Morgan: And, here we go: the final main character has arrived! Wait until
you get a load of this guy. Read about him. Wonder about him. Try and guess
who he is. You'll find out, but refrain from reading ahead; it won't be
nearly as good then.
Chuchiru: He's almost as cool as I am!
Mystery Character: Almost?
Chuchiru: (gasps, prostrates self) I make-a all slave-face, great one!
Mystery Character: That's more like it. Where's my tea?
Morgan: ???
* * *
After he had dried and dressed in more casual clothing, he went to his bedroom and flopped on his massive bed. He enjoyed having the entire top floor to himself, although it was a bit bare, since they had yet to complete the unpacking. After a bit more than two weeks in the opulent house, some of the paintings and hangings were up on the whitewashed walls, and the shelves in the library were stuffed with the Darkling family's books, but that was everything they had gotten around to so far, save the furniture.
The mansion in the Waterdhavian suburbs was four stories tall, with thirty-odd rooms. Ash privately felt that it was a bit ostentatious, but no more so than the other house that they still owned back in Luskan. Every wall, it seemed, was completely composed of plate-glass windows overlooking the ten-acre estate. There were lavatories, guest rooms, game rooms, a ball room, two dining halls, the huge library, a family room and den--even a sizeable office that his father had already laid claim to. His mother had fallen in love with the cavernous kitchen, immediately ordering her husband and son to pack her cooking things in there upon their arrival. Expensive but permanent cleaning spells kept the house in shape, and Aschakha Darkling loved to cook all sorts of foods from Mulhorandi sand ray to Sembian land crab. She was already perfectly at home in the new house.
Ash's own room was the largest on the fourth floor, a huge round affair without a corner in sight; the center of the ceiling sported a skylight that he had already sourly shadowed with a spell, and he even had his own bathing chamber attached to the sleeping quarters. Since he got to do whatever he wanted with all the fourth-level rooms, he had hung his weapon collection of rare swords and various polearms and throwing blades around the circumference of the main room and placed his bed in the center. Pushed against one wall was his phonode system, its sound outlets lined up on either side from largest to smallest; on the other side, his oneiroplate¹ hung framed between a colossal bastard sword and a wicked- looking brandistock. As far as the other rooms, he had only converted four so far: One was his own library, crammed full of shelves and his own substantial hoard of literature. One he turned into his practice room, with his instruments set up at the four corners in separate stations and a heavy silence spell warding the door. The third was his workspace, with a desk for homework, a low table littered with textbooks and reference volumes, and his state-of-the-art machinode² setup, which he had already hooked up to the astralnet. His collection of 'node games rested here in a rack, ordered by genre, publisher, and replay value according to his own personal system.
The fourth chamber was fairly bare compared to the others. It was his studio, which contained only three things, set up in a triangular formation on the white carpet that covered every floor in the house save lavatories, kitchen, and foyer. At one point was his small drawing desk with its matching stool, his styluses and paints tucked away inside along with canvas and paper. Straight across the room was his poetry stand, covered with loosely bound journals full of various forms of verse, from comical to tragic to deep to just plain weird. He treasured his work, and kept it in high regard as a form of art. The last object rested closer to the door and halfway between the other two, a podium whose interior was stacked with writings, and whose surface already held a blank sheet for the next time that the inspiration hit. Writing was his passion, his greatest talent.
As Ashnod lay on his back, staring at the canopy of his black-draped four-poster bed, he felt a presence in the room with him and rolled quickly to one side. Sitting cross-legged in the air parallel to the surface of the bed was a man Ash had wondered whether he would ever see again after the move.
"You followed us!" the young tiefling crowed, bouncing up into a sitting position and kicking his legs over the edge of the bed. His clawed toes barely touched the ground.
"Of course," said the other diffidently, shrugging his pale shoulders. He appeared to be no older than twenty, with a height that surpassed Ash's by two or three inches when he stood. He was stunningly handsome, dressed in ebony Ffolk pants³ that reached from a low-cut waist to mid-calf, a loose, short-sleeved, black silk shirt that was unbuttoned and hung all the way open, and black designer leisure shoes. His waist- length black hair was caught in a tail at the nape of his neck, and there was a black leather wristband around each forearm. His skin was nearly as pale as Ashnod's, fitted on a lithely muscled form that would have sent a nymph into convulsions of ecstasy after a mere once-over glance. Black tattoos showed here and there--Tigerlike stripes around the right biceps, a flame-shaped pattern wrapped around the left wrist, and a lovely black rose that ran from the right elbow to the back of the right hand. Swirling black flames peeked from over the naughtily low waistline of the pants, and set above them was a sunburst pattern around the navel, its rays spreading a minimal distance over the killer abdominal muscles, that matched the midnight dragon that curled across the right-hand pectoral.
The young man met Ash's gaze with sultry, acid-green eyes whose pupils were slit like a feline's. The fire in those eyes was at once cold as death and white-hot with a lust that was openly for sale, although the depth in those bottomless emerald pools was not for Ash. The tiefling's visitor leaned back in the air, putting his hands out behind him to brace himself and causing his already-open shirt to fall farther down his slimly muscular arms at the same time. "Did you think your guardian angel would leave you to fend for yourself in the cruel, lonely multiverse?"
The use of the term did not surprise Ash, who had known this person from his earliest infancy. He had memories of trying to introduce his "guardian angel" to his parents, who merely laughed and accepted his imaginary friend; the young man only appeared to the tiefling, who had thusly learned many years ago not to speak of him to others. He had, however, always thought of him as the divine spirit he claimed to be, since he did not age or change in form at all. He had inspired the young Darkling's own taste in clothing and style of life, and always turned a sympathetic ear to his problems.
"I was afraid you wouldn't be able to find us," Ash explained, though he knew that his friend could read his thoughts as easily as a book.
"Now, what possessed you to think that an angel, of all creatures, couldn't track down and keep up with the person he was assigned to watch over? I wouldn't be much of a guardian if I'd been five miles away at a party that time you were almost run down in the street by that speeding skimmer, would I?"
Ash grimaced, remembering the incident of his early childhood. "So what brings you indoors and away from your tan?"
The "angel" raised one eyebrow, casting a look down at his cream- colored front. "Is that supposed to be a joke?" He scratched reflectively at one smooth underarm with his slender fingers; like Ashnod himself, the man's body was absolutely hairless, save his lashes, slim brows, and long black locks. "I wanted to see how your first day of school went at Waterdeep High. You didn't get picked on, did you?"
"Only once or twice. I actually made some friends, in fact--or, at least, I hope they'll be friends when we've known each other for more than seven hours. There were a couple of teachers I took to rather quickly, as well. They even have a sorcery instructor!" He rolled back and laid spread- eagle on the bed, closing his eyes with a sigh. "I think it's going to be a lot better than the Hosttower."
When he opened his eyes again and rolled his head back to where his guardian had been hovering provocatively, the young man was nowhere to be seen. Ash snapped his head to the other side, coming face-to-face with his friend, who was stretched out on the bed next to him, his head propped up on one hand. The boy let out a breath of relief. "I thought you'd left, there for a minute."
"Never," the angel denied emphatically, his lips quirking up in a smile. "I'm glad to hear everything's going well. I'll check back on you later, kid, but for now I think you ought to take a nap until suppertime rolls around. You look peaked."
"But--" Ash went dead asleep in midprotest as his guardian angel passed a hand over his handsome face, shushing him.
For some time, the man gazed silently at his ward. He shook his head slowly, a touch of sober concern growing in his hot, fathomless eyes. "Sleep now, my little pawn," he whispered, rising from the bed and setting silent feet on the carpet. "You'll need all your strength for what lies ahead, and we haven't much more time. The game has begun, the first move has been made, and we're playing Black."
He seemed for a moment to shimmer, then his form tattered and blew away like a piece of shadowy gauze in the breeze, leaving the room empty, except for Ash lying semicomatose on the bed, his chest rising and falling rhythmically under his too-large black T-shirt and his long tail twitching in time to his dreams from under the black shorts he wore. Only the young man's voice, like a silvery river falling over crystal, remained to disturb the silence, and even that was strangely changed: instead of one seductive voice, it was an echoing chorus of voices repeating the words of the primary tone as he spoke.
"Sleep, my Black King. Soon, it will be our turn, and we have no option save the King's Gambit."
There was moment of silence, then:
"Perhaps we should castle?"
* * *
Ash woke groggily at his mother's call from the dining room on the first floor. Her pleasant voice sang out over the invisible communication spell that allowed her to speak into any or all of the rooms in the house from any location.
"Ash? Are you awake?"
"Yeah, I'm up," he replied, grinding the sleep from his eyes with his white fists.
"Dinner's on the table, hon. Come on down before it gets cold."
"What are we having?" he asked warily. Aschakha was a superb chef, but she had yet to find a reliable market for her favorite ingredients in Waterdeep.
"I just pulled a cloud ray steak out of the oven, and I'm setting sundew on the table as we speak, so hop to it."
"On my way," he chirped, brightening. Cloud ray and sundew was his favorite food, and this was the first time since the move that he had had an opportunity to eat it.
He slid off his bed, racing to the door and pulling it shut with his tail behind him. He vaulted down the stairs to the third floor, disappearing in a whirling blur of shadowy distortion before he hit the landing and reappearing the same way at the top step of the second flight. One reason he liked the new house was that it allowed him something his other home, which had been as big but not as open, had not: the freedom of visibility it took for him to teleport. It saved time and energy, and it was a great way to annoy his mother--she usually choked whenever he just popped into his seat in the dining room, even though she had come to expect it since the move.
As he appeared in his chair, Aschakha squeaked out an unladylike oath and nearly dropped her tray of cloud ray. She gave her husband, who was already seated at the dining room table, a glare full of daggers when he hid his chuckle unsuccessfully behind his hand. They settled down to eat, digging into the tender meat with forks and knives as they spoke about their day.
"I finally finished setting up the furniture the way you wanted in the den," Zander advised his wife around a mouthful of her excellent dish. "I still think we ought to drape those gigantic windows in something besides that spidersilk gauze you hung, though. Even when they're shut, anybody could creep up across the lawn and look in."
Aschakha snorted delicately, sipping her rothe milk. "After all the barrier and maze spells I set up on the first day here? I'd like to see Elminster himself get through."
Zander rolled his eyes and changed the subject. "So, how was your first day?"
Ash sat back in his chair, gorged and with plate empty. "It was okay. I met some people who seemed okay, and there are some really good teachers there so far. The evocation instructor has the same name as you, too. I forget his last name. Orpheus something."
"Zander Orpheus Cain?" his father asked with raised eyebrows.
"That's it!"
"I had no idea he was teaching down here," Zander said with a note of approval. He scratched at his short brown hair and smoothed the goatee that framed his mouth. "I haven't spoken with him in almost thirty years."
"You know him, hon?" Aschakha inquired, combing her long black locks behind her ears.
"Yeah. We were old school buddies when I went to Silverymoon University. We were pretty good friends back then, although he was always a bit stiff. Maybe I'll go in tomorrow and meet him."
"Anything else happen yet?" Ash's mother asked her son.
"Not so far. I've got pretty good classes, and what more can you ask for than that, I guess."
"Well, good. Now, help me with the dishes."
Ash sighed.
¹ The oneiroplate is the standard viewing device. It derived from crystal balls and such, but it looks and acts like one of those plasma HDTVs. ² Machinodes are the same thing as computers, with astralnet, a runeboard, and an oneiroplate for a monitor. ³ Ffolk pants are the same as Capri pants, except that they originated in the Moonshaes.
Chuchiru: He's almost as cool as I am!
Mystery Character: Almost?
Chuchiru: (gasps, prostrates self) I make-a all slave-face, great one!
Mystery Character: That's more like it. Where's my tea?
Morgan: ???
* * *
After he had dried and dressed in more casual clothing, he went to his bedroom and flopped on his massive bed. He enjoyed having the entire top floor to himself, although it was a bit bare, since they had yet to complete the unpacking. After a bit more than two weeks in the opulent house, some of the paintings and hangings were up on the whitewashed walls, and the shelves in the library were stuffed with the Darkling family's books, but that was everything they had gotten around to so far, save the furniture.
The mansion in the Waterdhavian suburbs was four stories tall, with thirty-odd rooms. Ash privately felt that it was a bit ostentatious, but no more so than the other house that they still owned back in Luskan. Every wall, it seemed, was completely composed of plate-glass windows overlooking the ten-acre estate. There were lavatories, guest rooms, game rooms, a ball room, two dining halls, the huge library, a family room and den--even a sizeable office that his father had already laid claim to. His mother had fallen in love with the cavernous kitchen, immediately ordering her husband and son to pack her cooking things in there upon their arrival. Expensive but permanent cleaning spells kept the house in shape, and Aschakha Darkling loved to cook all sorts of foods from Mulhorandi sand ray to Sembian land crab. She was already perfectly at home in the new house.
Ash's own room was the largest on the fourth floor, a huge round affair without a corner in sight; the center of the ceiling sported a skylight that he had already sourly shadowed with a spell, and he even had his own bathing chamber attached to the sleeping quarters. Since he got to do whatever he wanted with all the fourth-level rooms, he had hung his weapon collection of rare swords and various polearms and throwing blades around the circumference of the main room and placed his bed in the center. Pushed against one wall was his phonode system, its sound outlets lined up on either side from largest to smallest; on the other side, his oneiroplate¹ hung framed between a colossal bastard sword and a wicked- looking brandistock. As far as the other rooms, he had only converted four so far: One was his own library, crammed full of shelves and his own substantial hoard of literature. One he turned into his practice room, with his instruments set up at the four corners in separate stations and a heavy silence spell warding the door. The third was his workspace, with a desk for homework, a low table littered with textbooks and reference volumes, and his state-of-the-art machinode² setup, which he had already hooked up to the astralnet. His collection of 'node games rested here in a rack, ordered by genre, publisher, and replay value according to his own personal system.
The fourth chamber was fairly bare compared to the others. It was his studio, which contained only three things, set up in a triangular formation on the white carpet that covered every floor in the house save lavatories, kitchen, and foyer. At one point was his small drawing desk with its matching stool, his styluses and paints tucked away inside along with canvas and paper. Straight across the room was his poetry stand, covered with loosely bound journals full of various forms of verse, from comical to tragic to deep to just plain weird. He treasured his work, and kept it in high regard as a form of art. The last object rested closer to the door and halfway between the other two, a podium whose interior was stacked with writings, and whose surface already held a blank sheet for the next time that the inspiration hit. Writing was his passion, his greatest talent.
As Ashnod lay on his back, staring at the canopy of his black-draped four-poster bed, he felt a presence in the room with him and rolled quickly to one side. Sitting cross-legged in the air parallel to the surface of the bed was a man Ash had wondered whether he would ever see again after the move.
"You followed us!" the young tiefling crowed, bouncing up into a sitting position and kicking his legs over the edge of the bed. His clawed toes barely touched the ground.
"Of course," said the other diffidently, shrugging his pale shoulders. He appeared to be no older than twenty, with a height that surpassed Ash's by two or three inches when he stood. He was stunningly handsome, dressed in ebony Ffolk pants³ that reached from a low-cut waist to mid-calf, a loose, short-sleeved, black silk shirt that was unbuttoned and hung all the way open, and black designer leisure shoes. His waist- length black hair was caught in a tail at the nape of his neck, and there was a black leather wristband around each forearm. His skin was nearly as pale as Ashnod's, fitted on a lithely muscled form that would have sent a nymph into convulsions of ecstasy after a mere once-over glance. Black tattoos showed here and there--Tigerlike stripes around the right biceps, a flame-shaped pattern wrapped around the left wrist, and a lovely black rose that ran from the right elbow to the back of the right hand. Swirling black flames peeked from over the naughtily low waistline of the pants, and set above them was a sunburst pattern around the navel, its rays spreading a minimal distance over the killer abdominal muscles, that matched the midnight dragon that curled across the right-hand pectoral.
The young man met Ash's gaze with sultry, acid-green eyes whose pupils were slit like a feline's. The fire in those eyes was at once cold as death and white-hot with a lust that was openly for sale, although the depth in those bottomless emerald pools was not for Ash. The tiefling's visitor leaned back in the air, putting his hands out behind him to brace himself and causing his already-open shirt to fall farther down his slimly muscular arms at the same time. "Did you think your guardian angel would leave you to fend for yourself in the cruel, lonely multiverse?"
The use of the term did not surprise Ash, who had known this person from his earliest infancy. He had memories of trying to introduce his "guardian angel" to his parents, who merely laughed and accepted his imaginary friend; the young man only appeared to the tiefling, who had thusly learned many years ago not to speak of him to others. He had, however, always thought of him as the divine spirit he claimed to be, since he did not age or change in form at all. He had inspired the young Darkling's own taste in clothing and style of life, and always turned a sympathetic ear to his problems.
"I was afraid you wouldn't be able to find us," Ash explained, though he knew that his friend could read his thoughts as easily as a book.
"Now, what possessed you to think that an angel, of all creatures, couldn't track down and keep up with the person he was assigned to watch over? I wouldn't be much of a guardian if I'd been five miles away at a party that time you were almost run down in the street by that speeding skimmer, would I?"
Ash grimaced, remembering the incident of his early childhood. "So what brings you indoors and away from your tan?"
The "angel" raised one eyebrow, casting a look down at his cream- colored front. "Is that supposed to be a joke?" He scratched reflectively at one smooth underarm with his slender fingers; like Ashnod himself, the man's body was absolutely hairless, save his lashes, slim brows, and long black locks. "I wanted to see how your first day of school went at Waterdeep High. You didn't get picked on, did you?"
"Only once or twice. I actually made some friends, in fact--or, at least, I hope they'll be friends when we've known each other for more than seven hours. There were a couple of teachers I took to rather quickly, as well. They even have a sorcery instructor!" He rolled back and laid spread- eagle on the bed, closing his eyes with a sigh. "I think it's going to be a lot better than the Hosttower."
When he opened his eyes again and rolled his head back to where his guardian had been hovering provocatively, the young man was nowhere to be seen. Ash snapped his head to the other side, coming face-to-face with his friend, who was stretched out on the bed next to him, his head propped up on one hand. The boy let out a breath of relief. "I thought you'd left, there for a minute."
"Never," the angel denied emphatically, his lips quirking up in a smile. "I'm glad to hear everything's going well. I'll check back on you later, kid, but for now I think you ought to take a nap until suppertime rolls around. You look peaked."
"But--" Ash went dead asleep in midprotest as his guardian angel passed a hand over his handsome face, shushing him.
For some time, the man gazed silently at his ward. He shook his head slowly, a touch of sober concern growing in his hot, fathomless eyes. "Sleep now, my little pawn," he whispered, rising from the bed and setting silent feet on the carpet. "You'll need all your strength for what lies ahead, and we haven't much more time. The game has begun, the first move has been made, and we're playing Black."
He seemed for a moment to shimmer, then his form tattered and blew away like a piece of shadowy gauze in the breeze, leaving the room empty, except for Ash lying semicomatose on the bed, his chest rising and falling rhythmically under his too-large black T-shirt and his long tail twitching in time to his dreams from under the black shorts he wore. Only the young man's voice, like a silvery river falling over crystal, remained to disturb the silence, and even that was strangely changed: instead of one seductive voice, it was an echoing chorus of voices repeating the words of the primary tone as he spoke.
"Sleep, my Black King. Soon, it will be our turn, and we have no option save the King's Gambit."
There was moment of silence, then:
"Perhaps we should castle?"
* * *
Ash woke groggily at his mother's call from the dining room on the first floor. Her pleasant voice sang out over the invisible communication spell that allowed her to speak into any or all of the rooms in the house from any location.
"Ash? Are you awake?"
"Yeah, I'm up," he replied, grinding the sleep from his eyes with his white fists.
"Dinner's on the table, hon. Come on down before it gets cold."
"What are we having?" he asked warily. Aschakha was a superb chef, but she had yet to find a reliable market for her favorite ingredients in Waterdeep.
"I just pulled a cloud ray steak out of the oven, and I'm setting sundew on the table as we speak, so hop to it."
"On my way," he chirped, brightening. Cloud ray and sundew was his favorite food, and this was the first time since the move that he had had an opportunity to eat it.
He slid off his bed, racing to the door and pulling it shut with his tail behind him. He vaulted down the stairs to the third floor, disappearing in a whirling blur of shadowy distortion before he hit the landing and reappearing the same way at the top step of the second flight. One reason he liked the new house was that it allowed him something his other home, which had been as big but not as open, had not: the freedom of visibility it took for him to teleport. It saved time and energy, and it was a great way to annoy his mother--she usually choked whenever he just popped into his seat in the dining room, even though she had come to expect it since the move.
As he appeared in his chair, Aschakha squeaked out an unladylike oath and nearly dropped her tray of cloud ray. She gave her husband, who was already seated at the dining room table, a glare full of daggers when he hid his chuckle unsuccessfully behind his hand. They settled down to eat, digging into the tender meat with forks and knives as they spoke about their day.
"I finally finished setting up the furniture the way you wanted in the den," Zander advised his wife around a mouthful of her excellent dish. "I still think we ought to drape those gigantic windows in something besides that spidersilk gauze you hung, though. Even when they're shut, anybody could creep up across the lawn and look in."
Aschakha snorted delicately, sipping her rothe milk. "After all the barrier and maze spells I set up on the first day here? I'd like to see Elminster himself get through."
Zander rolled his eyes and changed the subject. "So, how was your first day?"
Ash sat back in his chair, gorged and with plate empty. "It was okay. I met some people who seemed okay, and there are some really good teachers there so far. The evocation instructor has the same name as you, too. I forget his last name. Orpheus something."
"Zander Orpheus Cain?" his father asked with raised eyebrows.
"That's it!"
"I had no idea he was teaching down here," Zander said with a note of approval. He scratched at his short brown hair and smoothed the goatee that framed his mouth. "I haven't spoken with him in almost thirty years."
"You know him, hon?" Aschakha inquired, combing her long black locks behind her ears.
"Yeah. We were old school buddies when I went to Silverymoon University. We were pretty good friends back then, although he was always a bit stiff. Maybe I'll go in tomorrow and meet him."
"Anything else happen yet?" Ash's mother asked her son.
"Not so far. I've got pretty good classes, and what more can you ask for than that, I guess."
"Well, good. Now, help me with the dishes."
Ash sighed.
¹ The oneiroplate is the standard viewing device. It derived from crystal balls and such, but it looks and acts like one of those plasma HDTVs. ² Machinodes are the same thing as computers, with astralnet, a runeboard, and an oneiroplate for a monitor. ³ Ffolk pants are the same as Capri pants, except that they originated in the Moonshaes.