17 The Most Hopeful of Dirges (III)

"What did you just say?"

"Alaundo seems to have predicted me just fine, given the prophecy that the Endless Chant of Candlekeep goes through at least once a day."

The wizard only continued to stare at him, wide-eyed.

Cyrus frowned. "Although I suppose it is possible that the words are only referring to the others and may have missed me entirely. Though I did come across references to a prophecy about 'Gorion's Ward' in some of the more obscure texts, so I doubt that's the case."

"Gods…" the man murmured. "So you do know after all."

"I was doing a good job of wilfully avoiding the obvious conclusion before I laid eyes on those tomes in there." Cyrus laughed bitterly. He actually laughed, but he didn't have it in him to be shocked even at his own emotion. "I was born in 1348. It is no mystery what happened that year. So given everything known about me, even discounting everything everyone like you seems to know that I don't, what else could I have been? Whose else, for that matter?" The small dwarf replied. Demanded, almost. "I choose death, and it is by my hand that all that you rule Lord Bane will eventually pass to Lord Myrkul. Both of you must pay honour to me and obey my wishes, since I can destroy your kingdom, Bane, by murdering your subjects, and I can starve your kingdom, Myrkul, by staying my hand." The Blackstaff closed his eyes as if in pain and that old and tepid thing surged within him again – a torpid ghost of something once known as compassion and intended for Gorion and not him – but the mage then opened his eyes once more and listened still while and after the dwarf boy quoted straight from the History of the Dead Three. "Of those three madmen, Bane manifested in a completely different part of the world so I couldn't have been his. And while it's not completely impossible that Myrkul might have sown his oats in the short time before Midnight slew him, his whereabouts did not intersect with those of my mother either. Besides, while I was still too young to remember all the details of my infancy clearly, I have always known and comprehended death, especially my own. I well remember the woman that took me from my slain mother as well as the symbol on the pendant she wore about her neck while she was chanting to her god and holding sacrificial athames just inches above my eyes." Khelben Arunsun had clenched his fists and gone utterly still but still didn't interrupt. "Even lacking that memory, the nature that seems determined to affect everything I touch with any sort of active intent is quite specific in its focus on inflicting death and, more than that, the moment of death."

Yet still the man didn't reconsider his decision not to kill him, even as his belief that the world would be better off with Cyrus dead seemed to only grow in strength.

And when he spoke again, he surprised Cyrus by asking about throwaway word that was effectively the most innocuous thing in everything the boy had just said. "You called them madmen." His eyes seemed to look for something, or perhaps nothing specific at all. "Why?"

The boy frowned and actually glared up with distaste painted clear on him. "And what else should I call them? Evil?" He wondered if ever there would be a time when he could feel, however briefly, and experience emotions that were at least in some way wholesome. It never seemed meant to be. "Evil is to claim dominion over the dead and immediately take steps to ensure that you can inflict as much torment as possible on the souls that arrive in your domain. For any and all slights, however minor. Evil is to thrive on fear, hatred and tyranny even before the portfolio taken from a god twisted you into one of the most dreaded and loathed of all beings in the Planes." Cyrus felt. He felt and it was called contempt. "Evil is to run around shapeshifting into every possible race big and small and take women by force to spread your divine essence in the hopes of reviving later." Because his sight had long ago revealed the mysteries of flesh to him. More than one female seeker had come to Candlekeep that had in the past barely escaped murder after being raped as prelude or even method of murder. "Evil is to actively seek out women already bonded to others just to inflict that extra pain, on them and their loved ones alike. Evil is to do all of that even though there would have been plenty of females of all those races that would have given themselves willingly." His clenched hands were shaking for the young boy felt disgust and everything else he hadn't felt at those realities in the past because back then he could feel nothing at all. "Evil is claiming the portfolio of death from an ancient power clearly old enough to know better than you and immediately decide that all death is and should be synonymous to murder. Even though suffering has nothing to do with the moment of death! People don't fear death, they never fear death, they're afraid or what comes before and what comes after! Death is painless. Death is peaceful…" His voice cracked with the last word but he took a deep breath, then another, then looked at the human again, or whatever he was under that disguise he had on. "Evil is to seek to kill and maim and inflict suffering even when there is no gain worth that death and pain. Evil is to inflict pain and suffering for their own sake! Evil is to inflict suffering on all, even one's self, and feel nothing but relish. Evil, evil, evil…" Cyrus nearly spat that word and started to realize he'd gone on a rant but didn't feel like stopping before he was ready, and this time it wasn't because he didn't feel much of anything. "Evil is to be unwholesome... To have discarded or to simply lack something inside. A lack that makes you feel the drive to steal what you lack from others, or enough spite to begrudge them what you no longer have. Tell me how all or any of that could be called anything other than madness!"

Khelben Arunsun gazed down at him, hand clenched on the Blackstaff at his side but doing and speaking nothing at all. Not for nearly five minutes. Cyrus would probably have returned that stare if the wolf pup in his arms hadn't started to fuss, his strength finally returning after being neglected for so long.

Of everything, that thought brought Cyrus back to the present and he gave the animal a sad gaze. How long would he be able to feel the way he did now, he wondered? Would he get another two months? Would he get more? Less? Barely any time at all? Would it be enough for his luck to swing to the point where he might find himself in a situation that would make him experience that mystery called joy?

Would these feelings be revealed as fake and he revert back to that state when he only felt possessiveness and hatred again?

The many readings of the Tome of Understanding and the Cursed Tome of Everything seemed to finally settle into a fully coherent part of his mind and the boy realized that he'd just made the whole situation about him again. He was as self-absorbed as they came.

How pitiable. "And to think I called your mother a terrible parent…" He murmured while holding the pup in front of his face to look at the whole of him. "Just a few days and I've already outdone her wilful abandonment with life-endangering incompetence." The pup produced a confused whine and licked his nose.

Something flickered inside his chest and he thought it might be affection. The feeling disappeared as soon as he thought about it. "Is this trust you're showing me, little one? Or pity?" The wolf cub tilted his head and whined again. "Or is it neither and you're just behaving yourself because you feel intimidated in the presence of someone with any amount of power?"

"If he does then that means he at least has some measure of sense, which makes one of you," the human finally broke his silence, drawing Cyrus' attention to him once again. "Though I suppose I may have been doing you a disservice in regards to that after all, this whole time…" But the man didn't apologise. Cyrus didn't expect him to, not when the mage still thought the world would be better off with him dead. "You seem far more animated than you were during our prior discussion. Care to explain why? Or was that an act as I believed it to be?"

Cyrus allowed the wolf down to exercise and didn't bother looking up at the man again immediately. "If it was an act then I have been using it all my life." All that magical reading seemed to have given him an inclination for speech rather more flowery and metaphor-riddled than normal. He wondered if it would last or if he'd go back to his stale, bleak/dark/nothing normal self after this internal reprieve ended. "The answer is not that complicated. The dead darkness inside me was depleted somewhat during the past few days and not all of it could return from the tome I altered. It seems to be self-replenishing and self-propagating to an extent, but that tends to happen more slowly after part of it has actually been irrecoverably spent." He glanced down at the fleeting gossamer of emotion that flickered where his aura would be. A reflection, perhaps, of his faint desire to stroke his new pet? To want physical contact rather than just submitting to it from Father because that was expected? The bleak/dark/nothing still nearly covered it up along with everything else. "To think that this is supposed to qualify as divinity." He looked away from his nearly-not-there soul-light and at the wolf pup that was now cautiously sniffing the hem of Khelben Arunsun's robes. Such a quick rebound in comparison… "What an unhappy power."

Khelben Blackstaff almost managed to stay impassive, but instead he finally seemed to decide there was no point to trying to pretend he was feeling or thinking anything other than what he really was. He shook his head and looked at Cyrus with a contemplative sort of melancholy that even came through in his voice. "So as redundant as it may seem to be asking this, you do not feel the urge to go around… exercising your nature?"

The boy's mouth turned in distaste, then twisted into the first smirk he'd ever produced as he looked at his hands again. "The darkness in me may be mad. But I'm not."

"And if I were to tell you that exercising it would make you powerful? More and more powerful until you could do anything you wanted?"

A young dwarf boy stared at the Archmage with something like bemusement. "Is this the part where you subject me to a secret character test shaped as a temptation designed specifically for my supposed fatal flaw?" He frowned. "Would my answer even be valid considering that I'm fully aware of the supposed trick?"

"I would hear it anyway. At this point I think I can manage believing your father's words that you have never said a lie in your life." The man fully forwent his cold countenance for the first time in Cyrus' presence. "You do not seem to believe lies carry any real power."

Cyrus wondered if that really was self-doubt that fleetingly coursed over the man's self-shade.

But the question was more important. Or its answer. "What is power? Maybe that should be my answer. It would make as little sense as anything else can in this world where madness is an enforced part of reality by the whim of some reclusive overdeity." Right then and there, Cyrus Anwar felt confident enough to assume that there would come, in the future, a situation when the only thing he would feel would be the desire to walk up to Ao and punch him in the face. "Gorion has power but he hasn't used any since the death of my mother, save for what he needed to save my life." It was the first time ever he thought of his life being saved instead of the way Gorion murdered everyone involved. "Tethtoril is the mightiest being in Candlekeep other than you right now, but he's happiest when everything runs smoothly and he does not need to use his power at all. He's more than content advising whoever is forceful enough to occupy the position of Tome Keeper at any given time." He looked at the Archmage and saw him looking nearly as spellbound as he sounded when he asked him about justice. "I can't see any death on him, did you know? Only the natural one that will come from aging. Wherever death lines would be are instead Mystra's star, Oghma's shadowy floating harp and even Deneir's holy symbol of the candle on the eye. He's actively protected by three gods and doesn't even know it. He is probably the only person in the world that has absolutely nothing to fear from me. Or from anyone." His thoughts turned to the Keeper of the Tomes then. "Of all the other people with power in Candlekeep, Ulraunt is the only one unhappy with the lack of opportunities to actively exercise it. That he already has the highest authority in the Keep seems to be insufficient for him and, well…" He shrugged and made sure to meet the mage's sight. "Even if there weren't others here like the Gatewarden, the Watchers and the Great Readers, Ulraunt's mentality would have been rendered irrelevant as soon as you came." The boy looked at the man then, and beyond him to the grey/dark/clotted and the lack of that tepid ghost of compassion that had emerged earlier for Gorion but failed to actually manifest for him. "When I look at you, I think that maybe it's not Bhaal's taint that's the issue after all, or not the only one at least."

"And what," The wizard asked slowly, "do you mean to imply by that?"

"You've got more power than anyone I've ever seen," he said simply, then blinked to shift his sight from the shade-self to the man's ancient black eyes. "But you're not happy at all. You haven't been for a long, long time."

The ancient mage stared down at the nine-year-old boy and, for the first time, truly did not know how to think or even feel. "From the mouth of babes…" Khelben Arunsun slowly shook his head and almost failed to internally talk himself into asking that one, last thing. "Is that really all you want, then? To be happy? After everything you've said, after everything I've said and done, wanted to do, is that really all you feel?"

"What I feel…" Only Father usually asked him that. How strange and ironic. How unfair that he wasn't there to hear this most meaningful answer. "I feel that it's a shame that Father's soul hasn't glowed even a fraction like Imoen's since before we even came to the fortress. I feel that it is unfair that the shining light that he would have deserved as an offspring somehow ended up a street urchin that Winthrop only accidentally came upon. I feel that my inability to shine the same way is unfortunate and unfair. I feel that it is unwholesome that I can possibly look upon Father's soul as it is now, dim and desperate, and feel nothing. I feel lightless and nothing when I am too far away from his or Imoen's soul light or any other soul light, and even when in their presence I feel only echoes of what they feel themselves. I feel that it is unfair that I cannot feel any of that, that my soul will only ever be this dark, colorless, dead thing. I feel…" His hands were faintly shaking and he barely remembered breaking eye contact with the man so he could stare at them instead. "I feel terrified that soon this reprieve will end, the darkness will return to what it has ever been and I will be back to feeling absolutely nothing of anything of my own." His hands curled into fists and he felt like he could pound on the walls of the cave until they bled.

But of course he did nothing of that. Instead, he took a deep breath and released it, then did it again and, once his heart stopped pounding, he slowly raised his eyes to the only other living person there. And he already felt himself beginning to once again feel nothing even as the small wolf pup rubbed against his ankles in total defiance of the terror his mother and siblings had felt when confronted with him. There was only him and the ancient man that had asked him Father's question, the question to which he could finally give an accurate answer. "I believe what I feel is called envy."

And finally, finally though Cyrus had not realized he was waiting or even hoping for it, that torpor of a ghost of compassion breached the surface of the man's soul and it was all meant for him.

Khelben Arunsun did not speak any further to him, save for what was needed to get them both on their way. Cyrus did not really pay much attention to his surroundings after that. Not on the long way back to the gates, not while the news of his reappearance spread like a ripple of relief and annoyance, not even while Gorion and Khelben Arunsun had a silent glare match or during those long minutes when Gorion had Amanather, Larth and even Tethtoril check mundanely and magically to make sure he was really his son Cyrus and not some golem or derivative method the Archmage of Waterdeep might have come up with. Khelben Arunsun had been insulted and made no secret of it, but Gorion pushed everything through regardless, and then asked Hull to double-check through whatever questions he could think of.

Gorion took him away immediately afterwards, though he was not quick enough to avoid Imoen somehow emerging from somewhere and slamming into Cyrus almost hard enough to knock him over, babbling about how scared she'd been, how glad she was he was okay, how she never wanted him to leave again and how sorry she was that she'd been the cause of it because she'd pestered Hull into admitting it and what could she do to make it up to him?

Cyrus had told her, truthfully, that he didn't know and that he'll get back to her on that at a later date.

Gorion didn't try to restrict him or ground him or do anything else after the incident, but he never was far away either. He'd always sit next to him or within arm's reach during lessons or evenings in the Grove. And through it all his soul light shone bright for the first time in years, with relief and happiness and what may have been love. Cyrus couldn't really tell, not even then. He just knew it was enough to almost entirely outshine the stark terror that had never entirely left his Father even after they were reunited.

A couple of days later, Tethtoril called him and Gorion to the inner antechamber where Cyrus technically wasn't allowed, since only Great Readers like Gorion or those above had permission for it. Ulraunt was also there, along with Khelben Arunsun, to inform Cyrus that his Cursed Tome of Everything (The name is the Universal Tome of Self-Sacrifice, boy!) could actually be used relatively safely if someone always watched over whoever read it and rationed the time. Given that it was a rule of Candlekeep to have a monk always watch over other readers (seekers especially), that would be easy enough to do. More importantly, though, was that the tome could accurately gauge the physical, magically and mental state and development of the reader and tailor its content to best suit them. It was a bizarre duality that its intended effect was outright divine (Gorion and Ulraunt had glared at Tethtoril at saying that, oddly) and entirely removed from the drawback that the (though no one ever said it aloud) essence of Bhaal (which neither Khelben nor Cyrus himself had brought up with Gorion for as yet unclear reasons) had needlessly imposed on the item. Provided a reader was of high enough wisdom, might and intelligence, the book may even take on the content of the Metatext itself someday, Tethtoril said reverently.

The book would naturally be sealed in the deepest and best-warded inner chamber of course, but they'd called Gorion and Cyrus there to tell them that the worth of the item was such that it had bought the boy the right to live in the Fortress forever or leave Candlekeep and return at any time in the future, however many times he wanted, without having to provide an entrance fee ever again. They would even waive the penalties for theft since it had been Khelben Arunsun that had actually removed it from the crypts in defiance of the young dwarf's promise to the spirits there.

Ulraunt had, of course, glared at Cyrus throughout that whole meeting but that was nothing new.

The next day Khelben Arunsun left after exchanging some strained words with Gorion that Cyrus had not been close enough to hear.

But the Archmage returned four weeks later, the minimum allotted time before any supplicant was allowed to return at all, and he provided the entrance fee – a rare text the Library did not yet have – so none could have kept him away even if they wanted to – which they didn't and wouldn't, given who and what he was.

Cyrus didn't inquire as to the reason why he'd come back, but he found out anyway that very evening when the ancient man came and sat next to him on the bench in the Grove where he was waiting for his father to join him after returning the latest texts they'd been studying.

The man did not greet him or otherwise delay broaching the reason he'd approached him. And it wasn't all due to how they both knew Gorion would not be pleased to find the Archmage near his son for whatever reason, not that soon. "You told me that you never feel peace or anything else as long as enough of the essence in you is not invested or otherwise extant outside your being."

"Yes."

"Like you invested in that tome, however accidentally."

"Yes."

"So, in theory… if you were to carry on your person enough items enchanted to constantly act as a drain on the Bhaal essence, by simple virtue of possessing enchantments 'flawed' enough to require constant fuelling, you could actually live a semblance of life."

"I believe so."

Gorion emerged from the central keep and, upon seeing the both of them there, quickly switched from his normal gait to a barely-qualified stride.

"Tell me, boy, how would you like to learn enchanting?"

Cyrus had long passed the point where he could feel anything at all, but he knew he would be surprised if he could. "I would have to learn magic first." Gorion hadn't said whether or not he would, and he'd have probably consented if Cyrus but asked but that was the problem: Cyrus never asked for anything.

And that was when Khelben Blackstaff finally looked at him. His eyes were searching and his soul as grey/dark/clotted as ever, but his compassion seemed a bit less tepid and his mask a bit less rigid. "Then we'll have to start teaching you magic as soon as possible."

Perhaps his Father was too close to the problem. Perhaps Cyrus was as well. Those were as good as any answers for why the Archmage would offer that. Or offer anything at all.

And even as Gorion finally reached them and drew the mage of Waterdeep into one of those borderline hostile, stilted talks all of their conversations were like nowadays, Cyrus Anwar realized he finally knew what favour to demand from Imoen in reparation for being the source of the chain of events that resulted in that entire mess. Not that Cyrus agreed with that, necessarily, but she seemed to and Hull also seemed to and those two never agreed on anything.

And Cyrus kind of did think that it would do Imoen good if she finally learned her letters and maybe even studied some cultural lore and other various things from the myriad of books that Candlekeep was all about.

So he tracked her down the next day and told her he knew what she could do for him now.

Needless to say, Imoen had totally forgotten about her promise or most everything pertaining to that mess of over two weeks prior. But she was intelligent and quick-minded and had a pretty good ability to recall things herself. And so she remembered soon enough and said ok, hit me.

And that was how Cyrus Anwar accidentally turned Imoen the Magnificent into a bard.

Though how she eventually went from writing a book titled "1001 Uses for Prestidigitation" to authoring a massive tome called "Calimshan Nights," a story about a Pasha's wife with a penchant for telling tales by halves each night, he was still trying to puzzle out ten years later.