And out of the dazzling heart of the rift, a nightmare menagerie was pouring out into the cavern and crashing into an outnumbered, battered line of drow who struggled to stop them, weapons flashing. This was the battle the drow war bands were rushing to join.
The beasts from the rift surged into the drow defenders, charging and sometimes rearing above the dark elves. There were hulking, shell-armored monsters with great mandibles and long, barbed stabbing antennae-or what looked like antennae. They were the largest, but were outnumbered by tigerlike cats that savaged the drow with the snapping jaws that darted and lunged at the end of the long, eel-like tentacles that sprouted in profusion from their powerful leonine shoulders. There were stranger rift creatures, too, including pillarlike glistening things that swayed as they fought, spitting long needles with deadly aim, lances that impaled dark elves and plucked them off their booted feet and hurled them away to crash against the cavern walls.
A great bloody fray raged in front of the rift, as the endless flood of monsters struggled over a growing heap of bodies, fallen drow mingled with a wild variety of dead or dying rift beasts. El could see great cages along the far walls of the cavern, barred enclosures rocking under the frenzied attempts of caged monsters to break out.
So this rift had been there long enough for local drow to mount a standing guard over it, and to establish a routine of capturing or slaying the beasts arriving through it. Aye, the creatures in that cage were probably intended as steeds, those in yonder distant cage as pack beasts, and the smaller motley heaps of squirming, crowded beasts filling that line of cages were probably intended to become food. If El knew anything at all about drow, they’d be seeking monsters they could use as weapons against Underdark foes, too.
Aye, probably the beasts in those cages, the ones almost buried in struggling drow and newly arrived monsters. A creature that looked like a great razor-toothed lamprey, and as large as the oldest sawmill back in Shadowdale, briefly reared up out of the tumult to shed struggling drow into a rain of blood-drenched dark elf body parts … and El got a glimpse of shattered, open cages beyond it.
Empty cages. Monsters had gotten free in the midst of the fighting, and were taking savage revenge on their captors.
Not that any drow seemed chastened or frightened in the slightest. The war band El had followed hurled itself into the nearest fighting without hesitation, the spiders racing up rift monster bodies to where they could bite and stab, the dark elf warriors drawing blades and plunging into the slaughter, and the priestesses stopping just shy of the fray to work a flurry of spells.
Ah, but mindless combat is always popular entertainment, El reminded himself wryly-then stopped, gaping in unthinking astonishment. Below him, priestesses gasped and cursed aloud, awed by the same sight.
The vivid purple-blue light of the rift had momentarily darkened, occluded by something gigantic moving through it, crushing smaller beasts in its way as it came, wriggling and humping like a gigantic inchworm. It slid out into the cavern, vast and glistening and blood red, its huge maw gulping a path through struggling dark elves and monsters alike.
Then it reared, towering. It was a worm, of a sort El had seen only once before-but that one had been a tortured captive in Avernus, an imprisoned, keeningly insane hulk cruelly enchanted to continually regrow itself as it was endlessly devoured alive by an ever-changing rabble of lesser devils. This one was no captive, and it was aroused and hungry, its great helm-shaped head almost black with rage.
A glaragh, such creatures were called in the Hells. But this one was far bigger than the huge captive he’d seen. It was as long as a Suzail street and as thick around as a three-floor house. It crashed through stalactites as it reared, but was unable to stand on its tail thanks to the low cavern ceiling. Elminster had seen hundreds of oversized worms in his time, from the infamous purple worms to the rockgnawers that ate endless passages out of solid bedrock in the deepest places of the earth, but this one beat them all.
Eight tentacle arms sprouted down the length of the monster worm, each ending in a sucking maw and a retractable bone talon that jutted like a spear when the beast desired but vanished back into hiding the rest of the time-and that meant “glaragh,” and only glaragh.
The mighty worm shuddered for a long, swaying moment as it was struck by spell after spell hurled by drow priestesses amid a hail of spears and darts-then crashed down into the midst of the largest knot of drow, crushing many to a bloody pulp. It surged forward, wriggling so as to strike out in as many directions as possible. Its tail lashed out, straightening in a great sweep that slapped foes into spattering meetings with cavern walls, ere it slid forward like an impatient snake to maraud freely among screaming, vainly fleeing priestesses.
Two or three of the larger rift monsters gave challenge as it came at them, roaring or rearing in defiance-and the glaragh tore them apart with glee, dashing the remains aside with its tail as it advanced. It was heading into the passage breeze, El noticed.
What carnage! Not that drow deaths tugged overmuch at his heart at the best of times, but once the glaragh reached the surface, its slayings would likely be human. Nor was this a lone peril. The many invading beasts endlessly pouring through a rift …
Mystra, preserve us all. That prayer, made out of long habit, carried little force now. Yet who else should be prayed to, to close rifts?
El glanced at that purple-blue sundering, yawning wider than ever, the deep drumbeat of its pulsings almost deafening now that the battle clamor had died down to the scattered moans and cries of the dying. Even if he’d had a body and all the spellbooks he could think of at hand, he might not be able to seal it and mend the Realms around it. Not without a Weave he could work with, or the right artifacts of power to expend, blueflame or otherwise.
Perhaps not even then.
Aghast, El looked one last time into the flood of lesser monsters coming through the rift, the stream of beasts quickening once again, flooding out into the cavern to overwhelm the few fleeing drow the glaragh hadn’t slain. Then he turned to fly after the great worm, fearing for the future of Faerun around him more than he’d done in years. He’d been facing a slow, sour decline and his own powerlessness for nigh a century, but this … A hundred rifts like this one, a thousand …
Mystra forfend. Hells, every god forfend!
Yet all he could do just now, without a body, was watch as the glaragh slid onward, roving at will, devouring everything it desired, shattering all who stood against it. An eerie whuffling arose from it-the glaragh smelled the drow trails branching off into the side passages.
Abruptly, it shook itself and stopped whuffling, gliding off toward the source of the breeze instead, undulating like a swimming snake as it gathered speed. Off it went into the Underdark, faster and faster.
With a grim line of ashes in pursuit. This was the very thing Mystra wanted him to stop, and right now El couldn’t do a hrasted thing about either worm or rift. He had been humbled like most wizards in the Realms; his reputation now far outstripped his power. And when he faced a foe who realized that …
“Rorskryn Mreldrake, what do you think your fate would be, if you walked into the royal palace of Suzail this evening?”
Mreldrake could just make out two cold eyes staring into his own, out of the dark shadow of the questioner’s cowl. Eyes that … glowed. Their regard was neither friendly nor comforting. Not in the slightest.