THE SEVERING

It was more than independent thought, Yharaskrik knew. It was independent desire.

Such a thing could not be tolerated. The seven liches that had created the Crystal Shard were represented by the singular power of Crenshinibon only. They had no say in the matter, and no opinions or wants that were pertinent.

But to the perceptive illithid, there was no missing the desire behind Fetchigrol's request. The creature wasn't acting purely on expediency or any compulsion to please its three masters joined as the Ghost King. Fetchigrol wanted something.

And Crenshinibon's addition to the internal debate brewing within the Ghost King was nothing but supportive of the lich-turned-specter.

Yharaskrik telepathically appealed to Hephaestus to deny the lich, and tried to imbue a sense of the depth of his trepidation, but he had to walk a fine line, not wanting the Crystal Shard to recognize that concern.

The illithid couldn't tell whether the dragon caught its subtle inflection of thought, or whether Hephaestus, still less than enamored with Yharaskrik, simply didn't care. The dragon's response came back in the form of eagerness, exactly as Fetchigrol had requested.

"How greatly might we tap the minions of the reformed Shadowfell before we cease to be their masters in this, our world?" Yharaskrik said aloud.

Hephaestus wrestled full control of the dracolich's mouth to respond. "You fear these huddled lumps of flesh?"

"There is more to the Shadowfell than the crawlers," Yharaskrik replied after a brief struggle to regain the use of the voice. "Better that we use the undead of our plane for our armies - their numbers are practically unlimited."

"And they are ineffective!" the dracolich roared, shaking the stone of the chamber. "Mindless ..."

"But controllable," the illithid interrupted, the words twisting as both creatures fought for physical control.

"We are the Ghost King!" Hephaestus bellowed. "We are supreme."

Yharaskrik started to fight back, but paused as he considered Fetchigrol standing before him and nodding. He could feel the satisfaction coming from the shadowy creature, and he knew that Crenshinibon had sided with Hephaestus, that permission had been given to Fetchigrol to fly back to Carradoon and raise a great army of crawlers to catch and slaughter those people who had fled into the tunnels.

The satisfaction of that creature! Why could not Hephaestus understand the danger in any independent emotions emanating from one of the seven? They were to have no satisfaction, other than in serving, but Fetchigrol was acting on his own personal ego, not a compulsion to serve the greater host. He had been shown up by Solme, who went to the Shadowfell to raise an army while Fetchigrol merely reanimated dead flesh to do his bidding. The escape of so many from Carradoon had added to that sense of failure in the specter, and so the creature was trying to rectify the situation.

But the specter should not have cared. Why could Hephaestus not understand that?

We are greater with competent generals, came a thought, and Yharaskrik knew it to be Crenshinibon, who would not speak aloud with the dragon's voice. "They would not dare cross us," Hephaestus agreed. Let us use their anger.

To what possible gain? Yharaskrik thought, but was careful to shield from the others. What gain would they garner by pursuing the fleeing Carradden? Why should any of them waste their moments concerned about the fate of refugees?

"Your caution grows wearying," the dracolich said as Fetchigrol exited the cavern, bound for Carradoon. Yharaskrik's initial recognition that it was Hephaestus speaking was given pause by the word choice and the timbre of the voice, reflecting more a reasoned remark than the bellow typical of Hephaestus. "Can we not simply destroy for the enjoyment of the act?"

The illithid had no physical body of its own, so it possessed no heels, but Yharaskrik surely fell back on its heels at that revealing moment. It had not adequately shielded its concerns from the other two. The mind flayer had no place to hide from ...

From which?

The Ghost King, the mind of the dragon answered, reading every thought as if it were his own.

Yharaskrik understood at that moment that the bond between Hephaestus and Crenshinibon was tightening, that they were truly becoming one being, one mind.

The illithid couldn't even begin to hide its fear that the same fate awaited it. As a mind flayer, Yharaskrik was well-versed in the notion of a hive mind - in its Underdark homeland, hundreds of its kind would join together in a common receptacle of intelligence and philosophy and theory-craft. But those were other illithids, equal beings of equal intelligence.

"And the Ghost King is greater than your kin," the dracolich's voice answered. "Is that your fear?"

Its every thought was open to them!

"There is a place for you, Yharaskrik," the Ghost King promised. "Hephaestus is the instinct, the anger, and the physical power. Crenshinibon is the collection of near-eternal wisdom and the dispassion - hence judgment - of a true god. Yharaskrik is the freedom of far-reaching projection and the understanding of the surrealism of worlds joined."

One word, buried in the middle of that declaration of power, revealed to Yharaskrik the truth: judgment. Of the parts of the proposed whole, judgment sat atop the hierarchy, and so it was Crenshinibon that meant to hold its identity. The dragon would be the reactive, the illithid would serve as the informative, and Crenshinibon would control it all.

And so it was Crenshinibon, Yharaskrik realized in that awful moment, who was granting the liches a greater measure of autonomy, and only because the Crystal Shard knew with full confidence that they would ever remain slaves to it, their ultimate creation.

Yharaskrik's only chance would be to get through to Hephaestus, to convince the dragon that he would lose his own identity in that ultimately subservient role.

In response to that unhidden notion, the dracolich laughed, a horrid, scraping noise.

Solme had bested Fetchigrol. Centuries before, they and five others had joined in common purpose, a complete unification into a singular artifact of great power and infinite duration. Fetchigrol wasn't supposed to care that Solme had outdone him. Crenshinibon's explanation had been instructive, not a chastisement.

The apparition, an extension of something greater than Fetchigrol, a tool for the furthering of Crenshinibon and nothing more, wasn't supposed to care.

But he did. When Fetchigrol stood at the docks of ruined Carradoon later that same night and reached through the planes to the Shadowfell, he felt elation. His own, not Crenshinibon's.

And when his consciousness returned to Toril, rift in hand, and tore open the divide, he took great satisfaction - his own, not Crenshinibon's - in knowing that the next instructive lecture would be aimed at Solme and not at himself.

Huddled crawlers poured through the rift. Fetchigrol didn't control them, but he guided them, showing them the little inlet just north of the docks, where the waters of Impresk Lake calmed and the tunnel complex began. The crawlers didn't fear the tunnels. They liked the dark recesses, and no creature in all the multiverse more enjoyed the hunt than the ravenous, fleshy beasts of the dark Shadowfell.

More came through as the rift swirled in on itself and started to mend, to return to the stasis of natural order.

Fetchigrol, Crenshinibon's blessing clear in his eager thoughts, tore it open wide again.

And he ripped it open again when it began to diminish sometime later, knowing all the while that each reopening weakened the fabric of separation between the two worlds. That fabric, that reality of what had always been, was the only real means of control. Gradually, the third tear began to mend.

Fetchigrol tore it wide yet again!

Fewer crawlers came through with each rift, for the shadowy gray region the apparitions had been inhabiting was nearly emptied of the things.

Fetchigrol, who would not lose to Solme, reached deeper into the Shadowfell. He recklessly widened his call to the far edges of the gray plain, to regions he could not see.

He never saw or heard it coming, for the beast was a creature of shadow, and silent as such. A black cloud descended over the apparition, fully engulfing him.

In that terrible instant, he knew he had failed. It didn't matter the issue, for there was no anchor to the specific disaster.

Just failure. Utter, complete, and irrevocable. Fetchigrol felt it profoundly. It devoured any thoughts he might have for the situation at hand.

The shadow dragon couldn't get through the rift, but it managed to snake its head out far enough to snap its great jaws over the despairing apparition.

And Fetchigrol had no escape. To plane shift would merely place him more fully before the devouring dragon on the other side of the tear. Nor did he have any desire to escape, for the despair wrought by the shadow dragon's black cloud of breath made Fetchigrol understand that obliteration was preferable.

And so he was obliterated.

In the Shadowfell, the dragon receded, but marked the spot of the tear, expecting that soon it might widen enough for it to pass through. When it left, other beasts found their way to the opening.

Nightwings, giant black bats, opened wide their leathery wings and took flight above the ruins of Carradoon, eager to feast on the lighter flesh of the material world.

Fearsome dread wraiths, humanoid, emaciated, and cloaked in tattered dark rags, who could leach the life-force of a victim with a touch, crawled through in hunting packs.

And a nightwalker, a giant, hairless humanoid twenty feet tall, all sinewy and with the strength of a mountain giant, squeezed its way through the rift and onto the shores of Impresk Lake.

In the cave on the cliff, the Ghost King knew.

Fetchigrol was gone, his energy winked out, lost to them.

Yharaskrik was an illithid. Illithids were creature of callous logic and did not gloat, but dragons were creatures of emotion, and so when the illithid pointed out that it had been right in its condemnation of Fetchigrol's plan, a wall of rage came back at it.

From both Hephaestus and Crenshinibon.

For a moment, Yharaskrik didn't understand the Crystal Shard's agreement with the volatile beast. Crenshinibon, too, was an artifact of pragmatic and logical thinking. Unemotional, like the illithid.

But unlike Yharaskrik, Crenshinibon was also ambitious.

And so Yharaskrik knew at that moment that the bond would not hold, that the triumvirate in the dracolich's consciousness would not and could not remain tenable. It thought to find a host outside the dragon's body, but dismissed the notion immediately, realizing that nothing was as mighty as the dracolich, after all, and Hephaestus would not suffer the illithid to survive.

It had to fight.

Hephaestus was all anger and venom, that wall of rage, and the illithid went at him methodically, poking holes with logic and reasoning, reminding its opponent of the inarguable truths, for those truths alone - the recklessness of opening wide a gate to an unknown plane, and the needed caution in continuing against a foe as powerful as the combined might of Spirit Soaring - could serve as a premise on which to build its case.

By every measure of the principles of debate, Yharaskrik was far beyond its opponent. The simple truth and logic were on its side. The illithid poked its holes and appealed to reason over rage, repeatedly, thinking to turn the favor of Crenshinibon, who, he feared, would ultimately decide the outcome of their struggle.

The battle within became a wild assault without, as Hephaestus's dracolich form thrashed and clawed at the stone, breathed fire that melted stone and minion alike, and bull-rushed walls, shaking the entire mountain in great tremors.

Gradually, Hephaestus began to play out his rage, and the internal battle diminished as it became a session of dialogue and discourse. With Yharaskrik leading the way, the Ghost King began to sort how it might correct for the loss of Fetchigrol. The Ghost King began to accept the past and look to the next move in the wider, and more important struggle.

Yharaskrik took some small comfort in the victory, fully recognizing that it might be temporary in nature and fully expecting that it would battle Hephaestus many more times before things were finally settled.

The illithid turned its thoughts and arguments to the very real possibility that Fetchigrol's demise indicated that the apparition had reached too far into what had once been the Plane of Shadow. But for reasons still unknown to the Ghost King, the Plane of Shadow had become something more, something bigger and more dangerous. It also seemed to be somehow moving closer to the Prime Material Plane, and in that event, what consequences might result?

Crenshinibon seemed not to care, reasoning that out of chaos, the Ghost King could only grow stronger.

And if a dangerous and too-powerful organized force had come through the rift, the Ghost King could simply fly away. The Crystal Shard, Yharaskrik understood implicitly, was far more concerned about the loss of two of the seven.

For Hephaestus, there remained only unrelenting and simmering anger, and most of all, the dragon's consciousness growled at the thought of not being able to exact revenge on those who had so ruined the beast in life.

While Yharaskrik thought of times to come and how to shape the wider path, and Crenshinibon considered the remaining five and whether any repairs were called for, the dragon only pressed, incessantly, for an immediate assault on Spirit Soaring.

They were not one, but three, and to Yharaskrik, the walls separating the triumvirate that was the Ghost King seemed as impenetrably thick and daunting as ever. And from that came the illithid's inescapable conclusion that it must find a way to dominate, to force oneness under its own commanding will and intellect.

And it hoped it could hide that dangerous ambition from its too-intimate fellows.