Free Dawn of Night by Kemp Paul S Page A

he?”
    Cale nodded.
    “You see him through those eyes,” Magadon said. “But I’ve been in his head, and I see him through his own.” Magadon paused before adding, “You two are very much alike.”
    Once, those words would have provoked a sharp denial, but not any more. Perhaps Cale and Riven were more alike than ever. Brothers in the faith if not the flesh. He looked at his regenerated hand and wondered again what he was becoming, or what he had already become. A shade, yes, but what else?
    “Get some rest, Magadon,” Cale said. “I’ll keep watch for a while.”
    Magadon rose, and said, “Well enough.” He hesitated, then extended his hand. “Call me Mags.”
    Cale took the tiefling’s hand and looked into his white eyes.
    “Mags it is.”
    The woodsman had laid down to sleep, pulling his hat down over his eyes. Cale looked down at the tome from the Fane of Shadows, picked it up, and after a moment’s hesitation he flipped it open.
    For a moment, he could not breathe.
    A swatch of black cloth lay within its pages, formerly pressed between the cover and the first page. He stared at it a long while before brushing the silken mask with his fingertips.
    A strange prologue, he thought, and placed what he knew to be his new holy symbol into his vest pocket.
    Cale refused to admit to himself the comfort its presence brought him, the charge it sent through him.
    He began to read, devouring the words as he once had done as a linguistics student back in Westgate. Written by several hands, alternatively in Thorass, Elvish, Infernal, and at least two tongues Cale did not recognize, the tome appeared to be a history of Shar, the Fane of Shadows as it manifested in several worlds, and the Weave Tap. As he read, he began to understand why Azriim—or Azriim’s master, the Sojourner—had sought the artifact.
    And with that understanding came fear.

CHAPTER 4: NURSING THE NIGHT
    Vhostym uttered the words to a spell, waved his hand, and opened a dimensional portal through the smooth stone wall and into the nursery. The moment the aperture materialized, moans of pain hissed through the magical door, the steam of agony escaping a heated beaker. Vhostym tuned out the sounds, though he felt like moaning himself. His affliction grew worse daily, despite his spells and medicaments. His bones throbbed with pain. He imagined he could feel them putrefying within him, one at a time.
    Pushing out of his mind an image of himself as a shapeless blob of flesh, Vhostym floated into the chamber.
    The nursery opened wide around him, a circular cyst in the earth of his pocket plane. Forty-four paces in diameter, the polished
    walls of the perfectly spherical room gleamed in the dim green light of a single glowball. Lines of diamonds and amethysts glittered in alternating spiraling whorls inset into the walls-three thousand nine hundred and fifty nine of each stone. The amethysts, attuned to the shadow Weave, fairly hummed with channeled power; the diamonds, attuned to the Weave, sang at a slightly higher pitch. The sum of the stones, when combined with the one of the Weave Tap, equaled seven thousand nine hundred nineteen, the one thousandth prime number.
    A number of power, Vhostym knew.
    The gems, arcane spirals, and the Weave Tap combined to make the nursery a nexus of the Weave and the Shadow Weave, a place where the frayed edges of both lay exposed and sizzling. Fertile ground for arcana, so to speak; rich soil in which the Tap could grow.
    And it had grown.
    Suspended in midair by magic, in the exact center of the nursery, hung the living artifact. It had blossomed to three times the size it had been when his slaadi first brought it from the Fane of Shadows. With its long, thin limbs, snaking roots, and narrow trunk, to Vhostym it somehow looked feminine. He thought it sublimely beautiful and marveled that mere human priests—even those inspired by their goddess—could have crafted such an item.
    Its glossy black bark pulsed with energy