Dariven still remembered when he had first cast the spell that encased him in ice. It had been four thousand years ago, during the fall of the last Divine Council. He’d waited to do it, wanting to be certain Magnus had been turned before committing himself to something that might never end. But had Dariven ever been truly certain Magnus had been turned? Magnus had certainly behaved as if he had been, seeming to take great pleasure in slaughtering those of the Divine Council who hadn’t been able to escape – which, as things had turned out, had been all of them save Adarion, who, like Dariven, had fled into the Halls of Twilight and then concealed himself. Unlike Dariven, however, Adarion’s concealment had been powered by his Divinity, and hadn’t required him to seal himself inside of something Hel couldn’t touch. And, because the spell that had encased him had left him all but immobile, Dariven had had the last four thousand years to wonder if he’d misjudged the true strength of Magnus’s character.
Then Thaddeus Alvarem had come. Dariven had known at once that Thaddeus was a Battlemage – and even, perhaps, a budding Nightslayer. By the time Dariven had encountered Thaddeus, Thaddeus had already done much to prove himself worthy of the title, even going so far as releasing the Demon Lords from their prison in the Sundered Halls so that they might finally be defeated once and for all. It had disappointed Dariven, then, when he’d learned why Thaddeus had entered the Halls of Twilight – he had been looking for a way into the Abyss Between the Halls in order to try and rescue friends of his that had been lost, and he’d been so absorbed by the task that he had allowed himself to be ambushed by three Demon Lords.
Dariven shouldn’t have been able to intervene, but, for reasons that, at the time, had been a mystery to him, he had, and the Demon Lords had fled. As he’d confronted Thaddeus following the Demon Lords’ flight, Dariven had learned something startling – Thaddeus had an air of Divinity about him. Thaddeus hadn’t yet begun to suspect the truth about himself – he’d needed something that would give him the spark to harness his Divine nature – and, all at once, Dariven had known that, unless Thaddeus found and rescued his friends, that spark would never come. And so Dariven, doing another thing that should have been impossible for him to do, had cast Thaddeus – who was, indeed, a Nightslayer, much like Dariven, himself, had once been – into the Abyss, knowing that, if Thaddeus failed, all would be, at last, truly lost.
More time had passed – Dariven wasn’t sure about how much, as time flowed differently in the Halls of Twilight, and, reputedly, even more strangely in the Abyss. And then, he’d felt something change – a shift in the magical field that he’d been certain hadn’t happened in millennia. The spell he’d encased himself in had fallen away at the same time, and, for a long moment, he’d simply stood there, utterly stunned by what had happened. With the falling away of his spell, he’d been able to sense something new, something that had, at the same time, also seemed incredibly old. He’d known what it was, of course – hadn’t he felt something similar when he’d first encountered Thaddeus, even if what he’d felt, then, had just been a foreshadowing of what he felt, now? – and the knowledge had made him smile.
It seemed that, once again, gods walked the land. Gods. Not just one, but three. Were these three to become the nucleus of a new Divine Council? Or, as prophecy had once foretold, had the time finally come for the gods to walk the land unfettered? Was the Reforging, at last, at hand? Either way, Dariven had new masters to serve. His purpose had been reborn.
Dariven left the Halls of Twilight. After four thousand years of being encased in ice, he felt, quite
literally, like a new man.
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