In the cave on the cliff, the Ghost King knew.

Fetchigrol was gone, his energy winked out, lost to them.

Yharaskrik was an illithid. Illithids were creature of callous logic and did not gloat, but dragons were creatures of emotion, and so when the illithid pointed out that it had been right in its condemnation of Fetchigrol’s plan, a wall of rage came back at it.

From both Hephaestus and Crenshinibon.

For a moment, Yharaskrik didn’t understand the Crystal Shard’s agreement with the volatile beast. Crenshinibon, too, was an artifact of pragmatic and logical thinking. Unemotional, like the illithid.

But unlike Yharaskrik, Crenshinibon was also ambitious.

And so Yharaskrik knew at that moment that the bond would not hold, that the triumvirate in the dracolich’s consciousness would not and could not remain tenable. It thought to find a host outside the dragon’s body, but dismissed the notion immediately, realizing that nothing was as mighty as the dracolich, after all, and Hephaestus would not suffer the illithid to survive.

It had to fight.

Hephaestus was all anger and venom, that wall of rage, and the illithid went at him methodically, poking holes with logic and reasoning, reminding its opponent of the inarguable truths, for those truths alone—the recklessness of opening wide a gate to an unknown plane, and the needed caution in continuing against a foe as powerful as the combined might of Spirit Soaring—could serve as a premise on which to build its case.

By every measure of the principles of debate, Yharaskrik was far beyond its opponent. The simple truth and logic were on its side. The illithid poked its holes and appealed to reason over rage, repeatedly, thinking to turn the favor of Crenshinibon, who, he feared, would ultimately decide the outcome of their struggle.

The battle within became a wild assault without, as Hephaestus’s dracolich form thrashed and clawed at the stone, breathed fire that melted stone and minion alike, and bull-rushed walls, shaking the entire mountain in great tremors.

Gradually, Hephaestus began to play out his rage, and the internal battle diminished as it became a session of dialogue and discourse. With Yharaskrik leading the way, the Ghost King began to sort how it might correct for the loss of Fetchigrol. The Ghost King began to accept the past and look to the next move in the wider, and more important struggle.

Yharaskrik took some small comfort in the victory, fully recognizing that it might be temporary in nature and fully expecting that it would battle Hephaestus many more times before things were finally settled.

The illithid turned its thoughts and arguments to the very real possibility that Fetchigrol’s demise indicated that the apparition had reached too far into what had once been the Plane of Shadow. But for reasons still unknown to the Ghost King, the Plane of Shadow had become something more, something bigger and more dangerous. It also seemed to be somehow moving closer to the Prime Material Plane, and in that event, what consequences might result?

Crenshinibon seemed not to care, reasoning that out of chaos, the Ghost King could only grow stronger.

And if a dangerous and too-powerful organized force had come through the rift, the Ghost King could simply fly away. The Crystal Shard, Yharaskrik understood implicitly, was far more concerned about the loss of two of the seven.

For Hephaestus, there remained only unrelenting and simmering anger, and most of all, the dragon’s consciousness growled at the thought of not being able to exact revenge on those who had so ruined the beast in life.

While Yharaskrik thought of times to come and how to shape the wider path, and Crenshinibon considered the remaining five and whether any repairs were called for, the dragon only pressed, incessantly, for an immediate assault on Spirit Soaring.

They were not one, but three, and to Yharaskrik, the walls separating the triumvirate that was the Ghost King seemed as impenetrably thick and daunting as ever. And from that came the illithid’s inescapable conclusion that it must find a way to dominate, to force oneness under its own commanding will and intellect.

And it hoped it could hide that dangerous ambition from its too-intimate fellows.

CHAPTER 19

PRIESTS OF NOTHING

We are nothing! There is nothing!” the priest screamed, storming about the audience hall in Spirit Soaring, accentuating every word with an angry stomp of his foot. His point was furthered by the blood matting his hair and caked about the side of his face and shoulder, a wound that looked worse than it was. Of the five who had been with him out and about the Snowflakes, he had been the most fortunate by far, for the only other survivor had lost a leg and the other seemed doomed to amputation—and only if the poor woman even survived.

“Sit down, Menlidus, you old fool!” one of his peers yelled. “Do you think this tirade helpful?”

Cadderly hoped Menlidus, a fellow priest of Deneir, would take that advice, but he doubted it, and since the man was more than a decade his senior—and looked at least three decades older than Cadderly—he hoped he wouldn’t have to intervene to forcibly silence the angry man. Besides, Cadderly understood the frustration behind the priest’s rant, and didn’t wholly dismiss his despairing conclusions. Cadderly, too, had gone to Deneir and feared that his god had been lost to him forever, as if Deneir had somehow simply written himself into the numerical maze that was the Metatext.

“I am the fool?” Menlidus said, stopping his shouting and pacing, and tapping a finger to his chest as he painted a wry smile on his face. “I have called pillars of flame down upon those who are foes of our god. Or have you forgotten, Donrey?”

“Most surely, I have not,” Donrey replied. “Nor have I forgotten the Time of Troubles, or any of the many desperate situations we have faced before, and have endured.”

Cadderly appreciated those words, as apparently, he saw in looking around at the large gathering, did everyone else in the room.

Menlidus, though, began to laugh. “Not like this,” he said.

“We cannot make that judgment until we know what this silence is truly all about.”

“It is about the folly of our lives, friend,” the defeated Menlidus said quietly. “All of us, and do look at us! Artists! Painters! Poets! Man and woman, dwarf and elf, who seek deeper meaning in art and in faith. Artists, I say, who evoke emotion and profundity with our paintings and our scribblings, who cleverly place words for the effect dramatic.” His snicker cut deep. “Or are we illusionists, I wonder?”

“You do not believe that,” said Donrey.

“Who believe our own illusions,” Menlidus qualified. “Because we have to. Because the alternative, the idea that there is nothing more, that it is all a creation of imagination to maintain sanity, is too awful to contemplate, is it not? Because the truth that these gods we worship are not immortal beings, but tricksters promising us eternity to extract from us fealty, is ultimately jarring and inspiring despair, is it not?”

“I think we have heard enough, brother,” said a woman, a renowned mage who also was possessed of significant clerical prowess.

“Have we?”

“Yes,” she said, and there was no mistaking the edge to her voice, not quite threatening but certainly leading in that direction. “We are priests, one and all,” Menlidus said.

“Not so,” several wizards pointed out, and again the bloody priest gave a little laugh.

“Yes, so,” Menlidus argued. “What we call divine, you call arcane—our altars are not so different!”

Cadderly couldn’t help but wince at that, for the notion that all magic emanated from one source brought him back to his younger days in the Edificant Library. Then he had been an agnostic priest, and he too had wondered if the arcane and the divine were no more than different labels for the same energy.