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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 912775" data-attributes="member: 143">Well, we're nearing the end now, so it's time for a revelation--and since it's Friday, a cliffhanger to boot.  Monday's post will be the conclusion of the story, with an epilogue coming later in the week to wrap up some loose ends, and then that's it, as Travels comes to an end. * * * * * Book VIII, Part 36Delem saw the Prince approach the woman that he loved, but his head was echoing with a memory, triggered by the words of Graz’zt.  The Prince’s words were eerily similar to the words of a prophecy that he’d heard years ago, on the docks of the city of Baldur’s Gate, worlds and planes away.  The strange seeress had promised that one of them would “produce a scion that will prove the bane of nations...”  The part of his mind that could still think whispered that the witch’s words had been for the four of them, the four original companions that had met on that lonely road in the West at the very beginning.  Dana hadn’t even been with them, at the time.  But that wasn’t what filled his thoughts.  Rather, the words he heard echoing inside his skull were different ones within that same passage, words he’d often dreaded...One will be forever destroyed, his soul consumed in the fireAs he’d come into his power over the course of their journeys, he’d feared those words, feared the fire that sprang from within.  His birthright, born of the Firelord’s touch upon him.  But Kossuth had abandoned him...No. Realization flooded through him with a force that nearly unbalanced him.  No.  Graz’zt had torn everything from him, had filled his head with lies and illusions and even the pure force of his dark power, purging him of nearly everything that had made him human.  He’d driven him to bond with a demonic skin, dangling the promise of escape before him, but in reality only cementing the link that held him captive.  Now, suddenly, he knew that he’d been wrong, that his despair had been rooted in a false hope.  He reached down inside himself, to a place where he’d never gone, a different place from the fire that fueled his magic.  To get there, he opened himself to a bond that he’d forgotten, a link to a power that he’d believed had deserted him, but in fact it had been him that had turned away from its light, deceived and betrayed by the evil lies of his captor.  Graz’zt stood over Dana, drinking in her fear with amusement in his dark eyes.  Thus occupied, he did not detect the change to come over Delem at first.  His hands dropped slowly to his belt...A white flash of pure light erupted from Delem’s hands, spreading outward in a blaze of fire.  The flames, as bright as the fires of Toril’s sun, tore into the glabrezu, burning through their innate resistances in a flash, incinerating the pincers that held him, immolating both demons as they collapsed backward, screaming as their corrupt flesh melted before the heat of the flames.  As the demons fell, Delem stood there, teetering, wreathed in a halo of white fire that filled the room with an almost painful intensity of light.  His face was a mask of anger as he looked down at the pit below. Graz’zt stared up at him, but the look on his face was not anger, nor fear.  Rather, the Prince’s expression was one of triumph... and naked avarice. “I knew you could do it,” he said, each syllable fat with gloating.  “I knew it was within you, Delem... my Delem...”“Release them,” Delem said, his voice like the edge of a knife.  His body crackled with the intensity of the flames that surrounded him, but he did not burn.  Within the flames, his body was still clearly battered, but within his eyes burned an intensity that sustained him beyond the physical needs of his corporeal form. The Demon walked almost casually toward the edge of the pit, lifting himself up out of it with another casual gesture.  He did not take his eyes off of Delem.  “To be honest, my little sorcerer, I was almost at a loss for a time.  You had resisted everything I did to you... Oh, your allegiance was won fairly swiftly, as such things go, but you had a remarkable resistance to unleashing your inner secrets...  The fire that burned deep within you... the thing that I saw in you right away, the moment that you first came to my attention, that night in that dirty roadside tavern in that flyspeck village...”Delem betrayed his surprise even within the nimbus of fire, and for a moment the white flames flickered.  Graz’zt pressed his advantage, laughing.  “Ah, did you think it was all an accident, then?  Perhaps in a larger sense it was, in that I did not expect to find you where I did.  That little statue that your ‘friend’ there lugged around all those years was a conduit in more ways than one, just one of the many eyes that I have, in a thousand different worlds...”“You cannot understand, for all that you’ve learned, Delem.  You are still bound to your material existence, to the limits of your own mortal perceptions.  I have seen the shores of nigh-countless realities, spanning the width and breadth of the Planes.  I have visited Primes as different from Faerûn as your Forgotten Realms are different from my Azzagrat.  My name is reverenced—and feared—in places you have never even dreamed of: Mahragzar, Pak-rothas, Assyria, Greyhawk, Obros’saar, Wyre...”“I am done with your lies,” Delem said.“No,” the Prince said, his eyes narrowing.  “No, you shall never be done with me, my Delem.  This discovery changes nothing, as you will see.  I will have the power you possess... the power that brought you to me, the one gift of Faerûn that I have sought for so long, a gift unique to that place, a gift that I have not found anywhere else, for all of my searching.” “Spellfire.”Delem screamed and lifted his hand in a sudden gesture, unleashing a stream of liquid flame that slashed through the air and tore into the Demon.  Graz’zt was ready, however, and his own palm came up to meet the assault.  The white flames struck black flesh in an ugly swirl of colors that briefly flared in the space between them, and then the flames were deflected to the side.  Where they struck the wall, the abyssal stone smoked and hissed and melted away, leaving a deep gouge in the rock when Delem halted their flow. Graz’zt shook out his smoking hand.  “Excellent.  More than I had imagined, even.”“Release them,” Delem repeated.  “No.  They are mine, as are you.”Delem launched another attack, but even as Graz’zt again moved to deflect the stream of energy, the sorcerer lifted his other hand and hurled a bolt of spellfire into the ceiling.  The blast sliced through stone as though it was parchment, and a huge slab fell down from the ceiling, toward the Demon Prince. But Graz’zt wasn’t there when it hit.  In that instant he’d... changed space and time, and when the smoke and dust cleared, the Prince was standing atop the edge of the dais, facing Delem.  An ugly black slash of raw fire-scorched flesh ran across the Demon Prince’s shoulder, his tunic burned away where the spellfire had briefly penetrated his defenses.  But in turn, the sorcerer had staggered as his latest assault faded, and nearly fell to his knees, the flames now just a faint halo around him. “I see that there is some of that other fire left in you as well,” Graz’zt said.  “But as for the spellfire... it exacts a high price.  I am not such a fool as to be ignorant of what the power that I seek can do.  Even for all your rage, and the righteous hatred that burns within you, you cannot defeat me.  You could even burn yourself out, toying with powers that you don’t understand... but I will not let that happen, of course.” The Prince stepped forward, without fear.  Delem screamed, a pure, primal sound.  Lunging forward with arms outstretched, he unleashed a final torrent of spellfire, a stream that lasted only a heartbeat before burning out.  Graz’zt didn’t even bother to dodge this time, accepting the blast that splashed against his shield in another chaotic burst of roiling, confused color.  When it was done Delem cried out and sagged to his knees, barely able to keep from falling on his face against the cold stone.  The halo of fire that had surrounded him was gone. “It is not so bad, my Delem.  You will be the progenitor of a new race of demons, a race armed with a power that will bend first the Abyss, and then other worlds, to me.  You are more than a mere thrall, Delem.  Your place will be one of honor, and once more you will serve as an ambassador of my will.”Delem did not look up, his body heaving with the effort of breathing, propping himself up with both hands against the stone floor.  “Never,” he managed to say.Graz’zt now loomed over him, a mere three paces away, his power surrounding him in a tangible aura.  “It is over, Delem.  You are done.”</blockquote>

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