You are at the forge. You have been here for six tendays, kept alert by the high magicks. Your whole body aches, but especially your hammer arm, but you keep hitting the infused amalgam of unstable pandemonic metals and solanian copper, motes of crackling arcane energy seeping out your pores, leaving your hands blackened, cracked and bleeding, the nerves purring painlessly, nerves your mind mastered centuries ago. You taste smoke and soot and there are a thousand maddening scents of pandemonium pouring from the forge. You blink away the sting of sweat in your eyes and shout the words of power with each thousandth crashing blow of your hammer.
One of your daughters plays sweet music on a golden harp while another sustains your flesh with her healing magicks. All of your children are near you, artisans all, designing buildings, painting your portrait even as you work. Your heart is full of pride, but you feel a great pressure to succeed this time.
The labor continues in an aching blur until finally you call your children to gather around you to see your hard earned success.
"This will be our hope in these dangerous times," you tell them, "The bane of the Phaerimm. Though the Nether scrolls are now long lost, and Ioulaum has left us, I know now that we can prevail." You cannot help but feel pride at the accomplishment of having crossed the great astral sea to bend time itself and risk your soul to learn to make this weapon that will now save your civilization. You feel a great sense of relief.
"Our Gryphon riders will be able to defend our people," says your daughter from behind you.
You're taller than all of these children, a tall man. You leave the weapon in the hands of your oldest son, the architect, and your body shakes with each step, writhing with the sleepless magicks that have kept you going for so long without rest. You dunk your hands in a magical fountain and the blackened, cracked mess of your flesh is healed.
You whisper a prayer to Mystril.
Then the room is upside down, and back, and upside down again, and back. There is a sick drop in your stomach as your palace seems to spin... and then you realize that gravity has taken your whole flying city tumbling.
You begin to utter the spell to slow time, a spell you have never actually cast, one of the two greatest spells you know, of the eleventh tier, the highest order of magic you believe has ever been cast.
Partway through your incantation time begins to slow. Your children sprawl and drift between the floor and ceiling, their bodies breaking upon whatever they hit, while you alone manage to escape the room, out onto your balcony just as you complete the incantation, and in that blistering scrape of a heartbeat there is the freezing time and for long hours you are slowly crushed to death between the surface of Faerun and the floating city you ruled. In the slow agony you are able to fully realize that all of your children, everything you have accomplished, your whole civilization has fallen, and that your world will never face a greater tragedy than this. You regret then ever having forged the mythallar, tearing the mountain from the surface of the world and building your city upon it...
Chananya Mishael Ap V'azariah's Initiation Stone
