04 Extinction by Forgotten Realms

Author:Forgotten Realms [Realms, Forgotten]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-04-10T15:56:44.702000+00:00

Later still, when Ryld had indeed slipped into Reverie, Halisstra stared at him. He sat cross-legged, his eyes closed. His hands were crossed on the scabbarded blade of Splitter, but otherwise he looked like a vanquished warrior, his armor strewn about him and his weapons cast aside. Sighing, Halisstra leaned back against a wall of the ruin and settled into Reverie herself. Her muscles were already loose and relaxed, and so it took but a moment for the familiar wash of memories to claim her. She drifted with them, observing with detachment as her mind skipped from one to the next, like a stone skipping on water. Memories of the first day of her service in the temple of House Melarn and her instructors caning her palms until they bled after she mispronounced the words of the daily prayer. And of the satisfaction Halisstra had felt the next day, when she was called to lead the prayer--and did so with a precision that earned a brief smile from the priestess who had beaten her. Memories, too, of the footraces she and her sister Jawil had run, as children, along the roads of Ched Nasad--and the terrifying plunge after Jawil had pushed her over the edge in retaliation when Halisstra at last won a race. Only the fact that Halisstra had "borrowed" an aunt's House insignia--one that provided levitation magic--had saved her. Later, Jawil had said that she'd known about the insignia all along. Those older, well-visited memories jostled against newer, fresher, somehow cleaner ones. Of the night she had been lifted from the cave and embraced by the priestesses of Eilistraee. Of the fierce joy she'd felt after defeating the phase spider. Her mind even drifted over brand - new memories that were only then being engraved upon her soul. All of the other males Halisstra had lain with had been eager, yes, but an undercurrent of fear ran just beneath the surface of their lust. Perhaps it was because they knew they were being taken by a priestess of Lolth and feared that Halisstra, like the spiders she held sacred, might casually kill them and cast them aside. When she had first started kissing Ryld, Halisstra had seen a fleeting trace of that fear in him, but then it had disappeared. At some point during their lovemaking, he had surrendered--not to fear, or even to Halisstra, but to something larger. It was not so much that she had taken him. Instead he had given himself. That realization acquired, Halisstra's mind drifted on to other recent memories. One of them, harsh and insistent, rose to the fore: Seyll. Or rather, her death at Halisstra's hands. Strangely, that image was garbled. Halisstra's memory of Seyll, dying, blood leaking from her side into the stream in which she lay had somehow become confused with that of Seyll in the moment just before she died, when the priestess had turned and was reaching out with both hands, preparing to help Halisstra cross the stream.

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