The Gates of Madness Read online

  Table of Contents

  NERATH, BEFORE THE FALL

  BAEL TURATH

  SIGIL

  PANDEMONIUM

  VOIDHARROW

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The origin story for the worlds-spanning

  Dungeons & Dragons® event

  NERATH,

  BEFORE THE FALL

  The Chained God spoke, and the Progenitor whispered its reply.

  “I will be free,” the Chained God said, “and all will perish.”

  “Perish,” the Progenitor whispered, an echo in the desolate infinity of the Chained God’s prison.

  The Chained God formed a hand of darkness and bone and stretched a finger toward the glowing liquid. Its light turned the darkness of his substance to blood.

  “They will drown in blood,” he said.

  “Blood,” whispered the Progenitor.

  His finger touched the liquid surface and it sprang to life at his touch, coiling around the bone and joining with his shadow, hungry for his substance.

  Once again the Chained God saw what it was and what it had been. He saw the world crumbling as it consumed everything, leaving behind only the void that was his prison.

  “So it shall be,” he said, his voice the only sound in the whole of the void.

  “All will perish,” the Progenitor whispered.

  “The Fire Lord will consume the world!”

  Nowhere watched a blast of flames roar from one of the cultist’s outstretched hands and wash over his companions. Brendis raised his shield to block the brunt of the flames, and Nowhere saw a hint of the divine glow that indicated the paladin’s magic at work, protecting himself and the eladrin wizard behind him from the searing heat. He allowed a hint of a smile to touch his lips as the echo of the blast faded in the strange vault beneath the capital. Brendis and Sherinna could take care of themselves—that was why he liked working with them. They didn’t need him, and he didn’t need them, except occasionally to distract their opponents long enough for him to get close. Like now.

  “The might of the gods stands against you and your Fire Lord,” Brendis said, raising his sword and striding toward the red-robed cultists.

  Nowhere slid the wavy-bladed dagger from his belt in perfect silence and assessed the three cultists. The nearest one, shrinking back from Brendis’s approach, was a portly man whose bald head bore tattoos in patterns of flame. The one who had shouted his defiance and blasted fire at Brendis and Sherinna was a small man with squinting eyes and a thin beard, clutching a staff and muttering invocations to the Fire Lord. The third cultist was a hulking brute with a huge iron sword that trailed fire as he swung it at the paladin.

  With all three cultists glaring at Brendis, Nowhere stepped silently behind the portly one. Nowhere and his companions had been working to root out this cult of fire-worshipers for weeks, and he had more than one painful injury to repay, not even to speak of the buildings the cultists had burned to the ground, the wares and treasures consumed in flame. He lined up his attack in an instant and drove his dagger into his target’s spine. A gurgling scream rose in the man’s throat, cut short as Nowhere pulled the blade back and drew it quickly across the cultist’s neck.

  The muttering cultist turned in surprise, and his squinting eyes widened as he saw Nowhere’s horns and the bony ridge of his jaw.

  “A tiefling?” the cultist said. “Heir of fallen Bael Turath, why not cast your lot with us? What love can you bear this world?”

  Nowhere shrugged. “I don’t see any profit in your line of thinking. There’s a great deal to like in this world.”

  “Our reward lies not in this world, but in what remains when it is gone.” The cultist punctuated his words by thrusting his hand toward Nowhere, palm first. Another blast of flame sprang toward the spot where Nowhere had been standing, but the tiefling was already in motion, rolling away from the fire and coming to his feet right beside the startled cultist.

  “You expect a reward from the primordial monster that burns the world to ash?” Nowhere stabbed with his blade, cutting a gash in the cultist’s arm as the man tried to twist away. “I don’t think the primordials work that way.”

  “You think the gods are any better?” The cultist had produced a dagger of his own, but he held it clumsily and seemed more interested in opening the distance between them than landing a solid blow.

  “I never said that,” Nowhere said, and his blade found a home in the cultist’s neck.

  “Nowhere!”

  The tiefling spun at the paladin’s shout, then dropped into a crouch below the third cultist’s sword, which came swirling over him in a tempest of fire. The heat of the flames trailing from the iron sword still seared his skin, and he threw himself backward to find a safe distance.

  The cultist’s hood had fallen back from his face to reveal the monstrous visage of a hobgoblin, marked with scars in the fashion of the warlords of the Dragondown Coast, far to the east. Nowhere frowned. Brendis had been sure that this fire cult was a local problem, nothing more than a few malcontents stirring up trouble in the underbelly of the capital. But if it was drawing members or other support from the eastern warlords, it might be far more.

  A bolt of crackling lightning shot from Sherinna’s slender fingers to engulf the hobgoblin, searing his skin and sending a wave of convulsions through his body. Brendis took the opportunity of the hobgoblin’s momentary paralysis to step forward and swing his sword cleanly through the hobgoblin’s neck.

  Sherinna rubbed her hands together, as though the lightning joining her fingers to the dead hobgoblin could have carried the cultist’s corruption to her. “Are any of them still alive?” she asked, nodding toward the ones Nowhere had dispatched.

  “No,” the tiefling said, frowning. “I thought we’d question the big one.”

  Brendis scowled. “Sorry,” he said. “I figured the one with the staff was the leader.”

  “Well, one of you should search them,” Sherinna said, her lips curled in disgust. “See if there’s anything that might identify other cult members.”

  “Nowhere?” Brendis said.

  “With pleasure.”

  A buzzing fly brought Albric close to consciousness for a moment. He waved a hand uselessly near his head and sank back into dreaming.

  He dreamed he was covered in flies, swarming around him, drinking at his eyes and mouth, laying their eggs in his ears and his open wounds. Then he was the flies, his consciousness fractured into thousands of tiny minds, all sharing a single purpose—to feast on flesh. Then he was a man once more, and the world was a fleshy body beneath him, and he joined with the swarm of all living things to consume the world.

  As they ate and ate, gorging themselves on the flesh of the world, what was left in its place was fire and chaos, a swirling maelstrom of annihilation. He slipped from the carcass of the world and fell into the maelstrom. He looked down its yawning gullet, and there he saw the Eye.

  It was a roiling mass of shadow, with numberless dark tendrils writhing out from it, reaching toward him as he fell. It bore no pupil, no colored ring of iris, nothing that made it resemble the eye of any living thing, but it saw—Albric was seen, and he was empty before it.

  Its tentacles coiled around him and slowed his fall, and they whispered their secrets to him. He strained to hear and understand, but most of what they said was beyond understanding.

  Another fly buzzed in his ear and Albric sat up, looking wildly around him.

  “Bael Turath,” he said, panting. “The Living Gate.”

  “What is this symbol?” Brendis said, putting the letter into Sherinna’s outstretched hand.

  The eladrin wizard studied the parchment, focusing her attention on the fiery eye traced at the bott
om of the page. “The Elder Elemental Eye,” she said. Fear tinged her voice, and Nowhere saw Brendis react to the name.

  “Should I know what that means?” the tiefling asked.

  “It means our problem isn’t confined to this little cult of fire lovers,” Brendis said.

  Nowhere pointed at the corpse of the hobgoblin who had carried the letter. “I thought he made that pretty clear. If they were drawing members from the Dragondown Coast, it’s obviously not a local problem. But what is the Elemental Eye?”

  Sherinna’s eyes were unfocused—an expression she adopted when deep in thought. It always gave Nowhere the impression that she was staring into a space between worlds, somehow, or perhaps peering into her home in the Feywild. When she didn’t answer, Brendis shrugged.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” the paladin said. “It’s some kind of primordial force. I think some of the more malign primordials are said to work with it or maybe even for it—including Imix, the Fire Lord these scum were so excited about.” Brendis’s eyes strayed to the idol the cultists had erected here in their makeshift temple, a vaguely humanoid shape roughly formed from clay. Nowhere guessed that the crude protrusions along the figure’s shoulders and the top of its head were supposed to indicate that the figure was burning, or perhaps made of fire.

  What the cultists lacked in artistic skill, Nowhere thought, they made up for in fanatic devotion. They were ready enough to die for their cause.

  Nowhere scratched his bony chin. “The letter suggests they’re trying to bring their master—the Elemental Eye, I presume—into the world. Terror and destruction follow in his wake, of course,” he said. “It sounds like the same dire-sounding rhetoric these fire cultists were spewing. So why do you two look so worried?”

  Brendis sighed and got to his feet, turning away from the others. “I was so sure that we were just facing a local cult of troublemakers expressing their discontent with the Empire’s firm and steady hand by claiming the Fire Lord as their patron. I miscalculated and led us into conflict with a much larger threat.”

  “You don’t like being wrong,” Nowhere said. He’d known that about Brendis for years.

  The paladin turned back to face him, his face grim. “Especially not when lives are at stake.”

  “We need to find whoever sent this letter,” Sherinna said, emerging from her musing. “This ‘Dreaming Prophet,’ as he calls himself.”

  “Tomorrow,” Nowhere said. “After we sell the brass candlesticks and the ruby on that one’s finger, and celebrate our victory over the cult of the Fire Lord … Right?” He looked to Brendis for support, even though the paladin wasn’t much for the kind of celebration Nowhere enjoyed. Brendis’s eyes were fixed on the wizard.

  “Now,” Sherinna said, and there was an urgency in her voice that squelched the argument in Nowhere’s throat.

  A second city, with its own wards and laws and commerce, thrived in the storm sewers and ancient tunnels beneath Nerath’s grand capital. Nowhere was as comfortable in the maze of its chambers and passages as he was in the equally labyrinthine streets on the surface—he’d spent most of his life moving between the surface world and the undercity. Brendis and Serinna were not so comfortable in the world of torchlight and refuse, but their long hunt for the arsonists and murderers that made up the Fire Lord’s cult had forced even the two of them to learn the undercity’s ways. Nowhere had made sure of that—he couldn’t have them relying on him to guide them.

  So even though he saw the trepidation in their eyes when he suggested that they split up, he knew they could handle themselves. Either of the two informants that had pointed them to the Fire Lord’s temple might be able to lead them to the Dreaming Prophet. If the matter was as urgent as Sherinna suggested, it would be best to speak to both informants at the same time. Brendis and Sherinna would talk to the tavernkeeper who had observed some of the cult members’ clandestine meetings, and Nowhere would pay a visit to the other.

  The night hag.

  Tavet the Heartless lived in a sprawling network of natural caverns in the deeper reaches of the undercity known, prosaically enough, as the Caves. Her fame as an information broker was exceeded only by her infamous cruelty. It was said that she stole secrets from the prominent figures of the undercity and even the city above by infiltrating their dreams. Nowhere approached her cavern home with every sense alert for danger in the deep shadows that surrounded him.

  He stopped just outside the entrance to her cave and opened the sack he carried. The smell of blood assaulted his nostrils as he drew out the bundle he’d purchased from a butcher in the nearby Gloomside district. “Blood and flesh for Tavet the Heartless,” he called. He opened the package, took the blood-drenched cow’s heart in one hand and held it forward. He imagined he could feel a hint of resistance in the air as his hand crossed the threshold of her lair, but the blood parted the barrier. Suddenly the cavern beyond didn’t seem quite so dark, and he saw the misshapen shadow of the night hag’s body shambling toward him.

  “Drop it.” Her voice was the croak of a bullfrog and the howl of a wolf, all the unnerving sounds of night wrapped around two small words.

  Nowhere let the heart fall on the ground and turned his back. He heard the hag shuffle forward and tried to stop listening, but he couldn’t block the sounds of her bloody feast.

  “Enter,” she said when she was done.

  Nowhere turned back to the cave mouth, and the night hag was lost in the darkness again. Steeling his nerves, he stepped across the threshold.

  “You come alone this time?”

  “I did not wish to try your patience again,” Nowhere said. Tavet and Brendis had not gotten along well on their previous visit.

  “Or perhaps you seek a bargain your friend would not condone.” Her voice came from all around him and echoed in the small cave.

  Nowhere peered into the shadows, trying to find a hint of the night hag’s outline. Although he saw far more than Brendis’s human eyes could have, he could not find a trace of her. “I need more information,” he said.

  “You found the head of your little fire cult and discovered that it was just the hand of a much larger cult. Now you seek another head.”

  “That’s right,” Nowhere said. She’d made a logical deduction based on the information they sought last time and what she knew about the situation, nothing more. And whether she meant to or not, she’d revealed that she had the information he wanted.

  “When will it stop?” the night hag asked. “When you find out that the next head is just another hand, will you seek the next head? And the next?”

  “My companions believe that the Fire Lord’s cult was part of a larger cult serving something called the Elder Elemental Eye, and that cult seeks to unleash its master on the world.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “I pulled a ruby ring off one of those cultists that could ransom the emperor’s third son. As long as they want to keep hunting heads, I’ll come along for the ride.”

  “And are you willing to continue paying the price I ask?”

  “If you keep providing information we can use, I’ll continue paying for it. We’re looking for someone called the Dreaming Prophet. You’re an expert on dreams, I’ve heard. So do you know where we can find this person?”

  “I want Sherinna.”

  “What?” Nowhere’s voice cracked around a lump that formed suddenly in his throat.

  The night hag laughed, a barking croak that filled the cavern. “Not this time, tiefling. But eventually. No meat is as sweet to me as the flesh of a fair fey princess.”

  “No. I won’t hand her over to you.”

  “We shall see. In the meantime, I can tell you where to find the Dreaming Prophet for a very reasonable price. But when you find this head and start looking for the next, and the next after that, consider carefully how much you are willing to pay.”

  “Flee. Now.”

  Albric awoke from his dream and leapt from the filthy pile of straw and fur he
used as a bed. He started to gather his belongings, but as soon as his fingers touched the golden symbol of the Elder Elemental Eye, the voice from his dream resounded in his mind again: “Now!” He seized the medallion and bolted from the filth and squalor that had been his home and his temple for the past three years, into the stench and decay of the city sewers. Without a backward glance, he hurried away at the Dark God’s bidding, intent on the task before him.

  Brendis braced himself against the stench and kicked open the flimsy door.

  “He’s gone,” Nowhere said. The tiefling moved into the tiny room, his eyes darting to every crevice. He stooped over the wretched bed and placed a hand gingerly on the furs. “It’s still warm. We must have just missed him.”

  “We could wait for him,” Brendis said. “He’s sure to be back, with all this junk still here.”

  Sherinna knelt beside a pile of loose pages beside one wall and began leafing through the papers.

  “How can anyone live like this?” Brendis wondered aloud.

  “Most people don’t have a choice,” Nowhere said. “We weren’t all born in the sunlight.”

  “No, but there must be other options,” the paladin said. “Even the worst parts of the surface city are better than this.”

  “Not much better. And where is a lunatic cult leader going to find respectable lodging?”

  “Fair point,” Brendis said.

  Sherinna stood up, still holding a large sheet of parchment. “Well,” she said, “I don’t think he’s coming back here.”

  “Why not?” Nowhere asked.

  The eladrin held up the parchment, and Nowhere and Brendis stepped closer to peer at the writing that covered every inch of it. Dense columns of cramped text sent Nowhere’s mind reeling as he tried to absorb the ravings of the mad cultist, the Dreaming Prophet. Images of swarming flies and feasting maggots leaped from the text to assault his thoughts, and the proclamation of the world’s doom ran like a steady drone beneath the maddening melody of the text. But five words appeared over and over, scrawled in the margins and written in a large hand across the page: “Bael Turath. The Living Gate.”