance, lost in thought. “What d’ya know?” Bruenor demanded, but Jarlaxle just shook his head.

The drow mercenary looked at Catti-brie again and thought of the sudden journey he had taken when he’d touched her. It was more than an illusion, he believed. It was almost as if his mind had walked into another plane of existence. The Plane of Shadow, perhaps, or some other dark region he hoped never to visit again.

But even on that short journey, Jarlaxle hadn’t really gone away, as if that plane and the Prime Material Plane had overlapped, joined in some sort of curious and dangerous rift.

He thought about the specter he’d encountered when Hephaestus had come looking for him, of the dimensional hole he had thrown over the creature, and of the rift to the Astral Plane that he’d inadvertently created.

Had that specter, that huddled creature, been physically passing back and forth from Toril to that shadowy dimension?

“It’s real,” he said quietly.

“What?” Bruenor and Pwent demanded together.

Jarlaxle looked at them and shook his head, not sure how he could explain what he feared had come to pass.

“He’s calming down,” Athrogate called from the tree. “Asking for the girl, and talking to me.”

With Pwent’s help, Bruenor pulled himself to his feet and went with the drow and the dwarf to Drizzt’s side.

“What’re ye about, elf?” Bruenor asked when he got to Drizzt, who was perfectly helpless, stuck fast against the tree.

“What happened?” the drow ranger replied, his gaze fixed on Bruenor’s arm.

“Just a scratch,” Bruenor assured him.

“Bah, but two fingers higher and ye’d have taken his head!” Athrogate cut in, and both Bruenor and Jarlaxle glared at the brash dwarf.

“I did—?” Drizzt started to ask, but he stopped and scowled with a perplexed look.

“Just like back at Mithral Hall,” muttered Bruenor.

“I know where Regis is,” Drizzt said, looking up with alarm. He was sure the others could tell that he was even more afraid for his little friend at that dark moment. And his face twisted with more fear and pain when he glanced over at Catti-brie. If Regis’s mind had inadvertently entered and been trapped in that dark place, then Catti-brie was surely caught between the two worlds.

“Yerself came back, elf, and so’ll the little one,” Bruenor assured him.

Drizzt wasn’t so confident of that. He had barely set his toes in that umbral dimension, but with the ruby, Regis had entered the very depths of Catti-brie’s mind.

Jarlaxle flicked his wrist, and a dagger appeared in his hand. He motioned for Athrogate to move aside, and stepped forward, bending low, carefully cutting Drizzt free.

“If you mean to go mad again, do warn me,” Jarlaxle said to Drizzt with a wink.

Drizzt neither replied nor smiled. His expression became darker still when Athrogate walked over, holding the drow’s lost scimitar, red with the blood of his dearest friend.

PART 2

PRYING THE RIFT

I know she is in constant torment, and I cannot go to her. I have seen into the darkness in which she resides, a place of shadows more profound and more grim than the lower planes. She took me there, inadvertently, when I tried to offer some comfort, and there, in so short a time, I nearly broke.

She took Regis there, inadvertently, when he tried to reach her with the ruby, and there he broke fully. He threw the drowning Catti-brie a rope and she pulled him from the shore of sanity.

She is lost to me. Forever, I fear. Lost in an oblivious state, a complete emptiness, a listless and lifeless existence. And those rare occasions when she is active are perhaps the most painful of all to me, for the depth of her delusions shines all too clearly. It’s as if she’s reliving her life, piecemeal, seeing again those pivotal moments that shaped this beautiful woman, this woman I love with all my heart. She stood again on the side of Kelvin’s Cairn back in Icewind Dale, living again the moment when first we met, and while that to me is among my most precious of memories, that fact made seeing it play out again through the distant eyes of my love even more painful.

How lost must my beloved Catti-brie be to have so broken with the world around her?

And Regis, poor Regis. I cannot know how deeply into that darkness Catti-brie now resides, but it’s obvious to me that Regis went fully into that place of shadows. I can attest to the convincing nature of his delusions, as can Bruenor, whose shoulder now carries the scar of my blade as I fought off imaginary monsters. Or were they imaginary? I cannot begin to know. But that is a moot point to Regis, for to him they are surely real, and they’re all around him, ever clawing at him, wounding him and terrifying him relentlessly.

We four—Bruenor, Catti-brie, Regis, and I—are representative of the world around us, I fear. The fall of Luskan, Captain Deudermont’s folly, the advent of Obould—all of it were but the precursors. For now we have the collapse of that which we once believed eternal, the unraveling of Mystra’s Weave. The enormity of that catastrophe is easy to see on the face of the always calm Lady Alustriel. The potential results of it are reflected in the insanity of Regis, the emptiness of Catti-brie, the near-loss of my own sanity, and the scar carried by King Bruenor.

More than the wizards of Faerûn will feel the weight of this dramatic change. How will diseases be quelled if the gods do not hear the desperate pleas of their priests? How will the kings of the world fare when any contact to potential rivals and allies, instead of commonplace through divination and teleportation, becomes an arduous and lengthy process? How weakened will be the armies, the caravans, the small towns, without the potent power of magic-users among their ranks? And what gains will the more base races, like goblins and orcs, make in the face of such sudden magical weakness? What druids will tend the fields? What magic will bolster and secure the exotic structures of the world? Or will they fall catastrophically as did the Hosttower of the Arcane, or long-dead Netheril?