The Death of Death

Dalamar had no trouble navigating the Abyss this time. Nothing stirred, and apart from a plethora of huge wolf-like tracks that ran back and forth near the places they'd been, he could detect no sign of life.

The tracks disturbed him. He'd not appreciated before how close to death they both had been, but seeing the enormous footprints in the dusty earth all around the portal, the cave...the Hounds had been close indeed to catching them.

He did not pause to think any further, instead electing to move swiftly across the dead landscape without thought to cover or stealth.

His was a grim, awful task, but he tried not to think of that either.

In his memory, he found a kind of refuge.

Raistlin had been inside, boiling water to make oatmeal for his brother and sister-in-law, and Dalamar was taking a short rest with Caramon on the back porch. He recalled keenly the creak of the sturdy wooden rocking chairs and the smell of the pear blossoms, the crickets in a choir of unseen insectoid joy all along the banks of the mossy cool stream. It was a place of simple beauty, something that he had not experienced in quite a long time.

In the ruby-lemon light from the sunset, Caramon turned to look at him. His sores were not as pronounced yet, and there was still the glow of health around him. But Dalamar had trouble meeting his eyes. He knew that it was only a matter of time, and that knowledge put a painful obstruction of sorts somewhere south of his throat.

"You don't say much, Mr. Dalamar." Caramon said softly. He was smiling, happy in the evening with his wife resting clean and comfortable in the bedroom and his brother quietly making dinner behind him in the kitchen. It was all he had ever wanted. Dalamar suddenly found himself envying Caramon's ignorance of his own fate, his simple desires in life.

"There is very little to say. And simply 'Dalamar' is sufficient."

"You know, I haven't thanked you yet for what you're doing for us."

"It is for your brother."

Caramon laughed easily.

"Yeah, I guess so. But it's still kind of you. All the woodcutting and the heavy lifting and everything...well, I guess I just wanted to say thanks. When we get better, I'll come on over to your place and cut some wood for you."

Dalamar hated this. It was like being skinned alive, this feeling of helpless rage and agony. But why did he care? He chanced a look at Caramon.

"How are you feeling?"

"Pretty much same as yesterday, but a little weaker. Must be some kind of bad flu. I hope I'll be better by the time spring comes. I would really like to go to the carnival."

"To the..." Dalamar shut his eyes, feeling a wave of nausea rise inside of him. It was just too vicious, too cruel, too pathetic to even begin to comprehend. And it was happening all over Krynn.

Something died a little inside him. But at the same time, miraculously, something began to stir to life. It was a warm feeling, very alien and unpleasant. He had reached over and taken the big man's hand briefly in his own.

"When you are...better. When you are better I would like for you to chop wood for my fire. Thank you."

Caramon brightened visibly, and they sat together until Raistlin called them in to eat and the sun went down and there was another day gone. One of only twenty-six that Caramon had left.

Dalamar was sweating, but whether from the memories or from the heat he did not know. By the rotting gods it was hot. Like a furnace. Even the light seemed to be baking.

He removed his outer cloak and wiped a trickle of salty moisture from his eyes.

Wait.

Hot? In the Abyss? It was never hot here. The air was supposed to feel stifling, heavy, neutral, but no breeze or change in temperature ever brought the relief of sensation to the unhappy inhabitants. But now the hot wind moved his robes and dried the sweat on his arms. He looked to what might pass for west in the world above with unerring elvish accuracy.

What he saw there made his blood run cold.

The Abyss was burning.

Roltan deftly shaved the thorns from an alabaster-white rose and added the stem to the six others already gracing the jade vase before him. He fluffed the flowers, looking at them with a critical eye.

"That is quite possibly the least imaginative arrangement I have ever seen. You ought to add a few red ones for depth." Raistlin offered, and felt foolish a moment later for uttering such a sentiment. It was the sort of thing he never would have dreamed of saying a few years ago. Roltan fished around for a bit in the pile of planty delights beside him and came up with a few red roses. He began shucking them, humming tunelessly to himself.

It was ten o'clock in the morning on a stormy, miserable day and the two mages were passing time inside together. Roltan busied himself with one of the few hobbies he had not yet mastered and Raistlin was deliriously copying every spell he could find into the fresh new leather-bound mage books that he'd been given that morning. He could not believe the profundity of some of these spells, really. Carefully written in a clean, neat hand on crisp sheets of paper, each one was a work of genius. It took his breath away, sending him into a coughing fit that brought tears to his eyes. Roltan paused in his flower arranging and trained a keen gray eye on the doubled-over mage across the room.

"Ah. Ah yes, your cough. I really am a bit absent-minded. And you ought to have reminded me, you know. Can you tell me when the symptoms first arrived?"

"Wayreth," Raistlin coughed once more, then seemed to recover slightly. He took a sip of the fragrant liquid that Roltan had brewed for him that first night, which he kept now in a small bottle always within reach, "The day of my Test at the Tower of Wayreth. I think...I think there may be something 'in' me. Maybe someone."

He was embarrassed to relate the truth, the whole horror of Fistandantilus and the viciousness of the Test itself. Roltan came to kneel on the floor at his feet, reaching up to feel his forehead.

"Is there a fever when the coughing fits strike?" he asked. Raistlin shook his head.

"Never. But sometimes they come when I am in a state of high excitement."

"I should like a bit of your blood."

Raistlin had to force himself not to recoil.

"Not like that!" Roltan hastened to add, seeing the look that came into his apprentice's face, "I mean a small drop, to test for this illness. I don't want to treat you for something you do not have. Mage-sickness isn't like a bacterial infection you know. There are things that penicillin just won't touch."

"Penny-what?" Raistlin asked, relaxing just slightly. He was terribly fond of hearing about new cures for old maladies. Roltan waved his question away.

"Another time, my friend. Your hand?"

Raistlin wordlessly held out an elegant golden hand for the necromancer to take, and when Roltan gently pricked his finger and siphoned off a small amount of blood with a glass pipette he did not flinch.

"You say 'mage-sickness' like one who is familiar with an affliction such as mine. Have you seen this before?"

Roltan said nothing, his guileless eyes trained on the microscope he now bent over. It was a startlingly complex device, all shiny metal and glass, covered in more knobs and dials than anything Raistlin had ever seen outside of a gnome's workshop.

"I say, this is a bit off. Do you know your blood cells are being destroyed by something ethereal?"

"If by 'know' you mean 'experiencing vast amounts of pain as a result of', then yes. I know."

"I've seen this before, in Dreamspawn victims. Dreamspawn are nasty creatures that occupy the black places you sometimes see beyond the boundaries of a Gate spell. If one of them attacks you, its darkness can swallow up all of the organic matter in you within a matter of years. What's left over isn't worth carrying home to mother in a thimble."

"Your bedside manner is impeccable."

"I hear it's excruciatingly painful," Roltan continued as if he hadn't heard, "But it doesn't look as though you're a Dreamspawn victim. This is subtler, almost as if someone were directing the destruction."

"Fistandantilus."

"A name I have heard of before. Not a very nice fellow, was he? But I though he had died. Still, I do realize that death doesn't quite have the permanence that we might wish it did sometimes. I can stop this for you. It might sting a bit, but you'll breathe a lot easier when it's over and all those mental blocks will be removed. I daresay you've been held back these long years from your true potential. A bit of pain, now, and then you'll be free."

Raistlin felt a great swell of hope suddenly in his chest. He looked at the feable light showing beneath the ragged clouds out beyond the window and away across the pond. Something big flew by across the horizon, a Drac most likely. He breathed in, held the air, tasted it, breathed out.

"I can be...something more? But I was the very best on Krynn." He stated it as a simple fact, with no hint of bragging.

"How special for you," Roltan replied kindly, patting his arm, "But yes, you can be vastly more. I think you're more talented than you realize."

"Is it possible to become more powerful than any mage who ever lived?"

Roltan laughed, digging through a tattered valise of chemicals for the ones he needed.

"Most likely," he said, turning around with a nasty-looking syringe in his hand, "As I have held that title for well beyond a billion years and am heartily ready to retire and take up flower arranging full-time."

"Where are you putting that?"

"Your arm, thigh, buttock - "

"Keep your evil needles away from my buttocks!"

"For one who has endured the torments of the Abyss, you're relatively squeamish."

Raistlin sulked for a fraction of a second, then proffered his arm and watched with irritation as Roltan administered the dose of yellowy liquid. A fire unlike any pain he had ever felt coursed through his vein, up his arm, and quickly spread through his body. Roltan watched him carefully, ready to catch him should he fall.

"The greatest..." Raistlin gasped, his knees buckling, and was grateful for Roltan's immediate strong hands on his shoulders, guiding him to the chair, "...mage...", and Roltan tilted his head back, peering into his dilated pupils, "...who ever...", his voice was full of elation, and in his mind's eye he saw his mother and his brother and his father and even damned Kitiara all cheering his name, "...lived!"

"Not if you don't settle down a bit," Roltan soothed, "Let the medicine do its work. I am killing off the parasites, my dear friend. You have played host to more than just an ill fate for quite some time by the look of it."

Raistlin shut his eyes, smiling to himself, and let the molten agony of the elixir bathe him in salvation.

Dalamar screamed. It was pulled from him like a worm is pulled from the earth, or a babe pulled from its mother. He had never seen anything so horrifying in all his days, and that was saying something. The sky itself was on fire, ablaze and burning, and how could a sky burn? It was not simply a fire burning 'against' the sky or between him and the sky. The clouds were not on fire. Even that he could have borne, because at least a cloud was a thing and not simply a perception of a boundary where there was none. The molecules of the sky itself, that vast featureless expanse that loomed over all the Abyss and made the world gray and forgetful, the molecules were burning burning burning. It was an unholy sight, this eating up of the heavens. Dalamar wished he had died rather than see it. A roar went up from the flames, the emptiness of a blackness from his worst nightmares that lay beyond the sky and was revealed through the inferno. He forced his buckling legs to move. MOVE! Robes flying, hair flying, satchel clinking madly, tears streaming down his white cheeks as he turned away from the horror and ran like a gazelle toward the far gate. The Abyss, that plane of utter damnation and rage and torment and - oh gods help him - 'familiarity', was ablaze and dying just as all those who made the world safe or unsafe, beautiful or ugly, strange or comforting had died. Could Roltan sing the soul of hell back to its body? Dalamar ran as he had seldom been called upon to run before, and did not stop until his hitching breaths came up bloody.

There.

He fell into the circle of stones, weeping and horrified, and gasped out the words to open the portal from one dead world into the next.

The sky burned fitfully behind him, the smoke stinging his eyes, and he tumbled through into the light of Krynn with the death of death branded on his heart.

Time to find the bodies.