From: bshsiung@quip.eecs.umich.edu (Bernard Hsiung)
Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn
Subject: [MG] The passing of an Archmage Supreme
Date: 4 May 1993 20:40:17 GMT
Message-ID: <1s6kbh$dc9@zip.eecs.umich.edu>

     The number of stars in the sky is vast, beyond counting.  Thus, it
follows that most of them are unnamed and insignificant.  Then there
are many more which are unseen, invisible to the naked eye.  Beyond
these are stars that are undetectable even by the finest instruments.
Their presence goes unnoted and for the most part ignored, even by the
most knowledgeable of sages.  After all, their influence, if any, must
needs be small and easily overshadowed by the larger and more visible
stars and planets.

     Mar sat in Nescie's room, humming tunelessly to himself with
satisfaction.  Once he had started, to continue was simplicity itself.
One Forsaken would know his pantheon, and these would likely also to be
gone from the minds of men.  Then he could trace Them backwards and
forwards to find others overlapping, coexisting.  He knew They would
come, starved for worship, starved for acknowledgement.  Like moths to
the flame, come and burn.  Like sheep to the slaughter, come and die.

     One after another.  How many sun gods have there been, with their
chariots and barges and sundry conveyances?  How many love goddesses,
with their mirrors and beauty and fickleness?  How many war gods, with
sword and spear and armor?  How many tribal gods, with the essence of
their peoples?  How many highgods, lords over the gods themselves?

     Many.  Many.  Lost first in the sands of time, then lost forever
to Mar.

     His work proceeded.  Mar had to choose most carefully so that his
presence would remain diffuse and unclear.  But as his strength grew,
it would matter less and less, and he could raise new gods -- his gods
-- to replace them, to distract any who searched for him, and to war
with the known.

     Far above him in the distant sky, the lesser stars began to wink
out.

			    *       *       *

     Ex-Supreme Archmage Delalle was feeling slightly depressed about
the events of the past twelve hours.  He had tried his best to win over
Leonaco's and Dasham's support during the meeting, but to no avail;
Thorn had moved more quickly than he had anticipated.  There was no way
that Urcohea could become the next Supreme Archmage now -- the majority
of the others would never support him without a detailed investigation
into that mysterious clone of ...sage.

     Thorn would step into the power vacuum effortlessly; Leonaco and
Dasham were too involved in their own work to want to be Supreme
Archmage and it looked like Fauteuil and Nescie supported Thorn also.

     That thought made Delalle pause and reconsider.  Why in the name
of Blog had Nescie voted against him?  He decided to find him and ask.

     The status monitor indicated that Nescie was still in his private
labs, but he wasn't answering.  Oddly enough, the door was slightly
ajar and the wards half-disassembled, then partially reconstructed.
Curious, Delalle summoned his staff of power and pushed through.

     Inside the lab it was dimly lit and eerily quiet.  A pale bluish
light flickered erratically from one end of the room with a slight
crackling noise.  As Delalle drew closer, he saw that Nescie stood with
his back to him, leaning over a table.  On the workspace, there rested
a faceless humanoid made of some sort of jointed wickerwork.

     Delalle pushed his long white hair out of his eyes.  Trapped
within the sculpture he saw scores of soundlessly screaming swirling
mouths.  The light came from Nescie's hands as he molded the form; the
noise was the sound of the wicker being bent into shape.

     "What are you doing, Nescie?"  Nescie didn't even look up.
"Nescie?"

     Then he straightened and turned around.  There was something
subtly wrong about the way he moved and the way he held himself.

     Delalle activated the lab lighting.  Nescie's face was
expressionless, the dark lines shifting there making it a shattered
plaster mask.  But his eyes were what caught Delalle's attention --
the eyes were not Nescie's light brown.  They were a dull unreflecting
and unrelenting black, the color of emptiness and despair.

     His mouth opened, and SOMETHING pronounced three words.

     "SERVE OR DIE."

     Delalle interposed his staff as his primary wards snapped down,
sending a maximum alert to Security Central requesting priority
support.  It was plucked out of the aether and crushed.  Delalle
furrowed his brow and transhifted four planes skarnwise, but discovered
himself still in Nescie's lab.  He found that his Guildlink had been
severed, his end replaced by an perfect fascimile that appeared to
leave Nescie's quarters and return to his own.

     Delalle's analysis spells were working overtime.  The readings
were impossible:  from this distance they could barely tell that a power
like that of a god laid shrouded in hibernation on the table, but they
said that Nescie was just Nescie and nothing more.  There was only one
conclusion that made sense to Delalle.  "You are the Reaverschild?"

     "I AM MAR," the thing-in-Nescie proclaimed.  Delalle's gaze was
drawn to Nescie's shadow, rippling and flowing like a thing alive.

     He released a second flurry of message spells but these, too, were
intercepted before reaching their destinations.

     The gateway of Delalle's desire failed to manifest.  He prepared
his remaining personal defenses, recalling Dariel's warning about
naming.  "What kind of service do you want?" he asked, hoping to buy
himself some time.

     "YOU DO NOT SERVE," Mar answered.  Nescie's robes bulged as
something shifted within them.  A thousand thread-filaments as dark as
hatred lanced through his clothes, spraying against Delalle's wards
and wrapping around them with a noise like sizzling oil, halted inches
away.

     Delalle tried to expand his wards to give him more working space,
but they were held in place.  He invoked forces of destruction against
the threads, but they were not of matter.  He invoked forces of
dispersion, but they were not of energy.  Then he channelled a pure
wind of random creation upon them and the sizzling grew louder as they
figeted and were repelled.

     For a period of perhaps ten seconds, Delalle thought he might
live.

     Then the counterblow fell.  Nescie's shadow bent twice backwards
and shattered his staff, cutting through the wards as if they weren't
even there.  The tendrils that followed were a swarm of wasps, ripping
into his body.  And where they touched, they burned like barbs of acid,
fire, and ice.  Delalle was slammed to the floor with the awful
splintering sound of breaking bone.  He felt the strands assaulting his
secondary wards and watched through his status spell as, one by one,
the wards fell and the threads tore into his vital organs.

     It was unbelievably painful to change his position by even the
slightist amount.  Breathing became impossibly difficult, every breath
a gasp of torment.  Delalle heard a faint dripping, and felt his robe
growing damp, the floor slippery with his blood.  He coughed incessantly,
the sporadic movements causing uncontrollable new sensations of agony.

     Mar's filaments twisted, coiled, twisted again.  They raised him
up off the ground, and then Mar made him shuffle puppet-like around the
room in halting, fitful, painful steps, a mockery of a walking man.
The pace doubled, then doubled again, until he was nearly running.  The
pain was overwhelming.

     Delalle tried to breathe, but only blood came from his mouth,
dribbling down his chin and staining his beard.  He shuddered once more,
and died.

     Being dead felt rather peculiar to Delalle, but at least it no
longer hurt.  His soul should have been immediately whisked away to his
quarters for reconstitution but his prior preparations, like all his
other magical structures, had been split from him and unmade.  So he
just stood there, waiting.

     Then he saw her -- a pale, black-haired woman.  She looked at Mar
solemnly, silently, and stretched her hand out to Delalle.  He reached
for it.

     Mar paused in his motion and turned from Delalle's pulverized
corpse.  He stared directly at the two of them, and started to walk
towards them.  The tendrils retracted instantly into Nescie's robes,
Delalle's body crumpling to the ground with a muffled thud.  He
stepped over the corpse and the blood, and as his shadow slid over
them, they were utterly gone.

     Delalle felt himself moving slower and slower as Mar drew closer.
Moments before he could grasp the pale hand, he found Mar standing
between them, keeping them separate.  He said something harshly
incomprehensible to the black-haired woman.  She flinched, withdrew
her hand, and took a step back from Mar, then dissolved into
nothingless like smoke and tears.

     Delalle's last observation as Mar's shadow claimed him was the
haunted sadness in Death's eyes.

			    *       *       *

     Security Mage Rusken blinked at the monitor as one of his
indicators sputtered and winked out.  "Ariel and Hecate," he swore.
"Dieter, we just lost Delalle."

     "What?  Where?"

     "I don't know; he was in his room a second ago and just now his
signal stopped.  Let me run a trace," he said.

     Dieter checked his boards and answered, "Okay.  Delalle's rooms
show normal environment enclosure.  I'm sending Beta in with full prep
and calling Nijorik."

     Nijorik took one look and summoned Urcohea, who accessed the
complete time-location records, cursing mightily all the while.  They
checked with Nescie, who might have been the last to see him, but he
arrived, rubbing his eyes tiredly.  He said that he had been taking
a nap and hadn't answered his door.

     Overriding the privacy spells, the Beta response team gated
directly to Delalle's rooms, ready for anything, but found them empty,
with no indication that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

     It was almost as if he had never been.
--
Comments, compliments, and complaints can be conveyed to:
Bernie Hsiung (bshsiung@eecs.umich.edu)