Umber

Sugar Primrose was picking her way through rubble in the company of Desverendi when the rumble of falling rocks started again. Klavicus was pulverizing a few more boulders. “Why does he keep doing that?” she asked the druid.

The old elemental sighed. “I expect to convince himself that he still can.”

A cloud of dust drifted toward them from further up the vale, and Sugar Primrose hastily covered her hair with a scarf. “Can’t you ask him to stop?”

“I could,” Desverendi nodded, “but I won’t. Nevertheless, I hope the Great One,” there was perhaps only a hint of sarcasm in his gravelly voice, “decides to go home soon.”

* * *

Balor do not dream. They are not born from a mother’s womb. They are not helpless young. If Klavicus had not at least read of these things, of dreaming and of birth and of helplessness, the ritual he performed in Urik would likely have driven him permanently mad, if he had survived it at all. As it was it tested his sanity in ways he was not eager to experience again.

He knew early on that something was wrong, but there was no stopping the rite once it was begun; he had to trust to his own raw power to see him over any obstacles, and his not inconsiderable intelligence to determine what those obstacles were. He had too many candidates for comfort. He knew that only Kerac had a genuine piece of the World Seed and that the others were merely facsimiles. He didn’t know whether that would be a problem. He knew that having to repair the damaged facsimiles (it was fortunate that Kerac had guarded his holy symbol with more care than the other clerics, or the rite couldn’t have begun at all) was going to cost him power he intended to use for the ritual. He didn’t know whether the cost would prove too high. He knew it was possible that being alien to Oerth would be a problem. He didn’t know whether being a balor would make the problem worse.

It felt like being torn apart, whatever in him was of Earth or Air, Water or Fire being drawn toward each of the elemental poles he had erected. All the energy he could muster was funneled into maintaining some still, small center of awareness that could hold his body together and his mind apart from the maelstrom he had become. He used the shadow on the wall to track his progress; as the bat-like wings shrank and something more gossamer grew in their place, there was no longer any denying to himself what he had done. He had taken the first step on the path to becoming an Avangion, and there was no turning back.

As time passed he began to wish he could. He had expected the ritual to be lengthy but not this long; he guessed that there would be remaking involved but did not expect to be hours trapped immobilized between larva and imago. The shell of his body remained the same but the core of him seemed to be dissolving, reforming, and the more radical the changes the more grimly he held fast to what was left. It is like shapeshifting, he told himself, nothing more. The body may do what it will, but the foundation – the thoughts and emotions – remain unaltered. A quiet voice within him questioned the veracity of that belief, but he crushed it back into submission whenever it uttered more than a few syllables.

As time passed he could feel his strength ebbing. The wings on the wall fluttered between leathery solidity and an almost energetic insubstantiality, and a darker corner of his mind began to admit that he was snared. The way back was closed to him. He had lost the way ahead. The elemental altars would drain him to a dry husk, another failed pupa that did not live to see the spring.

Still he did not give up; it was not in his nature. Even when Jaggo’s wards failed – if he survived this he and the mage were going to have words – and the room filled with Urikite guards, though his body was weak he still possessed ample force of will to stun them in their tracks before bending his thoughts again toward what precisely was blocking his forward progress. Let Skarp’s brood make themselves useful, he thought as everyone save Kerac moved in for the kill.

But then a discordant wail of frustration filled his ears. The sword of a sleek, self-satisfied lieutenant commander that Klavicus had seen swaggering about Urik shrilled a demand for blood. He knew that sound. In a more violent time of his life he’d had more than one of those blades swung at some tender part of his anatomy by righteous zealots. How it had survived the birth of the Dragon and all the centuries after was a mystery to him, but what was not a mystery was what would happen as the weapon tore itself free from its stunned wielder’s hand and hurtled toward the immobilized balor.

For the first time in all the millennia of his existence, Klavicus knew that he was going to die.

He felt the specially treated alloys tear through the flesh of his side, cut his ribs like paper, pierce his heart. In that moment all of his erudition, his cool calculation, his studied detachment from the world and himself were lost. He was a being of pure instinct now, and everything in him that was demonic recoiled in agony from the bite of that blade, raged against his life’s ending, gathered itself up to exact terrible retribution for his fate.

And in that moment the quiet voice within him had a moment to have its way. Not a paladin. Not a planetar. Not a paragon. Not a despoiler. Not a defiler. Not a demon. Then what? The path ahead is dark and strange, too strange, too dark…But in the room were seven lights, weak in power but strong in purpose, the promise for which he had walked this path. Then let them light the way.

In death’s final fever dream he saw them: a man as solid as Oerth itself; a woman bearing a staff that glittered like the heavens. A woman whose harp strings taut soothed damned souls, untwined condemned them to that damnation. A man who distilled the mind to two poles, dark and light in the ceaseless dance of attraction and repulsion; a woman who perfected her body in service to the dance of death. A man who wore his commitment to protect the weak as lightly as a feathered bird; a woman who stalked the shadows to have revenge on their behalf whenever his protection failed.

The quiet voice abandoned the center, tore itself space for a new reality, peopled it with those seven lights. And then it waited, to see what they would make of it. They were slow to understand where they were, what was required. The fragments of metamorphosis were all there, within his body, within his mind, but they could not assemble themselves into the coherent pattern that would become an Avangion. Skarp had gently mocked Mahlanda for her impurity, the inescapable taint of corruption within her, but how much more corrupt then a balor? He was no paladin. He was no paragon. However strong the will and desire to repair and renew, the template for renewal and repair was written nowhere in his nature. They wrote it for him, Skarp’s children, even as the demon fought them, and when he returned them to the place of the ritual, mere fractions of a second after they had left, the warrior picked up his almost lifeless body and they bore him away from Urik.

They thought he was unconscious, but rather he was diffuse, his body too paltry a thing to contain an expanded awareness. It was as if he had taken the elemental altars into himself and everything of which they were the building blocks besides. Past, present and hints of the future loomed around him as large as the desert wastes. Desires crowded him – his own and others, so many others – and he found it difficult to fix himself in a space and time. He had told them – had he told them? – Toward Tyr, but not by the road, and sometimes he had the feeling of wheels and a road beneath him but then the feeling would flit away and another would take its place – a buzzard searching for thermals, a thri-kreen searching urgently for something, an angry Urikite soldier hunting for the men and women who had killed his commander.

His consciousness was a gaping wound exposed to every living thing over a miles’-wide radius, and while he knew it needed to be closed, communicating that need was immensely difficult. Had he told Skarp’s brood? Had he told the thri-kreen? Had he told the buzzard?

On the sixth day he realized it was easier, though by no means easy, to communicate by dreams rather than speech, and this time when he told them Toward Tyr, but not by the road, the road was left behind them. On the seventh day the thri-kreen came, and with their powerful psionic ability stabilized a path through the confusion of thoughts and emotions and enabled him to communicate more plainly where he wished to go. To the Vale. To Desverendi. He had no idea if the old druid could help him, but if he couldn’t then no one could. Certainly he could no longer help himself.

They made for the Vale with dispatch, but might not have found it if Desverendi hadn’t sent one of his creatures to lead the way. Its tiny thoughts began chirping to him miles before the youths with whom he traveled saw it. I am coming, Great One. My master can help, Great One. Preparations are already begun. As it trilled its reassurance he felt similar refrains taken up all around him, from the thri-kreen walking beside him to the buzzards overhead, from kanks and scorpions and all of the other desert creatures. We are with you, Great One. We are here. Great One, you must survive, for our sakes and the sake of the world. He let the currents wash over him; he lacked the strength to do anything else.

As from a great distance he heard Desverendi instruct Skarp’s youths to place him in a pool of water. There was great anxiety within the Vale, and raging anger without. Within the vale all of its creatures gathered fearfully to watch as their elemental keeper placed Kerac, Sugar Primrose and a woman Klavicus did not know at the four points of the compass around the pool and dispatched the others to guard the secret entrances. Without the enemies Desverendi guarded against were coming, warriors and defilers with murder on their minds. And Klavicus could do nothing but hover on the surface of the water and wait, absorbing all of the anxiety and anger and determination through the rift torn in his spirit.

Almost as soon as the rite began the rift began to close, and he couldn’t help but be grateful for that. Soon the cacophony of the entire desert had dwindled to the strife within the Vale, and that was enough for his fevered mind and damaged body to cope with. An assassin slunk into their midst, and though he gave Desverendi a wide berth he struck down the woman cleric. She like her three co-ritualists was helpless before his assault, knowing as they all did that any disruption now meant irreversible failure.

Po rushed to revive her while Zane hovered nearby to take her place if needed. Once, twice, three times the paladin brought her back while the assassin moved on to harry Sugar Primrose and Kerac. Saphira and Reign with two of the thri-kreen held back the Black Sand Raiders while Regan and the remaining pair of thri-kreen struggled to defend against the Urikite half-giants, archers and defiler.

At first the luck of combat was against them, and in his half-conscious haze Klavicus more than half-expected the ritual to fail at the last and the Vale to be his tomb. The assassin sorely injured Sugar Primrose, and Regan might have fallen to the Urikite archers and their commanding defiler if Po hadn’t snapped at her to retreat and regroup. But then the tide began to turn. Saphira and Reign were dispatching their opponents so handily that the warrior fell back to bedevil the assassin, and a frustrated Regan finally slipped invisibly past the half-giants to hunt down the defiler.

By the time the assassin fell the arrival of a second defiler was no more than a temporary inconvenience. Skarp’s youths had found their center again, and none of the remaining attackers survived the ferocity of their assault. The ritual finished. The psychic rift closed. Klavicus was himself and no one else again; he opened his eyes, looked at the worried faces gathered around him, and scowled. “Help me out of here,” he grumbled to Desverendi.

He could not stand unaided – he could barely stand at all – but at least he wasn’t dead. It rankled to lean against the old druid before his saviors – he could barely form the word in his mind – so young and fresh-faced and eager, every last one of them with a paladin’s heart. Well, there’s some amusement to that, he thought, the paladins saving a demon.

But he wasn’t a demon anymore, was he? A casual glance in the pool told him that. The reflection looking back at him was the form he’d always taken masquerading as a human, now with slender gossamer wings and metallic golden eyes. The image caused him some discomfort, and he quickly looked away. If he was a balor no longer, what was he?

Skarp’s youths were still watching him expectantly, and although he felt like ordering them to stop staring at him like some circus attraction instead he offered an attenuated bow. “My thanks for your assistance,” he said, his voice weaker than he expected. “I need to rest now.”

Klavicus’ frailty was a source of great irritation to him, and though they tarried some time in the Vale Skarp’s youths wisely stayed away. As soon as he was well enough to rise and stagger about Desverendi brought him a walking stick fashioned from some of the sturdy wood of the vale. Armed with it he walked, and walked, and walked, nearly to the point of collapse until Desverendi came to him again. “You must sleep, Ancient One,” he said.

“Sleep?” Klavicus snarled. “I’ve never slept a night in my life.”

“Nevertheless…”

“Why should I sleep?” His eyes narrowed. “I haven’t made myself into some puny mortal, have I?”

“I do not believe so.” Desverendi met the daimon’s glare with equanimity. “It is more proper, perhaps, to say that you must dream. Dreams strengthen your tie to Oerth.”

“I’ve been tied to the elements for millennia.”

“It is not enough.” He gestured toward the plants around them, and the insects, animals and birds that still persisted in following the Preserver wherever he went. “You must learn to hear their voices as well.”

“Does the other – ” he bit off the sentence and began anew, “does the Avangion sleep?”

“I do not believe so. But he has achieved apotheosis. You have not.”

“And never will, if I have any say in it,” Klavicus muttered under his breath. “I have no intention of going through that nine more times.”

Though the young people avoided him occasionally he watched them, at a distance so they would not know that he was there. Saphira and Kerac spent some time puzzling over his holy symbol, and from somewhere in her trove of lore the bard plucked out the obscure legend of the World Seed and wedded it to the talisman Kerac bore. The discovery disturbed them, as well it might, but Klavicus had no interest in shedding light on their dark forebodings. Too much knowledge gained all at once, he had learned over the millennia, was generally a counterproductive thing.

Zane often sat in solitary meditation, with the orb before him. Sugar Primrose spent long hours in Desverendi’s company, but sometimes when she believed herself alone she would stare at the staff and her own reflection in the water. Klavicus had felt the staff draw something of himself into it and into her, but knew no more than she what that might mean.

Po and Reign sparred together for hours. Sometimes Regan joined them but more often she practiced alone with her katana. She seemed distracted and sloppy; when Klavicus spoke of it to Desverendi the druid replied that she was angry that Alentha died because of their inaction. “The anger is good,” Klavicus remarked. “The clumsiness is not.”

* * *

On the third day after his transformation the Avangion came to the Vale. The wings of light seemed to droop a little as he bobbed around the daimon. Today I almost regret not being corporeal.

Klavicus carefully lowered himself onto a moss-covered rock. “Desverendi is proving an adequate nursemaid.”

He tended me as well, when I underwent the change.

“Alone?” The daimon glared at him. “Then why did I have to go through all that rigmarole in Urik?”

Oerth is weary. The defilers’ predations complicate the change. And your – nature – made it more difficult still.

“As did not knowing what I was doing. You might have told me the ritual required psionic talent,” Klavicus growled.

How could I have known? the Avangion replied. I was many things. As well have said you must be a kobold. The injury you sustained, he floated nearer, did not help.

Klavicus waved the Avangion away, but the gesture lacked its usual strength. “No matter what the Galeb Duhr chose to christen me, I am – ” he hesitated, “was – a balor. With so many things lost, who would have thought that lieutenant would have a demon-slaying sword in his possession?”

I do not think they knew you were a demon.

He fingered the healing wound in his side and winced. “Small comfort, that.”

As if in response to his passing pain a half dozen small creatures gathered around him. He scowled at their appearance. “Does this stop?” he demanded.

In time.

A scorpion climbed onto his knee and stared up at him. Klavicus’ fingers twitched toward it as if he meant to crush it, but instead he let it scramble onto his palm. He held it at eye level, scrutinizing it for a time. “Don’t expect me to start singing with the Whos in Whoville,” he grumbled, then set it back on the ground. The Avangion’s light flickered in a complicated pattern of colors. “What are you laughing at?”

It is well, the Avangion chuckled, that in all ways you have not changed.

* * *

As Klavicus mended he discovered that, though his appearance had altered, his physical strength was waxing with his recovery. By the sixth day he was strong enough to smash through boulders with his fists, and for several days he did little else. In idle moments he supposed he was disturbing the other residents of the Vale, but truth be told he didn’t particularly care. Desverendi gave him occasional long-suffering glances but if anything that encouraged him to redouble his destructive labors. He had been outside the Vale now, had seen that it was expanding, and that the plants within were growing more lush and fertile with every day that he remained.

It had been a long time, in fact, since he had been a balor of the Abyss in anything but name. Sybarite, scholar, archmage, elemental priest: each of those roles he had worn as easily and well as his favorite velvet paisley coat. But to have flowers springing up in his wake and baby kank gamboling at his feet…this time life was asking a bit much.