Just a wall, not thickening, not thinning, impenetrable and impassable.

Yharaskrik couldn’t win. It couldn’t hold. The Ghost King became a creature of two, not three, and those two became one, as Yharaskrik departed.

The disembodied intellect of the great mind flayer began to dissipate almost immediately, oblivion looming.

All the wizened and experienced minds remaining at Spirit Soaring gathered in lectures and seminars, sharing their observations and intuition about the crash of worlds and the advent of the dark place, a reformed Plane of Shadow they came to call the Shadowfell. All reservations were cast aside, priest and mage, human, dwarf, and drow.

They were all together, plotting and planning, seeking an answer. They were quick to agree that the fleshy beasts crawling over Spirit Soaring were likely of another plane, and no one argued the basic premise of some other world colliding, or at least interacting in dangerous ways, with their own world. But so many other questions remained.

“And the walking dead?” Danica asked.

“Crenshinibon’s addition to the tumult,” Jarlaxle explained with surprising confidence. “The Crystal Shard is an artifact of necromancy more than anything else.”

“You claimed it destroyed—Cadderly’s divination showed us the way to destroy it, and we met those conditions. How then …?”

“The collision of worlds?” Jarlaxle asked more than stated. “The fall of the Weave? The simple chaos of the times? I do not believe that it has returned to us as it was—that former incarnation of Crenshinibon was indeed destroyed. But in its destruction, it is possible that the liches who created it have come free of it. I believe that I battled one, and that you encountered one as well.”

“You make many presumptions,” Danica remarked.

“A line of reasoning to begin our investigation. Nothing more.”

“And you think these things, these liches, are the leaders?” asked Cadderly.

Before Jarlaxle could answer, Danica cut him short. “The leader is the dracolich.”

“Joined with the remnants of Crenshinibon, and thus with the liches,” said Jarlaxle.

“Well, whatever it is, something bad’s going on, something badder than anything I e’er seen in me long years o’ living,” said Bruenor, and he looked toward the doorway to Catti-brie’s room as he spoke. An uncomfortable silence ensued, and Bruenor harrumphed a great and profound frustration and took his leave to be with his wounded daughter.

To the surprise of all, especially Cadderly, the priest found himself beside Jarlaxle as the conversation resumed. The drow had surprising insights on the dual-world hypothesis. He had experience with the shadowy form they both understood to be one of the liches that had created Crenshinibon in that long-lost age. These ideas seemed to Cadderly the most informative of all.

Not Drizzt, nor Bruenor, not even Danica fathomed as clearly as Jarlaxle the trap into which Catti-brie had fallen, or the dire, likely irreparable implications of a new world imprinting on the old, or of a shattering of the wall between light and shadow. Not the other mages nor the priests quite grasped the permanence of the change that had found them all, of the loss of magic and of some, if not all the gods. But Jarlaxle understood.

Deneir was gone, Cadderly had come to accept, and the god was not coming back, at least not in the form Cadderly had come to know. The Weave, the source of Toril’s magic, could not be rewound. It appeared as though Mystra herself—all of her domain—was simply there one moment, gone the next.

“Some magic will continue,” Jarlaxle said as the discussion neared its end. It had become little more than a rehash of belabored points. “Your exploits prove that.”

“Or they are the last gasps of magic dying,” Cadderly replied. Jarlaxle shrugged and reluctantly nodded at the possibility of that theory.

“Is this world that is joining with ours a place of magic and gods?” Danica asked. “The beasts we have seen—”

“Have nothing to do with the new world, I think, which may be imbued, as is our own, with both magic and brute force,” Jarlaxle interrupted without reservation. “The crawlers come from the Shadowfell.” Cadderly nodded agreement with the drow.

“Then, is their magic dying?” Drizzt asked. “Has this collision you speak of destroyed their Weave, as well?”

“Or will the two intertwine in new ways, perhaps with this Plane of Shadow, this Shadowfell, between them?” Jarlaxle said.

“We cannot know,” said Cadderly. “Not yet.”

“What next?” asked Drizzt, and his voice took on an unusual timbre, one of distinct desperation—desperation wrought by his fears for Catti-brie, the others knew.

“We know what tools we have,” Cadderly said, and he stood up and crossed his arms over his chest. “We will match strength with strength, and hope that some magic, at least, will find its way to our many spellcasters.”

“You have shown as much already,” said Jarlaxle.

“In a manner I cannot predict, much less control or summon.”

“I have faith in you,” Jarlaxle replied, and that statement gave all four of them pause, for it seemed so impossible that Jarlaxle would be saying that of Cadderly—or anyone!

“Should Cadderly extend similar confidence?” Danica said to the drow.

Jarlaxle burst into laughter, helpless and absurd laughter, and Cadderly joined him, and Danica joined them, too.

But Drizzt could not, his gaze sliding to the side of the room, to the door behind which Catti-brie sat in unending darkness.

Lost to him.

Desperation gripped the normally serene Yharaskrik as the reality of its situation closed in around it. Memories flew away and equations became muddled. It had known physical oblivion before, when Hephaestus had released his great fiery breath upon Crenshinibon, blasting the artifact. Only through an amazing bit of good fortune—the falling Weave touching the residual power of the artifact with the remnants of Yharaskrik nearby—had the illithid come to consciousness again.

But oblivion loomed once again, and with no hope of reprieve. The disembodied intellect flailed without focus for just a few precious moments before the desperate mind flayer reached out toward the nearest vessel.

But Ivan Bouldershoulder was ready, and the dwarf put up such a wall of denial and rage that Yharaskrik couldn’t begin to make headway into his consciousness. So shut out was the illithid that Yharaskrik had no understanding of where it was, or that it was surrounded by lesser beings that might indeed prove susceptible to possession.

Yharaskrik didn’t even fight back against that refusal, for it knew that possession would not solve its problem. It could not inhabit an unwilling host forever, and should it insert all of its consciousness into the physical form of a lesser being, should it fully possess a dwarf, a human, or even an elf, it would become limited by that being’s physiology.

There was no real escape. But even as it rebounded away from Ivan Bouldershoulder, the mind flayer had another thought, and cast a wide net, its consciousness reaching out across the leagues of Faerûn. It needed another awakened intellect, another psionicist, a fellow thinker.

It knew of one. It reached for one as its homeless intellect began to flounder.

In a lavish chamber beneath the port city of Luskan, many miles to the northwest, Kimmuriel Oblodra, lieutenant of Bregan D’aerthe, second-in-command behind only Jarlaxle Baenre, felt a sensation, a calling.

A desperate plea.