Free Dawn of Night by Kemp Paul S Page B

as it fed. Rings of soft, silver light periodically ran the length of its trunk, the pulse not unlike the greedy gulp of a magic-addicted drunkard. Even that mild silver illumination stung Vhostym’s skin and caused him to blink back tears with each palpitation.
    The limbs of the Weave Tap’s mostly leafless canopy extended upward to grow into and out of the still living, twitching bodies of the semi-conscious, opalescent-skinned astral devas that Vhostym had suspended there. After bursting from the celestials’ writhing forms, the Tap’s limbs continued upward before melding with
    the warp of the Weave. Then it disappearing into nothingness toward the rounded, diamond-dotted ceiling. Similarly, the Tap’s thick roots extended downward to penetrate the squirming bodies of the semi-conscious ghaele demons. Bursting from their malformed backs the roots invisibly enmeshed themselves in the weft of the Shadow Weave near the rounded floor, itself speckled with amethysts.
    Vhostym ignored the pained moans of the creatures upon which the Tap fed. They were little more than sentient, pain-ridden husks. Living fertilizer, their nearly extinguished life-force had helped speed the Tap’s growth. Already the artifact had produced one ripe seed. Soon, a second would be ready. And two was all Vhostym would need to realize his ambition.
    He floated across the nursery to hover before the Tap. The blank, ivory eyes of the devas, and the thick, puss filled black orbs of the ghaele, stared at him unseeing, blind to all but their pain.
    “Silence now,” he said.
    Vhostym cast a spell on the demons and devas that rendered them silent. Their mouths still moved in agony, but their verbalization no longer troubled his ears. He reached out and caressed the bole of the Tap with his frail hand. The warm bark felt more like supple leather than wood. He put his ear to the bark and sighed. A flash of the Tap’s silver pulse set his eyes to watering and his skin to burning, but he endured. He looked with anticipation on the burgeoning seed, hanging alone from one of the bare, low-hanging limbs. The seed was ovate, about the size of a fist, with throbbing black veins that crisscrossed its silver rind. In a sense, the seed was a metaphor, as was the Weave Tap itself. The priests of Shar had distilled an allegory of opposites down to a physical manifestation—a unique tree. Shar and Selline; new moon and full moon. Shar and Mystra; Shadow Weave and Weave. Perhaps the perfect enmeshing of those opposites was the secret of the Tap’s beauty and power. Of course, in the end the
    Tap remained a creation inspired by Shar, and hence a tool designed to spite Mystra and Selune.
    On a whim, Vhostym had tried to contact the Tap psionically, but had received no response. He had sensed a lurking self-awareness, but the artifact’s consciousness was so focused on its purpose—growing, tapping—that it could perceive nothing else.
    He eyed the thin limbs of the Weave Tap and imagined them as they were meant to be: blossoming with leaves of power. When one of the tree’s seeds was “planted” in a location of powerful magic, it would instantly root in the fabric of the magic there and pass the power thus gained along the net of the Weave and back to the Weave Tap, where Vhostym would be waiting to harness it.
    He had chosen with care the locations at which he would seed the Weave. He had dismissed mythals outright. While the mantles of elven high magic were areas of highly concentrated power, they were also too conspicuous. Tapping a mythal would have immediately drawn the attention of Toril’s most powerful high mages, and Mystra’s Chosen as well, and it was too soon for that. Instead, he had opted to tap a form of mantle magic different from mythals, but nearly as powerful. Already his brood had taken the first Tap seed and journeyed to the location of the first such mantle, a one-time Netherese Enclave.
    Eager to check on their progress, he concentrated