Fern opened his eyes upon the shore of the Shadowfell.
The battle with Vincent Van Bones was gone. The Necropolis was gone. The pain of death had disappeared beneath the sound of dark water rolling against a lightless beach.
A cloaked figure stood nearby with two ravens pecking at the sand around her feet. When she turned, Fern saw an alabaster face so smooth and still that it resembled a mask.
She regarded him without affection, anger, or surprise.
Fern recognized the Raven Queen.
“Father.”
She asked whether he intended to bathe in the River Styx and wash away his memories, as he always did.
Fern stared at her.
“I’ve been here before?”
The Raven Queen explained that he had come and gone many times. Eventually, each of his incarnations discovered the truth of the soul beneath them. Each learned that he had once been Corellon. Each returned to this shore carrying the grief of that knowledge.
And each chose the Styx.
She told Fern that he should not feel ashamed. Most fathers she ushered into the next life chose reincarnation and oblivion rather than spend eternity facing the children they had hurt.
Fern looked into the black water.
Corellon stared back.
The face in the river was not Fern’s. It belonged to the God of Elves he had spent days insisting he was not, wearing an expression Fern could not recognize as his own.
Fern did not enter.
He sat upon the beach and said that he thought he would wait for his friends to resurrect him.
The Raven Queen watched him.
“Yes. They will try.”
For the first time, something in her attention shifted.
“How interesting. I have never seen you do this before.”
Fern considered the countless lives that had apparently brought him to this same shore.
“Maybe I just didn’t have anyone to go back for.”
The Raven Queen looked across the water.
“Or perhaps it is because you made the choice this time, instead of me asking.”
Fern said that he could not leave the party behind. There were too many battles still waiting for them. The Elves were tearing one another apart beneath the Taimavar, and now that he knew he might possess the power to stop them, he could not abandon them again.
This life would be different.
The Raven Queen confirmed that far more Elven souls than usual had entered her domain during the past century.
Fern’s death, however, was different as well.
He had not been fated to die.
When Behzad conjured the Ring of Creation above Hallowed Falls and healed Dunedrift, he disrupted the intended course of history. Thirty-eight people who should have been dead by morning remained alive. Every breath they took now carried them farther from the lives fate had prepared. They would meet people they should never have met, change decisions they should never have witnessed, and create consequences that had never been written.
The ledger had to be balanced.
Thirty-eight other people would now die in their place.
Fern’s death had been one of those corrections.
Vincent Van Bones may have been a joke.
Fern’s death was not.
Fern protested. The party had already obtained the medicine. They were going to return to Dunedrift and cure the patients regardless of Behzad’s miracle.
The Raven Queen told him that she was not speaking about the plague hospital.
She meant the entire city.
Every wounded soldier who should have succumbed to injuries sustained during Asherdalon’s attacks. Every citizen left disabled or dying after the Gnoll invasion. Every elderly woman whose natural illness should have carried her quietly into death. The Ring had not simply cured the Rot or completed the party’s quest.
It had reached across Dunedrift and denied the Reaper thirty-eight souls.
Chaos would follow unless fate recovered what had been taken from it.
But the Raven Queen had called Fern to discuss something more important than his interrupted death, or even the revelation that he had once been Corellon.
The Paladin of J_On was pursuing Requiem.
Fern swallowed.
The Raven Queen told him that Requiem had to be stopped. The other seasonal Overgods were in agreement.
Behzad must die.
Ancient Laws prevented the Gods from simply descending upon the Material Plane and killing him themselves. Fern, however, was the current representative of Spring. He could return to life, slay Behzad, and end the threat before Requiem could be completed.
If Fern wished to obey the ancient laws while keeping his own hands clean, he could instead command Titus to do it. Titus remained Corellon’s final Cleric. He would obey the order of his God.
Fern recoiled.
He could not simply return from death and murder Behzad. He needed time to think.
The Raven Queen had heard that answer before.
“You used that same line with Saedor.”
She asked whether the additional time had spared the Elves of Dunedrift.
Fern looked down.
He wished he could have stopped Saedor. But Behzad was still his companion. If Fern returned from the dead and attacked him, the rest of the party would kill Fern before he succeeded.
The Raven Queen saw no difficulty.
She was the God of Death. She could command Sindatari not to reap Fern’s soul. The others could strike him down as many times as they wished. Until Behzad was dead, Fern simply would not die.
Fern warned that such naked divine power would only harden Behzad’s hatred of the Gods. Every terrible thing Behzad believed about Corellon and the divine order would appear to have been proven true.
The Raven Queen remained unmoved.
Behzad could be angry in the void.
The threat would still have been removed.
She explained what Requiem would do.
The ritual would bring down the Gods. Clerics, Paladins, Bards, and Warlocks would lose the sources from which their magic flowed.
More importantly, souls would stop passing into the afterlife.
The machinery of death itself would end.
Fern asked why this responsibility had fallen upon him. If the Raven Queen considered Requiem so dangerous, why did she not command Nys, her own champion, to kill Behzad?
The Raven Queen explained that her agreement with Nys granted the Shadar-kai complete autonomy until her second death. Only afterward would Nys enter the Raven Queen’s service. Until then, the Raven Queen possessed no authority to command her.
She had already attempted to recall Nys twice so that she could offer her this task.
Both times, Sindatari had intervened and prevented her death.
Fern again asked for time.
The Raven Queen told him exactly how much remained.
Spring would end in eight days.
Then Pelor would become the Overgod.
If Fern could not bring himself to stop Behzad before the seasons changed, Pelor’s Burning Hate would do it for him.
And if Corellon stood against the will of the Gods, Fern would soon find himself back upon this shore again.
Fern wished that he could reclaim Corellon’s memories. If he understood the life he had lived before becoming Fern, perhaps he could understand the Dawn War, J_On, Requiem, and what the Gods were truly asking him to prevent.
He looked at the Raven Queen and attempted to remember the last time he had stood before her.
Nothing came.
The Raven Queen told him not to try.
The Styx could not be undone. Corellon’s memories and the lives that followed him had been surrendered to Death. Whatever those people had known was gone.
Fern asked what had happened during his previous visits.
The Raven Queen said that during the first few, she had been angry. She had said horrible things to him. She demanded that he return to divinity and answer for what he had abandoned.
Now she felt nothing.
She had already said everything she needed to say to him.
Fern had simply chosen not to remember it.
He asked about J_On. If the Overgods had fought the Primordials in His name during the Dawn War, why did they now stand against His Paladin?
The Raven Queen corrected him.
The Gods did not hate J_On.
They simply could not anoint His Paladin with apocalypse.
As for the true origins of the Dawn War, the Raven Queen could offer little certainty. She had not yet been a God when it began.
She had been an Elf.
When she died, Corellon was absent. No Elven God came to take her soul by the hand and guide her into Arvandor. The God of Death was forced to process her himself.
He became enamored with her beauty.
He decided that her afterlife would be spent as his bride.
The Raven Queen allowed the silence to sit between them.
Then she explained that she stabbed him while he slept and took his mantle.
Fern chuckled.
“As you should have.”
The older Gods might possess answers about the beginning of the Dawn War that she did not. There was also one other possibility.
Corellon had once enchanted his Crown to preserve important memories. He used it while teaching the Raven Queen spellcasting, allowing one of the first Elves to witness knowledge and experiences beyond anything a mortal teacher could otherwise communicate.
If Fern recovered the Crown, he might be able to reclaim a small number of the memories Corellon had stored outside himself.
Fern asked whether the Crown had possessed thorns.
The Raven Queen said that it had not.
Not originally.
The thorns grew after Velatha embraced darkness. The Crown was later transformed into one of the Seven Seals used to bind Tharizdun.
Fern’s desire to ignore the Gods’ judgment reminded the Raven Queen of a former champion.
Ondor Sev had also rejected her advice. His choices had helped create the world they now inhabited, with the Seals scattered and an Aspect of Tharizdun stirring beneath Wolford.
Ondor entered the depths of Wolford seeking the Seven and failed catastrophically. Pride convinced him that the burden belonged to him alone.
The same Pride would destroy Behzad.
Fern grimaced as he realized that every road in the conversation led back to the same conclusion.
The Raven Queen finally acknowledged that Behzad’s death was not the only way to prevent Requiem.
It was merely the path of least resistance, if Fern considered murder an obstacle.
Requiem required all Seven Seals.
Titus already wore one of them: the golden Gauntlet that had replaced his hand and sealed the temple beneath Wolford. Fern could command Titus to invoke the Gauntlet’s ability of EXALTED DEED to destroy the artifact.
The Gauntlet would be gone.
Requiem could never be completed.
Titus would most likely be destroyed beside it.
Alternatively, Fern could recover the Scythe of Penance from the Charmed Cove. Beneath the city’s lighthouse stood an altar to the Raven Queen. If Fern carried the Scythe there, she could draw it into the Shadowfell and hide it beyond Behzad’s reach.
Either choice would make Requiem impossible.
It would also make it impossible to restore Tharizdun’s prison.
Without all Seven Seals, the Aspect beneath Wolford could never be fully bound again. Perhaps the party would one day become powerful enough to return and defeat it by hand.
That decision belonged to Fern.
He had to choose which enemy he would rather face.
Tharizdun.
Or Behzad.
The Raven Queen warned him not to repeat Ondor Sev’s mistake when making that choice.
Before their time ended, she gave Fern one final request.
He was to bring Nys to the altar beneath the Charmed Cove lighthouse. It was time for the Raven Queen and her champion to speak without Sindatari standing between them.
Fern agreed.
The tide began to rise.
Dark water climbed over Fern’s legs, his chest, and finally his shoulders. There was no violence in it. He sat upon the beach as though lowering himself into a bath and allowing the water to pass over his head.
The Raven Queen explained that his opportunity for reincarnation had expired.
He had refused the Styx.
Now he would wait in Purgatory until his friends found a way to resurrect him.
The water covered Fern’s face.
The beach disappeared.
He sank into an endless void of darkness and cold.
The Raven Queen’s final warning followed him beneath the surface.
“Remember. This will be all that is left if Behzad sings that sad song.”