Give me your hand
out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.

- Pablo Neruda

~*~
Chapter 50: Sorrows
~*~

I sat on a molded plastic chair in a hospital waiting room and stared at the cup of bad coffee I held clasped between my knees. My armor and gear were back. I'd thought them back. Not that it did me much good. "I hate mindflayers."

Valen sat in the chair next to me, perched on the edge as if he wasn't sure it would hold his weight. Despite the ridiculousness of his position, his expression was so grave that I wasn't even tempted to laugh. "So do I."

I wasn't sure if he understood. "No, I mean, I really hate them." The feeling boiled in me, hot and black. I didn't think I had ever felt hatred like this before. The closest I'd come had been for that albino-eyed bitch. Heurodis and Valsharess didn't even rate. They'd only tried to kill me. This was torture. It took all of my self-control not to smash the coffee cup, scream, throw it, pick up the chair I was on and hurl it through a window. "Why is it doing this? Why not just kill us?"

Valen's voice was bleak. "Because we have made it angry with our refusal to bend, and now it wants to break us."

Us. That just made it all the worse. It wasn't just me suffering. It was Valen, who'd already suffered so much. My hands tightened into fists. Cardboard collapsed. Lukewarm coffee sloshed all over my fingers, the floor, my pants. I snarled a curse and threw the cup across the room. It left a crazy comma of coffee on the wall, a feeble punctuation to my rage, then fell far too lightly to the floor.

Valen put out a belaying hand. "Steady."

I had dream coffee all over me. I yanked some dream tissues from the dream box on the dream end table and tried to mop up the dream mess. "Damn it."

Valen didn't touch me, like the last time had burned him, but he spoke soothingly. "It wants to break us, but it shall not succeed."

How could he be so calm? I wadded the tissues into a ball and threw them away. "Don't give me that," I snapped. "It's already succeeded."

Valen's eyes snapped blue fire back at me. "We are still alive, are we not?"

At least some things were constant – no matter how bad things got, no matter how much shit life threw at us, Valen could always find a way to argue with me. "Alive, and trapped like rats in a maze," I shot back. Tears burned in my throat. I swallowed them back. Tears were a luxury I couldn't afford right now. "Every door we take just leads to another door, and behind every door is more shit."

Valen frowned down at the floor between his feet. "True." He leaned back – cautiously - and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Perhaps…perhaps we are looking for the wrong kind of door."

Well, he was from the City of Doors, so if anybody would know doors, it would be him. I bit my lip. "Okay. I'm listening."

The tiefling rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "In the Abyss, everything is a blood sport, and mercy is an alien concept. Tanar'ri feed on the fear and pain of their victims as much as their flesh, and there is no better way to instill fear than to chase and to harry and bleed them, just a little at a time."

"If this is you trying to cheer me up…"

"No." A tail thwapped the chair leg irritably. "This is me trying to make a point. If you will allow me…?"

I gritted my teeth. "Fine. What's your point?"

"My point is that demons' prey are certainly doomed as long as they play the demons' game – but if the prey remembers that it, too, has claws and teeth, it so happens even demons can bleed." The summer skies in Valen's eyes had taken on a wintry chill. "Even demons can die. Not easily. Not cleanly. But they die."

I wondered if the Elder Brain was listening. It probably was, which begged the question of why it was letting us even have this discussion. Maybe it didn't care. Maybe it figured there was no way we could hurt it. Maybe it amused it to let us hope. My fingers twisted together until they went white. "Demons are tough to kill."

Valen's smile suddenly seemed to be mostly incisors. "So are we."

We. I stared down at my hands, feeling the shape and weight of this strange new 'we' settle into my head. "You think we should stop running and start fighting."

Valen cocked his head at me. "Don't you?"

My nails dug into my palms, and I pictured them…different. Sharper. Longer. Blacker. "Yes."

The tiefling's voice was soft and fierce, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the quiet ones you really had to look out for. "Then I say we fight."

An image flashed through my head – a hand, clutching something that was now a lightning bolt and then a sword. Part of me was terrified of it, and what it represented. The rest of me...

My heart pounded, and a tingling flush ran over my skin. "I want blood. Lots of it."

Valen's eyes flashed red. "Yes."

"Is that so wrong?" I couldn't tell anymore. "Is it wrong for me to feel like this?"

The tiefling hesitated, then shrugged. "I do not know, but if you are wrong, then so am I."

That was good enough for me. "All right. Let's do this." I pictured Enserric. Not the sword, or the mimir, but the man I'd glimpsed in Lomy's cage, because nothing I'd seen in that place was anything I'd soon forget. "Enserric," I called. "Get your ass over here."

The air in front of me blurred, then began to take shape. First it took on the silhouette of a man. Then it gained color, but it was all in gray. Then it gained depth, and then Enserric was there, not in some guise but as I remembered him in that cage – tall, undernourished, with steel gray eyes, longish black hair with gray wings at the temples, and a face like a thoroughbred. Currently, the expression on that face suggested that somebody had been pissing in his hay. "Are you out of your mind?" he demanded, without any preamble.

I pictured Silent Partner, and it appeared in my hands. 'So, you've been listening, have you?"

"I have, and I think that going up against an Elder Brain is an abominable idea."

"We are already up against an Elder Brain," Valen put in grimly. "We did not start this fight. All we can do is try to end it."

"You can certainly try, young man." Enserric sniffed. "Succeeding, however, is another matter entirely."

I angled Silent Partner so that its tip was pointed at Enserric like a stern finger. "You said it can't get at your mind, and as long as our minds are connected, you can protect mine. Won't that give us an edge?"

Enserric frowned. "It may." The sword/mage/spirit crossed his bony arms over his bony chest, tapped his foot, thought a minute, and sighed. "Very well. For the record, I think this is a very dicey gambit, but if both of you are convinced…" He trailed off meaningfully.

I exchanged glances with Valen. The tiefling's baby blues held nothing but rock-solid certainty, so I looked back to Enserric and nodded. "We are."

Enserric sighed. "Very well. I shall do my best to aid you, wielder."

"That's mighty kind of you."

"Not particularly. I simple have no desire to spend the next eon gathering both dust and slime, and I would rather go back to staring at my own corpse than at some giant, ill-tempered cerebellum."

"Fair enough." If I were him, I'd feel the same. "Which way, then?

Enserric looked around, frowning. "This way," he announced, and led the way down the hall, his robe fluttering around his bony shins.

We strode down the hospital hallway, Enserric in the lead with me and Valen shoulder-to-shoulder behind him, weapons in hand. Dream-nurses and dream-doctors saw us coming, shouted, and dove for cover.

I looked at the fleeing crowds. "I swear this didn't happen last time."

Valen frowned. "We can obviously alter some things."

Enserric looked over his shoulder. "You are rewiring your neural circuitry," he said, as if it should be so obvious. "Altering your memories, if only temporarily."

I scowled. The terminology he'd used was decidedly not local. "Have you been visiting my memories of science class again?"

Enserric snorted. He swept around a corner, his robes hitched to his knees and pinched between his fingers, like a little girl gone picking wildflowers in a meadow. "Now, now," he chided. "Do not be unreasonable. I take pains not to venture into thoughts you consider private, but given your indifference to your own education, I felt there was no harm in taking a peek." His lips formed a thoughtful moue. "And some aspects of your world truly are fascinating. The theoretical implications alone…" We reached the end of the hall, where there was a lone door. Enserric stopped, inspected it, and nodded. "A-ha! In here."

I eyed the doors. "The janitor's closet?"

Valen scoffed. "And you were complaining about the arena access through the bathrooms."

I scoffed back. "That's different. Your world is weirder than mine."

Valen's gaze swept all the beeping machinery that lined the hospital's hall. "I beg to differ."

Enserric opened the broom closet, looked in, then nodded. "This looks like it will lead to our quarry," he said, of a room full of cleaning supplies and spare lightbulbs. He stood aside and bowed. "After you, my wielder."

It was probably time to give up trying to make sense of any of this. "All aboard who's coming aboard," I said, and stepped into the broom closet.

My feet hit something mushy that stank of rotting vegetation, rust, ash, and corpses.

I stared around me, my heart sinking. We were on a loamy hillock in the middle of a vast swamp that rolled out beneath a black sky. The air was cold, but the ground was warm. Heat, steam, and an eerie red glow all rose from it. The light was dim, but so diffuse and pervasive that it turned the whole horizon red.

I turned. My boots squelched, and the sound travelled unnaturally far, like the air was too thin to resist the sound's passage. I felt unnaturally light, too, as if the gravity here didn't work quite the way I was used to.

In the distance loomed shadowy lumps that might have been mountains. A dark sheen and a faint burble hinted at the presence of moving water somewhere. And then there were other, more troubling sounds – drumbeats, screams, explosions, crashing metal, breaking wood. It sounded like there was a war going on, some miles distant.

I looked up. There were no stars. No sun. No moon. Just an empty black sky and a bloody horizon.

I lowered my eyes from the horizon. An obelisk stood on a hillock maybe half a mile away. It was big and black and thin, like a needle. Strange figures glowed, eerie carvings for which the word 'eldritch' had probably been invented.

I lowered my eyes further. An empty skull stared back at me, and when I looked, I saw more still, skulls and bones and rusting weapons and standing stones rising from the mud and stagnant water like the bones of dead cities.

I tore my eyes away from the graveyard sight and shivered. On top of everything else, the air had a sharp chill, and it tasted like rust, or maybe blood. I would have liked to run, but there was nowhere to run, so I turned to Valen instead. "Uhhh. Valen?" The sound of my voice traveled strangely, too. "Where are we?"

Valen took one look around us and started laughing – not like this was funny, but like it really wasn't funny at all. "Tarterus."

That word meant nothing to me. "Come again?"

"Carceri." Valen's voice was rough, and he had to stop to rub his eyes. "The Red Prison. We are on the first layer. Othrys. A borderland, between the Nine Hells and the Abyss." His lips twitched. "It is one of the main battlegrounds of the Blood War."

Now, those words - those words meant something. They meant something very, very bad. "Oh, shit."

"Yes." Valen chuckled in an unsteady way that sounded disturbingly close to a giggle. "Those are the first words of every poor sod who gets hipped in Carceri. Well done. We shall make a planar of you yet."

I eyed him. That laughter didn't sound so much like humor as hysterics. "Are you okay?"

Valen hiccoughed. "No."

At least he was honest. I put a hand on his shoulder. It took an effort not to yank my hand away. His mithril had vanished, to be replaced with a black-iron breastplate with spikes. Whatever his new armor was made of, it felt awful – cold and slick and just plain wrong. It didn't belong on him. Not the Valen I knew. "Stay with me, sunshine. This is just another memory."

Valen visibly got a grip on himself, although there was something in the way he tightened his jaw that suggested he was trying to keep his teeth from chattering. "Yes. Just a memory." He looked around, and his frown deepened into perplexity. "But…is this truly my memory? I do not recognize it."

There were splotches of gray void all over this place – not just holes, but vast, sucking pits that swallowed huge swathes of the landscape. I decided not to point them out. Just because years of trauma had turned portions of Valen's brain to Swiss cheese was no reason for me to rub his face in it. "Well, whatever it is, something tells me we shouldn't hang arou-" I stopped dead. Valen was staring at something behind me. My blood curdled. "V-valen?"

Wordlessly, and without taking his eyes off of whatever he saw, Valen reached out, put his hand on top of my head, and rotated my head about forty-five degrees to the left.

The horizon had darkened. At first, it seemed like the steam had thickened. Then it took on the shape of an army.

The infantry was made of fleshy, oozing blobs. I could hear them blubbering and moaning from here. Still, they moved in strange concert, as did the other things in that army. There were almost-human things with barbed pikes, gaunt figures with so many spikes they looked like porcupine corpses, things like gargoyles and things like flies and things that defied description, but the thing that struck me most of all was the eerie, silent discipline with which they all moved, marching in time with the drumbeat. I'd have expected the armies of Hell to be a mess of blood and screaming, but this one acted like it was on a mission.

Valen's voice was distant, thoughtful. "Oh. Now I remember."

Now he remembered? I gaped at the oncoming army. "What the fuck is that?!"

The tiefling's weapon was in his hands. "Those are baatezu troops." His face was chalk-white, his eyes red-tinged. "And this was the first battle I ever faced. It has featured in my nightmares...too many times to count." He had to pause and swallow before going on, his voice diamond-hard. "I suppose it should be no surprise that the Elder Brain would try to shake me with this." His hand tightened on his flail. "It shall not succeed."

I wished Valen sounded more convinced and less like he was trying to convince himself. "Good, 'cause we need to leave. Now." I couldn't take my eyes away from that army. "Enserric!" My voice was shrill with panic. "Where the hell are you?!"

The dead mage appeared next to me with a pop. "Hah! An apropos choice of words, all things considered," he said, with totally inappropriate joviality.

I tried not to scream at him. "Cut the comedy and tell me how we get out of here."

It was Valen who answered. "There is a portal." He lifted a pale hand, pointing. "The obelisk. It holds a portal to the Abyss. One of the few. We were...to guard it." He swallowed. "When I was here."

I spun. The obelisk I'd seen before was still there – tall, black, thin, and too far away for comfort. "Will that bring us closer to the Elder Brain?"

Enserric tucked his thin hands into the sleeves of his robe and squinted at the distant monument. "I believe so." He shot me a curious look. "Can't you see it?"

"See what?" I returned his stare blankly. "The obelisk? Sure, I can see it. It's fifty feet high."

The mage shook his head. "No. I do not speak of any physical thing. I speak of the places where the fabric of this spell are weakest. Can you not see the...the distortion?"

It just looked like a creepy sculpture to me. "All I can see is that army over there and our way out over there."

Enserric shrugged. "Perhaps death has opened my eyes to things I could not see in life." His lip curled in a humorless smile. "Life, as they say, is wasted on the living."

I stared at him a moment longer, then gave up. I didn't even know if he knew what he was doing. Maybe, maybe not. But I couldn't see any other options, so I gritted my teeth and hitched my belt and said, "Yeah, well, I'd like to keep on living, so if that's the way forward, then let's go." Then I suited action to words and started picking my way to the obelisk. This swamp was eerie and gross, but I'd traveled through swamps before, so I used Silent Partner to tap my way along solid ground and kept my eyes peeled for any signs of movement. Any signs of movement that didn't come from the army on our tail, anyway.

Valen followed, but his face was grim and uncertain. "They are moving quickly. I am not sure we can make it without a fight."

I risked a peek over my shoulder and swallowed. He was right. They were getting closer. "Can't you just imagine them gone?"

Valen grimaced. "Imagining a door unlocked is one thing. Imagining an entire baatezu legion, gone, just like that…" He trailed off and looked down, flushing. "I cannot. I tried. It is...too much. Beyond my ability to imagine."

I gritted my teeth to keep from yelling at him and faced forward, my quarterstaff tap-tapping sharply on the loam. "Okay, got it. We can only change little things, like hardware, not big things, like armies."

Enserric hurried along at my side, wearing a disgusted sneer and hiking his robe up to his knees so the hem wouldn't drag in the mud. "If you can just hold them off…"

"Sure. Hold off an army. Why didn't I think of that?"

"There are not that many of them," Enserric snapped back. "And you, my dear, idiot wielder, have more than enough power for the task."

I grunted. "So why don't I feel powerful?"

"Because you are afraid."

"Of that army? Damn straight."

"No." Enserric's eyes were the color of steel, but reflected Carceri's not-light in a way that made them glint red, for an instant. "Of yourself."

I flushed and opened my mouth to answer, though what with, I didn't know.

Luckily, or maybe unluckily, Valen's shout cut us both off. "Eyes up!"

My head snapped up in time to see a gargoyle, or something a lot like one, swoop out of the sky. It was gray and mottled and had spikes like a porcupine, and as it loomed, I saw those spikes lift and rattle and on instinct I raised Silent Partner and brought it 'round, dragging the thin air into a barrier.

The spikes made little pock-pock noises as they peppered the ground all around us, driving up little sprays of mud and stagnant water. The ones that had been headed for us didn't stop, but when they ran into my shield, they lost enough momentum that they spun and tumbled and bounced off of us without piercing.

The gargoyle thing paused to look, then, without further ado, turned and swooped away, back towards the marching force.

I watched it go, shaken. It hadn't even made a sound. If Valen hadn't seen it, we might all have been turned into pincushions, and while I didn't know if you could actually die in a dream, I didn't want to find out. "What was that thing?"

Valen took my elbow and hustled me forward. "Spinagon." His tail was lashing, and his eyes were hot. "They serve as scouts. It will report back, and then we will have that entire force on our tails."

I let myself get hustled. Anything to get out of here faster. "Any pointers on fighting baatezu?"

"Yes. Don't."

"Very funny."

"Do I look like I am joking?"

"No, but then, you hardly ever do." We scrambled up the little hillock to the obelisk. Enserric immediately began running his hands over it and muttering to himself. Acting on some unspoken accord, Valen and I turned and stood shoulder-to-shoulder, standing between the mage and the baatezu horde. My pulse ran so hard and fast it felt like dice rattling inside my head. "What now?"

Valen surveyed the situation. His voice was strained. "We have the high ground, which is good." He looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on Silent Partner. "At all costs we must avoid a pitched fight. You do not have the skill for close combat. Not in this scrum."

I couldn't say he was wrong. "Fine. How do we hold them off?"

Valen's eyes glinted red. "Kill the commanders." He pointed. "Most of the force is made of lemures – brainless cannon fodder." He shaded his eyes, then smiled. It was not a friendly smile. "There. Just as I supposed. A barbazu. He will be their minder. Without him, they will lose all discipline." He looked to me. "Lemures are only dangerous if you allow them to surround you and overwhelm you with their numbers. Thin their ranks. Clear a path to the barbazu." He shook his flail free and rolled his shoulders to loosen them. "I shall deal with him."

I looked up and bit my lip. "How am I supposed to thin them out?" Bottled lightning wouldn't cut the mustard against this crew. "There's not a cloud in the sky, if that even is a sky."

Valen was silent for an unsettlingly long while, and so still that I was just about to start freaking out when he finally, finally looked up, and smiled a little at the sky. "Will this do?"

I looked up, too. There were red clouds gathering, and where they gathered, white flashes leapt between them.

I couldn't believe it. Forget flowers or chocolates – Valen had just given me a storm. My eyes blurred, and my voice veered embarrassingly close to a squeal. "For me?"

Valen smiled. "For you." He jerked his chin at the approaching army. "Now, go kill those bastards, would you?"

I drank in the sight of the gathering storm, made greedy by long thirst, like a wanderer in the desert. "I'd love to." I waved a hand. "Stand back." Valen did. Then, because the first ranks were closing in, I grounded Silent Partner, took a couple of bracing breaths, and set to work.

Closing my eyes on that horror show was one of the hardest things I'd ever done, but I had to do it so I did it. Terror quivered in my throat. I pinned it and grabbed it, like a snake, and fed it into green fire. Worry went, too, and uncertainty.

Throw it all in the fire, the memory of Xanos told me. Feed it. Let it grow.

Anger, though – that one, I held on to, because the harder I held it, the hotter the fire burned. The sun-shade feel of Shaundakul's presence, too, I kept close, to keep the fire from burning me.

And one more thing – not mine, but I could feel it steadying me, like a hand on my shoulder. Valen. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that I could feel his confidence, his iron-clad belief that I could do this and any of my feelings to the contrary were just the doubt talking. I could feel it as if it was flowing straight from his mind to mine, buoying me up and feeding the storm beneath my heart.

Pressure built behind my temples. My pulse whirred like a hummingbird's wings. Sparks buzzed and snapped in the air around me, and I shuddered and tasted ozone on the tip of my tongue.

Strange, I thought, how calm I felt. Maybe this was what it was like to stand in the eye of a hurricane. Maybe this was what it felt like to be a hurricane.

I opened my eyes. Red clouds had gathered. A web of white light hovered in the black sky, flickering. I could feel it bearing down on me and pulling at me, all at once, until I felt like I was about to fly apart.

Then I looked at the nearest rank of demons and let it all go.

The sudden release of all that pent-up force brought a relief so profound it almost felt like sex. My body jerked. White flashes struck, so many that they all blurred together. Hail thudded into flesh, flesh burned, and black smoke rose over the battlefield.

Bodies dropped. I didn't even know how many. Calm reigned, for a split second. I tried to see through the wall of smoke and wind.

Then a purple-skinned thing with snakes writhing out of its face burst out of the smoke, whirling a hook-bladed glaive.

I yelped and jumped back, but before the thing could reach me, Valen had already stepped between us, swung his flail, swiped the glaive out of the thing's hands, then followed up with a brutal kick to the solar plexus and a flail to the side of the head. Bone crunched. Bits of barbazu head pattered to the ground. "Any time, Enserric," Valen said between clenched teeth.

More lemures were coming, slow but unstoppable, oozing over their dead comrades. I turned, called a fork of lightning down from the sky, grabbed it, wound it around my hand like a whip, then lashed out. The lightning looped around two of the horrible fleshy things and held. I heaved. The chain swung. Some of the lemures turned to look, and saw a line of white light coming at them, waist-height, with two of their number trapped in it. Then the chain swept into them, and they burst apart into smoking chunks in a way I was pretty sure I'd revisit in my nightmares.

That took care of a dozen more, but they just kept coming on and the sky kept darkening and there were still only two of us and a whole hell of a lot of them. I gritted my teeth and called down another lightning strike. Bodies flew. More came on through the smoke. I was breaking the waves, but I couldn't stem the tide. "Enserric!"

Finally, a sliver of light appeared in the obelisk, which parted in two with a grating of stone. Light shone out of it. The mage darted to my side. "Go," he panted. "Quickly."

I wasn't about to argue. I charged through the gap, Valen hot on my heels.

I stumbled into coolness. My feet slipped on damp grass. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck," I panted. It wasn't the most inventive swearing I'd ever done, but it came from the heart. I raised Silent Partner, my heart pounding. "Now what the fuck is thi-" The signals from my eyes reached my brain. I lowered Silent Partner. "Oh. That's what the fuck this is." My shoulders sagged. This wasn't working. We were still in the maze, and I couldn't tell whether we were getting closer to the heart of it or just running around in circles. "Damn it."

Valen spun, breathing hard, his eyes raking the shadows under the trees for enemies. "Where are we now?"

I swallowed and stared at the picture frame. It stood in its clear little space under the trees. Afterimages of myself appeared before it – standing, staring, pacing, railing silently. I looked terrible. I looked sick, but not sick in the flesh. I looked sick in the soul.

I looked up. It was night – a clear night, like that night so long ago, and how strange it was to find out how vivid my memory of this place was. Apparently, some things you just couldn't forget. "We're home. Again."

Valen lowered his flail, breathing hard. His eyes glowed a sullen red. "Any danger?"

I looked around. "No armies, if that's what you're asking."

He nodded. "Good. Excuse me." Then he turned and started hitting a tree. With his flail. Repeatedly. In grim, furious silence that was almost worse than if he'd been screaming curses.

I stood back and waited quietly amidst the sound of splintering tree bark. I didn't ask him if he was all right, because he pretty clearly wasn't. When he finally lowered his flail, I studied the tree, or what was left of it. "Better?" I asked.

"No, but at least I do not want to kill something quite as badly." His nostrils flared as he tried to catch his breath. "I am sorry." The moon leeched his face of color, but it didn't hide the darkening flush on his cheeks, or the way he looked down, as if ashamed. "You…should not have had to see that."

I shrugged. "Wasn't bad." I half-grinned. "Wait until you see me lose my temper."

"I thought I had."

I remembered the albino-eyed woman. "Not really, no." I looked away. "'Sides, there's plenty of stuff here neither of us wanted to show anyone." My voice was gruff. If I had to choose between dealing with another baatezu army and having to have this discussion, I'd have gone with the army. "I won't tell anybody if you won't."

He couldn't quite hide the relief in his voice. "Agreed." He looked around, pretty clearly looking for some excuse to change the subject. His eyes fell on the picture frame. "That is a portal." His eyes glinted red as he looked at me. I couldn't tell if it was because of the low light or his fading temper. "This is the portal that took you to the Seer's world, isn't it?"

"Yes." I looked at my hands. They were empty except for a smear of blood across my left palm, black in the moonlight. There was a hole there, barely more than a splinter's width, but blood just kept seeping out of it. I frowned. "And I know the key." I laughed. My throat ached. "For what it's worth."

Valen frowned. "Do we go through?"

An 'EXIT' sign flickered faintly in the air. I stared at it glumly. "You got any better ideas?"

Valen's face looked as glum as mine. "I fear that I do not." He stared at the portal, heaved a sigh, and looked at me. "Very well. What is the key?"

I knelt, set Silent Partner aside, twined some blades of grass around my fingers, and yanked. They came free. I chose the prettiest two and let the others fall. One, I gave to Valen. The other, I kept for myself. "That's one half of the key."

Valen cupped the grass carefully, as if afraid to crush it. "And the other?"

"A shard of glass," I said quietly, and when I looked again, there it was, sparkling and blood-flecked in my left hand. At first, I wasn't sure what to do with it. Then it came to me, and I reached out and took Valen's left hand in mine, so that we were both holding the little shard of bloody black glass. "Come on," I said. "Time's wasting."

We stepped through…

…and then we were in a room that was barely more than a cell. A cot was attached to the wall by two chains. There was a woman on it. She was lying on her side, facing the wall. I saw a fall of golden hair, pale skin with spots like a leopard and an unnatural purplish tint to it, the line of a delicate shoulder, the curve of a bare hip. "Valen," she called languidly, and made as if to roll over. "Come back to bed."

I stared, then yanked my eyes away. I shouldn't be seeing this. This was too personal. I had no business here. I was only here as a twist of the knife that this memory would drive into Valen's heart, and one look at Valen's face told me that the blow had landed and gone in deep.

Valen's expression hurt just to see – raw emotions warred there, too many to name, although if I had to name two, one would be love and the other would be agony. I didn't want to step between him and the ghost on the bed, but I didn't want him to get suckered in by the Elder Brain, either. I settled for putting a hand on his shoulder. "Valen, look at me. It's not real. It's just the Elder Brain fucking with your head." I felt a tiny sliver of hope, at that. "Maybe we're getting closer. Maybe that's why it's getting worse. Just…don't let yourself get pulled in, okay?"

He stared, then shuddered and looked away from her and into my eyes. His own eyes were red-rimmed, his knuckles were white on his flail, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. "It will pay for this," he grated.

I squeezed his shoulder. "We'll make it pay," I assured him. My blood was boiling, but my voice had gone ice cold. "If it's the last thing we do."

He nodded without taking his eyes off mine, as if my face was the only safe thing for him to look at right then. "Good." Then he turned on his heel and marched out of that room like it was on fire.

I followed him out, not really sure what to say or even if there was anything I could say. I realized that I still had Enserric in hand. Where had I left Silent Partner? Never mind – that wasn't important right now. "Enserric. Where to?"

The sword flickered. "Straight ahead."

There was a haze at the end of the hall. As we approached, the 'EXIT' sign appeared. Resigned, we stepped through…

…and I was crouched in the middle of a dirt road. Moonlight shone on bodies all around me. Arrows whistled, but I didn't hear them. I stared into the open eyes of a dead man, bald and baby-faced with a teardrop tattooed at the corner of one eye, and felt something break inside me. "Harry."

Metal flashed next to me. Something pinged off of it. "I do not wish to interrupt, but can you do something about those arrows?" Valen said from between gritted teeth. He was hovering by my side, his arms outstretched. At some point, he'd thought his armor back on – the mithril version, not the Hellraiser version. "I am one person. I cannot shield you on four sides."

I cringed in remembered terror. There was shouting all around us, and arrows flying, and people getting hurt, and suddenly it was like no time had passed at all and I was the naïve Earthling, untrained and untested. "What? Me? No, I can't…"

Valen yanked me to my feet and turned me to face him. "You are not helpless," he said urgently. "Far from it. Do not let this thing convince you otherwise." Another arrow bounced off of his elbow, and he grimaced. "Call the wind, Rebecca." He said it in the General's voice, which brooked no argument. "Do it. Now."

I stared into his blue eyes. He was blurry. So were the lights. It took me a moment to realize that I was crying again, but his eyes were so blue and his voice was so steady and this wasn't real and suddenly I wasn't scared but I was seriously pissed off.

Fury boiled out of me. I spun with a yell. My shout echoed out over the road, and the wind chased it. Arrows blew like twigs, dust rose, fires leapt, and the people, they just blew apart into tatters, like clouds – like they'd never even been.

Harry stayed, though. Some things were too heavy to be moved, even by a hurricane.

The wind died down. A couple of trees cracked and fell, too, with a whole lot of noise. I watched them go down, taking a few more trees with them, then spoke, my voice shaking. "Hey, I've got a question."

Valen eyed the road, then relaxed a little on seeing that I'd pretty much scoured it clean. "Which is?"

"If a tree falls in my head, does it make a sound?" Then I started laughing and I couldn't stop.

Valen tightened his grip on my shoulders. "Steady."

My laughs turned into gasps, then into gulping sobs. "I think I'm losing my mind."

Valen shook his head. "That is exactly what it wants," he told me, his eyes holding mine as if he wanted to drive home his point with the force of his gaze. "Do not let it win, Rebecca."

Win. What did winning matter? We were trapped, going 'round and 'round this carousel of shit, and now this thing was making me relive the death of the best person I'd ever known, because it wasn't enough to control me. It wanted to hurt me.

I didn't have a word for the rage that filled me then. It seemed like too much for one skin to contain. "I'm going to kill it," I snarled.

Valen raised his eyebrows. "That's the spirit." He studied my face with cautious concern. "I think."

My rant gained steam, my voice shaking with pure, unadulterated wrath. "I'm going to rip that motherfucker into little tiny pieces, and then I am going to jump up and down on the pieces, and them I am going to shit-"

Valen lifted a forestalling hand. "Peace. I think you have made your point."

"My point?" My laugh was a hollow bark. "That's right, isn't it? I have a point. Points and edges and…" I trailed off, turned, and looked at Harry's body. He looked so peaceful. He'd always been peaceful, unlike me. I looked at my hands. There was still blood on my left palm. "It never was mine, was it?" I murmured, and laughed again, crazily and a little sadly. "Enserric was right."

Valen's concern was trending towards alarm. "What are you talking about?"

I knelt by Harry's body. "Something I should have realized a long time ago. I guess I just didn't want to admit it." I held out a hand, and thought of Silent Partner. Zalantar – as warm and living and dark as a forest night – filled my hand. It seemed far heavier than it had any right to be. I looked at it, running my hand lovingly along its haft and feeling the way the wood tingled under my skin, so familiar and so comforting. Then, with a sigh, I laid the quarterstaff down next to Harry. "It was never my weapon." I had a soul in the shape of a sword, not a shepherd's crook. "It was always his." Tears were falling, hot and fast. I paid them no mind. "I was just borrowing it for a while."

Valen watched me. His stance had softened, as had his voice and his eyes. "I understand." Sadness pulled at the corners of his mouth. "Sometimes we are not what we would wish to be, and all the wishing in the world will not change that."

I sighed. "Ain't that the truth." I took the monk's dead hand and folded his fingers around Silent Partner's haft, where they belonged. "Sleep well, old friend," I said, to both of them. "I'll see you again in the next life, maybe." I levered myself to my feet, held out my hand, and called. "Enserric. To me."

The sword appeared in my hand instantaneously - like it had always been there, and had just been waiting for my call. It shone like a bloody supernova, it felt as inevitable as death, and it sounded like one smug motherfucker. "Would now be a good time to say 'I told you so'?"

I ground my teeth. "Not the time, Enserric."

The sword flickered, and the black glass sliver in my head went soft, for an instant. "I…am sorry, wielder."

"Don't be sorry, just don't be an asshole."

"That, I fear, is a request I cannot accommodate."

"I know." He was my weapon, after all. I gestured with the sword. "Find us a way in. I'm done with this."

"Your wish is my command, wielder." The sword glowed. An 'EXIT' sign appeared, hovering in midair under leafy branches. "There. Through that gap in the trees."

That was no more or less nonsensical than anything else that had happened so far. "All right," I said, and led Valen away, my sword glittering like a starry night.

Another step into the shadows, another shift, and we stood on a white salt plain where winged shapes circled in a blood-red sky.

Enserric found the door buried beneath the salt, a scant few inches down. Valen and I uncovered it and heaved it open. It yawned like an open grave.

The tiefling and I looked at each other. "Do we go in?" I asked.

Valen looked into the doorway and shrugged. "Do you have any better ideas?"

I laughed bitterly. "I'm all out of ideas."

"So am I."

I stared into the dark. It sucked at the eye like a black hole. There was no way I was going to be able to conjure up the nerve to jump in there by myself. My hand reached out blindly. It found Valen's, all scars and callouses and warmth. That helped. "Count of three?" I suggested.

Valen nodded. His fingers squeezed mine. "On three."

In unison, we counted to three, then jumped, hand-in-hand.

shift

We were underground. Stone was shaking all around us, and the ceiling was starting to come down. A white-bearded, bespectacled dwarf stood in front of an open portal. He was covered in blood. "Don't leave me here, lass," he begged.

His plea hit me like a fist to the gut. I took a half-step forward, my hand held out. "Drogan, I'm sorry, I couldn't-"

Something stopped me. "Rebecca." A hand was on my shoulder. "This is a trick. Come away, or we will die with him."

I shuddered. "Maybe I should have."

Valen's snarl answered me. "Like Hell you should have." His hand tightened, pulling me away. "You are not giving up and letting the Elder Brain win, do you hear me?"

He was right. I couldn't give up. Then I'd have his death on my conscience, too – for however long I still had enough brains to have a conscience. "All right," I said hoarsely, and let him pull me through the portal, trying and failing to close my ears to Drogan's pleas and the awful groan of stone coming apart at the seams, and then…

shift

We were somewhere with steaming yellow lakes and an awful stench, and something was rising out of the lake, something with spikes and mandibles and a shining carapace, and Valen was yanking me out of the way and dragging me towards a gap in a rocky wall…

shift

I was buried in white – heavy, cold, crushing. I couldn't breathe, and when I opened my mouth to scream, it filled with snow.

I panicked. Thinking wasn't an option. Reacting – fighting – was, but I was trapped and helpless and didn't even have a weapon in my hand and please don't let me die like this, Shaundakul, not like this.

A hand closed around my wrist and pulled. Snow groaned, then all at once, gave way in an explosion of white powder. Strong hands grabbed me unceremoniously under the armpits and hauled me out, then gathered me into arms that were as warm as the snow was cold. "Relax," a smoky voice murmured in my ear. "I have you. You are safe. Relax." A rough hand pushed my hair back from my face. "Say something, Rebecca. Are you all right?"

I clung to him, blinking snowmelt from my eyelashes. My breath was fast and panicky, and I couldn't stop shivering. "I've b-been b-better."

Between the dark circles under his eyes and the now-haggard pallor of his face, the tiefling looked like he hadn't slept in a month. "You are not the only one."

He was right. We needed to get out of here, or else both of us were going to go briefly insane before the flayers mercifully liquefied what was left of our brains. Enserric was back in my hand. I held him up in front of my eyes. "Way out. Now. F-find it."

Doubt had crept into the sword's voice. "I am not so certain…"

This was no time for doubt. "Why not?"

Enserric sighed. "Each step we take only takes us to another location in your minds, just as before. I am sorry. I…am serving you as well as I can, but I do not know if it will be enough."

Exhaustion and despair weighed on me like a lead blanket. Dully, I looked at Valen. "Do we keep trying?"

He looked back grimly. "We keep trying until we can try no more."

My heart eased a little. "Then it looks like we're on the same page." If I had to go down, I wanted it to be with a roar, not a whimper. "Find the weakness, Enserric, and we'll see where it leads."

This time, the exit was Nathan Hurst's old farm wagon, and when we stepped up on it…

shift

My feet touched the ground in a huge onyx chamber. Cages hung from the ceiling over a pit of lava. Chains, blood, and screaming figured heavily in the décor.

There was a figure standing in the center of the chamber. He was huge, easily above ten feet tall, and winged and red and held a flaming whip. There was a body at his feet.

I looked at the body. It had blood-matted blonde hair and pale purple skin, now white and red and gray.

I took the corpse's features in, then looked up with a sinking heart. Grimash't smiled, his burning eyes on Valen. "There," he said, in a voice like a lion's purr, and casually kicked the body to one side, where it flopped limply into the lava. "That should teach you to disobey me, shouldn't it, slave?"

My stomach wrenched. The fury was rising. Again. If I kept this up, I was going to give myself an aneurysm before the Elder Brain could. My lips peeled back in a snarl, aimed at the balor. "You vicious bastard…"

Valen had fallen to his knees and was staring at the spot where the body had fallen. His whole posture was hunched, curled in on himself, as if he'd been struck by a mortal blow. "No," he whispered. "Not this."

One look at the tiefling's face and I forgot all about the balor, which I would have thought was pretty hard to do until I saw Valen's face. Before I knew it I was standing in front of him, shielding him from the balor and the scene alike with my body. I reached out to cup his cheek, not certain what to do, but at the touch of my hand he resolved the issue by leaning into me and burying his face against my midsection. He was shivering. Tentatively, I touched his hair. "It's all right, babe," I tried to soothe him, even though I really was no good at being comforting. "It's just a nightmare. It's not real."

At those words, Valen sucked in a breath and looked at me, his eyes wide and brimming but his face as grim as midwinter in the Spine of the World. "Yes, it is," he said, his voice grating. "It is, it was, and I will not betray her memory by pretending otherwise."

My heart twisted. That's Valen for you. He wasn't just loyal to the end. He was loyal even past the end. I sighed and stroked his hair. It really did feel as silky as it looked. "You're one stubborn son of a bitch, you know that?"

His laugh was shaky and dark. "How do you think I have survived this long?"

The shadows were moving. I eyed them. "Good. Laughter's good." I heard heavy footsteps behind me. "Hold on to tha-" I blinked, and suddenly I wasn't holding Valen anymore, and there was metal around my wrists and weight pulling on my shoulder sockets. I looked up. I was chained to the wall. Also, my clothes had vanished again, which struck me as a little excessive, especially for somebody who was basically a squid. I glared at the manacles around my wrists. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

Grimash't stepped up to me. I got a whiff of rotten eggs, a blast of heat like an open furnace, and a good view into his burning eyes. "What is this, slave?" he asked over his shoulder. "Do you need another lesson in pain?"

Valen had shot to his feet, and now stood staring. Horror contorted his face, and pain, and growing rage. "Oh, Hells no…" he snarled, and reached for his flail.

I would have raised a hand to stop him, but I was a little short on hands at the moment, so I settled for raising my voice. "Stay there." The balor was stroking his whip in a creepily suggestive way. I tried not to look. This isn't real. This isn't real. This isn't real. "I'm fine."

Valen hesitated, balanced on the balls of his feet as if he couldn't decide whether to stay put or rush the dream balor. "FINE?!" he roared, which made this the first time I'd ever heard him raise his voice. "You call that fine?"

"It's not real, Valen." A fiery whip cracked way too close to my face, and I knew it wasn't real but boy did it feel real, especially when the backwash of heat hit me, near-blistering my skin. I jerked away, acting on sheer animal instinct. Chains jangled, the bones in my wrists ground together. I groaned, and Grimash't smiled. I tried to ignore him. "Just…try to think him gone, would you?" I yelled. "Remember, Valen! It's. Not. Real!"

Grimash't seemed equally perplexed, if for an entirely different reason. "Not real?" the balor echoed. He looked at me and smiled. His burning eyes turned black. "Oh, but it is, thrall. Haven't you been listening? Thought is the only reality there is, and no matter how you struggle, you cannot escape mine."

I stared at the balor-not-balor. Rage turned my vision red. "No, fuck you," I said, and thought of fog.

My body dissolved in an instant, and I slipped my bonds, leaving the balor-not-balor staring at the place where I had been. If I'd had lips, I would have smiled. Can't chain the wind, motherfucker.

I didn't waste time, but flowed right back to Valen and re-materialized in front of him with Enserric already in my hands. "See?" I said brightly. "I'm f-" Hoofbeats struck the stone behind me. "-fuck." I turned, shoving Valen behind me. A frustrated sigh boiled out of my throat. "You again?"

The balor-not-balor was coming after me in an unhurried but inexorable plod. "You cannot escape, thralls."

I rolled my eyes. This thing needed to use its super-mega-genius brain to come up with some new lines. "Yeah, yeah, you said that." He had a point, though. "Enserric. Get us out. Now."

The sword blazed red. "Done. Look up, wielder."

I looked up, although the sudden wind that blew my hair across my face had already given me a clue that something had changed.

The ceiling was gone. In its place was a sunless orange sky. I stared up at it. "Damn. Talk about blowing the roof off the place." The balor/illithid was coming, and with Valen down for the count there was no fighting it, and maybe this was a dream and we couldn't actually die, but I wasn't sticking around to find out. "Come on, sunshine." I got an arm around his shoulders and thought of the morning mist over Hilltop. "Up we go."

We dissolved into mist. The wind pulled us up and out, and…

shift

The ground tilted crazily underfoot. My feet – booted again, thank Shaundakul - slipped on broken glass and stone. Acting on either animal instinct or training, I dropped to a crouch before I could fall, and looked around, wild-eyed.

I was surrounded by stone and glass and the sky, on the tallest spire of a shattered city, and the floor was tilting under my feet because Undrentide was entering its death spiral.

A scrape behind me drew my attention. I whirled, still in a crouch, so fast I almost toppled. Valen was leaning against a broken column, his face drawn and his eyes closed. He didn't look hurt – not physically, at least. He just looked like that last memory had been the last straw, and now he was going to check out for a while.

I rushed to him, stumbling a little in my haste. My hands framed his cheeks, my fingers brushed his hair from his face, frantic. "Open your eyes, babe," I urged. "Open your eyes. We've got to keep going."

Valen opened his eyes, but didn't move. He looked like a man who'd found the light at the end of the tunnel, and it had turned out to be an oncoming train. "Why? We are getting nowhere."

I swallowed a scream of frustration. "Because we're not giving up until we're dead, that's why." I smacked his shoulder with an open palm, like he was a balky horse. I didn't know what else to do. "Get your ass moving."

His shrug was infinitesimal, and his gaze was distant. "You would be better off without me."

"No." I laced my fingers behind his neck and pulled him in until we were practically forehead-to-forehead, hooking him in place so he was forced to look me right in the eye. "We got into this together. We get out together, or we go down together."

His eyes searched mine, and softened a little around the edges. "Stubborn," he murmured.

I smiled at him and didn't move away. Stupid, stupid, stupid. "Takes one to know one."

Valen's laugh was mere puff of air against my cheek. "True." His eyes drifted, then widened in alarm. "Watch out!" he barked, and hurled me to one side.

Too surprised to react gracefully, I hit the ground in a messy roll-skid-sprawl. Scales scraped across broken glass with a musical tinkling and a nails-on-chalkboard screech. Behind me, there was a scream, a crash, and a gurgle. Then silence.

The world stopped moving, or stopped moving quite so much. I twisted and lurched to my feet. "What-" The question died in my throat, answered by the bloody sight in front of me. "You."

Heurodis lifted her head as if it weighed more than Undrentide itself. She was impaled on one of the broken glass columns of the mythallar. "Priestess," the medusa greeted me, her voice echoing sibilantly. "I have been expecting you."

Judging by his combat-ready stance and the red glow of his eyes, Valen had been the one to throw her onto that column, no doubt as soon as he'd thrown me out of harm's way. "Vanish her, Rebecca." His voice was tight as a noose. "Imagine her dead, imagine her gone. Quickly."

I didn't listen. In my head, I heard Drogan begging, crying, dying. In my head, I saw Xanos lying on the glass amidst streaks of blood and ash, saw corpses rotting in the desert, saw Blumberg burning and heard J'Nah's death rattle. This dream was turning out to be a lesson in hate – in what I hated, and who, and why, and how very, very much hate my heart could hold.

Suddenly, it wasn't enough to see Heurodis vanish. I wanted to see her die. Again. And again. And again. And if I could see the black eyes of the illithid in hers, just before the light went out of them, so much the better. They owed me a debt of pain, and I was of a mind to collect.

I stalked across the dying city to my old nemesis. My boots crunched on broken glass. The medusa's power-blinded head turned to watch me come. She smiled, dribbling bloody phlegm. "You have changed, Priestess. No longer a child, are you? No. Your eyes have seen…too much." Her laugh rasped and bubbled in her throat. "Pain...is an instructive teacher. I am glad..to have contributed…to your evolution."

I stopped and looked down at her. She looked frail. Broken. How had I ever been afraid of her? I could reach out right now and burst every blood vessel in her head, strike her down with lightning and blow her ashes so far and wide that not even the gods would ever be able to bring her back. "Hey, Heurodis. You haven't changed a bit," I answered, and grinned malevolently. Overhead, storm clouds gathered. "Oh. That's right. It's because you're dead, isn't it?"

Valen's voice broke in. "Rebecca. This is a trick. Do not let it draw you in."

I didn't listen. This was only a dream – an endless, terrible dream, but still a dream. You could suffer in dreams, but you couldn't get hurt, you couldn't die, and it felt good to see the pain and fear in Heurodis' eyes, especially after all the pain I'd just been put through. I wanted to enjoy it a little longer.

Heurodis was breathing shallowly, and her voice was getting faint. Her fingers twitched, as if to beckon. "Come closer. I wish…to see…the one who defeated me. One last time."

This was only a dream. What could she do? I watched her with pleasant malice. "You aren't going to win this," I told her, though I meant it for the Elder Brain, too. "I beat you before. I'll kill you a thousand times again, if I have to."

Heurodis gave me a blood-kissed smile. "Your words display…a lack of understanding…thrall." Her hand – the far one, the one she'd held concealed on the other side of her hip - came up, holding a dagger. Then she stabbed me in the chest.

The impact drove me back a step. I stared down at the dagger's hilt in disbelief. "But…but it's a dream." My protest was weak. You couldn't get hurt in dreams. You dropped, but you never hit the ground. You ran, but they never caught you. The knife fell, but it never cut you. This wasn't how dreams were supposed to work.

Pain hit me. My knees buckled.

Then again, I could be wrong.

Heurodis laughed, a bubbling kind of laugh that had tentacles in it. "Fool," she rasped. She placed the flats of her hands on either side of her hips and pushed herself up. The broken pillar moved through her with a sucking, scraping sound, and then, with a final jerk, she was free and standing upright. The hole in her guts was leaking freely. She ignored it and looked at me with depthless black eyes. "We have told you again and again. Thought is the only reality. This is thought. It is real. When will you lea-"

Whatever her/its question was, it was lost in a rattle, a whoosh, and a loud, wet crack and a short, sharp splatter.

I stared dumbly at the big, spiky black flail head sitting in the pile of mush where the medusa's head used to be. I watched as the last of her snakes flopped and rattled and hissed and died. Then I watched as Valen whipped his weapon away, absent-mindedly shaking brains and skull fragments from it like he did this kind of thing all the time – which, come to think of it, he did. "Come back from that, berk," he spat at the corpse. Then his eyes went to me, and the red in them flooded out like the tide, to reveal bright and worried blue. "Shit. Rebecca."

It must have been bad, if it got Valen to curse. I peered down at the knife sticking out of my chest. "Not again," I complained, to nobody in particular. Then my legs gave out.

The tiefling caught me before I hit the ground, and eased me down the rest of the way, shifting his hands up as he lowered me until he was cradling my head. "Easy," he said softly. His eyes scanned me. Their corners were crinkled, but not with laughter. Not this time. "Hold still. Save your breath."

I'd just wasted my breath – maybe my life. I'd fallen for the oldest trick in the book. I had to laugh. Why not? It was funny. "Hah." I had to stop to catch my breath and blink spots away from my eyes, because laughing hurt. "Hoist…by my own…petard." I giggled. It gurgled. "And by petard…I mean ego."

Valen shook his head, his face screwed up and tight with worry. "Damn it, Rebecca. What is wrong with killing your enemies?" He went for my belt. I felt a lot of lifting and tugging as he tore through my pouches. "Why must you always taunt them first?"

It was hard to catch my breath, and words only came out in fragments. "…pissed m'off."

Valen found a little blue vial and popped the cork. "Remind me never to make you angry." He leaned forward. "Speaking of which, I have a question for you."

I gazed up at him. He was framed in sunlight and blue skies, and kind of blurry, so that if I squinted, his horns almost looked like a halo. Hey, whaddya know. He really is an angel. "Hmm?"

"What is your favorite color?"

A lock of his hair was dangling a few inches away from my nose. I smiled at it dreamily. "Re-" He grabbed the dagger and yanked it out of my chest. My body arched like a bow and I let out a primal scream. "MOTHERFUCKER!"

Valen held me down by planting a forearm across my shoulders and leaning most of his weight on it. Also, while I was still screaming, he took the opportunity to pour the healing potion right into my open mouth. Then he grabbed my jaw in one hand and held it shut until I swallowed. "Sorry, sorry, so sorry," he murmured. "This will make it better, I swear."

It didn't. Even after I stopped spluttering and caught my breath, the pain in my chest had gone away, but everything else was just the same. The sky was still spinning slowly above me as the last flickers of magic went out of the mythallar. We were still caught in this nightmare. I lifted my hand, and saw blood. "Why did that hurt so much?" I asked. The pain was a fading memory, but it had felt so real. "This is a dream." A quaver of pleading entered my voice. "Isn't it?"

Valen's voice was grave and soft. "It is, and it is not, I think." Satisfied that I was okay and wasn't going to jump up and run off the edge of the city, he sat back on his heels, his tail coiling around his haunches. "I think…I think that belief has the power to shape reality, in certain places, and if it can do so in the Outer Planes, why not in our innermost thoughts?" He shrugged. "And we are real, if nothing else. Our thoughts are real. Which makes this…real. In a way. In all the ways that matter, anyway."

My brain broke, my brief spark of hope died, and just like that, I was done. Just…done. My head fell back. It made a hollow sound when it hit the ground. Somehow, that seemed fitting. "We're never getting out of here."

Valen shook his head. "I will not accept that. There must be a way."

It was obviously his turn to give the pep talk, and under other circumstances I might have been grateful, but under these I just wished he would stop. The sheer pointlessness of it just made me angrier. "What way?" I asked bitterly. "There is no way. We're stuck."

He leaned forward, his blue eyes bright with urgency. "Stop and think about it. How did you get out of here the first time?"

I went very still. Then I closed my eyes and let out a long, defeated sigh. Why lie? We'll be dead soon, anyway. "I didn't."

Valen went still, too. "What?"

My temper flared. I lifted my head. "What are you, deaf? I said 'I didn't'. "

His eyes searched my face, confused and a little annoyed, as if I'd given him a riddle he couldn't answer. "What happened?"

I snapped. "I died, okay?!" I yelled. "I died in this fucking place. I went down with the city, I died, and Deekin died, and Xanos died…" Words died, strangled by rising hysteria. I couldn't save them, in the end. I couldn't even save myself. And now, it was happening all over again. I covered my face with both hands. "I don't even know how I came back!" Fever-dream images twisted through my head – a hooded figure, a door, a tree, and…nothing. So much nothing. The memories were like thumbscrews, and the words tore out of me. "I'm sorry. I failed. I'm a shit savior."

Gently, Valen pulled my hands away from my face and brushed his fingers against my cheek. Soft as his touch was, though, his voice was as sharp as a broken mythallar. "Enough. You are far from a failure, and self-pity ill becomes you. Snap out of it."

I went rigid with shock and stared up at him, open-mouthed. I wondered if I was bleeding again. If I wasn't, I should have been. "Wow. Rude."

The ground tilted. Valen threw one arm around a handy column. The other arm, he threw around me, effectively gluing me to his side. "You can skin me for my rudeness later," he said through gritted teeth. "Act now."

I felt like I'd just gotten dunked in an icy lake, but it wasn't actually all bad, because once the shock had passed I found my head had cleared. Valen's little verbal bitchslap had temporarily knocked all of the despair out of me.

Unfortunately, my clear thinking led me back to the same place as the muddy. Enserric was trying his best, but it wasn't good enough. We were doing our best, but the Elder Brain was bigger, stronger, and nastier than either of us.

The fucking thing was winning, and I was all out of ideas.

I need help, I thought, and I started crying again, but quietly, the tears leaking from the corners of my eyes and down my temples to dampen my hair. Please. I need you, Shaundakul. We need you. I'm running blind. I need a signpost. A clue. Something. Anything. I was a Blumenthal, gods damn it, and Blumenthals never begged, but I was all out of everything, including pride. Please. Then I closed my eyes and braced myself for whatever came – and if it was a long fall and a swift end, so be it.

Then the world went pleasantly cool and dim, like a cloud had just passed over the sun, or the edge of a cloak had just been swept over me to shield me from the rain, and I smelled crushed grass and cool earth and trees, and something was different, somehow.

A voice, one that ran through me deeper than bone-deep, spoke. It sounded exasperated. "Much as I treasure your independence, child of mine, there are times when I wish you would treasure it less. Must you always wait until you are on death's doorstep to ask for my help?"

My eyes flew open. A blur of green and brown and pale blue resolved itself in a forest canopy. There was a dark shape between me and it. I blinked again, and the shape became a familiar face – wolfish, stern, amused, with eyes of every color of every sky everywhere. My heart leapt and dropped at the same time. It can't be. I searched my god's eyes, now stormy and now limpid, now gray and now blue, now cold and now warm, as vast and changeable as the winds. It can't be. It's another trick. "Is that really you?" I whispered.

Shaundakul smiled at me and answered my question with a question. "What do you think, daughter of mine?"

My breath left me at once, and I cried out – from relief or grief, I couldn't say. "It is you." Only he could be this much of a pain in the ass at a time like this. Before I knew it, I was scrabbling upright and hurling myself into his arms, weeping like a child. He was here. I was safe. "Thank god."

Cloaked arms enfolded me, and a laugh rumbled in my ears like distant thunder. "You are welcome."

Metal screeched and leather creaked. "Who is this?" Valen demanded. Then: "No. Forget I said that. It was a stupid question." A foot scraped behind me. "Rebecca. Are you sure this is…" He paused again. "…who you think it is?"

I scrubbed my cheeks and sniffled back an embarrassing quantity of mucus before I turned to look at Valen. He was standing, almost in arm's reach. He looked okay, if bewildered. I couldn't blame him. "Yes," I answered simply. I could feel the power in me unspool and reach out to Shaundakul, like calling to like. I could feel him, a sense of presence that I knew in a way that went beyond mere knowing. I could feel it in my soul. "It's him."

Valen shot Shaundakul a wary scowl and stepped a little closer to me, his hand on his weapon's hilt for whatever good it might do. "If you are certain…"

It was him. I had to believe it was him. "I am." I twisted around and looked at Shaundakul and reached up and touched his grizzled cheek. "Glad you could make it, old man."

Shaundakul returned my smile and my touch. His fingers burned like holy fire where they brushed my cheek. "Make it? I have never left you, child. I am always here, and have always been here, and shall always be here."

I growl-sighed a little and shook my head at him. "You know what I mean."

"Yes." Shaundakul laughed. "I always do."

Valen had relaxed enough to take his eyes off of Shaundakul and case the joint a little, although our change of venue didn't seem to bring him any peace of mind. "Where are we?" he asked. He took two swift steps, turned, and looked up and around at the surrounding trees, his eyes trying to pierce every shadow. "What is this place?"

I didn't know, but that was okay, because Shaundakul answered. "We are in the place in my daughter's mind where I reside." His eyes were as blue and calm as the sea. "A sanctuary, of a sort."

I frowned. We were in an evergreen glade, cool and shady and breezy. The air smelled like pine needles and damp earth. There was a moss-covered stone in the middle of the glade, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight. I knew, without knowing how I knew, that the stone would be good to sit on, and that there was a stream of clean water not too far distant, and that that white pine over there offered an excellent perch, sweet-smelling and sheltered and secure, from which I could watch the world go by with bird-sharp eyes. "I know this place," I said slowly. I'd seen it before, in dreams both waking and sleeping.

Shaundakul gave me a bemused look, as if I'd just stated the obvious. "Of course you do. You made it."

"You didn't?"

Shaundakul laughed at me, but gently. "No. Your mind is your own. I merely occupy the space you have made for me."

"Yeah," I returned drily. "Kind of like a stray cat who found the porch door open and came right in and made himself at home."

"I have always belonged here, my daughter – even if you have not always recognized that truth."

Valen frowned, then shook his head, as if he didn't understand what we were talking about and had given up on trying. "Are you saying that we are safe here?"

Instinct prompted my answer. "We are." I felt it, sure as the tide. I felt calm here – centered, as if I finally knew my place in the world again and had solid ground under my feet. "Until the Elder Brain takes over my mind, anyway," I added.

Valen still hadn't taken his hand from his weapon, and he stopped surveying the glade long enough to give me a gloomy frown. "I do not find that reassuring."

I snorted. "You and me both." I hesitated. Both of them were looking at me, in a way that made the remnant of my well-bred manners sit up and wave frantically. I cleared my throat, suddenly gruff. "I suppose I should make the official introductions." I gestured. "Valen, Shaundakul. Shaundakul, Valen."

Shaundakul subjected Valen to a long, measuring stare, then inclined his head. "Young man."

Valen returned Shaundakul's stare, with interest. "Are you truly a god?"

My god's tone was bland, but his eyes danced. "An unbeliever, hmm?"

Valen shrugged without taking his eyes off of Shaundakul. "Faith is for Primes. I am a Planar. I know that the Powers are fallible, and see nothing to gain in placing so much trust in them. The Astral is littered with the corpses of dead gods, and history is riddled with stories of the gods' short-sightedness." He smiled thinly. "Take Aoskar. He challenged the Lady of Pain - on her own turf, no less – and for that, she ended him."

Shaundakul's eyes swirled gray. "Yes. I know the limits of power – better than you think."

Valen gave my god a curious look. "Do you?"

My god's eyes darkened. "Ask my daughter what I know of loss, if you truly wish to understand."

Valen hesitated, then nodded. "I shall." His eyes flashed a challenge. "But you will forgive me if I do not place the same faith in you that she does."

Shaundakul laughed softly. "I would expect no less." He cocked his head, considering the tiefling with amused curiosity, as if Valen hadn't just insulted him on several levels simultaneously. Then again, I had tried to kill him the second time I met him and he'd still offered me a job, so it wasn't like Shaundakul was easy to offend. "A question for you, however. If you will."

Valen's face was unwelcoming, but not hostile. "If you must."

"Where do you place your faith, if not in the gods?"

"In my weapon, and my skill in battle." Valen touched the hilt of his flail. "In my own eyes and ears." His face softened, and he glanced at me. "In those I care for, and those who care for me."

Shaundakul dipped his head in acknowledgement. "A fair answer." A smile flickered about his mouth and in his eyes. "I shall not dispute it." He turned to me, his face going serious. "Now. You have asked for my guidance, daughter mine, and you shall have it, for this path you are on is a tangled one indeed. What is it that you need?"

I blinked at the abrupt end to their discussion – it had been kind of fun to see someone else on the opposite end of Shaundakul's Socratic needling, for once – but recovered soon enough. "I need to get to the Elder Brain and make it let us go."

Shaundakul laughed at me. "Then go to it." Briskly, he tapped my forehead with a forefinger. "What is keeping you, child? You know the way."

I scowled and rubbed my forehead with my fingertips. "Yeah, I really should have expected that kind of answer," I conceded sourly.

Shaundakul lifted his silver eyebrows. "Then why ask the question if you knew the answer?"

"I thought maybe I could surprise a straight answer out of you, for once."

Shaundakul smirked at me. "Then I commend your persistence, if not your wisdom."

I grunted none-too-gratefully. "Thanks." Valen was watching us, silent but attentive, and when I looked at him he gave me an encouraging half-smile, though he also kept one eye on Shaundakul. I went red and looked down again. "All right. Let me think."

I thought.

We were treading trodden trails, that was true – revisiting old memories, sometimes voluntarily but mostly not. Enserric had said that we needed to find a weak spot in the Elder Brain's net, but the net was so complex and multilayered that every time we slipped through one hole, we just sank into another.

What we needed, more than anything, was a way to slice the net – something to sever the strands and blaze a new trail through it, an avenue of escape that was broad and deep enough that this net couldn't reform fast enough to catch us.

My fingers froze in mid-rub, and I stared at the ground between my feet, hardly daring to breathe just in case my breath might break the fragile little seedling of an idea that had just sprouted in my head. "We've been going through the doors the Elder Brain made." I looked up, an incredulous smile spreading across my face. I snapped my fingers and pointed at Shaundakul. "That's it!" I shouted. "It's like Halaster's maze. We can't use the doors this thing has made, 'cause they'll just put us where it wants, not where we want. We need to make a new door." Then I frowned. "Wait. How do I make a new door?"

Shaundakul smiled at me, and it was like getting bathed in a sudden sunbeam and soothed by the shade under an old oak tree, all at once. "It is the simplest of matters, once you know how to do it."

It didn't seem so simple to me. "Will you show me?"

Shaundakul nodded gravely. "I will show you." He drew his sword and held it out to me, hilt-first. The sword's shadow streamed long and black over the mountainside. "Hold out your hands, Rebecca."

I stared at his sword. I'd never really looked at it before, but now I was looking at it, and it was the same depthless black of the ocean at night, with occasional flickers in it, like the reflections of strange and distant stars. I had never really looked at it before, but now that I did, it seemed…familiar. I licked my lips nervously. "Why? I have a weapon. I don't need yours."

Shaundakul inclined his head. "You have a weapon, yes – but you do not accept it."

I felt like crying, but I was all cried out, and my eyes stayed dry. "It's not what I wanted."

Shaundakul's voice was as gentle as a breeze, and as persistent. "It is what you are." He smiled, serene and reassuring. "Do not fear your nature, child. It is not the weapon which is evil, but the uses to which it is put."

I remembered a glowing brand, showing a sword – or maybe a lightning bolt - held in a clenched fist, and I felt Enserric's presence in the back of my mind, a wickedly sharp splinter that should have hurt but instead had slipped into my head so painlessly and smoothly it was as if there had already been a space for it there.

I bowed my head, then nodded and took a deep, long breath. I wished it wasn't so, but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride – and now was no time for scruples. This was win or lose, live or die, and I no longer much cared about the means, as long as they led to the right end. "If you're wrong and I die, I'm going to spend my whole afterlife calling you names," I warned.

Shaundakul's smile widened. "I would not have it otherwise, my dear."

"Right." I straightened. "Well, just so we're clear." Then I took my weapon from Shaundakul's hands.

As soon as our fingertips touched, the sword changed, and then I was holding Enserric, in all his black glass and scarlet glitter. I held him up in front of my face. "Enserric," I greeted him simply, because there was really nothing more to be said.

The sword gleamed, the crimson sparkles multiplying and merging until they almost swallowed the black. "Wielder. Is it killing time?"

I smiled mirthlessly. "Soon," I promised. I looked at Shaundakul, and he gave me a slow nod of encouragement, but offered nothing more. That was no surprise. The gods helped those who help themselves, and I'd probably resent the shit out of him if it was any other way. I stared at Enserric, then bowed my head. If this is what I am, then so be it, because I'm too tired to keep running from this.

Then I reached down into the power beneath my heart and drew it up and let the current run into the icy river that connected me to Enserric.

The shock of the joining made me jerk and gasp like I'd plunged into that river myself. My vision went strange – dark, then doubled, and then dancing with red sparkles…

…and then, all at once, the world snapped into focus again, only now I was looking out at it through the facets of a crystalline cage, and in the same instant I felt that crystal cage slam into place around my mind, and suddenly I could see clearly for what felt like the first time in forever.

Slowly, I lowered the sword and turned, my lips parted as I saw the world through Enserric's eyes. The world around me was rippled, distorted, as if it wasn't quite there. The sky had taken on strange colors, and the world was bleeding together, valley and mountain and river and trees, running like ink down a drain.

I lowered my eyes and looked at Shaundakul and Valen. In a world that had suddenly turned into a combination of a bad acid trip and a Dali painting, they were two points of stability. I could feel them grounding me, even as the waves of unreality tried to sweep me away. I looked at Valen and smiled. "You're real," I said.

Hesitantly, he smiled back. "Should I not be?"

I shook my head. "No. It's good. You should be." I felt like I was standing in some cold, dark current. I could feel it yanking at my soul, trying to drag me under, but as long as I had something real to hold on to, just one true thing in this ocean of lies, I thought I'd be okay.

Shaundakul stepped to my side. "Do you see it?" he asked. "Do you see the door?"

I looked up, scanning the sky. "What am I looking for?"

"The point where reality meets unreality. A warp in the weft." Shaundakul grinned like a wolf. "A portal."

I squinted. "I don't see it."

Shaundakul tsk'ed and rapped my forehead again. "That is because you are not using the eyes your god gave you."

He had a point. I grumbled a little, but blinked into my second sight, and there, at last, it was - a patch of sky that flickered and pulsed, so much heavier and denser and more there than anything else that it warped the world around it. It looked the way I thought a black hole might look. "Oh. Now I see it."

Shaundakul nodded. "Good. Now open it."

I frowned. "How?"

My god moved to stand behind me. He gestured for me to lift Enserric, and when I did, he reached around my shoulders and covered my hands with his own. "I will show you," he said, and together, we set the sword's point against the sky and began to draw a line.

The sword's tip opened up a thin red laceration. Light spilled through, and the world convulsed. There was a far-off scream – definitely not a happy one. I staggered. Shaundakul steadied me. "Keep going," he said. "Quickly, now. Your enemy will not tolerate this for long."

I nodded and set my teeth and kept going. Enserric's tip dragged, as if meeting some resistance, and even with Shaundakul helping me it took all of my strength to keep it moving, to keep extending the line.

My arms shook with exhaustion. The line lengthened, then turned, then turned again. A doorway, I thought. We were carving a doorway. In what, exactly, I didn't know, but it was working so I decided not to question it.

Another turn, this one harder than the others and carved with an irate scream echoing in my head, and at last the tip of the sword reached the beginning of the first cut, and a piece of the sky peeled away like paper, vanishing to wisps as it fell.

I stared. Space and distance had distorted as I opened the door, and now the door was no longer in the sky but was just a step away. It opened onto a place that was red and gray and pulsing. Sparks shot across it in irregular rhythms. "What is that?"

Shaundakul released me and stepped back. "A path you have yet to travel," he answered simply, and gathered his cloak around him. "I would hurry, if I were you," he added, as the world quivered like a giant Jell-O mould. "You have wounded it. If you give it time, it will heal the gap, and the next door will be harder to open."

I didn't think I could open another of those portals, period. My arms already felt like lead. "I'm on it." I turned to Valen, who'd been standing by all this time, watching and waiting with a patience I'd seldom seen from him. "Ready to go?"

Valen studied the door. "So you can open portals," he mused. His smile was faint, but there. "Shall we call you Planewalker as well as Windwalker?"

I waved a dismissive hand. "It's not a real portal."

The tiefling arched one eyebrow. "Is it not?"

This was a hell of a time to get philosophical. "Does it matter?"

Valen paused, then shrugged. "I suppose not." He eyed the portal, then stepped to my side. "I am ready. On your word, we go."

I nodded and took a deep breath. I didn't need to ask Enserric if he was ready. I could feel his hunger in the back of my mind. It echoed my own. The Elder Brain had tormented us for too long. It was its turn to suffer. I turned to Shaundakul. "Thanks," I said simply. "As always."

Shaundakul touched his forehead in a solemn salute. "Strike swiftly, strike hard, and show no mercy, my falcon."

I grinned grimly. "Mercy's the last thing on my mind." Then I turned and took Valen's hand, and with the world bleeding down all around us, we stepped through the portal, into…

shift

My feet sank into something squishy and kind of slippery. I stumbled. An arm went around my shoulder. "Steady," Valen's voice murmured in my ear, but I didn't answer. I was too busy gawking.

We'd been to a lot of strange places in this nightmare, but this last one really took the cake.

There were strange shapes all around us, traced in pink and gray and white and red. They were like elongated stars, or maybe comets, or maybe trees – bulbous shapes with long, many-forked branches and long, slender trunks ending in reaching roots. Each pair ran head-to-tail, and altogether they formed a web that stretched off into a seemingly infinite distance.

The light was flickering, but bright. It didn't take long to see why. Sparks were firing in the junctures of the web, where the trees met, root to branch, and while none of them were very bright, combined, they made enough light for even me to see by.

Red light rippled along Enserric's edge. "Neurons!" he said excitedly. "Wielder! Do you realize where we are? This is the Elder Brain's…er, well, brain." The sword's voice lowered to a mutter. "Bugger. That sounded better in my head."

Valen spoke, his voice half-wondering and half-wary. "We are in the Elder Brain? How is that possible?"

As if in response, the neuron we were standing on shook, and a voice like a million voices rose in a wave. YES. A GOOD QUESTION, THRALL. HOW ARE YOU HERE?

I shrugged. "We broke in. You really should hire better security." Valen laughed. It was a harsh laugh, and dark as sin, but a laugh it was.

The voice was not amused. AN OVERSIGHT. IT WILL BE CORRECTED. The wave rose like a typhoon…

…and broke, foaming and then falling against the cage that Enserric's unliving mind had erected around my living one.

The waves of thought surged around me. I watched them, amazed. It doesn't hurt. Why didn't I hurt?

Well, of course it cannot reach us, Enserric said, or I thought, or maybe it was both. Our mind is both living and dead. It hasn't the foggiest idea what to do with us.

I stared. We were right. I could remember our death – the pain just a passing insult compared to the cold and yawning emptiness that had tried to consume us, and both of those trivial compared to the feeling of our soul sliding down the sword's icy gullet, and the frantic terror as we tried to hold on to some remnant of ourselves even as the glass-sharp cold tried to shred us to pieces, and then…

Yes, and then the indignity of being forced to watch rats gnaw my fingers off and pup their revolting offspring in my brainpan, Enserric put in huffily. Have you tried watching your own corpse rot? It is a singularly disturbing experience.

I blinked owlishly. I remembered the rats. The memory was fuzzy and distant, like it had arrived secondhand, but it was there. I…think I kind of have.

I know. Enserric sighed. Bloody confusing in here all of a sudden, isn't it?

No fucking kidding. And that was not in the least because there was another mind in the cage with us, and it had no memory of cold, but it did remember fire, and it was seething.

I turned. Valen's baby blues met mine. They were lucid, albeit a little perplexed. "What is this about the rats?" the tiefling asked.

I had to laugh. That's right. I'd dragged his mind along for this ride, and while it had caused him a whole heaping helping of pain, now it was protecting him. I felt a crazy joy at the thought. So often I'd been the storm. It felt good to be somebody's shelter, for once. "Just some bad memories, that's all."

Valen put his head to one side, and I could feel him weighing that statement. "Ah," he said at last. "Well. We know what those are like."

We did. I watched electricity flow across the Elder Brain's synapses, and I smiled. It was not a nice smile. I wasn't feeling very nice. "Hey, sunshine?"

Valen turned to look at me. Curiosity flooded my own synapses, and amusement, and something that felt hot and coiled and red. It didn't feel very nice, either. It felt a lot like chained-up bloodlust. I could relate. "Yes, my lady?"

I lifted Enserric. "Wanna fuck shit up?"

Valen considered that. Then he grinned. His eyes shone red. "I would love to."

I smiled beatifically. "That's what I thought." I pointed. "You take that branch, I'll take this one."

Valen nodded. "On it," he said, and then he leapt, the power in his leap carrying him clear across the nearest synapse. He hit the ground running, his flail already humming through the air. Where it hit, it tore chunks out of the Elder Brain's neurons. Long coils of cellular goo streamed lazily from the ruptures, floating into empty space while the voices screamed in protest.

I waited long enough to see the tiefling move, then nodded, turned, and reached out with my second sight and sixth sense, calling to the lightning leaping across the nearest synapse and making it surge.

Sparks showered, then spurted. The long feelers that bridged the gap between neurons blackened and withered.

The Elder Brain howled. STOP! STOP, OR YOU WILL BE PUNISHED!

Valen paused, lowering his flail. "We have been punished," he growled. "And punished, and punished, and punished again. Nothing you can do to us can be worse than what we have already suffered."

The voices lashed out, a near-physical force. YOU HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED A FRACTION OF THE PAIN WE CAN GIVE YOU.

The tiefling clucked his tongue. "Now, now. Threats hurt." He lifted his flail again and grinned like a tiger. "But so does Abyssal steel." Then he whipped his flail above his head and tore a new hole in the Elder Brain's neural circuitry.

I stared at Valen, open-mouthed. Dayum, son. I couldn't decide whether to hold him back, cheer him on, or fuck him. All three would have to wait, though, because there was pain to be dealt, and for once, we weren't the target.

There was an undamaged neuron to my right. I turned, gathered myself, and jumped, gathering air to propel me. The brain matter was squishy, and I stumbled when I landed, but I solved that problem by plunging Enserric into a neuron to catch my fall. Goo splattered me. It was hot and briny and bitter-tasting. I paused to spit it out, wipe my face with the back of my hand, and yank Enserric free. Then I did it again, and again, and again.

The Elder Brain's many voices babbled and screamed as the tiefling and I savaged its mind. By the third neuron, the babble coalesced into coherent speech. NO! STOP! IT HURTS! More neurons were shriveling, the damage spreading. The voices groaned. WE WILL SPEAK, WE WILL COMPLY, ONLY YOU MUST STOP!

I lowered Enserric. Valen did the same with Devil's Bane. "All right," I said. "We're stopping. Start talking."

The voices gathered, fell, swirled around us, though this time they kept a wary distance. WHAT ARE YOU?

"Who, me?" I looked down at Enserric, glittering like a bloody black claw. Then I looked up and laughed. My teeth gleamed in the light of dying brain cells. "I'm the wrath of God." And, as wrong as it felt to say that, it also felt entirely right. God help me.

A million voices rioted in the background, while a million more spoke in icy unison. VERY WELL. WHAT DO YOU WISH OF US, WRATH?

I thought. "I want you to let us go. All of us."

Valen chimed in grimly. "Unharmed."

The sliver in my head twitched, then rather peremptorily shoved me aside and took over my vocal cords. "Yes – physically and mentally, if you please," Enserric chimed in, through me. "From now unto perpetuity, as I know the illithid have very long memories."

I scowled and wrested my body back. "Cut that out." A mute and only half-sincere sense of apology filled my head. They were followed by a flood of words in Enserric's prissy mind-voice, delivered like a script and accompanied by a foot-tapping kind of impatience. I sighed. "And with no retaliation against us or anyone connected to us, by you or your people or your thralls," I added reluctantly, on Enserric's inner prompting.

The voices conferred for a while, a million million separate arguments all being hashed out at once. Eventually, the arguing died down and the voices came back together into the single overarching voice. AND IF WE DO THIS, YOU WILL LEAVE? it asked hopefully.

It looked like we were winning, but despite what satisfaction there was in having caused this thing a little pain in return for the pain it had given us, our victory tasted bitter. Bad enough to think of what this little venture had cost us. I felt raw and filthy, like my brain had been scoured with raw sewage, and I had no doubt that Valen felt the same. I was pretty sure we'd both be having nightmares for a long time to come.

Worse, though, was the prospect of walking away empty-handed. I had a memory, although it felt like it came from another lifetime, of another negotiation – the one that had gotten us roped into this nightmare to start with. That one had failed. Without much hope, I tried one last time. "What about the alliance with the Valsharess?"

The voices gibbered. IMPOSSIBLE. ONLY THE MIRROR WILL MOVE THE ELDER CONCORDE.

Valen's voice was flat and cold. "We could destroy you." His eyes flickered red, and his grin was a touch feral. "Your grip on our minds is loosening. I can feel it. Without that, you are nothing, and once I am free, I think it would take very little for me to tear you apart."

PERHAPS. There was fear in the voices. WE MIGHT CEASE AT YOUR HAND. BUT OUR DEATH CHANGES NOTHING. ZORVAK'MUR CANNOT BREAK THE ALLIANCE ALONE. EVEN IF WE FALL, THE CONCORDE WILL SURVIVE, AND THE ACCORD WILL STAND.

I bowed my head. So we suffered all of this for nothing. And if victory had been bitter, it was nothing next to the taste of failure.

Somehow, Valen had found his way back to my side. I no longer questioned how. I was just glad he was there. His hand touched mine. "There is no dishonor in retreat, if it means living to fight another day," he murmured to me. His face was cold, his eyes were hot, and his voice was tired. "I think we should say yes, and end this."

He was right. I blew out a shaky, defeated breath. Then I nodded. "All right." I raised my voice. "All right, Zorvak'mur, or whatever you want to call yourself. If you honor your end of the bargain, as described, we'll leave."

The voices babbled eagerly. YOU WILL LEAVE? AND NEVER RETURN?

I wondered if this thing had been talking to my exes. Not since Robert had anybody been so happy to see the last of me. "We will."

Sparks flared. Neurons pulsed. THEN GO, howled the Elder Brain, and…

…and then nothing much happened, except that suddenly there was cool air on my cheek, and a voice screeching at me. "Boss! Hey!" Clawed fingers poked me. "What happened? Did it listen? We went and now we be back but you not even say anything all this time! Are you okay?" Poke, poke. "Bo-oss!"

I blinked and drew in a sharp, harsh breath, like a diver surfacing from an oyster reef. The creepy whirling lines of Zorvak'mur's outer ring swam into blurry focus. Memory trickled in. I gasped and spun, searching through eyes that couldn't quite see, as if I'd just woken up from a long sleep. "Valen."

His silk-smoke voice answered immediately, breathless with relief. "Rebecca."

I spun, and there he was, and there I was, throwing my arms around his neck and hugging him so hard that our armor made a sound a sack of pennies being poured into a steel drum. "You're okay?"

He had gone stiff with shock, but before I could do more than register it, his arms had come up and locked into place around me and it was still like being hugged by a postbox, but in a good way. "I am…uninjured," he said roughly.

I squeezed my eyes shut. The slight quiver in his voice and his choice of words told me all I needed to know. He wasn't okay. Neither was I. I had a bad case of the shakes, the jitters, and the tremors, all rolled up in one great big bundle of mindfuck. I opened my eyes again and stared past a lock of crimson hair and, past that, the pointed tip of his ear. It was the one with the notch in it. It looked real enough, but… "Is this real?"

Valen's arms tightened around me, and his soft exhale stirred my hair. "I do not know," he admitted, and his voice was tired. "I can no longer tell."

Anxious claws tugged at my pants leg. "Hey! Deekin still waiting for an explanation! What the kzzkt happened to you guys?"

Deekin's voice snapped me back to reality, or what passed for reality anymore. Shit. We were standing in the open in an illithid city. This was no time for a meltdown. I pushed away from Valen. My hand was already on Enserric's hilt. I didn't remember telling it to do that. I looked down at Deekin, feeling a flare of relief at seeing him hale and whole – if it really was him. If this really was me. "What happened in there?" I demanded, more harshly than I'd meant to. "What did you see?"

Deekin blinked up at me uncertainly. "Umm. Well, first we walks in, then you guys stops and stares for a while, then just when Deekin startings to get nervous, a mindflayer comes in and wiggles its tentacles and, poof! Here we be." He studied my face, his eyes intent and worried. "You be okay, Boss? Deekin only asking because, umm, you not look okay."

Valen's eyes had gained dark circles that hadn't been there before, and his expression was haunted. "How long were we in there?"

The kobold squinted in thought, then shook his head. "Not long." He gave me a reproachful look. "Just long enough for Deekin to get worried."

A voice came from behind my head. "There, do you see? It is as I said," Enserric put in primly. "The flow of thought is much faster than the flow of time in the outside world."

The sword didn't sound even slightly rattled. The icy sliver in the back of my head didn't feel rattled, either, though the implications of my knowing that sure as hell rattled me. It rattled me right into silence.

Valen looked at my face, shifted, and spoke into my silence. "At least there is that." He didn't sound so sure, himself. "At least we did not lose too much time."

I swallowed. "Yeah." I reached up to run a hand through my hair, and froze. The circlet. It wasn't there. Shit. They still have it.

Deekin's head turned. He squeaked. "Boss!"

Valen was already moving in front of me, his eyes flashing red, and I spun, reaching in and out and around and feeling the icy river sluice through me and the crystal cage slam into place around my mind. "No further," I snapped at the illithid who'd been creeping up behind us. "I'm warning you." A wordless growl from Valen punctuated my words.

The illithid stopped and surveyed me – with its eyes and, a moment later, its mind. I felt it slither along the facets of my crystalline shelter, seeking a way in, but the cage of Enserric's undead awareness was as smooth as glass and impenetrable as diamond, and after a moment, the sensation withdraw. The illithid's tentacles writhed, and a voice like something from the depths of a swamp came gurgling out from beneath them. "You have been told to leave," it said, and even through the strangeness of its voice I could hear its distaste. "The Elder Brain has instructed us in the terms of your pact, but you should be aware that any delay in your departure may be taken as a violation of that pact."

My left knee threatened to buckle. I locked it. Sweat trickled down my back. So this is where I run away with my tail between my legs, before they change their minds. "We're going," I said shortly, and made to turn.

A poke to my thigh stopped me. "Psst. Hey. Boss." Deekin tried to keep one eye on the illithid and the other on me, with the net result that he looked like he was about to enter a trance and start speaking in tongues. "What about the slaves? And the circlet?"

I stopped in mid-stride. Then, very carefully, I put my foot down, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The slaves. I'd forgotten about them. How could I forget? I turned around again. "Yes." My voice came out hard and grim and cold. Was this why Valen sounded the way he did, sometimes? Carrying all that pain around with him, all those memories – it was no wonder he'd almost forgotten how to laugh. I was feeling pretty far removed from laughter, myself. "What about the slaves?" I went on. "They're mine. I paid for them. Them, and my circlet."

The illithid tilted its head. It appeared to be listening to words I couldn't hear. "The item was not part of our pact," it said at last.

I gritted my teeth, but Valen's warning glance at me told me not to push my luck, which was already stretched to its breaking point. "And the slaves?"

The illithid did that listening thing again. "We will deliver the thralls to the destination of your choosing," it conceded. "We will not allow it to be said that the illithid of Zorvak'mur do not abide by their mercantile agreements." Its tentacles twitched. "But you must leave now."

Valen and I exchanged glances. I bit my lip, thinking, then turned back to the illithid. "Send them to the Seer of Eilistraee, in Lith My'athar. Tell her they're a gift, to do with as she pleases." There was no guarantee the slaves would survive the trip, but I'd done all I could. Valen was right. I couldn't kill myself to save them. I could barely even save myself.

The illithid paused, then nodded minutely. "It will be done." Its voice hardened. "Now go. You will not be given another warning."

"Fine." I turned on my heel. I felt like a sculpture made of spun sugar, so fragile I'd shatter at a touch. "Come on. We're leaving." And I walked away without a backwards glance.

Quarra met us at the mouth of the cavern of Zorvak'mur. She sat her mount like it was a rock, not a living animal, which was an especially impressive feat when you considered that the rock in question was trying to lick its own eyeball, for reasons which probably only made sense to a lizard.

As soon as we were in close sight, her sharp eyes went right to my brow, where the circlet should have been, then settled on Valen's face, which looked like it had aged ten years in a day. Her eyes narrowed. "What happened?" she demanded, when we were in hearing range.

Don't pull the punch. You don't deserve it. "We failed. They wouldn't deal."

Quarra frowned. "Explain."

Deekin eyed me. The little bard knew something was up, even if he didn't know exactly what. "Yeaaaah, Deekin not so sure explaining be a great idea right now."

Valen shook his head sharply. "Not here. We are exposed here." He reached my side, gave me a once-over, and jerked his head at her to follow. "At camp."

Quarra hesitated as if she wanted to argue, but in the end, she just saluted and spurred her mount and led us on.

The drow's hidey-hole was barely more than a crevice in the rock, but for once, I didn't care. Right then, a hole in the ground suited me just fine. Valen led the way in, his eyes red-hued and hunting for enemies like he was just hoping something would be dumb enough to try him right now. Quarra placed a glow-rock in a niche up the wall, shedding just enough light to keep me from walking into anything. Deekin rifled through his pack, muttering about food. I found a few feet of unobstructed stone and paced. Standing still wasn't an option. If I stopped moving, I started thinking.

A wave of red light washed over my shoulder. Come, now, Enserric told me in exhorting tones. His voice was so clear, I might almost have thought he'd spoken out loud, except for the way it reverberated off the inside of my skull, for all the world like my own voice. You are free and alive. What more could you want?

What I wanted was to feel clean, and to feel like my mind and body were still my own. Enserric's voice was all sunshine and rainbows, but he didn't feel like sunshine. He felt dark and contracted. Worried. Don't worry. I felt a bubble of dark amusement rise up. I won't fall on you and leave you to get picked up by some drow, if that's what's got you so concerned. I had no intention of dying. Not yet. I hadn't started this war, but I'd be damned if I didn't finish it.

Enserric went black, then flared. Fine. I was only trying to help, but if you prefer to be unreasonable, far be it from me to stop you, he huffed, and fell silent. I told myself that I was relieved. My pacing quickened.

A few feet away, the drow and the tiefling spoke softly. "The Elder Concorde demanded the Seer's mirror as a condition of breaking the alliance," Valen explained.

Quarra sucked in a breath through her teeth and clicked her tongue. "High price, that."

Valen's voice was flat. "Too high. We will not save this world from the Valsharess just to deliver it to the illithid."

"Speaking as somebody who lives in this world, I'll agree with that," Quarra muttered. Her lizard nipped her sleeve. She patted its snout absently. "We're leaving, then?"

"Yes. How are we for supplies?"

The scout didn't pause before answering. "Five cycles. Enough to get back with some spare, if we leave now."

I spun on my heel and walked back towards them, jingling with the force of my steps. "Good." I couldn't breathe in this cave. "Then let's go. Now."

Valen gave me a sharp look. "Are you certain you do not wish to rest?"

I wasn't in the least bit tired – not physically, anyway - and these walls were closing in on me anyway. "Yes." It came out grim and cold. I tried to soften it. "The more distance we put between us and that place, the better." I paused. I wasn't tired, but Valen looked almost haggard and I hadn't even asked him how he felt. I'd only been thinking about myself, as usual. Lois had been right. "Sorry." I'm a selfish jerk. Sorry. "Do you want to rest?"

Valen's face darkened. "No. You are right. It is best if we return as quickly as possible. The Seer must know of this, and I…" He trailed off. A hollow, hunted look appeared in his eyes. "I must speak with her." He took a deep breath and straightened, with bleak determination. "Lead on, Quarra."

The drow looked back and forth between us, then bowed and swung herself back onto her mount. "As you say, commander," she murmured, with unusual mildness. She buckled her harness and checked her weapons. "This way."

My chest hurt where Heurodis had stabbed me, but when I slipped my fingers beneath the collar of my coat, there was nothing there. Nothing but an old scar, too old to hurt the way it did.

I withdrew my hand, but my fingers still rubbed the spot. I couldn't help it. Did that really happen, or did I just dream it? I remembered it all so vividly, but now it was like nothing had happened at all.

I took my hand away from my chest. It drifted back. My fingers played a nervous patter on my scales. My eyes darted at shadows and stone. Is this real? Shaundakul help me, I can't even tell anymore.

I tried to be unobtrusive about my fidgeting, but Valen must have been keeping an eye on me, because he noticed. He shot me a look – sharp, questioning, a little worried, a silent, 'Are you all right?'. I tried to look away, but his eyes snagged mine and wouldn't let go, insisting on an answer to his unspoken question. I shook my head a little and flicked my eyes to the others. This wasn't the time or place to talk. After a second, Valen dipped his head in understanding and broke eye contact.

I relaxed. Then I rubbed my chest again. I couldn't help it. It was like tonguing a loose tooth.

Time ran together in the dark, the way it always seemed to. I followed where Quarra led. After a while, that turned out to be a cave.

We all filed in. Deekin lifted his head, blinking blearily. His nostrils twitched and his little fork tongue darted out between his teeth. "Huh. This be an old dragon's lair." His snout wrinkled. "Phew. Deekin knows that smell anywhere."

Quarra reined her lizard in and swung down, giving the kobold a surprised frown. "You have a good nose."

Deekin grinned. "Nah. Just a good memory. Old Boss was a dragon. Big. White. Smelly." He sniffed again. "Smellier'n this, that be for sure. If there be dragons here, it be a long time ago."

I remembered the pervasive aroma of freezer-burned beef and old farts in Tymofarrar's lair. "Don't remind me, Deeks. I've been trying to forget that smell for a while now."

"Sorry, Boss."

That made Quarra's eyebrows raise, but after a moment she shrugged, as if deciding she didn't really want to hear the whole story, anyway. "Well, you're right. This used to be a wyrm's lair. Nothing but bones now, but the stench is still there, so other beasts still steer clear of it." Her mount absently stepped on her foot. Just as absently, she elbowed it in the ribs. It blinked, snorted, and sat, whereupon she tied it to a handy rock and went about pulling packs and setting up camp. "Should be safe enough to rest a spell, and you lot look like you need it."

I didn't argue. Deekin was starting to droop, and even Valen was looking bushed. As for me…nope. Not going there.

We settled in. Deekin almost immediately curled up against the wall, huddled so deep in his blankets that just the tip of his snout poked out. The poor little guy didn't even pull out his journal, he was so bushed. I sank down next to him and laid one hand on his skinny shoulder, feeling it rise and fall with his breath. He was so tiny. I always forgot how frail he really was, like a bird. He's alive, I told myself. They didn't get him. At least there's that. My hand went to my chest again, rubbing.

Valen caught me at it. Again. He crossed to me and crouched down with a faint grimace. "What is wrong?"

I didn't want to talk about it. "I might ask the same of you." There was a tightness around his eyes, as if from pain. "Are you all right?"

He lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug, winced, and lowered it. "These tunnels are chill and damp." Beneath his pauldron, he rolled his shoulder, a little too gingerly. "I ache."

I almost dipped into my second sight, and stopped myself at the last second. "Where?"

He snorted. "Where not?"

That's right. I'd almost forgotten what I'd once seen in my second sight – that, underneath all that gear, he was a walking mass of scar tissue, and probably a pretty good barometer, in case anybody wanted to know whether it was about to rain. I winced. "Sorry."

Valen flicked his fingers dismissively. "Do not apologize. You had nothing to do with it." He gave me a penetrating stare. "And do not dodge the question."

My laugh had a quaver to it. "You don't give up easy, do you?"

He didn't laugh. "No. It is why I am still alive."

He was still alive because he had more heart, soul, and guts than he knew what to do with – and, after seeing some of the shit he'd been through, I found that I didn't have the heart to lie to him. "Fine. You wanna know? My chest hurts, or feels like it should, where…" I couldn't say it. "You know." I took my hand away from my chest, then clasped both hands in my lap. "But there's nothing there."

The tiefling's eyes softened in sympathy. "It was not real."

My hands twitched. I clasped them harder. "It felt real."

The weariness in Valen's face spoke volumes. "I know." A kind of despairing humor twisted his lips. "I was there." He studied my face. "You should rest."

"Me?" He looked like hell. "What about you?

Valen's face froze. "I…would rather not."

I remembered what he'd told me, back there, about being afraid to go to sleep when he first got out of the Abyss, for fear that he'd wake up in the midst of a nightmare and kill everybody around him before he came to his senses. "I know." I didn't want to think about how I knew, but I did. I'd been there, too. "But you're only human," I went on, trying to sound reasonable. "You won't make it the rest of the way without sleep."

Valen spluttered. "I am not only human." His hand went to one of his horns. "In case you have not noticed."

I waved a hand. "Eh. You're human. You can see in the dark and you've got…" I gestured vaguely at his head. "…you've got accessories that I don't have, but aside from that…"

He stared at me as if I'd grown an extra head, and it was even crazier than the first one. "Accessories?"

"Hsst." Quarra looked back. "Quiet."

I scowled at her, but not for long. My eyes slid back to Valen. Was it just me, or was he swaying a little? I jerked my head and patted the ground next to me. After a moment's hesitation, he gave in and sank down next to me, rather more slowly and less gracefully than usual. He didn't even argue. That had to be a bad sign. I'd never seen him this worn-out. I looked at Quarra again, then scootched close enough to Valen to whisper in his ear. "What can I do?"

He grunted. His eyes were a little bloodshot. "I do not suppose you can grant a dreamless sleep."

I gnawed my lower lip. "I have some powdered valerian root," I offered. "Found it in the market. I could brew you a tea to help you sleep. Add some willow bark, too, for the pain. That'll help."

He frowned at his hands. "Will I dream?"

"Maybe." I thought about it, and blew out a frustrated breath. "I don't know, to be honest with you."

Valen shook his head. "Then let us not risk it."

I strangled the urge to strangle him. "We need to do something."

He let his head fall back against the stone, closing his eyes. I had the feeling he was avoiding my eyes. "I can cope. Sleepless nights are nothing new to me."

Like hell was I going to let him martyr himself. "Bullshit."

Valen cracked one eye open and looked at the ground. "This must be real," he murmured.

If I had any laughter left in me, I would have laughed. "Yeah. No piles of shit."

"So I truly am this tired." Valen almost-laughed and let his eyes close again. "Hellfire. I was hoping that was just another hallucination."

"You and me both." I swallowed. My mouth felt dry. "There...might be another option."

Valen lifted his head a little and raised an eyebrow. "Which is?"

I didn't want to ask this question. Part of me still hoped that what had happened had just been some weird hallucination, but if I asked and he answered right, then I'd know it had all been real, and I wasn't sure how to feel about that. I glanced at Quarra and lowered my voice even further. "You…you remember what I did to that orc bouncer?"

Valen paused. Then, softly: "Yes."

My fingers trembled, then twined around each other, like the snakes in Heurodis's hair. "I could do the same thing to you." I had to stop and clear my throat and gather my nerve. "You'll be out like a light for a few hours, but you won't dream, either."

The tiefling's eyes went to one side, thoughtful. He frowned. His eyes cut back to me. "And in the meantime, I shall be useless to you all." He shook his head. "No. That is not a chance I am willing to take."

Time for some tough love. "You go much longer without sleep, you'll be useless no matter what. At least this way you'll be useless for less time."

Valen's lashes fluttered in surprise. "That was…blunt." He paused, then sighed. "But true."

I'd roughed him up. Now to be gentle. "It's okay." As okay as being unconscious in the Underdark could be, anyway. "We'll be fine." I snuck a glance at Quarra. She was setting up some kind of tripwire at the entrance to the cave. "Quarra knows what she's doing." I touched the pouch at my belt. "And I have lightning."

Valen's frown deepened. "You cannot see in the dark."

Enserric's drawling, prissy tenor chimed in. "Never fear. I can see for her."

I reached back and patted the sword. "Thanks." My voice was so bright, Deekin could have read even his handwriting by it. "See? No problem."

Valen stared at me and pressed his lips together in a way that said he saw plenty of problems with this idea, but after a long, drawn-out moment, he nodded. "Very well." His voice was almost leaden with weariness. "Do it."

It was a measure of his exhaustion that he was willing to let this happen, but I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. "All right," I said, and stood, reaching for my belt o' tricks.

We had little water to spare, and couldn't risk lighting a fire to heat it, but that was the advantage of powders – they would dissolve and make an effective tisane even in cold water. Thank you, Farghan. I didn't know how I would have survived this long without his teaching. Probably wouldn't have survived. Period. They called me a hero, but heroes didn't need this much help.

Valen made a face when he downed the tea – brewed in a beaten-up tin cup provided by Quarra – but he downed it willingly enough. "And now?" he asked, when he was done.

I put the cup aside and settled to my haunches in front of him. "And now, just…" I trailed off. "Just…trust me, okay?"

He offered me a hesitant smile. "That, at least, I can do."

I smiled back, a little tentatively. Just as tentatively, I reached out and placed a hand on his forehead. I'd been trying so hard not to think of touching him that it felt strange to touch him now, almost unreal. His skin was smooth and hot, like he was running a fever, but his eyes were clear and his color was good, so maybe tieflings just ran hotter than normal humans did. Not important right now. Focus. I thought of warm summer days spent dozing in a hammock with a cold beer and a soft breeze. I thought of how it felt to sleep curled in the shelter of a spreading oak, the stars twinkling overhead and the night wind murmuring in my ears. I thought of the bliss of sliding into clean sheets after weeks on the road and listening to the wind howl and rain lash the windowpanes. I thought of how good it would feel, just to rest and let go of all of this for a few blissful hours, and let the thought rise up with my power, like breath. "Sleep," I whispered. Most people put up some resistance – I could feel it in the way my command broke over them, like waves over a quay - but Valen was either too tired or too trusting to put up a fight. Maybe it was a bit of both. Almost immediately, his eyes fluttered shut and the lines of exhaustion in his face eased into sleep.

When I was sure he was out, I took my hand away, or tried to. The backs of my knuckles slid down his temple to his cheek. The memory of a red-haired boy lingered in the back of my mind. Had that been a real memory, or just a dream? I thought it must have been real, because I could see traces of the boy in the face of the man in front of me – buried under the weight of years and pain and disappointment, but still there, clinging to those last, precious shreds of innocence like a shipwreck survivor to the flotsam.

Quarra's voice intruded, although her feet hadn't made a sound. "What really happened back there?"

I let my hand fall. "I told you," I said, without looking at her. "We failed. They sent us packing."

The drow crouched in front of me, forcing me to look at her. "Seems to be more to it than that." Her eyes were red and cutting. "There something I should know?"

What we'd just been through was none of her beeswax. "All you need to know is that you'd better make plans to fight illithid forces when the Valsharess comes."

The drow reached for no weapon, but her face suggested that was only because she would have preferred to kill me with her bare hands. "If you let him come to harm…"

Anger flared like a firework. She had no idea what we'd just gone through, how hard I'd fought to get him out of it – how hard he'd fought to get me out. Then, also like a firework, my anger fizzled, because if not for me, Valen wouldn't have had to go through this in the first place. I laughed, bitter and harsh. "If that happens, I'll deserve whatever you do to me," I told Quarra. Hell, I'd even hold her coat.

"Very well." The scout stood, reaching for her crossbow. "Draw your weapon and keep watch, priestess," she cautioned me. "No sleeping." She nodded at the kobold and the tiefling. "Their lives depend on it."

I looked down at Deekin, and all the fight went out of me – all the fight against Quarra, anyway. My voice went quiet. "I know."

The drow nodded and stalked away, taking up her position by the entrance. She crouched there, and there she stayed, motionless as a statue and only slightly more impatient.

I stood, drew Enserric, and took up position a few paces away, grounding the sword's point on the ground and resting my folded hands on his pommel. I knew I should have felt tired, but I didn't. A cold energy ran through my veins, sluicing away the exhaustion. Shaundakul help me, I welcomed it. It made me feel a little cleaner – a little less like my very veins had been filled with sewage and bile. I stared down at the black-glass hilt between my hands. That's you, isn't it? I asked silently. You're feeding me energy.

Enserric answered so quickly and quietly, I couldn't tell if the voice was his or mine. I am. Forced gaiety colored the sword-spirit's voice. Never fear, wielder. I am with you.

Yeah. I stared straight ahead, into the shadows. I remembered the warmth of Silent Partner's haft, like a living thing, but the cold energy that beat in time with my heart now was as dead and dreadful as the eye of a hurricane. That's what I'm afraid of.