The ramp of ice-covered corpses began to show as a dark gray arc between the cold black stone of the mountain and the lighter gray of cloud-blanketed sky. Andral waited at the base of his ramp for dawn's reluctant approach. Joy swelled in his heart and his teeth ached from the freezing-wide grin across his face.

Death had led him to the power of the spirits, freeing him from the demands of the elementals. Death had also led him to the power of the source, freeing him from the fear of the Void in which those same spirits lay trapped. He was now free of anyone who might control or harm him—except for the man who had murdered his father. When the sun rose, however, he would take care of that as well. Soon, he would stride through the halls of Har-Tor bringing death in his hands.

Thoughts of wrapping his fingers around Karux's throat nearly made him giddy. Nothing could stop him now! His greatest challenge was going to be in deciding the slowest and most satisfying way to kill him. The angorym had tricks for that, he remembered. He'd have to discuss it with them.

Spearmen bustled about, organizing their ranks in preparation for the attack. They skipped aside for lumbering angorym who were drug through their neat lines by snapping and snarling drwg pulling at their chains. The giant dire wolves could smell the coming battle and crept toward the front lines despite their masters' efforts to hold them back. Even the gob-bocari, pale as maggots in the dim pre-dawn light, swarmed the sides of Har-Tor in their countless thousands, eager to join their brothers inside.

Andral stood in the calm center of it all, waiting for the first light to unleash this restrained violence.

A stillness settled in behind him, an air of nervous expectation. Andral turned to look and was punched in the midriff. He looked down. The base of a long bronze spearhead stuck out of his ruptured flesh. Holding the other end of the spear, Pronos gaped at him in an expression of stunned horror, as if the spear had decided to plunge into Andral all on its' own and he had grabbed it in a failed attempt to stop it.

Andral straightened and smiled sadly. "Oh, Pronos. I made you a promise and it looks like I'll have to keep it sooner than I expected." He grabbed the spear and Pronos' hand fell away. Andral pulled the spear out. Blood covered the spearhead, but none flowed from the wound. He turned the spear around, he plunged it into Prono's belly. Pronos grunted and staggered backward, but Andral did not let him fall. "I promised you, that when I wanted you to die, I would kill you myself."

Blood poured out, soaking Prono's tunic and leggings. His legs buckled, but Andral lifted him up like canvas across a tent pole. Prono's limbs twitched and he made feeble gasping sounds, his mouth opening and closing like a fish pulled from the water. Andral gently planted the spear in a nearby pile of broken rocks.

Pronos dangled next to the ramp blinking slowly.

"You probably would have ended up drwg food anyway," Andral said, "but I still want you to see my victory. I'm going to leave you here with the rest of my trophies until I'm finished."

Andral faced the remaining tacarchs who stood behind him mouths agape, forgotten spears drooping in limp hands. "Tazo." It was the one name Andral could remember. "You're in charge now. Are we ready to begin?"

Tazo's voice came out as a strangled quaver. "Y-yes, my Oracle."

Andral clapped his hands, rubbed them together and turned back to the ramp. "Good. We've had our desert early, but soon we'll eat the main meal."

<====|==|====>

A steady rushing sound, as of high-speed air or water flowing past, came first.  Next came a vibration, as if the world itself shivered with repressed urge to act, or perhaps it was already racing away along some unguessable course toward a destination of which only it knew. Then came a sense of presence, of physicality and the weight of a body being pressed down by gravity.

Garanth opened his eyes to a gray emptiness. Is this death? he wondered. Have I been cast out into the Void? Rejected by the Lord of the Mountain for my failure? Growing aware of his arms and legs, he tried to move them but they might as well have been mountains. His confusion was rising up into panic when a flash of light blinded him. The woman of light stepped, as if through a curtain, into existence. She leaned over where he lay.

"Eiraena?"

"I'm here."

"Am I dead?"

"I don't know how to answer that."

"What do you mean?"

"You are one heartbeat away from both life and death."

Eiraena knelt beside him and lifted his head.

He lay on a vast, high, grassy plain. The sacred mountain Archetor rose up in the distance, yet it seemed—impossibly—to stand in the west. He looked down at the deep gash in his upper thigh. Though it flapped open, ragged and bloodless, his blood had soaked his trousers a deep red and pooled thickly beneath him. From the center of the pool a plant had sprung with a spiraled bright green stalk, sword shaped leaves and small heart-shaped fruit of a rich dark red. "You have to decide. Will you join with the n'phesh and become one with the land?"

"I don't see that I have a choice."

"We always have choices. More people than you know destroy themselves just to prove they have a choice."

Eiraena picked a fruit and held it out, her black eyebrows a questioning arch in a glowing face of light.

Garanth took a deep breath scented with new spring grass and a dozen competing species of flowers. He couldn't remember if he'd been breathing a moment earlier. "Yes."

Eiraena put the fruit to his mouth and he bit down. It's cool juice filled his mouth with a delicate and unidentifiable flavor.

The world spun and fell away, plunging him into a deep coolness, and the light went out.

Garanth gasped, and water rushed into his lungs. He coughed it out, but more rushed back in. With one flailing hand, he reached for the water's surface, but only strangely textured rock met his touch. Realizing his eyes were closed, he opened them.

A cool blue light illuminated the edges of the world. Up and down righted itself. The stone roof become floor. Garanth pushed himself upwards and broke the surface of the water, gasping and sputtering.

He was back at the source. He was in the source.

Coughing and choking, Garanth flung both arms over the stony lip of the pool and dragged himself from the water. He rolled over, panting, his body numb with cold. His muddled thoughts were still focused on Andral. Andral had...Andral was...going to do something. Garanth had to stop him. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to do, but he knew he had to keep moving forward and the answer would come to him along the way.

He grasped the stone chair's arm to drag himself to his feet and a shock ran through him. It shot up his arm, buzzed through his head, shot down his legs to his heels, then into the land itself. Every nerve shivered with the painful awareness of being. Garanth jerked his hand back. He swayed before the chair, still dripping water from the source.

The air pulsed with his name from the insects' chirping. Gar-anth! Gar-anth!

Garanth looked at the floor, then all around the cave. Millions of beetles covered every dry surface. Had they carried him into the pool?

The memory of the fight with Andral rushed back. He had already confronted Andral and failed. He pulled at his torn trowsers and examined the gaping bloodless wound in his thigh.

Save us! Save us! Save US!

And suddenly he understood that us included him, as well as every other living thing in this world, Corha, Karux, Uncle Mac, Eiraena... Garanth cast about for some glimmer of pure light, wishing Eiraena were here with him. Had that been a dream? Even if it had been, it was certainly no less real.

He knew what he had to do. In fact he had already made his decision. Garanth sat in the chair.

And the seat of power claimed him.

The patterns of the world exploded before him like a vast flower opening up to reveal still more flowery shapes, entire worlds wrapped inside each smallest part. Garanth felt like he had lived all his life crammed inside a small box. He stretched out his left hand and felt the weight of Archetor, the sacred mountain, and all the mountains of that vast eastern range. He stretched out his right hand and grasped a vast chasm—deeper than Archetor was tall—which extended for half a continent. He had never even heard a rumor of its existence. He stretched his legs and felt the cool waters of the Pardos and the Burat rivers rushing over them as his feet probed the depths of the distant ocean to the south. He leaned his head back and the frozen north cooled his brow. And over all this arched the rainbow colors and shapes of the elemental spirits singing in such a perfect harmony that individual notes could not be heard. The sound washed over him, leaving an impression of a gentle physical caress.

Now that he concentrated on the song of the elementals, he sensed a growing discordant whine. He focused on it until he could discern individual spirits screaming in fear and agony as they died, swallowed by the Void.

Garanth found his half-brother. Men and drwg and angorym swirled around Andral, enclosing him like a physical manifestation of the Void who's hunger gripped him.

This will not do, he thought.

<====|==|====>

Eiraena's glow increased until it threw shadows across the room.

"What is happening?" Macander asked.

Karux couldn't find the breath to respond. He had once stared into the heart of several stones sent by the n'kroi to spread their evil influcence. Now, having shifted his awareness to the world of shapes, the maelstrom of power surrounding Eiraena was nearly as painful to focus on as those stones had been, though for entirely different reasons. "Somehow, she is drawing to herself unimaginable amounts of karis. From where it is comes, I can't even guess, but I don't think it is of this world."

The light increased. Karux and the others flung up hands to block its painful glare. Eiraena rose and opened eyes which shone like torches, bright as bolts of lightning which never faded.

"Eiraena? All this time...the woman of light...was you?"

As if dropping a mask, Eiraena smiled at him, acknowledging his recognition. An inexplicable joy geysered up within him. "Yes. Come." Her voice held a depth like a vast chorus of women.

Karux's feet moved towards her automatically.

"Bring your spears. We must cleanse this place of the gob-bocari."

Eiraena gestured to Karux's horn. He lifted it to his lips and blew the rallying cry. Men, who had been running back and forth through the halls of Har-Tor hunting gob-bocari, sprinted to its call in a near panic. They slid to a stop at the incandescent shape before them. The faeyn among them wept in joy.

Eiraena led them to the very bottom of Har-Tor. They searched every shadowed corner for cowering gob-bocari who even fled from the reflection of her light. The men set about slaying them wherever they hid.

They came upon some dwerka stone cutters who threw themselves on the ground, chanting praises to the High One and His Light. Proceeding upwards through the halls, Karux later heard gob-bocari had exploded from closets and cabinets where none had been suspected, just from mere hint of Eiraena's approach. They trampled people and each other in their haste to leave.

"We'll need help with the rest," she said as they approached the main gate. "It arrives even now."

Karux half expected her to throw open the doors of the gate, instead she took the stairs to the overlook. The guards gasped, drawing back in either fear or reverence. Eiraena flung her arms up, throwing light in all directions, illuminating millions of gob-bocari who covered the surrounding mountainside like maggots on a rotting corpse. At that moment the sun rose between the mountains of the east, but it could not compete with her radiance.

"They're here!" Eiraena looked up and Karux followed her example.

Above them all, like a circling school of sharks, draeken of all sizes filled the sky. Screeching with joy and hunger, they swooped down and began to feed on the panicked gob-bocari.