Elminster in Hell

"Where is he?" she said, more urgently." What have you done with him?"

Dragons came, flying hard and fast, jaws agape in hunger. They were goaded by archdevils whose hosts mounted the skies in their thousands and tens of thousands, blotting out die bloody vault with their bodies.

Mystra glared at those who thrust their weapons into her. They blazed away in wisps of silver smoke. Magic snarled and spat at her. She twisted it and struck back through it. More devils died.

Died forever, seared away as though they'd never been, gone in their hundreds. Beneath the converging hosts. Avernus trembled as archdevils deeper in the Hells looked up in real alarm and gave orders. From the very rocks of Avernus, pit fiends erupted, leading armies of winged devils.

Hell was aroused. The sky split with lightning and the smoking mountains roared fire. In the heart of a million devils and more, Mystra glared and slew, glared and slew, until those flying three ranks back of the vanished were singed. They fell from the skies onto Avernus in a dark, wet rain of broken bodies, cloaking the peaks and choking the blood rivers.

Terrible trumpets sounded. Dark chariots ascended the skies. From their fanged maws poured hordes of winged monsters, horrible hydras seldom seen in Avernus.

Mystra slew and slew, a bright silver flame against a tightening sphere of black bloody death. The air itself began to shatter and fall away around her like smashed glass. Rifts opened around the embattled goddess. When she saw Faerun bright and fair through them, below and behind her, Mystra knew that she must go or lose Toril in her trying. The harrowing of Hell-and the snatching of Elminster-must wait for another day and another way.

Like her faithful Chosen before her, she bent her attention to closing rifts between Toril and Avernus. Unlike Elminster, she passed through the last, closing rent with a parting gift in her wake.

The blood-red sky of Avernus flashed silver and then blue-white. All over that tortured land, every flying devil fell, torn apart in an instant.

Black, smoking blood drenched and drowned the land. Mystra never knew that she almost drowned the man she'd come to save. An erinyes had swooped out of the slaughter moments earlier to embrace and shield a blindly crawling Elminster... and when she fell away from him, torn apart and dying, he was unscathed. He staggered to his feet to see the last silver glow fade.

"Mystra," he whispered. "Great Lady... all this, for me?"

Weeping, he fell back among the dead. The air for as far as the eye could see was filled with dark explosions. Countless pit fiends arrived from Nessus, full of the fury of Asmodeus to slay the lone intruder who no longer stood in the sky. Hell shook with dark rage from below. The flames rose high. The sky became blood-red for another eternity.

***

Azuth.

In the drifting darkness of a space that was not a plane, formed by the magics of all the enchantments of Candlekeep, the Lord of Spells glided like a bright serpent from one rune to another. They stood like sculptures in a void. He restored the fire of this one, and subtly reshaped that one, shifting its powers and meaning slightly to safeguard the fabric of Toril and to guide mages in slightly new directions, thus...

The voice in his blood, as he drifted as a thing of fire and risen magic, was so soft that it might have been an imagined thing.

High One, I have need of you. This time the mind-voice was dear and strong. Mystra, near at hand, sought him.

"Great Lady, I hear. How may I serve?"

The void suddenly blazed with silver fire. A blue-white glow rolled to the horizon like a wave seeking a far shore. Two eyes, as dark and star-shot as a warm summer night, regarded him from a spot within easy reach of his hand.

Azuth restrained his sudden desire to embrace the goddess and taste of her love; it was a feeling that washed over him at their every meeting, the call of her power to his.

"Great guide," she said softly, "our most mighty Chosen is fallen into Avernus, and Hell is risen against me. We must take him back. How?"

Startled, Azuth shaped himself into a tall, young mage with robes of shimmering white and eyes both large and dark. "You're sure-but of course." There was a flash as Mystra shared with him what had befallen her, her mind-touch with Elminster... and how feeble the mightiest of her Chosen had been. The Lord of Spells frowned.

"Well?"

Azuth winced. "Great Lady," he murmured, "with Hell roused, force is not the way. Stealth, too, is doomed for a time. If he survives, a small, swift rescue might succeed- but know, and forget not, that whomever we send, we shall be throwing away. Even those who escape Hell physically are often driven mad."

***

So your mystra has missed you and wants her little lapdog returned. Yet even goddesses find hell too warm in its welcome and flee empty-handed, she'll never have you now.

You're mine, little chained wizard.

Mine, while your sniveling ruin of a mind still Totters along, vainly trying to hide things from me. There's not much of you left to resist me, is there?

Let's see if we can uncover your memories of control over magic by seeing you teach novices, hmmm?

Glass burst into the room in a thousand sparkling shards. Sighing, Elminster put one hand over his teacup.

"Die, cursed mageling!" The mage in the window thrust her hands forward in claws, and lightning burst from her long fingers.

They snarled across the room amid the customary blinding flashes and spitting sparks, and struck something unseen a foot or so shy of the Old Mage's nose. He calmly watched them rebound and waved cheerily to the Red Wizardess as her own spell smashed into her and drove her-shrieking-back out of the room.

"Lhaeo," Elminster a

"I know," a sour voice floated in from the gardens outside. "My roses-why must they always land in my roses? Half an acre of lilies and wort to lie and smolder in, but oh, no, into my roses it is, enthusiastic plunge and all the thrashing..."

"It's thy turn for the casting," El reminded him sweetly. He stuck a thumb into his teacup to do some serious stirring.

"I don't have to do this, you know," Lhaeo muttered. "I could be earning a whole copper piece a month digging graves in Voonlar."

"Ye could be ruling a kingdom somewhere not so far away, lad," Elminster told the ceiling.

"Don't tempt me," Lhaeo grunted. "Glass everywhere, roses shredded and smoking, and several dozen young Sernbian ladies coming to tea! Couldn't you just slay me : now and get it over with?"

"And what would I be doing for fun tomoirow, eh? Ye princelings-always thinking only of thyselves, sparing not a thought for the welfare of feeble old wizards, worn out from saving the world for a few thousand years...."

"Oh, belt up! The only thing worse than a gushing gossip is a puffed-up wizard! You've already eaten half the sandwiches, and they're not even here yet!"

" Twas the least I could do, lad," Elminster replied in hurt tones, "after ye went to all that trouble, trimming off j the crusts."

Lhaeo's head rose into view through the glass-toothed window frame. "And that's another thing! Off you go to another of these 'other worlds,' and pick up another utterly crazed idea! Cutting my perfectly good egg-glazed crust off bread sliced so thin I can spit through it! What idiotic sort of folk do that? I-"

"Could spit through it, as a mere supposition, I hope," Elminster said reprovingly, one eyebrow lifting.