Where two great, keen eyes he’d not seen for long centuries suddenly opened in the air in front of him.

Stealing away his breath again.

Elminster gazed into them, dumbstruck. Floating orbs of silver-blue fire regarded him with love and an excitement to match his own. Eyes he’d feared he’d never see again.

Amarune’s body lacked the feel for the Art that his aching old frame had possessed, but strain though he might, he could sense nothing false about what loomed before him. This was Mystra, though the heat in his mind remained a whispering echo of her full power.

Yet Our Lady of Mystery could easily hold back, cloaking her divine might to seem less than she was, and often-usually-did so. The eyes of deepening silver-blue fire were linked by softly coursing threads of the same radiance, lines like lightnings too gentle to crackle or spit, to… things strewn among rocks on the cavern floor.

A gauntlet with gems inset in the knuckles, a wand, a ring, other small items still hidden among the stones.

“Some blood of my mortal self spilled on these trifles of Art in the time before I became Mystra,” came the warm whisper of the goddess, both in his head and filling the cavern as if she were awakening in purring languor right beside his ear. “When you came nigh, El, the nearness of your mind alerted me. I am… preoccupied much, now.”

“Ye collected these things when ye were Midnight?” El blurted, trembling in a sudden chaos of wanting to know so much, yet not knowing what he dared ask. Her love-or at least fondness-was in his head and all around him, But something was subtly different in it, a distance that had not been there once, or rather one that had grown since Midnight had ascended to replace the Mystra his far younger self had first touched and tasted. Gone was the Mystra whose mind would long ago have merged with his to let them converse wordlessly, thoughts flashing.