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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 892493" data-attributes="member: 143">Oh, it gets worse!  Muwhahahahaha!* * * * * Book VIII, Part 32Cal stirred.  The first thing he was aware of was pain, but it was a subdued, familiar pain, like an old companion.  The pain was brother to a deep feeling of emptiness, a hollow pit that seemed to fill him deep inside the core of his being. He tried to get up, but found that he could not.  It was as if a heavy weight lay upon him, although he could feel nothing more than an thick blanket that felt scratchy against his skin.  He looked around, but couldn’t see much; he was in a small chamber, with a single exit blocked by a hanging curtain.  The furnishings were spartan, just the hard bed on which he lay, a side table, and a chair shoved into a corner.  The walls were old stone, cracked and worn.  “Where am I?” he asked, but there was no one to hear him.  His own voice felt strange, tenuous and scratchy.  Again he tried to get up, with no more luck than his first effort.  He wasn’t wearing his rings or other arcane items, and when he tried to recall the words of a spell, his head only spun and the room grew out of focus.  A noise drew his attention to the side of the room just before the curtain flapped back and a man entered the room.  He was a human, once tall but now bent, maybe sixty years or so old, with little more than a fringe of white hair and a face that was a maze of hills and valleys.  He was carrying a flask and a wooden bowl, and his brows tightened when he saw that Cal was conscious.  “So, yer awake.  Might’a been better if yer’d stayed out... I’m afraid the corruption’s spread, and yer goin’ have to lose them legs, I think.  Maybe yer life, but I’m thinkin’ I can save that, mayhaps.”“Get... a cleric...” Cal managed to groan.  The man looked at him incredulously.  “A cleric?  For you?”  He laughed, but it was a cold, bitter sound, with no mirth in it.Cal closed his eyes and tried to call upon his own inherent magic, the healing song of the bard, but that discordant jumble in his mind was the only response.  “Where am I?” he asked. “Ah, so yer forgettin’, is that the way of it?  Can’t say I’m surprised, what with the fever you’ve had since they brought you in here.  Dumped you, more like.  I don’t know why I’ve bothered to help you, once I learned who—and what—you are.”“I... I don’t understand...”The old man leaned over, close enough so that Cal could smell the stale onions on his breath.  “I should turn you in.  The Lords’ Alliance has increased the bounty to ten thousand crowns, I hear.  Not that it matters.  Not that anything matters anymore...”  He drew back, a wasted and broken expression on his face.  “What did I do?” The man fixed him with a hard look.  “The fever’s truly taken your mind, then?  Well, that rich, truly.  The gods love their ironies, they do...”“My friends... there’s one, a cleric, she can help me...”“Weren’t you listening?  NO CLERIC CAN HELP YOU!  You and your friends, you’re all forsaken!  What you did... you don’t even know, do you!”  The man paced violently through the small room, shaking with the emotion that had stirred in him.  “I should drag you outside, and show you!  You can still see the smoke rising from the pyre that was Elturel, if the day’s clear enough.  Not that we get many clear days left...  Or maybe we could go visit the other ruins; Iriaebor, Berdusk, Scornubel?  How about the hell-pit that is Baldur’s Gate?  The scorched wasteland that was once the Greenfields?  The ribbon of black ooze that was once the blue Chionthar!”  He was now screaming, spittle blasting from his lips as he hurled each statement like an accusation at the helpless gnome.  “I’m sorry,” Cal said.  “I don’t remember.”“You brought them,” the old man said, his voice now calm and cold as ice.  “You opened the door, let them into Faerûn.  You and your friends.”“Who?” Cal said, though his heart had suddenly gone cold and his breath caught in his throat with the word. The old man leaned over him again, his lips tight over his uneven teeth.  “The demons.  You brought the demons.”Cal shook his head.  “No.  We waited, we did as the Oracle commanded, we waited until the Portal closed...”“I wasn’t there,” he said, “but I knew some who were, at the conclave called at Harper Hall shortly after your return.  From what I understand, it started soon after you returned, with your friend.  He was the one that carried the link, that burst the barriers that separate our realm from the Abyss... But by the time the High Ones realized it, and destroyed him, it was too late...”“Delem?  They killed Delem?  I... but we had to bring him back, to free him...”  Cal’s head spun, and he felt the world swimming out of focus around him again.  “You freed him.  And condemned the West to death and destruction.  By the time we realized what was happening, thousands of demons had already come through the first portal, and others were opening throughout the region.  Demons, and other beings—uncontrollable elementals, half-fiends, undead...  They poured into our land, and although the Lords rallied the defenders of Faerûn to stop them, they could only slow the devastation, could not undo it.”“But... the gods...”“I don’t know how or why it happened.  But when you sundered the link between the Planes, you disrupted the contact between Faerûn and the Outer Realms.  Oh, it wasn’t as bad as the Time of Troubles, but it was bad still.  Wizards, too—they say that the presence of so many demons at once in our reality tore the Weave, threatened to unravel it altogether.  If it hadn’t been for the intervention of the Chosen, it might have been Armageddon.  As it is, it will take centuries for the West to recover, if it ever does.  Tens of thousands... hundreds of thousands, perhaps, have been killed.  Cities ruined.  Demons still lurk by the hundreds in the dark places, scattered across the land.  The Portals have been closed, but the cost... oh, the cost...”Cal started at him, his eyes wide in horror.  The man seemed to have forgotten him, lost in his despair, sobs wracking his lean frame.  He was holding something, a wooden symbol dangling from a thin chain around his neck.  As the man shifted, Cal caught sight of it—a familiar sigil, carved in the shape of two hands bound by cords.  “Ilmater,” he breathed.  The word broke through the man’s grief, and he looked up again at Cal.  “Yes.  The Suffering One has been given no shortage of grief.  My oaths bind me to care for you... they are all that I have left.  But my magic cannot touch you, the gods have abandoned the ones who unleashed this hell upon their people.  I will care for you... I will save your life, but it will cost you your legs.”  He rose, and turned to leave, pausing the glance at the flask that he’d laid on the table near the bed, close enough for Cal to reach it.  “I would drink that, if I were you.  It will make you sleep throughout.  I will return shortly, and we will begin.”“No, please... there’s got to be another way!  Don’t go!”  But the man had already departed, the curtain swaying shut behind him.  “Wait!  Don’t take my legs!  Please!  I’m sorry!  I’m sorry.... we didn’t want to... please...”Blackness.</blockquote>

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