He set the relic down, facing the half-lidded eye upward. The voices of the chanting aboleths circling overhead broke for the briefest of moments before resuming. Luckily, none swooped down to pierce the darkness and relieve him of their progenitor's prodigal eye. The creatures had felt the relic's sudden proximity, even if they couldn't yet see it. In some ways, the small orb at his feet was more vital than the entire bulk of the Eldest stretched overhead.

He took hold of the silver compact. Its touch dried his mouth with anticipation. Trying not to think about its contents, he popped it open and administered a dose of traveler's dust to one eye. It occurred to him this would be the first test of his new pact. How well would it protect him from the symptoms of his addiction when tested?

He blinked at the irritation. Too late now.

Before the red haze completely overtook his perception, he unstoppered the vial of crushed dragon scales and poured them over the stone orb. Its harsh odor burned his nostrils.

Even as the oceanic surge of the dust washed over Japheth, he unrolled the scroll, twin to the one he'd used last time, and laid it out on the cold floor. It tried to curl back into a cylinder, so he used the Dreamheart to weigh down the top and the toes of his boots the bottom. Its tip was broken off, but it was still serviceable. He picked up the jade rod blessed in a temple of Kelemvor. He bent forward, so he could both read the text and touch the end of the rod to the Dreamheart's mottled side.

The eye in the relic blinked. The sphere rotated until it aimed its gaze at him.

He shuddered, but spoke the words of the ritual, doing his best to ignore the distracting, blissful detachment the dust leaked into his blood. He judged the dust's ability to pierce veils was necessary, just in case his new spell that granted him the ability to see things unseen failed. He just had to make certain he wasn't borne away in the initial rush it produced.

Blasts, shouts, and explosions resounded through the chamber. He thought he heard a yell of victory, followed by a woman's shriek of pain. Not Anusha's, though, Japheth didn't stop chanting his ritual. He couldn't afford losing even another moment. There was no time to help his friends. Better not to even look.

His only silver lining was that the passivity the traveler's dust lent made it easier for him to ignore everything but the words on the curled page at his feet.

*****

Raidon attempted to trace a great ring on the floor, one underlying the circle of aboleths flying above him. The Sign showed him the designs he must carve, one sigil at a time, with blasts of cerulean fire supplied by Angul.

The ring was an integral ingredient required to wreck the aboleth's waking ritual so violently that the Eldest would not only fail to rouse, but be snuffed out while it was at its most vulnerable.

In order to complete his counterritual circle, Raidon killed aboleths. All of which were simultaneously trying to kill him.

Every few moments, five or six tried to seize Raidon's mind with formless psychic clamps. Angul and the Sign shattered each domination attempt without the monk being aware of them.

It required a larger fraction of his attention to dodge the constant barrage of slime, lightning, and whoknew what else. He spun beyond the periphery of an exploding sphere of green energy, flipped over a bolt of another as he skewered an aboleth, and ducked a tentacle slap. All was wild motion as he whittled away at the press of nonstop attacks.

When a lucky tentacle or body slam hit him, or a ravening bolt of energy, he staggered and sometimes even fell down. But Angul's balm instantly turned flaring pain into so much fading warmth, and his own trained reflexes righted him after each fall. Those lucky hits required only a minuscule portion of his awareness, but he had to reset his position each time he was pushed or knocked over. It was important he not lose his place on the floor.

Were he facing nearly any other enemy in such a multitude, Raidon would have long since been pulled under.

Neither Angul nor the Sign promised unending vitality. However, these creatures were the nemesis of the Keepers and their implements. Both sword and seal sapped some portion of their permanent strength to feed the monk what he required to keep standing amid the storm of death that struggled to pull him under. But the energy Angul and the Sign used to heal him was dwarfed by the power he channeled in a brief burst toward the floor every time he stepped forward.

Raidon wondered if all three of them—sword, seal, and himself—would be drained to their final end as they finished. If providence were kind, it would be so.

A muscled, boneless arm smashed Raidon in the face, bursting some sort of cyst encrusting its end. The smelly, fatty material that sprayed across Raidon burned like acid. Even before he could grit his teeth to endure the pain, Angul purged the damaged tissue and grew new skin cross his face, neck, and left shoulder. Raidon bit his lip against the agony of the healing wave.

The Blade Cerulean's repair was nearly as painful as the attack that caused the damage.

My reserves falter, the blade warned.

Raidon grunted and moved another step.

He swept the sword through an advancing aboleth, then pointed Angul down to scribe another quick sigil in cerulean fire on the floor.

He weaved beneath a blast of green energy, whirled, and leaned forward to thrust Angul up through the mouth of an encroaching aboleth. This put his left leg in position to snap a devastating back kick at another foe. He advanced another step into the momentary clearing he'd created, and dashed off the next symbol with Angul.

If not for the press of lashing aboleths, Raidon's curving path across the floor would have been far more apparent. He realized he'd completed more than half the circuit mirroring the route of the chanting aboleths swimming through the air overhead, counter-current to their direction. Ironic, the monk reflected, that the mass of squalid bodies trying to smother him obscured what he was doing.

A tentacle grabbed his leg and pulled him facedown onto the stone. He felt bones in his face break. The Blade Cerulean roughly set the bones an instant later. But not completely.

Angul's healing surges were no longer completely erasing his wounds. The pain of each wound was eased, true, but blood ran down one of his arms, and now from his nose as well. Each alone wasn't enough to slow him, but the incomplete recoveries were adding up. It would be a close thing, whether he could finish his circle of binding before the swarm finished him.

It didn't matter. He would finish the circle, or he would fail.

If he failed, the Eldest would fully wake.

If he succeeded, then the aboleth's ritual would fail instead. One or the other. The fate of Faerun depended on what happened. Not that he cared. Even as he fought forward another step to draw the next sigil in the sequence, he wondered at his persistence. Faerun hadn't been particularly kind to Raidon over the last dozen years. Or, now that he thought about it, for most of his life. Yet there he was, striving for all he was worth, to save the world.

Perhaps some shred of honor yet motivated him, finding one last opportunity to shine amid the fused jumble of his personality.

Or perhaps it was merely Angul.

Raidon noticed that the number of attacks he had defended against over the last span of heartbeats had dropped off. He spared a moment to glance up from his last scribed glyph.

He was astounded to see that, indeed, only about a dozen aboleths—at least of the original number that had sleeted down the walls of the throne chamber—remained to contest him. And half of those were receiving attacks on their flanks, even as they tried to squirm toward Raidon. Some unseen force was alternately carving into and dazzling these outlier aboleths, even as wizard fire rained down upon the creatures from afar.