The battle was fought and finished.

Amelyssan the Blackhearted, once High Matriarch and Deathstalker of Bhaal, later traitorous aspirant to her dead Lord's seat of power, lay broken before her throne. Rivers of golden ichor flowed from her body—once so very striking in its malefic splendour, but now a grisly crisscrossing of long deep gashes, her divine flesh parted by impossibly sharp swords—pooling on the floor of the Throne of Bhaal, rivulets running over the edge, dripping into the abyssal depths below.

By decree of the Solar, the winged, metallic-skinned, topaz-eyed, golden-armoured servant of the gods, the contest was over. Amelyssan, she who presumed to be Lord of Murder was defeated, and now the choice belonged to the sole remaining heir to Bhaal's divinity, Amelyssan's conqueror Verona.

"Your destiny is upon you, godchild," spoke the Solar. "Your brothers and sisters who sought your father's power are defeated, and all the divine essences of the Lord of Murder have gathered here, at his throne of blood, which is now yours by right of birth and conquest. You are at a crossroads, godchild… think carefully on which way to choose."

"What are my options?" said Verona.

And the Solar said that Verona could choose to deny her blood and birthright: to give up the essence of Bhaal within her. The throne of blood would be destroyed, and all of Bhaal's evil taint locked away and hidden by the gods, and the Lord of Murder would never rise again. Verona would become mortal, no longer steered by Bhaal's dead hand, free from destiny's design.

Or, she could take up the mantle of her dead sire, and rise as a power among the planes, born anew as Lady of Murder. She would sit upon the Throne of Bhaal as the sovereign of her father's domain; she would be a god in name and fact, in power and responsibility.

But Verona waited with her decision. Instead, she swept her gaze across the abyssal plane, over the starscape that glittered in the distance, and set her eyes upon the distant light in the firmament. A few feet away was Bhaal's throne of blood—a column of light, perverse in its purity—there throbbing with familial power just within reach. And Verona was still silent.

In that long moment, when it seemed the fate of the universe balanced upon her choice, Verona's companions weighed in with their advice. "I be thinking," said Korgan Bloodaxe, the mighty dwarven warrior, "if ye be a god, 'twill be spoils aplenty for the rest o' us. So, quit yer girlish dithering, and say yes already." The drow Viconia, of the noble house DeVir, concurred: "The hargluk speaks truly, abbil. I see little cause for hesitation; choose wisely, and I might be your high priestess one day." Next to speak was the red-robed archmage Edwin Odesseiron: "There is no choice when such power is in the offering; take what is yours (and give unto me what I am long due, oh yes, long due indeed)." And then Sarevok, Verona's brother, dead by her hand but raised back to life to fight by his sister's side: "Godhood is there for your taking, sister; seize it, and become what you were meant to be!" Against this chorus stood a lone voice of opposition: Imoen, Verona's sister and friend since earliest childhood, along with whom she has learned magic and who had shared the road with her the farthest. "Is this really what you want, Verona?" said Imoen. "What Bhaal was is not what you are. I'll support you either way, but if you become Lady of Murder and all, I'll miss you."

"The time has come for your decision, Bhaalspawn," said the Solar. "What is your choice?"

A question in demand of an answer, a destiny about to be fulfilled.

Verona rose to the occasion. "I say no to my father's throne," she said. "No to the essence of Bhaal. No to divinity. I want to be mortal."

With those words, Verona sealed her fate: she was godchild no longer, but a mortal reborn.

She made a gesture and spoke a word, and they all rose into the air, given flight by will and magic, all the better to bear witness to the shattering of the throne of Bhaal. A single swing from the Solar's burning sword was all it took and the throne broke apart, to fall into the oblivion below, taking Amelyssan with it. A great wave washed over them, and Verona and companions were thrown onto the planar currents, soon to set sail for home.

Thus concludes the story of Verona, greatest of the children of Bhaal.


"She said no. She said no? She said no!?"

"She said no?"

"Silence your mocking tongue!"

Milo glared at Morul as the boy let him out of his cell. He'd been reading Volo's biography of Verona all night, which had caused him all manner of confusion and distress. His captor had been born of a god! She had reached such heights of wizardly might that Volothamp Geddarm—acquaintance of such august personages as Elminster Aumar, the Sage of Shadowdale, among others—ranked her as one of the most powerful mortals to ever walk the realms! She had slaughtered her way past dragons, archmages, demon lords, and so many murderous siblings and would-be godlings that Milo had lost count, cutting a bloody swath of destruction through Tethyr as she did, fighting tooth and nail until she reached the throne of blood itself! And then she had refused to sit it! Said no to her birth right! Verona, of all people, had said no!

It was as if everything Milo knew had suddenly been thrown into doubt. He had to re-assess his conclusions about his captor's capabilities, psychology and motivations, and how they affected his situation. If experience was any judge, a side-effect of being in Verona's orbit was to have your entire worldview come crashing down around you about, oh, once every month or so.

One small consolation was that Milo could always amuse himself thinking about Verona running from giant spiders in Beregost.

After stepping out of his cell, Milo addressed Morul, "Well, do you have any insight to offer? Why did your master choose not to assume godhood?"

Morul gave shrug. "I never asked."

"I swear," said Milo in a mutter, "by the Lady and all her mysteries, I've had it with sheepish, spineless, incurious, obsequious—"

As if called forth by Milo's litany of disparagements, Verona arrived in a flash.

"Morul and Mister Tosscobble!" said Verona as the mouth of the magical portal closed behind her. "You're both here. Excellent. I was just going to—"

"Why did you refuse your father's godly throne?" said Milo. To the hells with caution.

For once, the master of the sphere looked taken aback. Whatever else came of Milo's indecorum, that made it all worth it. In the space of time Verona took to decide whether to rebuke him for his rudeness, Milo examined his captor with new eyes.

Today, Verona wore casual robes of colourful make. Like people with the Illuskan look, she tended towards the tall and slender, and her demeanour suggested meekness and humility in all the ways her words and behaviour never did. Her face was open and heart-shaped, her eyes large and expressive and the colour of some pale yellow shade, and her hair an artless sweep of gold-blonde curls. Altogether, Verona had an innocence about her that was wholly incongruous with her character.

And she was young. Unreasonably, absurdly young. Milo knew well the vanity of wizards, so he had given this fact little thought, and it had been crowded out of his attention by other things. But now he noticed, and cursed himself for a fool for thinking it an illusion. According to Volo's book, Verona was born in the Year of the Bright Blade, merely twenty-two summers ago. Twenty-two years old! Even as humans reckoned things, she was barely an adult—younger than Milo even, by almost a decade, and seeing her now, looking as she did, swaddled in colour as she was, he could well believe it.

"Ah," said Verona. A brief glance to Morul, who recovered enough from his embarrassment to return a nod. "You know," she continued, "I'm always surprised when a wizard asks me that question. I really shouldn't be, since it has happened often—even from Edwin, who should know better—but I keep holding to the same assumptions. Well then, let's have this conversation now, and be done with it. Mister Tosscobble, you made a study of religion in preparation of becoming a lich; did you happen to read about the Time of Troubles?"

As far conversations with Verona went, this was going downright dandy so far. Milo had indeed read about that tumultuous period of recent Faerûn history.

"Yes," said Milo. "The gods were cast down from their high seats, made to walk the earth in mortal form. Though greatly reduced in power, they were still mighty, and they soon fell into fighting each other. The realms bled from their struggle, and many gods perished. Myrkul and Moander, Bane and… Bhaal."

"Quite right, however…" said Verona, and then began a chant-like recitation, "'When shadows descend upon the lands, our divine lords will walk alongside us as equals. The Lord of Murder shall perish, but in his doom he shall spawn a score of mortal progeny. Chaos will be sown from their passing,' so sayeth the wise Alaundo." A ghost of a smile graced her lips. "As my progenitor knew well, this was Alaundo the Seer, who spake the truths that became prophecy."

Milo felt the hairs on his gift of skin rise. "So Bhaal knew that he'd die. And you were one of his children, there to ensure his rebirth."

Verona regarded Milo for a moment before speaking again. "Indeed. Things didn't quite go as my dear father had intended. But that's accepted history, as is what followed, the bloodletting so aptly chronicled by Volo. But what interests me, and should interest any aspiring godling—listen well, Mister Tosscobble—is what caused the Time of Troubles in the first place.

"There is a power above the gods. Lord Ao the Overfather reigns as supreme over the gods as they reign over us. No one speaks of him much, because he has no clergy, and memories and written records about him have the curious tendency to fade away. Nevertheless… two gods—dead Bane and Myrkul—sought the source of all divinity, so they stole the Tablets of Faith, upon which the Overfather had written the powers and responsibilities of each deity. When Lord Ao discovered the theft, he called all the gods to him, and demanded the guilty step forward. None did. In his wrath, he stripped them all of their powers, and the Time of Troubles ensued. But why did he do this?"

A brief silence, and Milo realized he was meant to fill it. "Are you expecting me to answer that?"

"Please."

"I have a hard enough time guessing your motivations, never mind those of the gods and whatever stands above them."

Milo's statement elicited no response from Verona. She just looked at him as she had before—cordially and attentively—and she kept looking at him that way for a long moment that seemed to go on forever. Verona was often at her most eloquent when she said nothing, and now her silence made Milo feel very much like the small-minded insect she likely thought he was.

Eventually, mercifully, Verona stooped to speak again.

"I'll tell you then. Lord Ao made the gods flesh to remind them whence their authority derives: their mortal worshippers. The Tablets of Faith held no power, but in stealing them, the gods showed they had forgotten this. To wit, gods aren't mighty unto themselves, but by the sufferance of the rabble who pay them homage.

"So, I can understand why someone like my brother Sarevok—a more formidable warrior the realms have never seen—why someone like him would aspire to godhood. For all his undoubted prowess, Sarevok knows only one thing well: how to swing a sharp metal stick around. He's not unlike a barbarian chieftain, which is all what the gods really are, if you think about it, just in greater proportion. Similarly, I see why priests and clerics might dream of sometime rising to become deities—all their lives, they've been grovelling before the gods, begging them for scraps of their might—'tis the only concept of power their piety-poisoned minds can grasp.

"But why should wizards be content with such? We who command the very forces of reality, who dictate terms to the universe, whose power comes not from undeserved blood, dumb muscle or blind faith, but from our own sovereign minds, why should we wizards be satisfied with the paltry potency of mere gods?"

Inspiring as he found Verona's megalomaniacal declamation, Milo had to raise a point of protest. "Are you not forgetting Mystra, the goddess of magic, who wove the Weave from which all our magic springs?"

"I am not," said Verona, with the air of someone who had anticipated this exact question. "How goes your study of the spell I gifted you?"

The spell that let you do the impossible: use magic in an anti-magic zone. Alas, the complexity of the spell was commensurate with its reality-defying effect.

"I know that it belongs to the school of evocation, and that's about it," said Milo.

Something dangerous flashed in Verona's eyes, and she made an odd staccato movement—barely noticeable, but for Milo's unnaturally keen eyes—as if she had paused mid-action, only to resume a sliver of a second later. And then she sighed, and the tension went out of her. Milo was left with the oddest feeling that a moment of great peril had come and gone.

"Doesn't it ever tire you, being so cringingly timid?" she said. "I know it does me. Why don't we try something different, for a change? Perhaps you could scare up some logic from whatever passes for your brain nowadays? Tell me what the existence of this spell implies." (Or, as the implication seemed to be, 'Prove your mind is worth more to me than your body is as a test-subject.')

Milo had to force himself not to respond with a sarcastic rejoinder, and instead turned his mind to thinking. Given Verona's insistence that the spell was significant, within the context of a discussion of wizards and their reliance on the goddess of magic, a possibility occurred to him.

Raising his hand, Milo said, "A question. Does this spell work where the Weave is wounded, where magic is absent and not merely blocked as it would be in an anti-magic zone?"

Verona lips twisted into a smile. "It works in both," she said, to which Milo's conclusion followed,

"Then when the wizard casts this spell, he weaves a Weave anew—the tapestry will soon unravel, I think, but as long as it coheres, it supports the casting of other spells, even in places where magic is dead or blocked—an act of magical creation not of Mystra's doing."

Milo kept his hand raised, for he was not done.

"Furthermore, you said before that this spell was the 'least solution to the problem,' which I now understand to be a wizard's dependence on the gods. And that's your project to solve and the purpose of the planar sphere both."

Turning to her apprentice, who was himself listening in rapt attention, Verona said, "See Morul, I knew adding him to my collection would be worthwhile." Then, to Milo, "Do you think yourself ready for the higher mysteries, Mister Tosscobble? Follow, both of you."

After a short walk, they arrived at a chamber in the sphere Milo had not visited before. The space was like the interior of a large dome, and at its centre was an obsidian globe the size of an elephant. Arcane energies took shape around the globe and whizzed around it in tight orbits, casting the chamber in a dim light. At first glance, the floor, walls and ceiling of the chamber seemed uniformly dark, but upon closer inspection Milo noticed that it was an abstract mosaic of whorls and lines.

"This is where we held the graduation ceremony!" said Morul. "I was standing here, with Larz and Nara. Masters Teos and Williamson were there over by the globe, and Master Verona next to them."

It was a grander space than Oriseus's office, where Milo received his own Cowled Wizard credentials, that's for sure.

"This is the entrance to the sphere's true interior," said Verona.

Milo looked around. "I don't see a door." He looked to Morul, who seemed as lost as Milo.

"When we walk the planes," said Verona, "things are seldom so simple."

She rested her hand against the globe's surface, closed her eyes, and began a soft chant interwoven with the incantations of all schools of magic.

The effect was subtle at first. Just a breeze that tickled on the edge of perception.

Then the mosaic, previously so indistinct, began to come together into shapes, resolved almost to the point of recognition.

And then the floor, ceiling and walls fell away.

All around them was a vastness, multifarious in its extravagance. Milo could see verdant forests, and mountains that stretched up into the sky and beyond. There were oceans large enough to swallow planets, and chasms that seemed to go on forever into unfathomable depths. In the distance, he spied a gleaming city raised high upon a hill, and just below it, a world of marble disciplined into the shape of palaces aglow with splendour. Strewn about were windswept vistas of endless winter, lakes of fire and rivers of blood, battlefields upon which great armies clashed in never-ending wars. From the ramparts of a ruined castle, a mad ruler surveyed his dominion, a desolation as far as the eye could see. At the centre of a great web woven from strands of void and woe, a spider was attended to by a court of swindlers and lickspittles. This there was, and more, much more

"What is this? Where are we?" said Morul, his voice sounding so small in this place.

Verona was no longer chanting, no longer holding her hand to the surface of the obsidian globe, which instead now held the three of them in its orbit. Somehow they were at the centre of this totality, while at the same time floating high above it. Verona did not seem to have heard her apprentice's question, so Milo was moved to speak.

"This… I…" Such was his distraction he seemed to have been robbed of all his reason. But he marshalled his thoughts, and recognition trickled into his awareness. "I believe this is the planes we're seeing; the world tree of Toril."

Yes, he could he see it clearly now. The trunk was the material plane, somewhere within which was the planet Toril, which had a continent called Faerûn and a country called Amn, the capital of which was Athkatla, the city of coin. Misting around the trunk was the ethereal plane, the world of ghosts, and the plane of shadow, the dark reflection of the prime material. The tree had its roots in the inner planes—the positive and negative of the energy planes, and the air, earth, fire and water of the elemental planes—and from the trunk the outer planes radiated out in great branches, where both gods and devils dwelled.

"This is where we live," said Verona. Though she spoke quietly, her voice had a strange quality: rich in reverence, resonant with the tones of a sermon given in a grand cathedral, delivered by a high priest who declared judgment on all. "This is the province of Lord Ao, where all the gods we've ever known have their own fiefdoms. But this is not all there is."

Everything changed all around them, as if the sphere had rotated along a higher-dimensional axis. Instead of branches on a tree, now the planes spun on the rim of a great wheel. Within the wheel clustered the inner planes, which in admixture gave rise to another prime material—another world with countries and cities, where people milled about their daily lives. In-between the spokes of the wheel flowed currents of the astral plane, the road that goes everywhere, a great silvery expanse littered with the corpses of dead gods.

"Here, Lord Ao holds no sway. Tyr is not the god of justice, nor is Torm the divine exemplar of valour and chivalry; in this place, Heironeous the Invincible holds those offices, and he splits the responsibility of war with Hextor the Scourge of Battle. So no Tempus, and no Hoar or Helm, either; St. Cuthbert of the Cudgel is their Watcher and Doombringer in one."

A pause pregnant with expectation, which Milo complied to meet. "And here there is no Mystra and no Weave."

Verona continued to speak. "Enigmatic Boccob rules as this world's god of magic, but he can no more deny a wizard her spells than their deity of death can reap all the souls on this material plane. The native wizards tap into raw magic directly, without divine mediation; no need for a Weave, and all our spells work here as they do back home. Stranger still and stranger yet, if we turn our eyes to the hub of the great wheel, we find a city of doors, with portals leading everywhere in the multiverse. All gods are barred from entry by mandate of this city's protector: a lady wreathed in blades."

Again the sphere rotated, and a new planescape came to view, where the prime material floated in a boundless ethereal sea. Another rotation, and the sea was the astral plane, embedded in which were planes of dreary grey and utter black, as well as the mindscapes that formed from the thoughts of every sentient being on the material plane. Then another rotation, and another, and another…

Stretching out on all sides was a grand assemblage of cosmologies, the set of sets of worlds.

"These are just the collections of planes of which I have direct witness corroboration. I have heard tell of other existences, available only if you cross the Sea of Night on the great skiffs that can navigate the phlogiston 'twixt crystal spheres. Ancient lore has it that the illithids arrived on Toril on such vessels, fleeing the dim suns of their dying worlds. Though these sights may seem strange, they are actually close to home, with principles not too dissimilar from our own world. We can strike out a little… further, plot a perpendicular course you might say… and then things take a turn for the outlandish.

"I have seen in my divinations wondrous places, governed by rules we wouldn't recognize. One such place is a reality comprising a material world and a world of spirits, which is also their elemental plane, accessible perhaps via our plane of shadows. In that place, magic is more like a martial discipline, and its mages are sorcerer-monks specializing in one element at the exclusion of all others. That is except for one being, who brings all the elements into harmony within itself, and can therefore wield all of them at once. To think what I could do if I captured such a being…

"But if we delve deeply enough into the most fundamental laws of reality, if we tease apart contingency from necessity, we find that other modes of existence suggest themselves. Some teem with life, however queer in expression; others are visited only by death, with infinities of absence all 'round. The strangest world that I have yet glimpsed during my investigations consists of only a material plane. Oh, to imagine it! There, there are no gods and no magic, only nature's laws working themselves out… yet life finds a way. I suspect that if it were even possible to open a portal to that world, you would be trapped there forever. Do you know this concept I have been referring to?"

This was the first time since they had stepped into the sphere's interior that Verona had directly acknowledged Milo's existence. And while Milo did not know the precise answer Verona hoped for, he was very good at guessing.

"All possible worlds," he said. "The planar sphere is your gateway to all of them."

Verona graced him with a smile so heartfelt that Milo could believe everything would be all right between them.

"Infinite diversity in infinite combination," said Verona, looking into his eyes for a moment, and then letting her gaze wander off into the distance. "Do you still wonder why I said no to godhood, Mister Tosscobble?"

"No, I believe you've answered my question to my full satisfaction."

The silence that followed afforded Milo sufficient time to come to his senses.

He would be a fool to trust Verona's appearances, especially in consideration of what he had learned today. It turns out the Ancient Netherese were wrong: sufficiently powerful wizards are not indistinguishable from gods; sufficiently powerful wizards are beyond gods by weight of infinities. Whatever Verona were really feeling as she looked out over the macrocosm arrayed before them, be it hunger, reverence, ecstasy or indifference, it didn't matter. What did matter was that Milo believed she might have it within her to achieve her ambition. By virtue of that belief alone, Milo couldn't conceive of fearing anyone as much as he did the master of the sphere just then.

It was Morul who eventually stirred himself from his stupor and broke the silence.

"Master, you mentioned that… uh… the room we were in was the entrance to the sphere's interior… But this is… Do you mean to suggest…"

"When we walk the planes," said Milo, in echo of Verona, "things are seldom so simple." He then spoke to her, gesturing at the vastness around them, "This is not a true image, is it?" ('…much like some of the other things you've shown,' Milo left unsaid.)

"No," said Verona. "But it is a reconstruction, not a pure fantasy. It will look something like this when all works as it should. To navigate the planes, the sphere requires part of a creature that can naturally move between realities; the more powerful the creature, the better. Some of this picture, and the pictures you've seen painted here, I've wrung from the demon heart we procured yesterday, after I fed it into the sphere's machinery. The Blood War spans many universes. Nevertheless, much remains to be done until the sphere is fully functional once again."

She turned to the obsidian globe and placed the palm of her hand against its surface. When she did, the planescapes blurred out, and the three of them were back in the dimly-lit dome in the planar sphere, standing on the darkly mosaicked floor as before. If there had been a moment of warmth earlier, it had left Verona by then, for she gave Milo and Morul a look that promised that she was no more forgiving of their flaws now that she had taken them into her confidence.

He could live with uncertainty no longer. "And what becomes of me?" said Milo. "How do I fit into all this?"

At first Verona seemed sincerely puzzled at the question, as if the concept of taking into account any perspective other than her own was unfamiliar to her. But the confusion didn't last long, and she took on her usual habit of haute amusement.

"How and where you fit or not, Mister Tosscobble, is entirely your choice. I find that people fit easily into categories. There are those who are friendly, and those who are not. Those who are powerful, and those who are not. Those who are useful, and those who are not. Why, there are even those who are such that others would go to great lengths to save them if there was even the slightest chance they were in danger… and then there are those who are not. It would behove you to contemplate which categories you fit, how you fit into them, and with respect to whom."

Verona then vanished into thin air, as she was wont to do when she had nothing more to say, leaving Milo and Morul to figure out their place in the grand scheme of things.


AN: I have now written a detailed outline for the remaining chapters of this story. Readers should expect somewhere around three to four additional chapters (perhaps five), and then Milo's tale will have been told.

I am however in some need of feedback. In vain I have prodded people in meatspace to read and critique, and I have been denied. So I reach out to you, my hordes (I wish!) of loyal readers: if anyone should be interested in being a beta reader for this story (both retroactively and/or proactively, their choice), please send me a PM and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

The spell Verona and Milo were talking is not something I invented, but exists in a sourcebook. Kudos to Dungeons and Dragons nerds who might have known what spell I was referring to.

Thank you kindly for reading.