High in the Desertsmouth Mountains, the spire of the archmage Ethric's citadel towered over the treacherous Shadow Gap, looming two hundred feet into the air. The great valley at its feet was large enough to embrace a fair-sized town in its encircling arms: great, jagged ridges of stones that could themselves have been the very roots of the mountain. A smaller keep plugged the only navigable gap into the valley, and a great fissure, dropping down through the earth into a blackness of inestimable depth, ringed the tower itself. The natural moat was spanned only by a single bridge, which arched gracefully from the gatehouse on one side of the gap to the massive entryway of the citadel on the other, passing through the protective shield wall halfway across, which was itself a forest of smaller towers. The entire complex was constructed of a solid black marble, veined with green, which seemed grown more than hewn from the very rock of the mountains.
It gave one the definite feeling that visitors were not, as such, welcome.
Through the tower's highest windows, lights flickered: The normal yellow of lamplight, occasionally interrupted by bursts of an ugly, acidic green that ate at the eyes and was the visual equivalent of a damp finger run around the rim of a glass. Looking into it was like peering into a slit cut into some other universe, one filled with an emerald fire so incredibly hot that it had passed through normal thermodynamics and into the other side of absolute zero. It speared through the night and illuminated the bellies of the thunderheads above, which swirled with malevolent purpose.
Two wizards were having an argument.
"I forbid it." Ethric's voice was flat and hard, like the rock face of the mountains outside.
"You forbid it?" the younger man echoed incredulously. Like his older counterpart, he was slender, but it was the muscular slenderness of a dancer or swimmer rather than the emaciation brought on by eighty years of missing too many meals. His voice matched his figure—a liquid, silvery tenor that any bard would cry themselves to sleep over, rising with ease into the upper registers of finely-tuned outrage.
Ethric's eyes narrowed dangerously. "I will not be argued with, Sandro. I took you on as my apprentice only as a favor to your sainted mother in the first place—how she tolerates such behavior as this in her own home, I shall forever wonder—and you agreed to my terms when you accepted that position. You will study what I tell you to study, when and where I instruct you to do it. I can be no clearer than that, I believe."
"Of course, O mighty archmage!" Sandro sneered. "And shall I lick your boots for you, as well?"
"Scrub those sulfur stains off the floor while you're down there, if you would."
The apprentice made a noise usually only associated with creatures that went around in jungles with stripes on and pretended to be dapples of sunlight on the forest floor, typically near the local watering-hole.
"What do you expect me to say?" Ethric growled back. "If you ask a foolish question, you should expect a foolish answer to be the only kind forthcoming."
"All your answers are foolish, you wretched old hedge-wizard!"
"Tread carefully, stripling!" the archmage barked. "My patience with you is nearing its end!"
"'All things must come to an end,'" Sandro retorted, his tone mocking, "including your vaunted 'patience,' I expect. Bah! You preach and harp upon the values of research, of maintaining a broad range of knowledge—'a wizard is a sage first and foremost,' indeed—and then you propose to punish me for doing no more than following your instructions? Your hypocrisy is astounding, master mine." His voice left no doubt about his opinion of the honorific; it could have etched his words onto glass.
"My instructions were not to seek out the dead for tutelage!"
"Your instructions were to use all the resources at my disposal to advance my training," Sandro countered, wholeheartedly reinforcing all the Faerûnian stereotypes regarding redheads. "What have I done that was so terrible?" he added, bringing his astonishing aptitude for diplomacy into play. "You are liberal with your praise for the other magicks, but a little necromancy and you grow red and flustered as a country virgin on her wedding night! You cannot expect me to believe that you, of all people, have never galvanized a corpse."
"The dead," Ethric grated from between clenched teeth, "are to be respected, and left in peace. You have no idea what sort of power you are dealing with—tapping into the very forces of life and death themselves! In the hands of the inexperienced, necromancy can warp the fabric of existence into something best not contemplated. Whether I have or have not performed such magic myself is immaterial; the issue at hand is that you, of all people, should not be trusted with it."
The young mage blanched as his teacher threw his words back in his face, then responded in a voice so full of venom that he could have spit lacework in adamantine.
"Should not be trusted?" he hissed, a whisper that could make the very rocks crawl off in search of safer pastures. Vicious green light flared up in the archmage's study once more.
"Do you think I have not seen the hunger in you, the lust for power in your eyes when you unroll a new scroll, when you hold a fully-charged wand in your hand? You must overcome your thirst for dominion over the magic before you can be allowed to fully master it—or will I be held responsible for unleashing a black monster upon the world, another dark wizard with a taste for blood?" Ethric fairly trembled with anger. "Look at yourself, even now! See what you are becoming!"
And indeed, as Sandro glanced down with a frown to where the old man pointed, he saw the telltale swirls of green around his tightly clenched fists. Viridian balefire, shot through with black, writhed between his fingers and up his arms like something spawned half of mist and half of dragon's breath, coiling in a sinuous, caressing cloud into the air. Occasionally, a looping prominence would arc from one knuckle to another, like a small sun relieving itself of some incredible internal pressure.
"You expect me to place the power of the Dark Arts in the grasp of such a hand as that?" Ethric said very quietly, jerking Sandro back to reality.
"I expect," he replied, as though explaining something to a child, "for you to allow me to choose my own path. I agreed to be your apprentice, not your simulacrum."
"And as an apprentice, you have failed, so it seems we must try the other."
"Perhaps you should look to your faults as a teacher before you condemn the student for his lack of success!"
"You crave mastery over the soul itself in order to control death," Ethric said coldly, "and that is something, my foolish apprentice, that I will not teach you."
"I seek to avoid death, not to control it!" Sandro snarled. "By projecting your own limitations onto me, you force me to dread what lies ahead—I look at you, withered and dry for all your power, and fear that I may become as you! What good is magic if one can live only through its continued good graces?"
"So," Ethric sighed, suddenly seeming very small and old, "you strive for immortality, then. Eternal youth." He shook his head. "Necromancy is something I will not give you, Sandro—but to live forever is something I cannot give you. You must indeed find it for yourself, and I see now that you are determined to look, even though you shall never find it here."
Both the archmage and the necromancer were silent for a long moment. Finally, Sandro spoke.
"So, then," he said, his hot rage replaced by a creeping cold one, far more insidious and infinitely more dangerous—the anger of hatred, of scorn, of paradise lost. The air of the room quickly became chill with it, and Ethric shivered. "You have nothing left to teach me."
That was all. He turned, moving like some great hunting cat, and strode to the chamber door, his shoulders stiff with the burden of his pride.
He paused in the arched doorway, turning to look over his shoulder with a sinister smile. "I shall tell my mother, upon returning to Shadowdale, that you send her your best," he said by way of farewell, and his tone was somewhere between honey and something dripping from the bottom of a coffin.
Then he was gone, and Ethric watched him go, saying nothing as the door slammed shut with a hollow boom. Where Sandro's hand had touched it, the wood was already turning black with rot, tendrils of corruption creeping through its surface, and the polished handle was gritty with a thick rash of rust.
The archmage stood, pondering the multiple possible meanings of his apprentice's parting words, until he heard the clatter of skeletal hooves echoing up from the rocky valley below. Then he went to the window and closed it, just as the rain started.
He had a rare moment of precognition, one of those freak glances into the realm of destiny that are given only rarely to human beings, but always to small animals looking up at a grin with a striped tail attached.
The future was looking back at him, and he didn't like its expression at all.