The crawling lightning reached the cavern’s far wall, the rock surface suddenly sparkling as if holding a thousand little stars. Through the curtain came the undead liches moving into a semi-circle before Hephaestus. They prayed in their ancient and long-forgotten languages and kept their horrid visages low, directed humbly at the floor.

He could command them, Hephaestus realized, but he chose to let them grovel and genuflect before him, for the beast was more concerned with the wall of blue energy dissecting his cavern.

What could it be?

“Mystra’s Weave,” the liches whispered, as if reading his every thought. The Weave? Hephaestus thought.

“The Weave … collapsing,” answered the chorus of liches. “Magic … wild.”

Hephaestus considered the wretched creatures as he tried to piece together the possibilities. The apparitions of the Crystal Shard were the ancient wizards who had imbued the artifact with their own life-forces. At its essence, Crenshinibon radiated necromantic dweomers.

Hephaestus’s gaze went back to the curtain, the strand of Mystra’s Weave made visible, all but solid. He thought again of his last memories of sight, when he had brought forth his fiery breath over a drow and an illithid, and over the Crystal Shard. Dragonfire had detonated the mighty relic and had filled Hephaestus’s eyes with brilliant, blinding light.

Then a cold wave of emptiness had slain him, had rotted the scales and the flesh from his bones. Had that spell … whatever it was … brought down a piece of Mystra’s Weave?

“The strand was here before you breathed,” the apparitions explained, reading his thoughts and dispelling that errant notion.

“Brought from the first fires that shattered the shard,” Hephaestus said.

No, Yharaskrik said in the dragon’s mind. The strand released the necromancy of the ruined shard, giving me sentience once more and reviving the apparitions in their current state.