Forsaken House by Richard Baker Read Free Book Online Page B

triangular in shape, with a curiously beveled base and a long, tapering point. A glimmer of violet fire seemed to dance in its depths. Swirls of phosphorescence drifted in the wake of Sarya’s fingertips as she touched the crystal.
    “For over five thousand years I dreamed of holding the key to my prison in my hand,” she mused, admiring the stone. “Fifty-eight centuries crawled by while I waited and watched. Sharrven and Siluvanede passed away, and I waited. Eaerlann—hated Eaerlann—grew old and decrepit and forgot the ancient enemies her lords had imprisoned beneath their fortresses, and still I waited and watched. The city of Ascalhorn was raised up over my living tomb, and I watched when demons and devils warred in the streets, driving out the simpering humans and their paleblooded friends. Fifty centuries I dreamed of this, Nurthel, and now only five short years after gaining my freedom, the crystal is mine. The irony of it!”
    “You are free now, my lady. The ancient treachery of your foes has been undone.”
    Sarya’s eyes narrowed and she said, “Only through the ignorance of foolish adventurers, who thought to cleanse Ascalhorn with no less a weapon than the Gatekeeper’s Crystal.”
    They succeeded in throwing down Hellgate Keep—dying heroically in the process, of course—but they had also managed to crack the deeply buried magical prison in which
    Sarya and her daemonfey sons had been interred thousands of years before the city of Ascalhorn had been raised.
    At once Sarya had set about, exploring the new world that had grown over the ruins of the one she had known five millennia earlier. In the five years since the Harpers had unknowingly set her free, she had gathered together the remnants of the fey’ri, demonspawned elves who had served House Dlardrageth in the days of her glory. Some, such as Nurthel himself, she had liberated from lesser prisons similar to her own. Others she had found hiding in distant planes, and a handful had survived unimprisoned, hiding amid the cities of her enemies. And she had also turned her attention to unraveling the mystery of her freedom, employing all of her formidable sorcery to learn how and why she had come to be freed.
    “I wonder how the palebloods of Evermeet found the third piece,” he said.
    The daemonfey princess shrugged.
    “Most likely it was found by some human mageling or tomb-plunderer,” she said, “who recognized it as elf-work and sold it to someone who understood its true worth. My divinations informed me of the crystal’s location, but did not suffice to solve the mystery of its travels.”
    She turned to a golden coffer that stood on one table, and spoke a charm of opening. Inside gleamed two crystals virtually identical to the one she held in her hand. The first segment Sarya had found in the rubble of Hellgate Keep, soon after gaining her freedom. It took her four years, but she eventually found the second piece in a volcano in Avernus, first of the Nine Hells.
    She lifted out the other pieces one at a time and joined them, base-to-base. As each segment’s lower facet touched that of the neighboring segment, the crystal glowed blue and melded together, forming a seamless, perfect whole. When the last piece was added, the device seemed to hum with power. It resembled a three-pointed star almost a foot in diameter, stronger than steel and imbued with magic beyond mortal means.
    “Ah,” Sarya purred. “What a pretty trinket this is!”
    “Will it work?” Nurthel asked, peering at the artifact.
    “Oh, yes,” Sarya said. “Nothing can stand against it, though we must be careful, or else it will fly apart and fling its component crystals to the far ends of the multiverse. I dare not invoke its powers here, not within the spell wards of Myth Glaurach—but it will serve for the task I have in mind. I am confident of it.”
    Sarya replaced the conjoined crystal in its coffer, then set a lethal spell over the chest. She gestured at a