Soulshadows

by Solara Spellforger

Kalesra finds herself caught up in the struggles of gods and demons when she finds an artifact that could determine the outcome of the Blood Wars in favor of one side or the other. Demonblood herself, she finds her place in the conflict an uncertain one.

PREFACE

This is a work that is to be regarded as incomplete, even the portions of it that have been written already. I am less pleased with it than I could be. I cannot read through it without finding an error that needs correcting and having the feeling edge in upon me that there are still mistakes that I have missed. The work was originally posted to a message board on GameFAQs in an un-revised form, and it was rushed. Furthermore, though every character and element of plot was my own, I originally used place and creature names which are the property of Wizards of the Coast, as I was writing this for an online audience that played Dungeons and Dragons and wished to link it to this in some way. These things have been changed back to the way they were in the original document, before their online posting, but other articles have undergone a bit of revision as well. There are holes that need patching, snares that need untangling, and pictures that are a bit worn about the edges and could stand a bit more paint--or maybe a bit less. Read with this in mind. It is not finished, it is not perfected, and maybe it never will be. I can only hope that it continues to evolve.

SOULSHADOWS

ãAmbika Kirkland, 2005

CHAPTER ONE

Where am I?

This was the only question that she could ask, the only coherent thought of any sort that would come to her. The rest was chaos -- her mind, the sensations rushing in from all around, the visions...

The visions.

Sand, white hot, windblown as the faintest breath of a newborn wind caressed its rippled surface. Spires, monoliths looming and black against the impossibly huge orb of a red-gold sun; sentinels in this strange desert, alien watchers over the puzzling vastness.

She could not see. Only these visions dominated her mind. They pressed against her senses with a hard edge almost akin to reality, stirring up odd feelings and sensations. It was like a dream, but then it wasn't; it was too vast and insistent to be entirely illusion, but it was too alien to be any part of real.

Who am I?

Now this was a strange thought. It spread out from her mind, and gradually, through force of persistence, it began to take hold in her body and lend it substance and realness. Now she could feel the soles of her feet pressing against the insides of soft boots, exerting a force upon warm, sifting earth below and supporting knees, thighs, arms, a body that weighed down from above. She felt strands of hair drifting to and fro across a partially bare back. More subtly she felt other things, a grace and power possessed by this form, this avatar.

The avatar was she.

She was Kalesra.

This sudden epiphany took her by the shoulders and breathed life into her with a sudden forceful suspiration, left her shuddering and dizzy and almost weeping. It was like dying in a dream and waking in real life, and as the feeling passed over her she was filled with a mixture of weary resignation and awe. She was here, whatever this place was, and it was no wandering of her imagination.

Kalesra turned her eyes to one of the great dark spires that marked the landscape and tried to use it to ground her thoughts, as an anchor for her mind. Fragments of memories were flitting by. It was an unnerving thing, knowing that a full life's history lay just out of her grasp and all that she could remember was her name.

Kalesra

Kalesra, you fool, don't die on me. Don't, do you hear me? No, damn it!

Now listen, child.

Kalesra. There must be a reckoning between you and I. Only one of us will walk away from this.

The road is long. Like a winding slip of unforged shadow it

Kalesra, will you saddle Lliriya?

Imposes itself, gathers up circumstance and

Kalesra, you know well enough how damned dangerous that thing is! It was not meant as a plaything for mortals, and you take your life in your hands by taking it for such! Why must you always toy with death? 'Tis foolishness at the worst!

Casts a quiet darkness upon it. We walk this path, we

Kalesra, will you saddle Lliriya?

Walk this path

Kalesra…Kalesra…Kalesra…

Never knowing that we have fallen beneath this gentle spell of darkness until

Kalesra

Comes the question. The

Kal

The question.

Can we be redeemed? And as slips this moment unspeaking upon us

Kalesra. Look upon the darkness in my eyes when I speak to you

The shadow has already been cast

She grabbed at these last fleeting thoughts like a dying woman embracing her last breath. For a moment they meant nothing to her, but then slowly she felt the thing that was clasped in her hand and unfurled her fingers. In her palm there rested a gem. It was a plain enough bauble, a luminous orb with the appearance of blood swirling through clouded water, unfaceted and smooth, pretty to look at but otherwise unremarkable. Yet there was more to it than its outer appearance. As she gazed long at it, a chill caught her; a dirty chill that shivered along her spine like the trail of some repulsive creature. Her stomach roiled with an odd, squeamish sort of nausea. Quickly she tore her eyes away from it. No, not just a simple "it". It had a name, and a purpose, and a story to tell. Something about it invaded her mind, smoky wisps of thought tugging ever so gently at the edge of her comprehension. Kalesra's eyes traced a slow path back toward her hand. A shudder caught her. A voice whispered to her.

I am named Ixxmaal

The though shook her mind and sent an invisible hand running cold fingers up and down her spine. There was no doubt that the "message", or whatever it was had come from the thing that she held in her hand. This filled her with a strange, deep worry that she did not fully fathom. She didn't care for this sudden disturbance of mind at all. It was invasive. It was dark, violating. With uncanny and discomfiting persistence it clutched at the edges of her soul. Steeling her mind against the possibility of any more foreign thoughts, she secured the gem in her belt pouch and determined not to remove it again without good reason.

A thought, one that she would loose to confused frustration a moment later, passed through her mind: I don't think that Ixxmaal wants me to remember...

The awareness of temperature crept upon Kalesra slowly. At first the heat was like small insects, crawling harmlessly but irkingly along the surface of her skin. But gradually, this hurtless tingling gave way to an intense burning that engulfed the whole of her. Her tongue felt parched and swollen in the back of her throat, and all that she could think on for any length of time was the unpleasant fact that she felt as if she were traveling through the inside of a lit furnace. The great orb of the sun in its palanquin of flames bore down upon the parched earth with all of the fury of the Hells, and it turned the sand to a sea of burning grains as it went.

Kalesra's vision was a haze of heat, shimmering and shifting before her. Her eyes could find no purchase for there was nothing for them to focus on; no distinct shapes, only a vastness of sand with each portion of what lay ahead being no different than what lay behind.

And everything was aflame.

Fiery shapes danced before the woman's unfocused eyes, blotting out everything substantial as they engulfed her field of sight; leaping, catching things afire, painting the world in shades of orange and scarlet and flame-white. She saw fire and she saw shadows, all battling for purchase, all railing against the boundaries of her mind. The grasp of the feverish temperature was edging in upon her sanity with all of the strength that it possessed, and she was blind and powerless. She staggered. The hotness had sapped the strength from her legs. Now they were worthless to keep her aright. They swayed beneath her with growing threat of collapse as she pushed on, and it seemed to her that around her was not air but sand, a thickness of it permeating harsh and dense and invading every parcel of air until breathing was near to impossible. The woman felt her mind fleeing. It went out into a vast and burning darkness, leaving her blind as sight and power departed. She did not feel herself falling.

She only knew that she woke. From where she lay, on her back in a cot of sorts, she could see only the ceiling of a tent with the sun shining through to tint her skin the same golden color as the fabric draped above her. Tentatively she stirred – and at once her arms and shoulders felt as if they had been rubbed raw with a sanding block. With a small hiss, she lay back and was very still; but it was too late to put a stop to the pain. It had snuck up to her the instant she was fully awake, and now it was not very well about to go anywhere.

Painfully, Kalesra appraised herself. Sunburn was the most obvious of her problems, but she was likely dehydrated as well, and though it was hard to tell in the heat she seemed to have a slight fever on top of all of her other worries. She tried to remember when she had passed out, or what had happened afterward, but it was a wasted effort. She had no concept of time, no notion of what she had been doing in the space between fainting and waking, and no apparent way to correct either dilemma. She closed her eyes and tried to take stock of everything.

"I'm in a tent," she whispered, "All alone. Before, I was in a desert, but I've no idea whether the desert is still outside or not. Or if it ever was outside of this place. Wherever this place is. And my name is Kalesra. And I most certainly shouldn't be here, even though I think that I came here on purpose. Damn everything! And this stone which I have in my pocket…" And here, to reassure herself, she slipped a hand into the belt pouch, expecting to feel the smooth surface of the gem. But there was no gem.

For a moment she searched through the sheets and on her person furiously, ignoring the raw pain in her arms, but as she was in the midst of this activity a voice interrupted from behind her.

"There was nothing that I could do. He took it. I am sorry."

It was a man's voice that spoke, deep and rough but unusually quiet. It was almost as if he was holding a hand over his mouth to mute his words, but he was not. Kalesra wondered at the reason for his quietness for a while, but soon she realized that this was his normal manner of speech.

"Who…? who stole my gem?" she asked.

As soon as she had spoken she sprang back in surprise at herself, for though she had said clearly what she meant to say, with some hesitation, the string of words that had issued from her mouth was completely strange to her. That is to say, it was in an utterly alien language, one that she was sure that she had never heard before. Unbidden, it had sprung from between her lips, and the birthing of the strangeness gave her a jolt. She blinked. The stranger was puzzling over her surprise.

"I'm sorry," she stammered slowly. "I didn't, I didn't realize that I could speak whatever language this is that I'm speaking. I mean… 'Tis a shock. I have never spoken words like these before or, or even heard them. I haven't any idea where I got them from, or for that matter what language I'm supposed to speak or even where…. where exactly this is, and well, you can see that I'm confused, but then you would be too if you had just, well…. I mean…" She shut her mouth and sat marveling over the new stream of unfamiliar words in shock. A river from my damned mouth. A foreign stream that flows and flows and will not stop. Ah, Hell and the Gods.

The stranger seemed taken aback himself, though not at the woman's language. Kalesra suspected that he had never heard such a long and strangely confused monologue in his life.

"You are from one of the Otherworlds," the man said slowly. Kalesra almost spoke, but then she hesitated, taking a moment to let the man's appearance register in her mind now that she had temporarily gotten over both her anger and her surprise. She took him for a cleric of some sort, but she was not really sure how accurate that guess was. A symbol of Solundarian the Lord of Flames hung from his neck, which struck her somehow strangely. Here in this place the familiar was almost more a shock than the unusual. But after all, throughout the entirety of the multiverse, if one thing was to remain unchanging, it should be the gods. Even if differences of language gave them different names from place to place, their symbols and purposes should be reliably constant.

"What do you mean by other worlds?" Kalesra asked, still letting her gaze wander over the stranger. He seemed human enough, tall and sturdy with long dark hair and deeply tanned skin. A few scars marked his face, one here, along the contour of the cheek bone, one there, running from eyebrow to hairline. All and all, his face was a pleasing one to look at--though perhaps, she supposed, it would have been a bit more pleasing had it not been quite so blunt.

"Otherworlds," he corrected firmly. "The varying phases of the Material Plane."

Ah, well here, Kalesra thought, he was beginning to make some sense.

"This is a phase of the Material?" she asked, "And you think that I have come from a different phase? You're most certainly right; because this doesn't seem like any sort of place that I've ever even heard of. The monoliths, those great stones…what are they?"

But the stranger was not about to let himself be sidetracked.

"I know for a fact that you come from a place far removed from here," he said, "but this is nowhere on the Material, here. It is a basement of Elysium, so to speak. Do you see that great orb above us? That is the view of Elysium from here. This is a between-world, you might say."

"And what am I doing in this between-world?" Kalesra asked. The man shook his head.

"I know no more than you. But the man who took your bauble and fled with it seemed to know."

"Tell me about him."

"There are many things to tell about him. But I suspect that you want the details of the encounter. I felt your presence the instant you shifted into this plane near to this place where I have set up camp, and went to satisfy my curiosity by investigating the disturbance that you caused.

"When I reached you, you had passed out from the heat. Not knowing your business, but not able to allow some hapless planewalker as I took you for to die out in this place, I began to sprint across the sand toward you. Then while I was still a good distance off I felt another fluctuation as a new 'visitor' made his appearance.

"He was very tall, likely a spellcaster of some sort but well built, dressed in scarlet robes the hue and shade of fresh-spilled blood. Not at all the sort who ought to be taken lightly. I paused, for I was somewhat cautious of him, and in my moment of hesitation I saw him bend over you and remove some sort of bauble from your belt pouch. I called out for him to hold, but far from listening, he clasped the stone tightly in his hands and pushed back through the fabric of the planes, fleeing to one of the Otherworlds. I would have followed him, but your survival was more pressing."

He stopped, noting Kalesra's discomfort, and frowned slightly. "Here," he said gently. "I am being lax. You need not continue to suffer."

He reached toward her and laid a hand lightly on her arm. At first there was only the slight pressure of his touch, but after a second had passed, a delicious coolness twined its way up Kalesra's arms and then slid down her raw back. The pain vanished.

"Thank you," she told the man with a small nod, now sure that he was a cleric. "I -- well I hate to be rude, but I must ask you. You said that you would have followed the man if there had been time. Can you still follow him? Could you send me after him?"

"I could," the man shrugged. "Whether I do or not is your decision."

"Then it is possible."

"Yes. The Otherworld that he escaped to lies directly juxtaposed against this plane, and thus reaching it is within my scope. But I wonder why this gem-thing is of such great concern to you."

"It knows something," she replied broodingly. "It is the key to something. I can't remember a scrap of why I'm here, and I feel that if that thing is lost, I will have lost my last hope of remembering."

"I cannot agree or disagree with you," the cleric answered, once again shrugging. "But I can tell you that you have no hope of accomplishing what you seek without great danger."

Kalesra had been sure that he would say something like this. She steeled herself.

"I don't care," she replied resolutely. "Send me to this place. Send me now, if you can and will."

"Then prepare yourself," the cleric told her solemnly. He placed both hands on her shoulders, as if he were an exorcist come to drive forth some spirit from her body.

There was a wild, exhilarating rush as every sensation in the two worlds that she was traveling between converged upon her. It felt as if she were making love, as if she were hanging by one fingertip over a bottomless precipice, as if she were freezing and burning, both at once, all at the same instant, an incredible, indescribable onslaught of feelings and emotions. And then there was a sharp nausea like a knife being twisted about in the pit of her belly, followed by a violent lurch.

And then there was stillness. She realized that she had been closing her eyes, and ever so slowly she let them flutter open. She was standing in a forest, beneath the canopy of myriad sunlit leaves, and from nearby the sharp stench of decaying bodies rose up to meet her.

Some of the corpses could almost have been sleeping men.

They had died restlessly, and lay with their arms flung out from their bodies or laying across their chests, fingers lightly curled. And their faces; their faces bore an odd peacefulness, a look of sad resignation to some unknown circumstance. There were no marks on their bodies, no signs of what had killed them. They had lain here, in this spot, and with no apparent argument they had died.

That was all there was to the matter.

But then, it was not, and Kalesra felt disquieted. She had seen this before, somewhere in the roiling confusion of her past. The corpses, laid out like a sacrifice, faces turned up, eyes staring sightlessly through closed lids and seeing nothing; it had a meaning, all of it, a significance. They spoke to her.

This could have been your doing. You could have killed in this manner, struck us dead with a single word…If only you could remember, remember the word that must be spoken…

She balled her hands tightly into fists, choking back an unexplained fury. She was filled up with a sudden revulsion; an angry self-loathing that had no apparent basis. Some memory of an ugliness in herself had stirred up, died down, lingered now beneath the surface of her thoughts.

"What manner of monster am I?" she demanded aloud. Her voice, so strangely loud in the quietness of this place, startled her; and as she spoke, it awakened an awareness of other sounds, of the noises of brooks and small creatures and hawks winging above the canopy of green. Noise did not seem right here, nor did the apparent apathy of the sun falling uncaringly about. It seemed as if nature were conspiring to mock this strangeling woman's concern over things dead.

"Then damn it all!" she exclaimed in an aggravated tone, feeling flustered and upset. "They're dead, and I didn't kill them and I can't bring them back. So. To business." She stopped, for again her voice had seemed alien. There was an almost-silence in the wake of her monologue, a pause, as the forest seemed to hold its breath. At first Kalesra thought that she had caused the hush, but out of the silence a faint, distant noise echoed. Something far and away from the clearing where she stood had exploded violently, making a cacophony unnatural enough to frighten the forest into silence—and she felt a faint tremor of nervousness herself, for there was an undertone to the sound that she recognized and did not like.

"'My' mage," she murmured faintly beneath her breath, "is up to certain tricks."

"Well." The voice that came suddenly from behind her was soft and ironical, like the whisper of a late spring wind through the branches of trees, but with an undertone of sarcasm. "You know much about something that interests me."

Once so far in recent memory (which was really the only memory she had), a voice from behind had taken Kalesra by surprise. She was not at all pleased with this second instance. In fact it irked her a great deal. In fact it angered her. It filled her, in fact, with a strange and inexplicable rage at whoever had spoken.

"I doubt that I, or my business, are of any interest to you at all," she snapped, turning around quickly and drawing a sword whose existence she had forgotten until now. "And I furthermore do not see how you should know what I'm doing when I'm not even sure."

The man laughed. It was a pleasant thing to watch, like sunlight passing over the ripples of a lake. His face was oakwood brown, with eyes the particular hue of foliage that is lit softly from behind by sunlight, and falling around it was a shock of shaggy hair, a deep, warm auburn in color. The laughter changed Kalesra's mood at once. She bowed her head, feeling sorry that she had raised her voice without provocation.

"I apologize for my rudeness," she said quietly. The man shook his head.

"There is no need," he smiled, the same unintentional note of irony playing through his voice. "Does the rain apologize for every leaf that it rips from a branch in its passing?"

Kalesra raised a brow.

"You are a druid," she noted. This was a statement, not a question. The fact was obvious. The man nodded, his green cloak shifting around his shoulders.

"I am," he replied. "Achalos is my name, and I follow the path of Balance. There are two things that concern me. First, one of my kin passed through here not long ago—though I am sure you know nothing of that—and though she does not know it, I have been following in her shadow for some time now. Something else has been following even more closely, and I fear for the safety of my fellow druid should it decide to reveal itself."

"What…what is this thing?" Kalesra asked quietly.

"A hellhound," the druid told her, ominously lowering his voice. "An unnatural creature which has no place in this world, and in this case even more unnatural, for it has somehow become separated from its pack."

"Why does it follow her?"

"That is what I do not know. There is a mark of some sort on her soul, a mark placed by someone who wishes her harm, and this rogue hellhound is drawn to her like a moth to the light of a lantern. But I must hand this matter over to the governing High Druid of this area, for something more pressing has come to my attention. Something more…personal.:"

"That being…?"

"A man is here, a man who has something in his possession that I have been seeking to destroy for a good number of years. He has it now, but the mark of it is on you still. And you know him, and more importantly, how to use what he has and how to dispose of it."

"I know none of these things that you claim I know," Kalesra started indignantly. "I cannot remember what took place even a day ago, and I have no way of knowing who is worthy of trust and who is not."

"Are you hinting that perhaps you do not trust me?" the man asked. "You can feel the power of this Ixxmaal thing, the scope of its influence, the number of creatures that it has touched and altered. You are one of them. I, too, have had dealings with the unnatural thing, and am quite tired of its existence. Yes, there are few who can be trusted. I am not asking that you give me trust. I am not asking that you give me anything. I am only asking that you hear me."

She thought on this, and at last she gave the stranger a weary nod.

"Tell me."

"It is better that we do not speak of it just now," he said with s light drop in the pitch and volume of his voice. "I have no desire to evoke its attention."

"You speak of it as if it were sentient," she complained. Really, she did not wish to admit to herself what had just been expressed.

The druid shrugged.

"Do you find that odd? You?" Actually, she did not. She shook her head mutely.

"No. But tell me. Do you know me? Have we met before?"

"We are not acquainted, but I know your name. You are Kalesra, mage and warrior, a vampire's taint that will never quite fade dirtying your blood, though you are no vampire. You are a planar traveler, saint, monster, legend, hero, fool, storyteller, liar, harlot, chaste and bloodthirsty worshipper of Tyr; murderer, savior, manipulator, tool—take your pick. You have not lived long, yet you have been more things than I can count."

"How do you know these things?" Kalesra demanded, feeling suddenly frightened at this overly knowledgeable stranger who claimed not to know her and yet acted as if he had read her life story from a book, all with casual matter-of-factness. The druid looked at her piercingly in a way that conveyed his words somehow as inarguably truthful.

"Ixxmaal binds our minds together," he said quietly. "You are not attuned to this…uncanny…bond, but I am. Could you remember, you would know many things about me as well, things that I would never willingly disclose."

"Then you have my memories!"

"Some of them. Others, no. I am blocked from what you know of Ixxmaal's weaknesses. It is not aware that I am tapping into its hive mind still, but its unconscious defenses block me."

"Tell me what you do know of me, at once!" Kalesra exclaimed excitedly. "I certainly cannot allow you to go on knowing things about me that I myself have forgotten."

Achalos smiled wryly.

"No," he replied. "You cannot, at that. Very well, sit on the earth there and I will tell you what I know."

When he had finished, Kalesra was trembling with emotion, flushed and chilled and sweating, all three at once. Her head was light, as if her mind was not really there but floating somewhere above.

She staggered.

Achalos caught her arm and steadied her as she tried vainly to make sense of the thoughts that were spinning through her head like a swarm of giddy flies. She had been a monster once, a vampire no less; cursed undead, tainted in mind and spirit. And now, now that the memory had returned, she could feel it; the icy creatures crawling through her veins, cold and malevolent, dirtying her, fouling her blood.

Vampire, demon, bloodlusting creature. Monster.

But also saint, savant, savior. Also healer, also hero. She clung to the good memories desperately, trying to overwhelm the bad and make them go away. They would not leave. They were here now, a part of her, not to be forgotten again. Now that she had her memories back, she could not simply dismiss those which did not please her and cause them not to have been. Regret and relief mingled. So many things were explained now, and bitter as the knowing was, it was better than the vaguely horrified doubt that had been before.

So, she was not just "Kalesra:" anymore, a hollow name without meaning or purpose. She was Kalesra the battlemage, bastard daughter of a Altumairi sorcerer, kin of the Night, demonblood, planewalker, mageborn, battlerager—a complicated creature of deep and lengthy history.

There had been so much blood: strange blood spilled by the battlemage's sword and stranger blood flowing in her veins. Her father had been a man twisted and consumed by the art that he had practiced, a tiefling, a demon's child, genius and madman. And as to her mother, there was little or nothing to recall, only vague memories of a woman driven near to insanity by her own shadows. Was it, then, any wonder that Kalesra had strayed so many times, with these forces of blood and shadow contending for her soul?

Yet she felt that she should have done better somehow, should have tried harder. She had set so many things into motion. She had fixed so many things, and broken so many things. It hardly seemed plausible that all of these memories could have fit into twenty-four years. Her hands had been in everything, it seemed, and her feet had been everywhere from Arkane to the Dead Lands.

Still, there should have been more memories. There were holes and blank spots that seemed suspiciously as if they had been cauterized out of her mind deliberately with the searing knife of some ill-meaning will. She could not remember Ixxmaal but vaguely, nor could she remember what she had learned of it, or of Achalos, or of the man who she hunted after, or any who had been part of this "hive mind" the druid had spoken of.

And Achalos had said very little of Ixxmaal. He was put ill at ease by mentioning the name, and with the general steadfastness of character that he seemed to possess, the fear must have been well warranted. All that Kalesra could gather from his brief references was that Ixxmaal was the spirit of a demon, a vicious entity imprisoned by a god long ago and meant not to be tampered with. Kalesra had approached it with too much confidence, entering its mind with the false idea that she could simply take control and direct it as she pleased. She had been wrong, and her foolhardiness had led her into a trap. Ixxmaal had easily dominated her will as it was unknowingly offered up to him, doing as it pleased with the contents of Kalesra's mind. But she had broken free, at last, and this seemed to surprise Achalos more than anything.

Achalos.

Ah, yes, Achalos…

He planned to join her, so it seemed. He was here. He was not about to be elsewhere. He had planted himself firmly in her shadow and there he intended to stay until matters were resolved. Though Kalesra generally found it better to keep her distance from others, the solid fact of the druid's existence was comforting. She hated to keep thinking in metaphors and similes when she tried to describe him to herself, but the tendency was reflexive, to think of him in terms of trees and winds and rivers.

He was tall and powerful, built as solidly as an oak or a piece of granite, and he carried a staff but it was not to lean upon. Achalos had seen twice as many years as Kalesra had, yet it did not show in his face; and his back and arms were as strong as the limbs of trees, for he was on good terms with nature, and she and time had been kind to him. He had not aged a day past the prime of his life.

Beyond this, the druid had a calm, even wisdom about him. He was untouchable, unshakeable, like some constant force of nature. His confidence showed through every facet of his presence, through his warm eyes and ironical smile and in the patient tone of his voice. Nothing could entirely destroy his composure. Kalesra found herself liking and respecting him a great deal.

Evening was fast descending upon the brow of the ancient forest, wrapping the wood in a cloak of shadows and replacing the sounds and odors of day with those of the night. Kalesra wanted to go on, but Achalos insisted that they had made good enough time that they did not need to continue their chase into the hours of night. They had passed the great crater that the thief's magics had left in the forest floor earlier that day. It was a great hole, blackened and ragged, like a wound in the earth. The sight of it had darkened Achalos' mood considerably, and he had spent a quarter of an hour fussing over it like a mother with an injured child, re-growing things and washing away the taint of destructive magic. Though Kalesra did not mention it, she could sense that a person's soul had left its body here. This mage was violent, uncaring as to what became of those in his path. This vast smudge was the grave of an unknown person, who had died, apparently, simply on the whim of Kalesra's quarry. The man was someone to be wary of, there was no doubting that, and she wished that she could have put a name or a face on him.

At length they had gone on, making good time, or "satisfactory progress", as Achalos insisted. And so, when Kalesra wished to press on, the druid protested.

"You are tired," he said firmly, "as am I."

Kalesra was quite sure that Achalos was not truly weary as he claimed to be, but she offered no argument. He was far more self-assured than she.

They made a small fire, to ward off the chill and to cook a light meal. Kalesra had only just now realized that she was ravenously hungry, and as she watched Achalos preparing dinner she could hear her stomach protesting loudly over the delay. She was surprised at what varied fare this forest had to offer. For a while, she had assumed that they would be subsisting upon nuts and berries and the like, for it had been her idea that druids objected to hunting. This was not the case, and furthermore there was far more to be had , as far as edible plant matter went, than acorns and raspberries. Achalos had brought down a young pheasant with his sling , saying upon observing Kalesra's surprise:

"It is no more a sin for a druid to take the role of predator than it is for him to take the role of protector. Balance can be served through either path."

She crouched down, watching him shred tender dandelion leaves into the rapidly boiling pot of wild mushroom and pheasant stew with his hunting knife.

"Do you ever make normal conversation?" she asked with a sideways tip of her head. Achalos smiled slightly.

"I don't know what you mean by that," he replied. "What is the purpose of aimless talking?"

"Aimless?" Kalesra said, her voice taking on a lofty, didactic tone. "Would you call the course of a stream aimless? Or the place where each drop of rain falls? Everything has a purpose."

Achalos laughed, seeming to exude warmth through his eyes and through the very pores of his skin.

"Well," he said cheerfully. "I see that you can play my game as well as I can. I bet you think yourself rather clever."

"I do."

"Then by all means, lend me your clever young mind and your strong young back and devise some means of getting me more firewood from yon sleepy, beckoning forest."

"The only thing that beckons right now," Kalesra growled in reply, "is 'yon' food."

Achalos laughed again.

CHAPTER TWO

That night was a difficult one, full of strange terrors. The darkness seemed to be crowding around Kalesra, suffocating her, uprooting her sanity. There was a wailing on the air, barely heard but still present. The shadows lent the trees strange faces, breeding childish fears of night-beasts and bogeymen—but this was not what brought Kalesra awake slick with a cold sweat, some time after midnight.

It was the scream. Something high, cold, unnatural, had torn the air, pierced the thin veil of sleep and drawn Kalesra's mind out of its fog with an icy talon. Now she was sitting upright with her hands pressed into the needle strewn loam of the forest floor, panting like some frightened animal. The scream had been a summons, a call, meant for her.

Like a sleepwalker she came to her feet. The balmy night wind tugged insistently at the strands of her hair, and her chest rose and fell agitatedly as she drew in the pine scented air in fitful breaths. It was quiet. The chirrups and animal calls that usually crowded the air had died down to a high, verdant humming. For a moment, all that could be distinctly heard was the erratic beating of Kalesra's heart.

Then the scream echoed again, this time closer and shriller than before. It caught some invisible hook in Kalesra's chest, pulling her forward and stirring up a feeling of nausea that rose up in the pit of her throat. Her feet moved of their own accord. She was spellbound as they guided her toward the place where the call had risen up, away from the clearing and its slowly dying fire. She wanted to stop, to be asleep again, cradling the bedroll and hugging against it like a child so that nothing dark could find her, protected by the earthy scent of Achalos' hair that still lingered in the spare blanket—but she did not have the will to resist. She murmured somniloquent protest to her trudging legs and was ignored.

She took another step. There was a noise, almost like a constrained scream, from very close ahead of her, and her eyes riveted on the gaunt figure that stood silhouetted against the chalk-white moon. The creature was pale as snow, dark haired, with a pair of red eyes guttering in deep sockets. It wore a black cowl, but more than that it seemed to be wrapped in a palpable aura of darkness. Shivers traversed the length of Kalesra's spine. She knew what this creature was. She knew all too well.

The vampire whispered to her mind, its voice like a funeral dirge, cold and sonorous with a knifelike edge to it that cut cruelly into Kalesra's spirit.

I can help you, my kin, in return for the piece of your soul that you still owe to my pack, it hissed. You remember me still, don't you cousin? You abandoned us, you did, but the smell is on you still. Every Night Hunter within miles will smell you, and your dear cousins will recognize you for what you are. There are few of us left, of your family, but we are still here. We will always be here.

Kalesra tried to speak, to utter a threat, to remind the creature that as long as she yet lived its existence was nothing near to intransient. But she could not utter a sound. Her mouth felt as if it were sealed shut.

Say my name, the creature prompted in cold tones. This time words slipped from Kalesra's mouth unbidden.

"Sunbane," she said slowly. Her voice felt thick and strange, as if her throat and mouth had been filled up with syrup.

Yes, Sunbane hissed, sounding pleased with himself and full of pride. If she had had the full measure of her wits, Kalesra would have crushed this pathetic creature where it stood, blotted it out of existence so vengefully that all that remained of it was a dark smudge upon the earth—but now, she could only stand helpless and mesmerized, seething with fury that Sunbane had dared seek her out and address her. He was walking about in her mind and gloating at his dominion, so full of hubris over having caught his hated nemesis off guard. She wanted to put her hands around his throat and squeeze the life out of him, worse than she had wanted to do anything else in a long time.

I can help you, Sunbane hissed, or I can become your enemy.

"You have always been my enemy!" she snarled. "Ever since I first knew you I loathed you. What makes you think that I would want your help?"

You refuse my offer of aid?

"I spit upon it, fiend." And she waited for the attack, bracing herself, but no attack was forthcoming.

You forget your place, calling me fiend when demonsblood flows in your veins! Sunbane snapped viciously. You should consider yourself lucky that anyone would offer you help in your endeavors!

"You aren't really here, are you?" Kalesra demanded suddenly, moving closer toward the image of Sunbane that stood apparently tangible in front of her. The vampire laughed hollowly.

But I am here, fool, he spat. My body is some miles off, and it would be another night before I could…see to you personally…if that is what you mean. But until then, I am here, in your mind, going there about where I please. You are malleable in my hands, your mind a tool to work as I desire, powerless to offer any protest. You have recently recovered from a temporary loss of memory, I see. How tragic that you were forced to forget me for even a short time. Well…let me refresh your memory a bit.

He reached into her mind and selected a memory with surgical precision, drawing out the one that he knew she loathed the most. Bits of it began to invade the edges of her mind like some terrible dream just beginning to encroach upon the boundaries of sleep. As it began to take hold, blotting out the real world and consuming her vision, she tore away with all of her will. There was a sharp and painful wrench in her chest that almost made her cry out. She held the scream tensely against her.

Leave me alone! she growled in a panicked tone. Leave me alone, you foul creature! Leave me alone, "Leave me alone, leave me alone! Stay out of my mind!"

She felt a hand fall on her shoulder from behind, and she spun around, full of fear and anger, ready to meet an attack with a barrage of magic—or with bare hands, if that were the necessary thing.

It was only Achalos.

"Kalesra," he said. The word was part question, part statement, asking and confirming at the same time. "What happened?"

She let herself relax, or at least tried to. It was not easy to let go of the sharp, wrenching sense of horror that still quivered her insides sickly.

"Vampire," she whispered in a voice that could barely be heard over the renewed voices of winds and animals. "It's here, watching me, asking questions. Well…not here, but far away, projecting itself. It knows me. It can smell me. I reads my mind like a book. I'm afraid of it! I'm so damned afraid of it and it knows it; it knows that with one negligent gesture, it could take away what I am, replace Kalesra with a monster, bring the nightmare back that I fought so hard to escape. It terrifies me, and I'm ashamed of my fear. I shouldn't be cowering from that dirty-blood-filth! Damn it!"

"Easy," Achalos told her levelly. She turned away from him very abruptly.

"The simulacrum fled when you came," she said, pointing vaguely into the dense pack of foliage. "Sunbane is afraid of you. He would be afraid of me too if he didn't…know that I was terrified."

"So." The druid's face was thoughtful. "Sunbane. That is who it was."

She turned back toward him sharply.

"You know too much of me for your own good," she said with more anger and harshness in her voice than she had really intended. "I wonder. I wonder if you would have such faith that I was on your side if you knew the things about me that even Ixxmaal could not pry out of my mind."

"So you did manage to keep things hidden from him," Achalos mused, "If only because you hid them, from yourself. You have a stronger will even than I suspected. I suppose that you're talking about what you did to Pallin."

The color drained completely from Kalesra's face. Achalos watched the change in expression that fell over her mobile features, the pupils of her earth-brown eyes dilating to fill her iris in with black, the full lips compressing into a thin line. Her mouth twisted with bitterness. He began to wish that he had not brought the matter up.

"I don't like you prying into my mind, druid," she hissed, all of the usual expressive warmth gone from her voice.

"It wasn't your fault," he said quietly. "You must accept what you did, and then accept that you had no control over the matter. Only than can your mind be in balance between the desire for good in your heart and the inescapable evil in your blood."

"Do not preach to me," she spat. "We are temporary allies, you and I. I—I like you, but that is not good enough. It is no excuse for you to presume that you know more about me than I myself do." Her voice had taken on a strident quality. "You might know what I went through, but you were not forced to experience every minute of it as I was. There are some things that just can't be forgiven. Not even by the one who did them. Good night."

She slept until the sun rose and was troubled in her sleep by nightmares.

When morning came, it brought a chill drizzle in its wake. The rain had put the killing blow on the unusually persistent fire long before Kalesra woke, penetrated the roof of leaves with damp fingers and chased all trace of dryness from the wool bedroll. Now it was unpleasantly wet in the little clearing. As Kalesra sat stiffly, a waterlogged moth caught itself in her damp hair, tearing up its fragile wings in its struggles for freedom. The worldwalker brushed the damaged creature away gingerly. It fluttered to the earth and lay there broken, spent, unable to conjure enough will even to move.

The woman lifted the creature gently. Touching its wings she breathed a bit of magic that she had nearly forgotten, pouring energy through the tips of her fingers and into the damaged moth, binding the little rips and restoring the fragile lattice. She opened her hand and the moth took flight. In a moment it was gone into the wet air.

It was still drizzling and Achalos was gone. Kalesra pondered for a second that she might have dreamed him, but the memory was too solid in her mind. She yelled his name twice. There was no answer, only the noise of a clutch of grouses that had been startled by the sudden noise, and from deeper into the forest, a high animal call. Kalesra waited. It was cool, and she was damp and chilled—and by now more than a little bit panicked. Had the vampire come in the night and spirited him away? Or worse, would nightfall bring him back with the smell of blood about him, pale of face but with an odd flush of the cheeks, mouth bloodstained, with two livid red marks adorning his neck just below the ear?

No. That was just silly. Achalos could handle himself too well for that—and furthermore, Sunbane was too far away to have reached the encampment before the sun set, or even to risk it. So he claimed. Still…

Worry wrapped itself around her chest and suddenly she could not breathe, her senses seized by a sudden heaviness as some dark emotion settled on her chest. The bitterness was too much to bear. It overwhelmed her as she remembered again, remembered the terrible thirst for blood, the lust, the rage that had consumed every moment of her thoughts when the curse had had her in its grasp. Achalos had left because he saw what a monster she was. She deserved to be alone. She deserved no one's help or friendship.

She was cold, filthy. She clutched her knees and wept helplessly against the damp fabric of her trousers, shivering with cold and self-loathing. She hated herself, hated herself, hated what she had been, knew that the taint of darkness could never be washed out of her spirit.

There are some things that just can't be forgiven…

She could feel her body shaking convulsively with the sobs, but she could not stop. Where was all of her towering will and arrogance when she needed it? Could she not muster enough dispassionate composure to chase away this spell of foolishness? She was Kalesra the worldwalker, master of spell and sword and elements. No emotion was new to her, no pain, no joy…except for this, this strange feeling of regret. Wherefore then this weakness?

She just wished that she could have done something better. Everything; every action, every evil, every good, had led her to this place—to being adrift with great holes gouged from her memory. She felt lost. The people who inhabited her past were ghosts, the places vague impressions on maps that had been misplaced in some dusty room of her mind. She could walk the planes, from Elysium to Baator; could travel freely to anywhere on the vast Material, but the past was a forbidden place, barred to her—a locked and abandoned house that loomed behind her no matter how she turned, and cast shadows on everything that she did.

If she had only been less proud, less confident, perhaps things would not have happened as they had. She remembered the warnings and cautions, vividly every one, and how she had ignored them. Her connection to the vampires frightened and repulsed her, but her fiend blood gave the dark and demonic a certain dangerous allure. She was always dancing on a precipice, one step away from a bloody death, all the while evading the sordid madness that she refused to let out of her blood and into her mind.

She was still getting rid of the vestiges of her sorrow when Achalos returned, emerging from the trees with such startling suddenness that he might have been invisible but the second before.

"Where have you been?" she demanded, furious at him for being the one to have awakened the worries that lurked about furtively in her unsettled mind. "I though you'd disappeared! Couldn't you have at least told me where you were going before you went? I would have left you…I—I was really just about to."

"You were sleeping, ill-natured little kestrel," he informed her. "I was a'feared to wake you lest I evoke your anger."

She was being made fun of a little less than subtly and she knew it.

"Just tell me where you were and then let's be going before we loose the trail."

"Oh," Achalos said absently. "We won't loose the trail. But before your fiendish temper ignites… I was off informing the druid council of the matter of the other druid, the one who's being pursued. She should expect aid soon. And…"

"And?"

"No, it is nothing."

"Tell me," she insisted. Achalos sighed.

"Sunbane," he told her tersely. "Dead. Never to trouble anyone again."

Her temper flared up immediately.

"I should never have told you anything!" she exclaimed. "Do you take me for some helpless invalid who cannot deal with her own shadows? Do you think that that my position of comparative weakness makes me any weaker than you? That was my kill, mine, and you, male, had no business, no…no business—"

She stopped abruptly, realizing what she sounded like—a bloodthirsty, chill-voiced vampiress grown irritated at having her prey snatched from her grasp. Now she was only angry at herself. The first few tears fell, and then she tightened a corset of icy will around her mind, ironing the dismay out of her face. She was glad that she had turned quickly away from the druid.

"Thank you Achalos," she said in a small voice. "Thank you. Very much. I am sorry that I lost my temper." She said it with all of the politeness that she could manage, carefully keeping the tremor out of her voice.

"Dear girl," he smiled. "I forgive you. You'll be fine in a day or two. Ixxmaal has put a mark on you not easily erased; stolen away a few of your memories, some perhaps for good. I can see that you are weary and confused, not knowing whose blood you got on your hands in the weeks that you cannot remember and not wanting to know. If you are anything like I was after having my mind taken by that thing—" he shuddered "—then you must be disoriented, as if you were outside of yourself and all of the parts of your mind were disjointed. It will pass…and you will have learned from it."

She could not argue with his wisdom, though she wanted to, and she hadn't the spirit left in her for more contentions anyhow. She felt restless.

"I'm wet," she said quietly. "All over."

"I can see that," he replied, even though she had been talking more to herself than to him. "Here, let me fetch you something from my packs."

The tunic was far too large. Kalesra was tall, but Achalos made even her seem short, and she did not have nearly his mass. His trousers had turned out to be quite impossible without rolling up and belting securely, in which case they were still impractically loose and kept snagging on her heels. This did not disturb her much, as her own trousers were just a little damp—and she would have felt odd in someone else's pants anyhow. Her surcoat on the other hand had gotten the worst of the wet, and she was quite happy to accept a new one however loose it was.

She peeled off the wet surcoat, then the chainmail that was underneath it, and finally the padding below that. She had slept in her armor unthinkingly the night before. Now it was rusted and foul smelling and more irksome than ever, and had left blisters all over from chafing against skin. She felt half bare without it though, so finally she compromised by putting the sleeveless chain shirt on over her tunic and forgoing the sleeves and thigh guards. There was a trick to getting the sleeves to work anyway, and it involved spellwork—and Kalesra was too foggy-headed to be bothering with unnecessary magics just now. Even the mending cantrip this morning, a simple little spell, had seemed to sap a part of her spirit.

Kote, haidate, she though absently as she packed the sleeves and thigh guards away. She pointed lazily at the chain cuirass and said to herself, do, and then, fingering the knotted sash and the tunic that it held in place, shitagi, obi. Suddenly she thought to be surprised at the words that she was speaking in her mind. They were pieces of memories from some other part of the Material, fragments still drifting about in her mind.

They were moving again a few hours after dawn, making steady progress through the thick forest. The trees were set so densely, the brush so high, that Kalesra could not even see how Achalos could find his way. The thief's trail, though, was glaringly apparent. He had waded through the brush slowly but steadily, leaving a trail of breakage and an occasional singed patch of once-foliage in his wake. At one point they found the remains of his camp site, unskillfully covered over. He left a trail of mess behind him like some foul monster after its meal, never stopping to dispose of the entrails of his day to day living.

Now, Kalesra could see how they gained on him so steadily. Any normal man would not have been able to move through this overgrown forest with the speed of a druid, knowing precisely where to step and where animal trails could be found to make the way easier. Without Achalos, Kalesra would have been just as lost.

Near the height of the day, they came upon the two captives in the shade of a tall elm. Achalos paused and stood still, motioning for Kalesra to keep quiet, but the two had not seen or heard them anyway. Their hands and feet were bound, and while the man seemed to be seething with anger over his plight, the woman was unconscious. Someone had cut her across the wrist with a jagged instrument, rather ineffectively so that it did not cut deep enough to be fatal, but nonetheless spilling out enough blood to make her pass out. Kalesra found herself studying both of them objectively. The woman was slender and pale with delicate features, a nose slightly upturned and a face spattered with freckles. The warm golden hair that fell down around her shoulders had been hacked to that length with a dull knife, unevenly cut so that one side was far longer than the other, but that did not detract from its beauty. The girl's hands and feet were small. Kalesra thought at first that she might be elven—but looking more carefully she could make out the rounded tips of her ears poking up slightly from the silky hair.

To the girl, the strange young man set a sharp contrast. He was heavyset with skin that tended toward ruddy, and his hands were so large and thick-fingered that they seemed as if they should have belonged on a much larger body. If you looked at him the right way he could almost have been handsome. His brows were dark and heavy, though the hair that wreathed his face was reddish-gold, and he had a rather large nose which at the moment was tinged red as a result of his anger. But the most stunning thing about him was the eyes. They were the palest shade of blue, clear and liquid with long lashes.

Achalos took another step, and calculatingly let his foot come down on a branch with unnatural loudness. The man's head snapped up and swiveled toward the place where Kalesra and Achalos stood, but though the woman and the druid were in plain sight from where the man was situated, he seemed to be looking past them rather than at them. It was then that Kalesra realized that he was blind.

The druid did not waste words.

"Cut them loose," he whispered, leaning so that his breath rasped in Kalesra's ear. "Quickly, quietly."

She went lithely into the clearing, and unsheathing her blade with a soft hiss of metal on metal, she struck down crossways over the bindings. They fell loose about the prisoners' wrists. The man sprung to his feet at once, but the woman's head fell forward into her chest and she did not move. Achalos cleared the distance between them , and gently gathered her into his arms, lifting her as if she were a child. She was almost as light.

The man was stubborn, and it took much prodding and threatening on Kalesra's part (neither of which he agreed with) to move him the few yards that lay between the moss covered elm and the concealment of the trees. But at length, muttering something that could not quite be discerned beneath his breath, he was forced to comply. As she saw him more closely, she noticed that he had suffered a terrible beating. His face was swollen and covered with tiny lacerations and he held himself stiffly, as if everything hurt.

Achalos bent over the woman, and spoke a few soothing words. A green-gold dweomer poured forth from his hands, caressing her tired face softly. The ragged flesh on her wrist sealed over. She gave a little moan, shifting about, and then the hard edges of her face slowly smoothed as she fell into a restful sleep.

"I need to know right now who has captured you," Achalos whispered huskily. The man looked up at him, face defiant.

"I don't know who they are," he growled softly.

"Describe them."

"They were bandits," the man grunted. "Took everything I had and…and…" His face twisted with contemptful fury. He was silent for a moment, simply too enraged to go on. Finally he spoke again and his voice could have almost caught aflame. "They had their…their twisted idea of fun with her," he snarled. "I could have torn them limb from limb with my bare hands." He paused and made grasping motions in the air with his large hands, as if he were demonstrating. "But there were too many of them. Half a dozen, armed with enchanted blades that they had plundered from other poor souls. There was nothing that I could do…nothing…"

"Do you know her?" Achalos asked. "This girl?"

"No. No. I had just come upon her about to pass out with her wrist cut when they caught me by surprise. She...she didn't speak much, but I…I think that she cut herself, because she had a bloody shard of pottery in her hand. I don't know why. I could barely understand what she was saying."

Achalos touched the girl's brow almost absently, with a frown etched into his face, muted anger playing through his eyes and along the ridge of his brow.

"Will they return?" he asked. The young man shook his head.

"After doing their worst, the dogs decided that beating me senseless was going to begin costing them as much as it was costing me. So, they tied us up and left us to the wolves."

"She's a girl," Kalesra said softly, looking at the sleeping young woman with pity. "She can't be more than sixteen."

"Aye," the man snarled. "If there were any way to pay those monsters back for what they did in a casual fit of selfless lust, I would do it gods help me, no matter how terrible."

"If we won't be expecting them to return," Achalos said with a gesture toward the abandoned campsite, "then I suggest that we rest here for a bit."

The girl's voice was halting as she spoke, soft and mellifluous but shaking with weariness.

"I was…a changeling," she said quietly. "I was taken away from my crib as a child, spirited off and…exchanged for another…creature by the faerie folk. But then I came back. A…a cleric…a cleric, he brought me back, he…he…" She swallowed, and looked briefly at the young man, whose name was Col. He shifted uncomfortably. He was a cleric of Íalos, and this fey-touched girl named Deyah had already made it clear once that she feared and disliked clerics—no matter which god they prayed to.

"He put holy water on my feet and wrists," she went on haltingly, "and on my forehead, and I remember…I remember that it burned. They wanted to kill me then because of that, but my mother would not let them. Then…the cleric said a prayer over me and I hurt for a long time, ached from the inside. It was a raw pain, harsh…And after that I could not see the fey anymore, I could only hear them speaking to me and calling out and crying because they could not reach me. They had taken me because they loved me, they were the only ones who did…and I couldn't go back. I felt as if someone had ripped my heart out.

"They were always afraid of me, always blamed me for everything that went wrong; even my mother until she died. And then I used my magic. I shouldn't have; they already mistrusted me, they were…afraid because I was so strange and pale and quiet, and…weirdling they called me; demon's child; moon calf; touched in the head. But I didn't mean to let them see me. I had dropped my aunt's favorite pitcher while I was serving dinner to her guests, the alderman and his wife. I knew that she would be furious, so I gathered up the pieces, all but the one that fell into my pocket, and I willed them to go back together, and they did except for the hole. They saw me.

"I was bound hand and foot. They called me a witch, and they were going to burn me, but Father Aarduan pretended to have pity on me. He said that he would try to make me confess so that he might clean me of my sins. He took me aside, and at first he seemed kind enough. Then…" her face grew stony, a cold mask without emotion. "He tried to do to me what those men…what they did do to me. I screamed, and I touched him in the chest in my struggle. He…he fell dead. I killed him. I could feel the power run up my arm and down into my fingers and stop his heart. It was a terrible thing, but…but at the same time--" she paused and ran her hands along her arms as if she had gone cold "--at the same time, it was…it was beautiful." Her delicate face seemed to have become a stage for some vast conflict of emotions. The skin creased, pulled taut, as a dozen expressions took their turn upon the stage, and though the eyes were focused steadily on the ground there was a strange, undulating intensity in her gaze.

"When I took his life I felt something that I had never before felt. I…I felt strong. I felt…full, complete. I almost cried but I did not. I laughed. I looked at the still mask of his face with the same excitement rushing through my veins, and…I laughed."

"I went out through the back door and ran away. The fey covered my footsteps, so they'll never find me no matter where they look. But…I couldn't live with what I had done. I deserved to be burned to death. I'm a murderer. A witch. I must be a witch, because Father Aarduan was a…a good man, and he wouldn't have done what he did unless I had put a hex on him without knowing it. I did other things too. I gave a man named Paulith the evil eye and struck him blind, and I made Aelera loose her baby by stepping in her shadow. I don't…I don't try to do those things, to hurt people, but I can't help it.

"So I found the piece of pottery in my pocket and I used it to cut my wrist, to kill myself. But I didn't cut the right place, and I couldn't cut deep enough because the sight of the blood kept making me swoon, and then he came and made me stop. And then…"

She collapsed sobbing in a way that made Kalesra's regretful weeping seem constrained. Her whole body heaved, and a steady stream of tears poured from each reddened eye. To her surprise, it was Kalesra who found herself comforting the girl, putting an arm around her shoulders and trying to put a stop to her crying. She couldn't really think of anything to say, but it didn't matter. Deyah clung to the offering of much-needed comfort like a child clinging to her mother, grasping fistfuls of Kalesra's tunic as she leaned into her shoulder. The woman suspected that if any of the men had tried to hold her, she would not have reacted in nearly the same way. She was angry at them and all of their kind for the moment. For the moment.

Finally, she dried her eyes. Col was shaking his head over and over, furious, his jaw tense and his body aquiver. Achalos was chewing at his bottom lip meditatively.

"I should kill those fools for putting such thoughts in her head," the young cleric raged, the dwarven anger that he had inherited from his father taking hold again. "They made her believe all of those things that they said that she did, the superstitious bastards, made her think that she was the one who was evil and wrong-headed! They took an innocent mind and tainted it with their sordid filth."

"You must forgive the ignorant," Achalos admonished. "They were led like so many witless cattle by this Father Aarduan, and had no more control over what they were made to believe than did Deyah."

" I You /I may forgive them if you like," Col snapped. "I for one refuse to lend them either pity or mercy."

"This conversation," Kalesra broke in, "is really not getting us anywhere. We must be moving."

"So the question is whether you continue with us or go alone," Achalos told them.

"I'm going back to my town," Deyah said in a dull tone. "I'm confessing to what I did so that I can be punished for my crimes."

"You will not!" Kalesra and Col said at once. There was an awkward silence.

"You'll come with either Achalos and I or with Col," Kalesra informed the girl levelly, "whether you like it or not."

"You," Deyah said quickly, furtively giving Col a sidelong glance. Col folded his arms over his chest and tipped up his chin.

"Who said that I wasn't going with these two?" he demanded. "I don't wish to travel alone. We'll part ways in…in Athkatla maybe. But for now, if it isn't too much of a bother, I might, because of the bandits and all…" He broke off distractedly. Everyone looked at Kalesra, as if she were supposed to be the leader of the little group. Kalesra looked at Achalos. The druid refused to acknowledge her questioning glance.

She thought about the matter for a while, first mulling over the new knowledge that they were near Athkatla. She doubted that Col would really want to part ways when the time came, from the way he spoke; and furthermore it was starting to feel uncomfortably crowded, but she was unwilling to refuse help when she was not even sure of her enemy's strength. The thief was fleeing from her, yes, but that still did not offer her any comfort. She sighed.

"We're a party of four then, I guess," she told them.

An hour after nightfall, Kalesra stopped suddenly and stood listening to the sounds of someone approaching from the distance. The noises had been faint at first, but now they rose in volume, until they were unmistakably clear.

"Do you hear?" the woman asked as she turned to Achalos. The druid nodded.

"Yes," he replied. "Company is almost upon us, it seems. They moved so silently that I did not notice their approach until just now. No doubt they hear us."

Col pulled his oak cudgel from where it had been slung over his back, a look of restless excitement showing in his face. Achalos gave him a stern look.

"The goal is to avoid combat," he told the young man with a frown. "Away from the trail quickly! Come, or I will drag you by your ears, Silvanus help me!"

They hid themselves quickly. Achalos was not particularly afraid of combat, merely cautious, not the sort to shed blood unless he had no choice. Kalesra, on the other hand, was feeling almost as resentful as the surly Col. She had not seen battle in longer than she could remember, and her fiend blood filled her with a certain restlessness at the prospect of hiding from a fight. But she did not voice a complaint.

A few tense seconds passed. At last, the interlopers made themselves visible, emerging from the thick forest and onto the narrow path with none of the typical clamor made by any other large group of warriors. They went like shadows, slipping along the path almost noiselessly. There skin was nearly the same shade as the night itself, dark and smooth, absorbing every ray of the soft moonlight like a vacuum—but their pale hair set a sharp contrast against their shadowy countenances , almost seeming to give off its own luminescence. They were quite evidently warriors of the highest caliber. They wore finely crafted armor that fit their bodies seamlessly, and their masterfully fashioned blades caught the dim light and shattered it a million different ways. Kalesra almost recognized the insignia that marked their breastplates—almost, but though she could not quite recall what the stone-gray blazon meant, she recognized those who wore it with fierce pride for what they were.

They were Drow. She took this in for a moment, trying to consider all of the implications of their presence. It was then that she saw something that made her pulse leap wildly.

The sharp-featured man who strode in the lead of the group carried a chain on the end of which was a creature which Kalesra had momentarily taken for a man. But a second glance was all she needed to prove her first impression wrong. The thing was a vampire. It was not Sunbane—Achalos had made that an assurance—but any vampire, to Kalesra, was enough to inspire a jolt of terror. She tracked its movements warily with her eyes.

The thing was noticeably displeased with where circumstance had placed it. It moved at a recalcitrant shuffle, going only as fast as it was made to go and not the slightest bit faster, dragging its feet in the earth and making low hissing noises beneath its breath. Kalesra wondered briefly why a drow hunting party would have captured such a creature alive rather than simply killing it or ignoring it. It made little sense, as far as she was concerned.

The four were very still for a while, waiting for the drow to pass. Instead of moving on, however, the party stopped up short not ten yards from Kalesra's hiding place. The vampire was standing attentively, sniffing at the air, eyes searching restlessly. The drow captain gave the creature a rough kick. Apparently, standing and waiting did not suit him.

"Move," he snarled seethingly in the drow tongue, irritation heavily saturating his sibilant voice. The vampire bared its teeth and let forth a harsh hissing.

"I smell something," it snapped, "Two humans, one human with the reek of dwarf in his scent, and one who might call itself human but has no right to. They hide not fifty feet from here, O captain, O pride of House Ssil'lis, and yet you and your most excellent comrades seem about to pass right by them without noticing their presence."

This speech earned the vampire a distasteful cuff across the back of the head, but the drow captain's interest had been aroused nonetheless. He turned until he was facing in the direction that the vampire had indicated, and drew his sword from his sheathe with a soft growl.

"Fire into those trees," he snapped coldly. Kalesra was the only one who understood his words. Before she realized what she was doing, she conjured up a shield spell from somewhere in her memory, placing herself squarely in the path of missile fire and in front of her companions. It was a few seconds before the crossbows discharged. Then, the bolts came whistling by with high pitched voices, uncomfortably close, some deflecting off of the magical shield while others flew off into the thicket beyond.

" I Harventh mina ulu in'loilien! /I ," the captain shouted vehemently , spittle flying from his mouth. The lack of the expected screams from the brush seemed to have dismayed him.

Col charged out of the cover of branches as soon as the firing of the crossbows paused, impulsive and reckless as usual, before Kalesra had a chance to stop him or warn him. She threw a mobile wall of force in front of him. He blinked as five bolts headed in a straight path toward him, stopped, reversed direction, flew the other way and caught two drow in the chest. A bit more cautious, he ducked back into the trees. Kalesra heard him murmur something, and a wash of blue energy came up around him. The battlemage, meanwhile, had gotten Deyah out of sight and instructed her sternly to remain there. As the warriors took aim at her again, she waded out onto the path with foliage catching on her cloak and drew her weapon.

Two things happened at once. The captain released his hold on the vampire with a malicious sneer, jerking a dagger from his belt to compliment the long sword that he already held in his right hand, and something incredibly massive came tearing through the trees from behind Kalesra.

The battlemage braced herself.

A huge grizzly barreled by on her right, roaring a deafening battle cry, and was upon the undead creature and tearing it apart savagely with his claws before it could react. Blood was everywhere. An instant confusion ensued as the drow, disciplined as ever but taken by surprise, staggered to avoid the grizzly's charge. Bodies were thrown aside as if they weighed nothing. It was too close for missile fire by now, and the warriors were fumbling for swords, shaken and disoriented, as their comrades were gutted and cast aside carelessly.

I Achalos, /I Kalesra thought with a smile. She moved coolly into the fray, feeling a rush rising up in her blood. Here was her element—a battle waiting to be fought.

A blow came from Kalesra's left, skillfully executed but miscalculated. Twisting her shoulder to avoid the cold bite of steel, she drove her sword point sharply into her opponent's abdomen. Or at least, she drove it into the place that the middle of his body had occupied just a second ago. By now, he had twisted aside, dodging narrowly but dodging nonetheless. Kalesra made a short arc toward the top of his head. He blocked easily, but he had miscalculated once again. The battlemage went easily under the block, thrusting her sword upward and piercing his vulnerable underarm. With a harsh scream he dropped, clawing at the air.

The airy hiss of a passing blade came from behind, and Kalesra spun about, knocking aside the strike at the last moment. The drow bared his teeth, and with a snarl, he made a vicious slice for the woman's neck. She avoided this blow, but as she made to counterstrike a sword bit into her flesh from behind, sending pain racing up her side. She drew her breath in through her teeth with a hiss. Only her armor had saved her. If she had worn only a tunic—or even unenchanted mail—she would have found herself without a kidney, or some other internal organ that she was equally reluctant to part with. She took a quick step to the side, moving so that both of her attackers were within her range of vision. The first made the mistake of rushing her. She slid her blade through his middle, smooth as silk. With an odd, strangled cry he went down and did not move. The other man took a more cautious stance, rooting his feet into the ground and waiting for Kalesra to take the initiative while he measured up his defenses. Before either of them could move, a stone came from somewhere farther off and caught the drow warrior squarely between the eyes, embedding itself an inch deep into flesh and bone. He staggered, and then Col's club was crashing over his head.

"You've got a good aim with that sling," Kalesra observed as the warrior reeled and fell. Col grinned, but spent no words, rushing after a new opponent. For a cleric of Lathander, Kalesra decided, he had a very violent mind. Gentle at times, yes, but violent first and foremost.

Now, however, was not the time to be thinking of matters other than the battle at hand. Kalesra surveyed the narrow path. Nearly a dozen drow lay dead, their bodies strewn about haphazardly; a mage here, a warrior here. The last charged Achalos with the fury of a doomed man, spear held out in front of him, screaming wildly. Achalos batted him aside with very little effort or attention, the razor claws tearing through armor and into flesh, and he joined the rest of the corpses.

The body of the captain was conspicuously absent, something which was very presently explained as his cold voice cut through the silence of the battle's aftermath.

"Move and she dies."

The exact words that came from his mouth were understood only by Kalesra, but his meaning was quite clear. He held Deyah up by the hair, with his knife glinting against her bare white throat. She was mute. She dared not make a sound.

Achalos shuddered into his human form slowly.

"What do you want?" he asked, the vestiges of a growl still about his voice. "You haven't killed her yet, as you could have, so you must want something."

Kalesra translated. The drow sneered.

"Surrender," he said. "Put down your weapons and allow yourselves to be bound so that you may be taken as slaves before the Matron Mother of House Ssil'lis, and she may allow you to suffer as her slaves rather than dying slowly. If such is her will and Lolth's."

Kalesra relayed this in more abstract terms back to Achalos, who frowned.

"You attacked us," he said, "unprovoked. We had no quarrel with you. Let her go, and let us part ways with no further bloodshed."

Ah, how little this druid understood of the drow! The captain curled his lip back contemptuously.

" I Nindyn vel'uss kyoril nind ratha thalra elyhin dal lil alust, /I " he snapped coldly. An icy smile touched Kalesra's face.

"Indeed," she replied. She spoke a single word. There was a rush in the air, a wash of power, and rolling his eyes back in his head the captain went limp.

I was a long while before Kalesra had fully recovered. The shock of using such powerful magic to such deadly effect had shaken her, chilled her. She was very silent for a long time, speaking a few words only when addressed directly. She was remembering the corpses that her thief had left in his wake—but in his case, they had died with some semblance of peacefulness. The drow captain had left the world of the living with his face contorted in horror, eyes rolled up in their sockets, mouth open and lips curled back from his teeth as if he were sleeping.

Kalesra shuddered. It was horrible, and yet it brought her a certain sense of pride to realize the extent of her capabilities. She had remembered, yes, but experiencing the exhilarating rush of power was something different. It excited her. It frightened her.

"We'd best set camp," Achalos said. They had all been waiting only for Kalesra to end her musings, Col proudly beating at the air with his newly acquired drow mace while Achalos stood with his arms crossed.

"Fair enough," Kalesra nodded. She turned to regard Col with amusement. "That thing will only crumble into dust when the sun comes up, or shortly thereafter," she warned him. "There really isn't much point in keeping it."

Not seeming to take her words to heart, the cleric thrust the weapon down into his belt and went after Achalos to help with the fire. Kalesra sighed and shook her head.

"You're going to reach down and find it missing when you most need it!" she called at his retreating back.

This time they were up before sunrise, packed and out of camp by the time the first blush of red was touching the sky with its color. The small path that wound through the forest soon merged with the High Road into the City of Coin, and the woods began to slowly fall back around them as the sylvan gave way to the rural. Sometime late in the afternoon, they passed a man sitting at the side of the road with a staff lying across his lap. His face was obscured, enclosed by the dark hood that he wore over his shoulders and head. Kalesra cast a surreptitious glance in his direction as she walked by, sensing something strange about him that she could not quite place. He spoke her name. The first time, she could not have been sure that she heard him correctly, but the second time it was quite clear.

"Kalesra," he called. Her head swiveled back around cautiously, and stopping in the road she narrowed her eyes.

"Who are you?" she demanded. How do you know my name, recognize my face?"

"I have a message for you, Kalesra," he replied. "That is all that you need know."

"Do you know me?"

"You are known to me. Let that suffice. My message is of importance to you, but my time grows short. Will you hear it or no?"

"I will hear what you have to say, and then you will explain yourself before I loose my patience with your games," Kalesra told him. He tilted his head back to look up at her, most of his face still concealed by shadow so that only the end of his nose was revealed from below the hood.

"We shall see about that. Here is what you must know. There is a man whom you are acquainted with, a man named Captain Lance. He is in Baldur's Gate right now, besieged by enemies. I do not suggest that you aid him, though he might suggest it rather strongly himself, but he has something that belongs to you in his possession. He has been keeping it for you in your absence."

"And what is this thing?"

"A pair of swords, identical to look at but different in power. The Calling and Shadowblade they are called."

"If I had owned such swords and given them to this Captain Lance," Kalesra told the man suspiciously, "one would think that I would remember both the man and the blades. Yet I remember neither."

"Then perhaps you should investigate the matter for the sake of refreshing your memory."

"I am busy now, and Baldur's Gate is a long way from here and out of my way."

"It will take not but an hour of your time, if that. You are a worldwalker. You know ways of moving from one place to another quickly. And the man who you seek has reached Athkatla already and plans to stay for some time."

Kalesra gave the man a distrustful look.

"I do not know you," she snapped, "and you will not even show your face. How do you expect me to put any measure of confidence in the truth of what you say?"

The stranger shrugged.

"I do not care whether or not you believe me," he said lightly. "I am merely the messenger. Heed me or not. It is your memories that you stand to loose as the one who you left them with comes closer and closer to the danger of death with each passing moment. Delay too long and they may be lost to you forever."

He came slowly to his feet and turned his back. Kalesra felt an odd jump in the pit of her stomach as she saw the arched humps that rose up from just below each shoulder blade like stunted wings. What manner of creature I was /I this, and what did it want with her? She reached out to tap its shoulder, to make it turn back, but her hand passed through air. With an odd shimmering of its form, it had disappeared.

Kalesra looked at Achalos, who gave her an unreadable look.

"Despite sanity," she sighed, "I believe him—and my curiosity is too much for my common sense. I will go to Baldur's Gate, and hopefully I will return within the hour."

"Shall I go with you?" Achalos asked her. She hesitated for a long moment, tempted to say yes but not sure that it was the right thing. At last she shook her head.

"No," she replied. "I don't know if I'm up to carrying anyone along, and someone must stay with Deyah and Col. I will go on my own. If I should fail to return before noon of the next morn, go your separate ways without me."

"I don't know how much I like that idea," Achalos protested.

"Well," Kalesra told him, "You're going to have to live with it anyway."

The druid took her long-fingered hand in his and gave her a look that was full of concern, his eyes meeting hers briefly and then dropping.

"Be careful, little hunting bird," he said quietly. "Walk softly, and be on your guard. This could be any manner of deception."

"I know. But you really need not be concerned. I can handle myself."

He smiled, letting her hand fall.

"I suppose that you can, kestrel," he laughed, "But still, do not be foolish."

"Oh, I shall try my best. Goodbye Achalos."

She gathered up the power that flowed through her until she was shaking with it, and then placing the image of her destination firmly in her mind she let it out with a little sigh. The dizzy rush of emotion and sensation took hold of her again. She realized why she was a worldwalker. It was the addiction to this great diversity of sight and sound and feeling, the burning desire to experience all things in existence that consumed even the bloodlust and the madness, purifying it, washing it from her mind. She thought sadly of Achalos. It was her destiny to roam the planes, and nothing could take her away from it, no force and no person.

As her vision cleared, the harsh sounds of the dying filled her ears. She was in the midst of a siege.

No. Not a siege. She tried to see where she had found herself, but the air was thick, crowded with blood tainted smoke and rising so densely that there seemed to be no clear space as far as could be seen. There were screams, so many screams, the terrible noises of men coughing out their last breaths in whatever place this was. Kalesra found herself speaking words that she had only just remembered, weaving strange yet familiar patterns into the air. As her fingers stilled and the dweomer of magic faded, the air around her cleared. There was a sick, wrenching lurch in the pit of her gut. She wished that she had not allowed herself to see.

These were no men who were contending with each other on this vast plane of war, nor elves, nor dwarves, nor any other creatures that inhabited the face of the Faerun. Ah, Kalesra recognized them, most certainly, but it was a recognition that brought with it a hollow, sinking feeling of illness and horror. They were demons. Some were Tanar'ri, others Baatezu, and Kalesra found herself automatically identifying them, naming each type and their politics and habits. But the most pressing matter was not what sort of demons they were—it was the fact that they even existed in this place, that they were here and Kalesra was here with them.

They did not notice her presence. A constant aura of protection hovered around her when she traveled outside of her native plane, a precaution against the attention of a plane's inhabitants established specifically for occurrences such as this, when attention would have been quite unwanted and likely fatal. This fact, however, eliminated the urgency of the situation only slightly. This was I not /I the walls of Baldur's Gate. It was not even on the same plane of existence. Kalesra concentrated for a moment. When the answer that she sought came to her, the coldness that clung to her chest grew yet more.

I I am in the Nine Hells. /I

Could matters have gone worse, she wondered bitterly? Was there I anywhere /I in the entirety of the multiverse that she would have hated more to be in? She was Tanar'ri. As much as she hated to acknowledge it, some level of her self was Tanar'ri. She claimed no side in the Blood War, had no sympathies for the race of her grandfather; but the choice of where she stood in the matter was not really hers to make. The Baatezu had an obsessive fondness for putting things into boxes, and as far as they were concerned, Kalesra belonged in a box with the word "enemy" scribed clearly across the front. They bore a great hatred for her and always had. For the most part her dealings with the Tanar'ri were neutral, tending towards uncooperative but never openly hostile for reasons of sensibility and caution, and this, of course, was as unacceptable as Tanar'ri blood to the Baatezu—not that they ever needed a reason to bestow their hatred.

Kalesra took a deep breath, and feeling with her mind and spirit the edges of the fabric of energy that made up the Nine Hells, she pushed through it. The jagged waves of sensation that stabbed through every part of her body was the most agonizing thing she had ever experienced. There was no joy to go with the wrenching sorrow, not masochistic thrill accompanying the harshness, only raw pain that cut deeply into all levels. Mind, body and spirit ached with unbearable intensity. Kalesra collapsed in agony, her face contorted and tear-streaked. She had gone nowhere by her efforts. She lay in the same place as before, facedown in dirt and blood with the sound and force of battle shaking the earth around her. Something would not let her leave this plane, and whatever it was, it was far too powerful for her to simply push through. She had already tried that. The thing was insinuated in the very fabric of the plane, a great dark blot of shadowy evil. She had come here only by its will. It had drawn her here, pulled her off of her desired course and led her here instead. That meant only one thing—that the presence knew that she was here.

It had been a trap. That was certain now, it should have been certain before. The talk of old friends and lost swords may or may not have been true, but in any case it was only a lure. The attempt at planar travel had led Kalesra into this mess, and likely would have upon the very next instance of plane jumping regardless of where she tried to go.

But why did this presence want her? What business did she have with it? Perhaps it was the matter of Ixxmaal…

There was no time to dwell on speculation at the moment. Kalesra picked herself up slowly from the bloody earth, which was strewn all around with severed limbs and misplaced entrails, and spent a moment just trying to avoid becoming the unwitting target of some poorly aimed weapon or spell. She was on the very edge of the conflict however, and soon the chaotic melee had moved away from her altogether. She watched it roll off to the north like a cloud of bloodred dust, and when at last it was only a distant blot she breathed a relieved sigh.

But there was all of a minute to spend indulging in feelings of relief, and not a second more.

" I Ayushekkah sheruvuu muru'o. /I "

The voices came harshly, gutturally through the hot air. They were surprisingly close, and as Kalesra made a quick turn she found herself facing a squad of Baatezu warriors. She stumbled back, for they were practically on top of her—but she was not quick enough on her feet to avoid tripping over the bodies that littered the ground behind her. She fell onto her back, and the noise harsh against the newborn silence, gave her away. Before she cold react, she was being jerked roughly to her feet by the black-skinned abishai squad leader, looking up the grotesquely muscled arm and into the hideous face that was something between simian and reptilian. The leathery wings flapped twice, and the sinew of the knotted arm spasmed. Kalesra felt the claws slip into her ribcage, each sliding in just beneath a rib and through the flesh. It was a curious thing, for it hurt very little, and there was no blood. A shiver of magic ran through her body. Well, this was something new. Kalesra had never known abishai to use anything other that their own innate magic, and this was external. She didn't have much time to marvel at this though. All at once she I did /I hurt, so intensely that her teeth ground together and crushed off the tip of her tongue as she tried to restrain the scream. It was no use. The demon's hand was I holding /I her heart, gripping it with its long claws, and the sheer revulsion of it was enough to elict a scream. The gurgling cry rose up out of Kalesra's chest all of its own accord. She twisted, spitting out blood, making tight, agonized noises as she struggled. The pain only intensified.

"My hand is around your beating heart, dirtblood," the captain snarled viciously in the Baatezu tongue, lowering his face until the flaring nose nearly touched Kalesra's. "If you move, or utter another sound against my will, your heart will stop beating. Especially," he sneered, "if you attempt to use magic of any sort. Are we most clear on this matter, blood filth? Answer me!"

"Y-y-ye-es," Kalesra whispered, forcing the words out through the pain. The captain's free hand struck her sharply across the face, and for a second her vision was obscured by blood and darkness. The abishai's sneer widened.

"You will refer to me as 'my Lord'," he snapped. "That, chaos-spawn, is the only acceptable manner of address. Say 'Yes, my Lord', filthy blood. Say it! And if you do not muster the proper tone of subservience, it will be all the worse for you."

Kalesra forced her eyes up, her face locked in a grimace of pain, and met the creature's eyes defiantly. Only silence issued from her lips. The Baatezu captain tightened his grip. Kalesra compressed her lips, this time suppressing a scream only because she had already accustomed herself to the pain that was already grating at her. The agony intensified for another second, and then dropped back off to its previous level.

"That was only the very beginning of the pain I am capable of inflicting," the abishai growled softly. "Proud or not of whatever you're foolish enough to believe you have the right to be proud of, it would take a fool to continue defying me. Now. Will you answer my questions or will I be forced to kill you?"

Kalesra forced herself to be calm. The greatest shame was not worth dying for in some remote place, apart from friends and goals, for the sake of pride.

"Y-yes, my Lord, I-I-I will."

"Vastly better. What is your name, slave?"

"Kal…lesra."

The captain's eyes narrowed a bit.

"That name," he hissed, "is familiar to me. Nundu'ratha, I think that this is the one that we were sent to find."

Another black-hued abishai stepped forward, and after sniffing loudly for a moment with his hand moving repetitively in front of Kalesra's eyes, he snorted.

"The female just smells like Tanar'ri scum to me," he shrugged with a malevolent glare at the worldwalker. "I say kill it. Might be a shifter, a spy. Can't take any chances these days, Qar're'liss."

The Baatezu named Qar're'liss did not seem to like this answer. His lip curled back contemptfully.

"It would be a greater chance to kill the female when the Master instructed us to come to this place and find a strange she-human who reeked like a Tanar'ri," he said harshly. "Would you like to risk Hash'u'kair'izu's wrath because of an unfounded suspicion? Would you enjoy writhing in the deepest pits of the Hells, in mortal agony, your entrails aflame with the unholy fire?"

"I would not, my Lord Qar're'liss."

"Finally you recall the proper term of respect," the captain hissed. "You are slower than a spinagon today. Such laziness cannot be allowed to go unpunished. Five days in the pit when we return."

He turned his attention back to Kalesra.

"How did you come to be here?" he asked coldly.

"I-I was trying t-to jump to somewhere d-different and I-I found myself here instead. My Lord."

The abishai furrowed his brow in thought.

"Yes indeed, I think this is the one," he hissed. "And as to where you came from, human?"

"The Prime Material Plane," she replied. Qar're'liss frowned deeply.

"That tells me nothing," he growled, "and once again you have forgotten how to address me. I will spare you torment this time only because I know what lies in store for you. Where were you, precisely, before you came here?"

"Somewhere…somewhere just outside of Athkatla, my Lord," she stammered. Qar're'liss and his second exchanged brief glances. There was a slight nod from both of them. Slowly, the captain drew his claws out of Kalesra's chest and the wounds sealed over behind them. He produced a collar from somewhere, a metal choker etched with shimmering runes, and snapped it around Kalesra's neck. The pain disappeared, but in its place was a new sensation, a dull, chilling heaviness that seemed to suppress all trace of emotion.

"The collar is the only thing that will keep the pain away," Qar're'liss explained. "If you remove it, you will hurt so badly that you cannot walk. But also, it can be used to deliver pain while you wear it, should you disobey me. Do you understand how the system works?"
"Yes, my Lord."

"A stroke of genius, I think," the abishai smiled fiercely. He raised a clawed arm that he had adorned with dozens of steel bracelets, all of them threaded through the flesh, and made a gesture in the air. There was a sudden darkness, a hush.

Kalesra woke in a cell.

For a while she could see nothing through the veil of shadow, but as her eyes adjusted to the dim light she could make out the bars of her cage. The cell was small, dank, too hot for comfort and filled with a foul odor that reminded Kalesra of rotting flesh. Laid about all of this was the noise—a soft, steady hissing that passed through the metal pipes that ran along the ceiling of the cell, accompanied from time to time by distant screams of pain. The worldwalker forced herself to stand through the dull aching that seemed to have caught hold of every part of her stiff body. It was a massive effort. There was a sickening pain in her chest, raw and dull at the same time, as if something valuable had been ruptured, and the collar around her neck choked her and burned her throat with every breath.

She was alone. The cell beside her was vacant, save for a drying pool of blood, and if there were guards about they were not to be seen. The last precaution was a good enough idea. No one in his right mind would enjoy being in a sorceress's line of sight with their attention elsewhere if she managed to break through the wards that restrained her magic—not that such was at all likely. Whatever force was bound up in the dampening collar was determinedly strong. Even thinking of a spell hurt.

Kalesra sank back down to the cold floor of the cell and put her hands around her knees, head sinking down into her chest. She almost would have cried from frustration, if it had not seemed that shock and pain had drained all capacity for emotion. Instead she took deep breaths and tried to think logically. She was in the prisons of the Nine Hells, locked up in one of the most securely guarded dungeons in the breadth of the planes. She had escaped from such places before—in Sigel, in Baator, in Curst—but this was a different matter, and as much as she searched her mind she could think of no conceivable plan for obtaining her freedom. Her past escapes had relied mostly on luck, and besides, every lock required a different key. She had no key to this one, nor had she any friends to aid her in this remote place. The situation, simply put, was a hopeless one. She did not possess the resources to effect her delivery on her own, and if there was anyone else in this place whose sympathies were aligned with hers then they were certainly in no place to help her. The only possible hope was to comply with her captor or to defeat him as soon as she was alone in his presence. The former depended wholly on this captor's mercy, however, which was certainly not to be relied on, and the latter still left her with attacking a pit fiend and his minions (or perhaps something yet more dreadful) with only her bare hands and the threat of incapacitating pain lingering over her head. Unless she could destroy the collar, her prospects were exceedingly grim.

She turned her attention to the device with a sort of stoic determination. She could feel its purpose, sense the overwhelming aura of alteration and enchantment with ease, but this got her nowhere. What she needed was a key, a weak point, a way to break through the wards with her will alone—but how was she going to manage that in her current state? Her will had been depleted ever since her harrowing second life as a vampire. Yet, yet…She had broken free of Ixxmaal's dominion, and that was an achievement of will far greater than any normal person could manage. There was something in that particular triumph to think on. It meant that there might be a way—not necessarily, for circumstances were always subject to change, but maybe…

Having this new flicker of hope lent Kalesra an obsessive resolve. She prodded at the thing ceaselessly, ignoring the occasional shocks of pain, looking its defenses over and over in search of some possible weakness. It was not so much dominating her mind as dampening it, cutting her off from the reservoir of power that fueled her magical talent. The effect was a confusing one, for she was unable to draw on her usual resources in her fanatical attempts to find an ambiguity in the device's construction. At last, she fell asleep again, exhausted from her efforts.

She was having a dream. A nagging voice was addressing her monotonously, instructing her, directing her, and she tried to close her ears but the sound continued in her head.

I Under no circumstances may you use magic under no circumstances may you break the ward under no circumstances my you break the ward of another under no circumstances may you exit your cell under no circumstances may you physically damage the restraint device.. /I

Kalesra found herself filled with a growing interest in the voice's orders. She pushed through some sort of flimsy barrier that had held her away from the source of the commands, and strained here mind to listen more closely. All at once, the sound was an overwhelming rush, an onslaught of noise that sent pain shooting through her ears and filled her head with a maddening roar.

I UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MAY YOU ALLOW ANOTHER TO BREAK THE WARD UNLESS HE CARRIES A SIGIL OF POWER UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MAY YOU ALLOW ANOTHER TO PHYSICALLY DAMAGE OR REMOVE THE DEVICE UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MAY YOU ATTACK ANY CREATURE UNLESS UNDER A DIRECT ORDER FROM AN AUTHORIZED CREATURE UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MAY YOU BE ALLOWED TO POSSESS A CONTROL ROD OR POWER SIGEL UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MAY YOU ATTEMPT TO OVERRIDE ANY OF THE COMMANDS GIVEN BY THIS DEVICE END COMMAND SEQUENCE OVER. /I

She sat bolt upright and awake, sweat glistening all across her brow, a clenching tightness in her chest. The memory of the words still lingered in her mind. She refused to let them leave. She would not allow herself to forget the slightest nuance of what had been said.

For what could have been hours, or perhaps even days, she repeated the commands in her mind until it seemed that sheer mental exhaustion would defeat her. There was a surety in her mind that something had been forgotten, but what this secret way out was, she had no notion. Perhaps, she thought, it was only her infernal stubbornness. Perhaps she was making herself believe untruth out of desperation. Whatever the case, it was obvious that she could not simply give up.

She slept again, a long, dreamless sleep, and woke laughing uncontrollably in a way that made her think that perhaps she had gone insane. The laughter went on for quite some minutes, and at last it died down to a low chuckle of half-constrained mirth. Kalesra shook her head.

I Who is defined as not being allowed to break the ward? /I She demanded of the device. There was a pause, and then the drone of artificial telepathy.

I Any entity, /I the device replied, I animate or inanimate, living or undead, organic or inorganic, native to any plane of existence, sentient or non-sentient, which possesses the capacity to effect the escape of any entity constrained by the device, end definition. /I

I What about an entity which is native to no plane, both or neither living and/or undead, organic and inorganic, both or neither sentient and/or non-sentient, and unable to effect my escape? /I Kalesra prodded. This time, the ensuing silence was long and pronounced.

I No being exists which meets all of those specifications, /I the voice replied at last. Kalesra made a little noise in her throat, something between impatience and triumph.

I Thus, no being which exists may break the ward, /I she said.

I No, slave, you are incorrect, /I the device snapped icily. I You may not allow any being which exists to break the ward or your life will be terminated. However, there are certain beings which possess the ability to break the ward. /I

I But a creature which does not exist may break the ward without my death resulting, /I Kalesra smiled.

I That statement is in agreement with my currently defined parameters, /I the device conceded. Kalesra crossed her arms.

I However, if an entity which meets the definition that I gave previously were to exist, it would be permitted to break the ward without me dying as a result, correct? /I

I Correct /I

I I claim that there is such an entity, /I she said smugly. There was a long pause, and she continued. I The Gods are beyond all mortal definition, for they can be anything that they desire to be and are not subject to your classification in any way and thus outside of the system. If so they wish, they may alter the very fabric of reality and override your definitions without technically overriding them. You and your masters have no right whatever to dictate to them what rules they must follow. As they exist in all of the infinite points in time, they are and have been and will be /I everything I . Thus, hoping deeply that I am not mistaken, I pray with all of my being to Tyr the Even Handed, Lord of Justice, Righteous Truthbringer, that these bonds which constrain me and dampen my soul be removed. /I

Everything was overtaken suddenly be a resounding silence. Kalesra felt a great hand lift her up, remove her from her current state of reality and into some adjacent yet somehow simultaneously distant place. A voice came to her from all directions at once, a voice so deep and rich in tone that it sent a raw shock of emotion through Kalesra's chest.

:I HAVE MANY SUPPLICANTS MORE FAITHFUL AND DEVOUT THAN YOU: it growled::YET YOUR UNIQE NATURE ALLOWS I YOUR /I PLEA TO CIRCUMVENT THEIRS, TO REACH ME DIRECTLY AND WITH SUCH URGENCY THAT I AM COMPELLED WITH UNNATURAL PERSUASION TO REPLY. I HAVE APPEARED TO PERSONALLY ADDRESS YOU FOR SEVERAL REASONS. FIRST, KNOW THAT I AM GREATLY DISPLEASED WITH YOU AND YOUR VARIOUS ACTIONS AND ASSOCIATIONS. SECONDLY, YOU ARE CAUGHT UP IN SOMETHING VERY DANGEROUS—SOMETHING WHICH HAS THE FAILITY TO AFFECT EVEN THE ALL-POWERFUL DIVINITIES TO WHICH YOU PRAY. IF THE DARK POWER WHICH HOLDS SWAY OVER THIS PLACE SHOULD GET ITS HANDS ON IXXMAAL AND THE COUNTLESS SOULS WHICH ARE BOUND TO HIM, THERE WILL BE DISASTER. YOUR DRUID MIGHT RECOVER THE THING, BUT HE DOES NOT HAVE THE ABILITY TO KEEP IT SAFE THROUGHOUT THE PLANES OR TO TAKE IT WHERE IT NEED GO TO BE DESTROYED. I MOBILIZE OTHER FORCES EVEN NOW, BUT I FEEL STRONGLY THAT WITHOUT YOU AS A PRECAUTIONARY MEASURE THERE WILL REMAIN HOLES IN MY DEFENSE. THUS I OFFER THE AID THAT YOU REQUEST. IN RETURN, YOU MUST AGREE WITHOUT QUESTION TO DO ALL IN YOUR POWER TO DISCOVER AND DESTROY IXXMAAL.:

"But if my soul is somehow bound into the thing's essence," Kalesra protested, "To destroy Ixxmaal would be to destroy myself."

:THAT IS NOT THE CASE. YOU WOULD PERHAPS LOOSE SOME PART OF YOURSELF WHEN THE BOND IS DESTROYED, BUT YOU WOULD REMAIN INTACT FOR THE MOST PART.:

"All of my still-missing memories," she murmured. "Fragments, sparks of my power, bits of my will…lost irrevocably."
:PERHAPS, BUT SUCH THINGS ARE INCONSEQUENTIAL WHEN VIEWED AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF THE GREATER CONCERN. I MUST DEPART NOW. TELL ME, AT ONCE, WHERE YOU STAND AND WHOSE SIDE YOU TAKE.:

"Release me. I will recover the thing and destroy it. I swear upon all things which are virtuous and sacred."
:I CAN RELEASE YOU FROM THE WARDS AND ALLOW YOU TO OPEN THE DOOR OF YOUR PRISON WITHOUT THE POWER THAT PRESIDES OVER THIS PLACE DETECTING MY PRESENCE, BUT FROM THAT POINT YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN—IN A SENSE. DO NOT STRAY.:

"I shall endeavor."

:IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN THAT, SUPPLICANT.:

Achalos could not remember another time in his life that had involved more anguished cursing of everything in existence than this one. He was angry—angry at himself, angry at circumstance, angry at Kalesra, angry at the High Road that ran to the north and west ahead of him. He was most angry at himself, when he took all of his sources of fury carefully into account, and least angry at Kalesra. It was Kalesra who had set forth the condition that he must leave her behind if she failed to return, but it was he, bloody fool that he was, who had been ignorant enough to pay her heed. He had waited for a week, so he supposed that he should blame fate rather than himself—but the more he considered it the more it ate at him. He had allowed her to go in the first place. He had allowed her to go alone. Now, the gods only knew what had happened. He took the form of a hawk and threw himself at the gray sky that had been threatening rain for hours, screaming more curses, curses which had no words. He felt as if he had allowed something valuable to slip from his grasp and that now there was no hope of recovering it. He could not focus on his previous plans for hunting down the thief who had stolen Ixxmaal, for such concerns occupied a place of secondary importance in his confused mind. He wanted to hear Kalesra's voice. He wanted here to be here, present, tangible, solid, not some uncertain probability that was lost to his clumsy efforts to realize.

Finally the druid crashed down amid a stand of pines, drained and in a state of distress. He was unreasonably tired, and his head was light from hunger, for it had been at least three days since he had been able to muster the interest in his own existence to eat. He hadn't the energy to do anything about his starvation at the moment though, other to endure it along with the rest of his troubles. He slid wearily back to his human form and stretched out on his stomach in the dirt, resting his cheek against the damp earth and twining his fingers nervously through air. There was a little overhang of gorse bushes in the lee of a small embankment, and with the remainder of his energy he crawled into this space and fell asleep without concern for the disagreeable nature of the surrounding flora.

The rough noise of heavy feet bearing down on leaves woke him. Cautious and alarmed, he took on the shape of a sparrow and darted up through the ceiling of trees. There was a man approaching noisily, moving through the forest with no regard for the disturbance that he was creating. Achalos cocked his head to the side and tried to get a better look with his less than perfect vision, but it was too dim to make out any familiar details. At last, quietly as possible (though this man would scarcely have noticed any noise), he slipped into owl form. The man's features became vividly clear in the dreary light of early dawn. Achalos caught his breath. I This /I was his thief. Full of nerves, he flew to a closer tree and settled there. He was not at all sure of himself right now, and thinking of the conflict that was certain to come ruffled him somewhat. He tried to plan. His mind, however, was not cooperating.

Finally, he jumped to the forest floor behind the man with the lithe grace of a feral cat and closed his hands around the thief's throat. The man thrashed about wildly as his supply of oxygen was cut off, and twisting furiously about he jerked something out of his belt. Steel bit savagely into Achalos' thigh. The druid gasped as a rush of pain and hot blood flowed down his leg, but the jolt had served to clear away some of the grogginess that had been lingering in a fog about his head. He pushed the mage away from him and murmured the words of an incantation. A streamer of lightning poured down from the clouded sky, and the man was thrown back convulsing and gagging as it struck him down the middle of his body. He came to his feet slowly, hair standing on end and limbs twitching oddly. The smell of ozone was sharp, rising from the singed places on his body and clothing, but he was alive and strangely sound given the circumstances. He opened his mouth to stammer something angrily at Achalos. The druid disregarded him. He was already calling on another token of Nature's fury. As the mage tried to stammer out a spell, thwarted by his terribly disoriented state of mind, a massive, gnarled limb struck him in the back of the head from behind. He struggled away and looked up.

Surprise registered clearly on his face as he confronted the looming shape of the living oak tree that had uprooted itself from the ground to come to Achalos' aid. For a moment, he was too stunned to move. A second later though, harsh words were flowing from his sneering mouth as he raised something bloodred and fiercely glowing in his strong hand. A dreadful sickness filled Achalos as a wave of power spread through the surrounding forest. The treant stopped abruptly, limbs jutting into unnatural positions, and as the druid watched through the stinging nausea in his gut the leaves that covered its mossy arms shuddered and fell to the ground. More creatures suffered as well. Achalos could hear them, countless tiny beasts falling dead around him, even as the foliage of every tree in sight withered and browned.

The druid coughed violently and blood welled up from his throat, spattering his pale lips as he struggled to fight off the wrenching feeling of illness. His hands grasped at his staff, and slowly he pulled himself upright. The knuckles that were wrapped around the length of oak were white.

The mage was smiling, a maniacal expression of smug amusement locked in his face. Power was radiating from the stone that he held clenched rigidly above his head, coursing down his arm and into his body. He turned his eyes to Achalos and sneered.

"Kneel," he commended in a high-pitched whine, the edge of something harsh rasping in his voice. "Kneel before me, mortal! Bow! I am Ixxmaal!"

"You are an abomination," Achalos growled. "I refuse to obey you. I would rather die."

"That can easily be arranged, human! I would like nothing more than to make you suffer and die, as all of your kind shall when I am reunited with my true vessel!"

"What have you done with the worldwalker?" the druid demanded. The mage laughed stiffly.

"I have done nothing to her. The master has her, and he will get what he wants of her and throw away what is left of her when she is done. She is trash, nothing more. Stinking Tanar'ri trash. I used her, sated my fury and lust on her delicious memories, and then when I no longer had need of her, when she became to strong, I threw her away. That is what she exists for. She is garbage, foul human, tainted and worthless. Mortals are all alike! All corrupt, all impure, all burning with malice! That you dare to judge me is an outrage! You only want her because her body inflames your sordid desires, and when you are finished with her, you will discard her as everyone else has done!"

The expression of crazed fury that erupted from Achalos' throat as he threw himself at Ixxmaal had no translation in any human language. It was hatred and rage in its purest form, dark, seething, without restraint. The druid's wolf form tore trough the mage's throat as if the cartilage and muscle of the windpipe were no more substantial than water. Blood sprayed in all directions. A vague shape tried to separate itself from the dying man's wildly twitching form, but Achalos latched onto this as well with his muscular jaws and shook it as if it were a small animal until it fell still and seeped back into the faintly glowing stone. The druid became himself once again. Kneeling in the blood spattered leaves beside the stiff form of the very dead mage, he picked up the gem that contained the demon's spirit. It was almost too hot to touch. Warily, keeping an adamant hold on his will, Achalos wrapped Ixxmaal in a scrap of cloth and tucked it into his belt pouch. It was speaking to him in honeyed tones, then raging, then whining petulantly, but he blocked it out of his mind and ignored it. Having been possessed once had been quite enough. Now that his attitude toward the imprisoned demon openly hostile he was not going to fall prey to its blandishments a second time.

He could have used Ixxmaal to locate Kalesra, but at the moment that did not seem the best idea. He was tired, wounded, and not overly sure of himself, and did not think it a wise time to engage in a battle of wills.

Col forced Achalos to lie down when he returned to their camp, and refused to let him stand or engage in any sort of strenuous activity.

"You're bleeding inside," he said curtly. "There seems to be blood seeping out from everywhere. I don't know what it is, but I don't like it, and much as I hate to seem like some fussy old healer, it is my duty as a cleric to forbid you to exert yourself until you've recovered."

"I am capable of healing myself," Achalos snapped. Col frowned.
"Don't attempt it," he replied in a sour tone. "It won't improve your situation."

"You're a cruel young man," Achalos observed dryly. "How did they ever let you become a cleric?"

Col gave the druid a long look.

"That isn't necessary, old man," he said levelly. "Just get some sleep. The sooner you recover, the sooner we can be going."

"Now, who is impatient? And calling me 'old man' is not the safest—"

Deyah's clear, high voice came loudly through the cool morning air, full of alarm.

"Col, 'Chalos, come quickly!"

Achalos made to stand, but there was suddenly no question of the young cleric's wisdom in bidding him to be still. Pain tore through his insides sharply, like a knife perforating the delicate tissues of his internal organs, and a fresh stream of blood welled up in his mouth. He spit the salty liquid onto the ground furiously. Again, he tried to stand. This time, the pain was accompanied by a pressing darkness, a dizzy sensation of losing one's self that tore fiercely at Achalos' will. Ixxmaal was trying to burrow into his mind, to take hold again, to deprive him of his autonomy.

I You'll burn in hell before you touch my mind or anyone else's again, you filthy maggot, /I the druid snarled, lying back on the bedroll with cold sweat stinging his eyes. I That I can promise you /

Ixxmaal's icy voice returned across the small void of space.

I Then hold me off as long as you can, druid, but I have a promise for you as well. If you will not bow to me, you will die, slowly and painfully. /I

Col tore through the heavy growth of brush, following the sound of Deyah's voice. When he came upon her, she was standing on a crag that overlooked a long expanse of broken land, her eyes wide as she watched the scene that was taking place below her. A creature, one which might perhaps have been human despite its odd appearance, was staggering across the jagged rocks in what was obviously a flight for its life. Pursuing it was a pair of monsters which Col would have been rather more comfortable never to have seen again. They were almost bovine, large-bodied with hooves and long tails—but then there were the hideous heads that sat in an ungainly fashion atop their massive bodies. They had snouts like those of a badger, blunt ears set far back in their heads, and small, piggish eyes that burned red with a ravenous hunger for flesh. Their mouths hung open as they ran, and these were set liberally with jutting teeth, blunt and crooked but nonetheless capable of ripping and tearing.

"Leucrotta," Col hissed. "Nasty creatures. It's lucky that neither they or that thing that they're chasing can get up this bluff."

Deyah gave him a shocked look.

"But that's a woman down there!" she protested. "They're going to kill her! Where is the druid? We can't leave a human being down there to be ripped apart by those monstrous things!"

"That isn't what you would call a human being, lass," Col growled impatiently, his rough accent beginning to rise in his voice as irritation took him. "Haen't you eyes? That's a drow woman. The same under-dwelling scum as would have killed all of us but a week ago, outside of Athkatla—only the females are even worse than the males. Leave the bitch to the fate that she deserves." His mouth twisted, and he looked out over the wasteland, where the creatures were quickly gaining on the fleeing drow. "You go back to the camp," he snapped. "I want to watch this."

Deyah pushed him hard on the shoulder, her eyes furious.

"You're being a monster!" she cried. Col sneered, the margins of his eyes tight, and crossed his arms.

"Dark elves destroyed my home and killed everyone who I loved," he snarled. Emotion was rising in his voice, choking his words. "They are no less monsters than those creatures there. Tell me why I should have any sympathy for any of them!"

The girl's face was flushed as she replied, angry, impassioned.

"Because you can't judge a person just because of what others like them have done to you. Should I hate men? Should I hate you because you're a cleric? Should I be afraid of everything and hide myself because someone or something might hurt me? I think that I'm a lot braver than you, priest! I think that you're just a scared little boy hiding behind your hatred!"

"That's different!"

"No it isn't! It's the same, it's I exactly /I the same, and I'm going to rescue that woman whether you like it or not!"

She jumped. Col cried out in shocked terror, clutching at the air where she had been a second before as she leapt from the edge of the cliff. Now loosing balance himself, he gyrated wildly, spinning his arms in an effort to keep his unsteady footing. When he had finally recovered, still shaking almost uncontrollably, he looked cautiously over the edge of the precipice. He was expecting to see Deyah's broken body somewhere below. Instead he saw her in midair, gliding gracefully toward the waiting ground with her arms out and her small feet moving in slow circles below her. She raised her hand and waved.

"Deyah!" the cleric yelled in a panicked tone. "What do you think you're doing!"

There was no reply. He looked down again, searching for handholds in the rock. There was only a distance of thirty feet, give or take, between the cliff edge and the ground—so if he could make it even halfway a fall might not kill him. Making it so much as fifteen feet, though, was the very essence of the problem. Col was not at all one for heights. Even looking at the distance that spanned below him evoked a sullen nausea.

Deyah had already made it to the ground. She was standing, watching the leucrotta with newborn fear suddenly catching hold of her. Col decided that he had no choice. Grabbing the branches of an overhanging tree, he began a slow and ungainly descent.

The girl measured up the situation. She had not really been thinking before, having acted more out of impulsive anger than from any practical basis, and now she was not so sure how precisely she intended to go about doing what she had just lowered herself down a cliff and into leucrotta-infested barrens to do. Her knowledge of magic was not particularly extensive. For the most part, it was restricted to those few feats that she had first performed accidentally out of necessity—such as a mending spell, and the "floating charm" that had saved her from what would have been a ghastly tumble from an apple tree some springs ago. She looked back to Col, slowly descending the cliff face, and then back at the drow. The woman did not have long. Perhaps, Deyah speculated, if she thought on what she wanted the appropriate magic would come to her. She fixed her attention on the leucrotta fiercely. For a second there was no apparent result, and then the foremost creature tripped over itself, falling face first on the rock earth in a spray of gravel and dirt. This would have provided only a minor inconvenience, had not the second beast found its companion suddenly in its path. It stumbled and sprawled, tumbling over once so great was its momentum, and there was the dull snapping noise of breaking limbs. Two trails of blood followed its abruptly bent forelegs. The front limbs had been worn down to the bone along their length, rubbed ragged on the cruelly sharp rocks, and the leucrotta found itself too ill-disposed to make any effort at moving. With only the briefest of surprised glances at her rescuer, the dark elf drew a two-handed sword from the scabbard on her back and advanced toward the second leucrotta. The beast was getting to its feet slowly, snarling murderously.

The drow swept her blade downward. At once, the leucrotta was back on all fours, moving with astonishing speed for its massive bulk. It reared back and its hooves struck down. The drow's sword flew from her hand and clattered along the stony ground, far out of reach, where it lay inert. Not deterred, the woman jerked a dagger from her belt with a curse. A pair of hooves smashed her hard in the ribs. She stood for an instant, and it almost seemed that she might keep her feet, but at the last second she staggered and fell.

Deyah hurled a sharp stone with all of her strength. This scarcely annoyed the leucrotta, but it created a distraction. The beast turned away from its victim and made an ungainly charge at its new antagonist. With a yell, the girl threw another rock, and then finding her sanity protesting the monster's uncomfortable closeness she scrambled away. A rock caught her heel. She wheeled about trying to keep her balance, but her leg had already slipped violently from under her and she felt a sharp pain in her ankle that gave her the grim feeling that she had sprained it. Before she could have another coherent though she was on her back with the wind knocked out of her lungs, watching helplessly as the ugly creature bore down on her.

A rock picked itself up from the ground as she screamed, and then another, and then yet another, until a whole barrage of rocks was flying thickly through the air. Deyah could feel the little extensions of energy coming from her prone body, moving the shards of stone, directing them, casting them through the air. She had not even thought about it, it had simply happened.

The leucrotta backed away with an enraged scream as broken bits of rock caught it in the eyes and smashed into its blunt snout. Deyah raised her head a bit—then, she quickly closed her eyes. The drow woman stood over a headless monster with her sword grasped in her skinned and bloody hands, a look of smug triumph on her face. She extended a hand toward Deyah.

"Stay away from her!" Col yelled fiercely, scrambling the last few feet down the embankment all covered in dirt. The knees of his canvas trousers were torn and blood from his abraded legs was staining the fabric from the inside out. All and all, he was not a very dignified sight—panting, flushed, and clearly bursting with anger. The drow woman gave him a disdainful look as he hurried to help Deyah to her feet.

"Such anger, surfacer," she purred in a low voice that bordered on a snarl, perfect lips pulled back from her straight white teeth. "Or perhaps it is fear? Oh, yes, I can see the terror in your eyes, little male."

"You have no right even to be living," Col snapped. "If this girl had not just risked such a dear life to save yours, I would kill you where you stand. Leave, now, before I loose my temper and kill you anyway."

"Mmm, yes, I suppose that loosing your temper would be the one thing that you are good at."

"Get out of here! You've been saved from death when you should have been killed—is that not enough?"

The woman looked at Deyah coolly.

"I owe you a life," she said distastefully, cold anger hiding behind the smooth richness of her voice. "As your I friend /I so graciously pointed out, you saved me from death. Weighing the situation leads me to admit that without your intervention I could not have survived. Thus, I owe you something. I must either lend myself to your service until such time that circumstance allows me to rescue you from a certain demise in which my aid is the only clear factor that contributed to your deliverance, fate notwithstanding—or you must take my life where I stand, kill me, with your own hand, as providence would have decreed."

Deyah was stricken with surprise at hearing a drow speak in such a manner, and not less so at what had been said—but Col quickly enough found words.

"Everyone knows that you drow dogs have no sense of honor or duty," he spat. "Why should anyone take your pathetic mewling as anything other than the manipulative trick that it is?"

"You know that I'm up to something," the drow smiled in a singsong voice that was laced with sarcasm, "But you don't know what that something is, only that it's something that I'm up to and that the something that I'm up to is no good—whatever it is. But see, that still really leaves you with knowing nothing whatsoever of value or interest."

"I don't believe you," the cleric said bluntly. "You're lying. I admit that I don't know why, other than that your kind are naturally fond of deception and trickery, but—"

" I My kind /I ?" the drow spat with sudden bitterness rising up so thickly in her voice that her well-formed words suddenly lost their soft clarity. " I I /I have nothing to do with I my kind /I , as like animals you so quaintly classify them. My kind are blind. My kind wallow in the filth of chaos, blindly led along by their false pantheon of savages. I love the Drow because they are strong and fierce and unforgiving and have such delicious methods of cruelty that the mortal mind can only grasp at—but the Drow will not accept me because I see the truth, the truth that cold justice and not the nepotistic anarchy in sheep's clothing that they masquerade as law, would give us more power than ever could blind reckless ambition." Her eyes had grown bright with fervid anger. "Why do they think that the human races are so successful at keeping us away from the surface, at driving us back every time we advance? They are weak fools, their only advantage being that they breed like rabbits in their degenerate race to spawn and spawn and spawn until their scum covers the earth. Ah, but they have one more thing that they can hold up to the Drow. The have order. They do not allow personal ambition to prevent them from uniting when the need arises. I have studied them for years, and I have seen this! They band together when danger threatens! Among the Drow, it is always: this city is making a foray on the surface, now this city has broken through and destroyed some damned settlement or other—never, 'the Drow are rising up against the surface'. I tell them that they must make more laws, stricter laws that even the Matron Mothers must not be allowed to evade, that we must think of the Drow people as a whole and not of ourselves as individuals. They killed my sisters with their foolish disobedience of the just order of the universe, and they will destroy themselves! They accuse me of betraying their ideal, but they betray the Drow people! I shall see the cold hand of reason and justice force their actions or I will die in the attempt!"

Deyah shivered, as if a sudden chill had caught her.

"You have just admitted that you hate humans and consider them inferior," she told the woman, "Why would you think that you owe me anything?"

The drow sneered.

"Because I have a code of conduct," she snapped. "Because I am bound to duty. Because I must do as my god wills without question. My faith has led me to live amidst the stench of humans for decades—and now, it leads me to be your slave. I shall find release from my bondage soon enough. You will either find yourself in unmanageable danger and I will extricate you, or you will die through your foolishness. Of this, I am sure."

"I cannot accept your offer of aid," Deyah murmured. "You're free to go as you please."

"No, I am not!" the woman insisted furiously. "To waver at one point of the Law is to give ground at all points!" She pressed her heavy sword into Deyah's hands and knelt before her. It was difficult for the girl to keep the sword from falling out of her grasp, almost too difficult. "If you reject my right to serve my Law, then you must take my life. Bring the sword down on my neck. End this if you wish it ended, coward."

"Gladly," Col hissed darkly. Deyah threw the sword off to the side with all of the force that she could muster.

"No!" she protested. "I can't kill you. I will not. I won't let Col kill you either. If you can't be persuaded to listen to reason then I suppose I don't have any choice short of tying you up and…"

"This is foolishness, Deyah!" Col yelled furiously. "She can't travel with us! She'll betray us at the soonest opportunity!"

"I swear that I shall serve you only faithfully until my onus no longer binds me," she replied.

"And what good is the word of a drow?" Col raged. "Either she leaves, or I shall."

"Then go!" Deyah retorted with more sharpness than she'd intended. "I don't see any chains tying you to me, visible or otherwise!"

"Damn this! Damn! Rotten, damned, bloody…Damn you!" He stomped off and began trying futily to scale the high cliff. The drow woman watched his efforts with a cool smile.

"I," she said in even tones, "am Cha'Yessa, former bard of House Urusth of Elenthessaros, neither of which most have heard of. I am most displeased, surfacer female, to be at your service…"

The creature was spitting fury.

Rage. Rage poured from its eyes, welled up from its lungs and overwhelmed its throat with violent cries, protested its oppression with such ire that the very walls seemed to shudder. I must have been tearing its throat raw with its insane screams. It, he, did not seem to care. His being was so absorbed in the passion of his wrath that it seemed as if he were not at all aware even of his own existence, only of the consuming fury that burned like the depths of an inferno in his pale eyes.

He resisted with almost not physical aggression, slumped forward in the gnarled arms of the Baatezu guards with a bearing that suggested bodily weariness so deep that every part of his mind concerned with moving and subsisting had shut itself down and given up. Instead he screamed. His voiced echoed, ululated, tore and stabbed at the overly warm air with a violence that seemed almost capable of wounding.

The threw him roughly in to the cell, face first in the slick pool of rotting blood, and departed with icy lack of interest. The crescendo of animal screams dropped to a low whimper. The creature did not move, did not even make an effort to lift his head up from the mess of fouled carrion. Kalesra studied him with pity. He might have been at least an impressive creature, if not a magnificent one, had his state not been so wretched as to inspire horrified revulsion. He would have been tall standing-within human limits, but only barely. His shoulders were wide, his profile strong and assured. He was built powerfully. No, Kalesra corrected herself, he had been built powerfully until months or perhaps years of torture had robbed him of his vitality. Now he was gaunt, skin stretched taut over his massive frame, his hair hanging dull and limp around a face with hollow cheekbones and numerous jagged scars where the flesh had been cruelly torn by some hooked instrument. A thin, ragged robe was draped over his entire form, as if in an effort to conceal something, but his scarred arms and the lines of his body were defined in the places where the fabric hung close to his sharp contours.He lay on his side, eyes closed, face toward Kalesra, his front soaked in blood and bits of gore. Some manner of monster, he seemed. Perhaps he was at that.

Kalesra felt a lurching jolt of nauseated loathing, mixed with an equal measure of pity. Despite her better judgment she reached tentatively through the bars that separated the two cells and touched the splayed fingers of his limp hand. There was no response. She took his thumb, which was nearly the size of two of hers, and tugged at it. His eyelids parted slowly.

"What in the Hells?" he began in a voice that was groggy with sleep and pain. His gaze came gradually into focus and he blinked owlishly, his pale irises swiveling a bit in the sockets of his eyes.

"You…are no demon," he observed sluggishly. Kalesra shook her head.

"No, though I've been called that."

"Tiefling," he whispered. Kalesra stiffened a bit, then shook her head.

"Not quite," she told him quietly. He frowned, and Kalesra resisted the urge to wipe the revolting smear of blood off of his face.

"I am fallen," he said simply, as if this carried a great deal of significance. He met her eyes, and his eyes were full of torment. "I do not know who I am. I have seen only demons for…for longer than I can recall. They loathe me. They take pleasure in covering as much of my flesh as possible with scars. I think that they believe that I have been broken, when in truth I was only hiding away my spirit. Now I suspect they will kill me. You have been branded for the Deathwatch as well."

"What do you mean?" Kalesra hissed.

The man took her wrist through the bars and turned her hand up. There, branded into her palm over the ritual scars, was a rune and the infernal characters for the number 85500492. Kalesra felt a chill shiver down her throat.

"Then I am marked for execution," she murmured. The man nodded.

"But you will escape," he said in a low tone. "I can see it. Yet you will not escape without me."

"I cannot remove your bonds and release you," Kalesra told him. "I cannot escape I with /I you."

"But the bonds are only on my wrists," the man laughed, "not on my spirit. They can only cage my flesh. You have the means to break my cage—I have the means to help you escape, for my mind knows every step of these halls. I traveled them countless times while my flesh was enduring torment."

"What are you?"

"I am a man. I was more than that once, but now…I am fallen. I found godhood and it was taken from me. Now I am nothing more than a warrior with a broken body and a spirit that is more elusive than most. I have died once. Now my only ambition is to be free of this place."

"Then how do you suggest that we do that?" Kalesra asked him. "I can open the door, use magic to go unseen, but I have no way to know which direction to take—and I am sure that there are wards all over the place to discourage hiding. Not to mention the demons. One anti-magic zone is all that would be necessary to get us both killed."

"True, they have ways of seeing invisible creatures, but there are more ways than one to be unseen. Observe."

A soft growl rose up in the man's throat, and then gaining force and timbre it erupted in a burst of guttural sound. Fire flickered and caught hold in his eyes, cold and burning both at once from deep set sockets. Something seemed to be moving beneath his ragged cloak. After a second, Kalesra realized that it was his flesh, heaving like a disquieted sea as the arrangement of bone and muscle amended itself. The transformation continued, and a few moments thence the gaunt and ragged prisoner had taken on the aspect of his Baatezu enemies so fully and convincingly that the coldness of emotion in his pale eyes caused Kalesra to recoil in surprise and shock. For a moment or two she seemed to have lost the capacity for speech.

"That was not quite…magic," she said breathlessly. "It felt different. It was almost more of an…alteration of reality than an alteration of form or appearance. I don't really know how to express—"

"Good," the man snapped with fierce irritation in his voice. "We have not the time for your pointless and windy speculations. Get the doors open."

Kalesra tapped the door with a faintly glowing finger, and true to the word of the Even Handed the wards had been removed, leaving only a simply constructed lock that yielded easily to Kalesra's magical prowess. She slipped nervously through the entrance and began fiddling with the lock on the adjacent cage.

"The wards are still in place here," she protested. "I don't know if I can—"

"Open them, female," the transformed prisoner snarled. "Time is quickly wasting."

"Well, that may be," Kalesra flared, "but it doesn't change the fact that—"

An infuriated growl answered her. She was not entirely sure what had come over the man, but she did not care for it—and she could see no point in continuing to argue with him. She turned hesitantly away.

"Where are you going ?" he demanded with anger and panic tightening his voice. "Open the damned door!"

"I cannot. The wards are too strong."

"You haven't even tried!"

"I'm not about to risk killing myself by smashing my will against something that cannot be broken."

"You will never escape here without me. Even now sentries are coming to investigate the slip of magic that you used on the lock."

"Very well then, damn it!"

She put her hands on the door and pushed a stream of force imbued with anger against the magical boundary. For a second there was a sharp, breathtaking pain as the energy began to force itself back against the conduit in the wrong direction. Then something strange and foreign intervened. A third force from some unknown location turned the energy back against the ward, pushing and battering at the infernal magic with the force of Kalesra's will aiding it. There was a mechanical click. The door of the cell opened.

At this point, Kalesra quite hoped that the man had something concrete in mind, for if her minor use of magic had caused an alarm to be raised, surely that last trick would provoke an immediate response.

The hand that fell roughly onto her shoulder from behind startled her.

"Hang your head and walk in front of me with your bonds in plain view," the man instructed in a rasping hiss. He prodded her forward with a firm but relatively gentle push, and at that moment a trio of disgruntled looking red abishai made their appearance in the hallway. The man began to stride forward deliberately, shoving Kalesra ahead of him. The shortest of the fiends stopped, barring the way.

"Move aside," the rough voice commanded from behind Kalesra. There was an air of superiority in the man's tone, a hard edge of authority that left no willing room for dissent. The abishai shuffled nervously.

"My lord, there was a disturbance—" he began hesitantly.

"I am well aware," the man replied in snarling Infernal. "It has been dealt with. I am bringing this prisoner to My Lord Hash'u'kair'izu for questioning. You may go about your business."

"I was told—" the abishai began irritably. Kalesra saw a gnarled black hand lash out to strike the protesting creature across the face. The fiend gave a growl of pain and backed away.

"Now you are being told otherwise!" the man snapped, his Infernal at this point almost igniting around the edges with fury. "You miss the befitting tone of subservient terror! Report yourself to the Pit before I grow so tired of your existence that I end it where you stand! You two. See that our dear friend does not stray."

The three of them departed quite briskly.

Achalos met Cha'Yessa's presence with a noncommittal grunt and left the introductions at that. She was a good liar, he decided, and well versed at playing both vicious and fanatical. He smelled the unmistakable odor of manipulation on the whole thing. Perhaps there was some sincerity in what she claimed, for her entire display had been most convincing—but the drow were expert actors, and as Cha'Yessa had ranted at Achalos over her principles and beliefs he had gotten the distinct feeling that she was putting on a show for his benefit. Clarified, the situation seemed to him thus: The woman had found herself in danger, Deyah and Col had proven themselves capable of offering protection, and the drow had decided that making the protection more enduring would work in her favor—whereupon she had realized that she would need to make an awfully strong and unusual case to prevail upon the timid young girl and the surly cleric. From there she had put her agile mind to work at spinning her elaborate untruth, with the aid of her impressive force of personality. Now it was only a matter of time before she decided that her "escorts" were more trouble than help, and subtly relieved herself of their presence. Achalos was unconcerned only because he had no fear of the woman. If she had been possessed of more than a half ounce of real power, matters might have been different. As it was, he only found himself vaguely hoping that she would not insist on getting herself killed and leaving the stain of it on his, or Deyah's, hands.

He cast a furtive glance in the drow woman's direction. She was sitting on the ground off to the edge of the camp, simply sitting, a contemplative look on her face and no particular interest in her surroundings registering in her eyes. Col had been watching her as well, far less surreptitiously. His eyes met Achalos' briefly and he gave a brisk nod of acknowledgement.

The druid stood. His strides took him away from the small camp, into the pervasive solitude of nature, where thoughts could more easily find purchase in his disoriented mind. He was ill at ease. Kalesra had been spirited to some unknown place, Ixxmaal was trying ever and ever more determinedly to break its bearer's resolve, and now, the arrival of the drow brought tension and resentment into what he thought of fondly as his "pack". She was an intruder, unnatural, unwanted, a manipulative and unscrupulous force of selfish chaos. He'd had enough on his plate (which was seeming rather too small lately), I before /I she had arrived. Now it was simply too much.

A sharp little dagger of pain ran through the spot behind his ribcage. This stab of agony was partially Ixxmaal's fault, Ixxmaal with his continued efforts at punishing Achalos for his disobedience, but at least an equal part of it had been more a thrill of emotional misery turned vengefully upon his physical senses than anything. Kalesra might well have been dead. He construed this as his fault.

Hesitantly he pulled the throbbing stone from its place in the folds of his cloak. This was his means of locating Kalesra, the only means that he had short of his meager divining skills. He would not have wasted a moment on deliberation if he had not feared to open himself up to an attack from Ixxmaal.

As it was, however…

"I'm a coward," he scolded himself. "I should be doing more."

But the voice of reason wished to voice a protest, which it promptly did.

I Why? /I it demanded. I You owe her nothing, and risking yourself is certainly no help to anyone. And are your actions truly serving Balance? It seems more that they contradict it. You have no right to be selfish for your own sake at the expense of what is rational—what makes you think that you have any right to be selfish for the sake of another. She has been fighting her own battles since long before you knew her. /I

"I don't know how to destroy this thing that's plaguing me," he growled softly to himself. "The key to it is somewhere in her lost memories. If I don't find her…"

I How easily you assume that there is only one solution to the problem /I

"This is the solution that suits me, damn it!"

I Then at least admit that if you're determined to go about this the hard way you're going to need someone else's help. /I

"No."

I You know that you're wrong. You'll give in eventually. /I

After a lengthy spell of stomping about and muttering, Achalos calmed himself and sat down on the earth with his legs crossed and his mind in even more turmoil than it had been in before. Having Ixxmaal's voice in his mind had been quite enough. The internal dialogue between conscience and reason had nearly convinced him that he was going mad.

The drow. She could help him. That silver scrying mirror that she liked to cast cautious glances into when she was not aware of being watched could tell him where Kalesra was. She might refuse at first, and she would certainly require something in return, predatory and disobliging as she was, but her imagination for prices to be paid could not be nearly so vicious or extensive as a millennia-old demon's. Achalos sighed. He did not care for it, maybe even loathed the thought of it, but he could see no more agreeable choice. He stood stiffly and stalked back to the camp with a feeling of reluctance.

"This way."

Ruash, as the strange creature was called, took Kalesra's arm and directed her roughly down another hall with a certain urgency in his voice. The alarm had not yet been raised, but it was only a matter of time. Soon enough, the place would be swarming with guards and diviners, all searching for a tall young woman and her companion. Ruash did not precisely fit his old description right now, but that was a minor point. They would know Kalesra when they found her, and they would very soon discern that Ruash had no business with her.

Ruash had to find a ward key if he wanted to go undetected, and he had to do so soon. As they passed a slightly built imp in a corridor, he took a furtive glance to either direction—then, seeing no one, he dodged back into the corner, pushing Kalesra against the wall beside him, and wrapped strong fingers around the tips of the devil's wings. Snared, the creature struggled, but it was too late. With one deliberately vicious twist, Ruash snapped the imp's neck and crushed its fragile windpipe. He quickly searched the limp body and found what he was looking for—a slim rod perhaps the length of his finger, runes etched all across its copper surface.

He had the advantage of knowing what he was doing, where he was going, where each door and each hallway lead and at what times the patrols made their way along certain courses. He had passed through theses halls many times, his mind drifting through them while his body was trapped, and every detail had been inadvertently burned into his memory. Getting past the first levels did not concern him. The problem would come later, once the alarm had been raised, when they had to pass the Warden at the outer gates. A passkey such as the one he had just procured would be no good at that point. He would need the necessary papers, the forms authorizing him to take a prisoner out of the jurisdiction of the prison, and this would be made especially difficult by the fact that the very woman that he was trying to leave with was the one he was looking for. These fiends were not stupid. Some of them, maybe, but not the higher ranking ones. They would see through him in a second, even if he did manage to procure the necessary documents.

Trying to push that out of his immediate attention, but allowing himself to work at a solution beneath the surface of his mind, he concentrated on maneuvering through the maze of hallways. Once or twice they were stopped, briefly questioned, but Ruash's fierceness deterred the lesser demons and the officious presentation of a passkey satisfied the others. If they had really been thinking, they would have stopped to check on Kalesra's identity—but in such a massive complex there were prisoners coming and going constantly. Likely, they were not even yet aware of the escape.

But even the best of plans are bound to fail at some point, and so it was with Ruash's designs. A black abishai, arrogant of face and walking with a haughty swagger, approached Ruash and snarled him to a halt.

"Stop," he growled. "Don't move. Stay where you are." He motioned for a sharp-faced imp, and then turned back to Ruash with an unreadable look on his face.

"Might I ask what the meaning of this is?" Ruash demanded indignantly.

"You need ask?" the abishai demanded curiously. "One would think that you would already know. There has been a break. Two prisoners, very dangerous. One of them a human sorceress, one of them a shifter." He grabbed Kalesra's chin between his fingers and lifted her face roughly, ignoring Ruash's rumble of protest. She met his eyes squarely and he sneered.

"This one," he said, "matches the description. Zarush! Tell me. Is this her?"

"I believe so my Lord," the imp named Zarush replied with a wheezing voice. He darted over and grabbed her wrist, turning it over to examine the brand.

"Prisoner number 85500492," he confirmed smugly. The abishai waved the imp away and fixed his gaze on Ruash.

"Who are you?" he asked acerbically. "Recite your name, rank, company, and identification number."

"Hazzaku'esh'Morinin, second lieutenant, Ashekkai Company, third division, number yah torish hah rennakh yah yah atosh," Ruash lied outrageously, coming up with names from memory as well as he could. The abishai stared at him long and hard, his eyes searching and bright, as if he were trying hard to find something amiss.

"I haven't the time to check up on you," he snapped at last, "but I don't know you, Second Lieutenant…What did you call yourself?"

"Hazzaku'esh'Morinin."

"Hazzaku'esh'Morinin. Yes. Well. I don't know you and I don't trust you either. Whatever the case, you seem to have successfully apprehended our prisoner. If you are who you claim to be, you will hand her over to me this second and report back to your barracks."

"I was given orders to take her," Ruash stumbled weakly, trying to sound confident. The abishai's eyes narrowed.

"Oh yes, Lieutenant esh'Morinin? Given orders by whom?" His eyes had a nasty, dangerous glint to them now, and he was gesturing to a trio of green abishai who had just passed by on patrol. "Tell me the name of your commanding officer."

"Uh…Captain—Captain…Jurevilesh ha'Shadekh. Uh…"

"You're lying, lying, lying," the demon purred disapprovingly. With dizzying quickness, his long-taloned hand reached out to grab Kalesra's throat. She was ready though—more than ready. She had only been waiting for the mistake, for the stumble, prepared for the attack that would follow. With a savage cry she unleashed a white-hot stream of magic. The crackling bolt caught the abishai full in the chest, and with a strong odor of burnt flesh and a spray of ichor and blood, the creature was thrown ten feet and resoundingly into the opposite wall. He bowled into the green abishai as he went, scattering them and knocking them to their backs. Kalesra turned to Ruash."

"I think it's time to run now," she decided.

Ruash was scanning the walls and corridors with sharp eyes.

"Hold them back!" he snarled fiercely as the three green abishai began to rise to their feet. Kalesra cast a quick, fleeting glance back toward the shifter and saw that he was changing again, discarding his demon body in sporadic bursts of pale gray light. He was shrinking, becoming rapidly smaller.

Kalesra turned back to the demons and flowed liquid fire from her fingertips as they advanced toward her. A wild, raucous scream rose up from all three collectively as the acid tore the flesh away from their grotesque faces and melted through their chest cavities to corrode the organs beneath. There was a sharp stench, a continuation of the shrieking, and then a silence that seemed to utterly engulf the long hallway. Kalesra turned back to Ruash. In the hulking demon's place was now a small creature, soft and paper-winged, fluttering lightly to keep aloft as it fought the slight updraft.

: I There is a vent leading up to the top level. /I : Ruash's mind-voice indicated. : I Can you shift to a similar form? If so, we could make it part of the remaining way without being seen /I :

"I think that I can manage," Kalesra said hesitantly. "It's been a long time…"

Footsteps echoed loudly from down the hall.

: I Hurry then, /I : Ruash told the sorceress urgently. Kalesra took a deep breath, concentrating for a moment, and held a picture of the moth in her mind. She felt herself slip slowly into the new shell, not casting off the previous shape as Ruash did, but putting this new one on like a suit of clothing.

: I I'm done, /I : she told the shifter.

: I Quickly! Through the vent, /I : he replied. They slipped like a pair of whispers through the metal grate, Ruash in the lead.

Cha'Yessa gave the druid a long, quiet look, her dark face betraying scarcely any interest or emotion. She turned the scrying mirror about in her hands thoughtfully and chewed at her bottom lip, taking just long enough time in her deliberations to drive Achalos to the edge of insanity as his patience wore thinner and thinner.

"I won't do you a favor for nothing," she told him. "You must give me something in return."

"Name your price," Achalos said tensely. There was a brief whisper of air, and Cha'Yessa was standing with the length of her slender body an inch from his, fingers like sprigs of ebony wood resting carefully on the open stretch between the folds of his shirt. He caught his breath swiftly. This woman was adept at getting attention of a particular kind, and it took a considerable act of will for Achalos to ignore her.

"There are many things that you could do for me, male," she smiled, "but I know better than to even mention a breath of some of them. You're strong, wise, powerful, even for a human. You know yourself. What do you have that you are willing to offer me? A bit of your vitality, perhaps? A secret that no human would willingly tell his enemy? A favor, whenever I might ask for it? Or something else? Perhaps you have some magic to lend me."

"I can give you my blood," he offered broodingly, his voice hesitant. He wished that he had not made the offer the second he had spoken the words, but it was too late to recant now. Cha'Yessa was looking curiously at him.

"What do you mean by that, male?" she asked with a delicate frown.

"A Great Druid's blood," he told her, "is powerful magic. Taken by force it can curse the land and weaken all of those who tread upon it, twisting Nature's creatures into abominations and poisoning all that grows. The greatest of wastelands and many of the unnatural creatures that prey on man were forged by dark powers with the blood of potent servants of Balance. On the other hand, the blood of such a druid bestowed willingly is a protective force. It gives to whoever receives it the grace of Nature and protects him from the elements, shielding him from harm whenever he walks away from civilized lands. Every time a druid bestows his blood, he grows weaker until the one who bears the blessing passes from the world of the living and that borrowed piece of his spirit returns to him. I would far rather have given such a gift to the one whom I ask you to seek for, but out of necessity, I offer it to you."

Cha'Yessa could barely conceal her sneer.

"You're weaker than I thought, human," she said in a chill voice. "You allow emotion to tie shackles about your neck. What is this woman to you that you would give up a piece of your soul for her, make yourself yet more weak than you already are?"

Achalos gave her a hard glare, his face growing dark and his heavy brows drawing together fiercely.

"I don't think that you would understand, drow," he growled softly. She raised a skeptical brow.

"I think that I understand all too well," she replied. "You think that you love her, hmm? You know nothing at all about her. You're confusing the needs of your putrid human flesh for something that doesn't even exist."

"I knew her before I ever met her. I know something of the torment that she was forced to endure. I will not be foolish enough to presume that what you so acidly suggest as truth does not play some part in it, yes, but I know my own feelings well enough—and certainly better than you. The fact remains that you are not human. You have not fathom of human feelings, in fact, you look upon them as flaws. That being the case, you have no right to judge me in any capacity regarding such matters."

Cha'Yessa looked greatly irked. Agitated, she crossed her arms over her chest.

"Very well than," she grumbled. "Give me your blood and I shall show you your precious sorceress."

Achalos drew the hunting knife from the belt beneath his moss-green cloak and held the palm of his hand upward. The knife's edge swooped downward briefly and a slash of red manifested itself across the length of the broad palm, staining the glinting length of steel with a shimmer of blood. The druid held his hand cupped as the flowing blood began to well up from its center with stunning speed, pouring over the boundaries like a font of molten metal.

"Cut your hand, as I have done," Achalos instructed briskly, placing one hand under the other to catch the spilling blood. "Quickly."

He felt dizzy as the loss of blood weakened him, the older weariness of Ixxmaal's relentless attacks catching up to him again. Cha'Yessa saw this, and with a cruel cat-and-mouse gleam in her bright almond eyes she went about the ordered task at as leisurely a pace as she could manage. When at last she had finished, Achalos took her bleeding hand quickly and pressed it against his own. There was a little thrill, a shock of almost blinding dizziness as a bit of his soul passed out of his body and through the bond into hers. For a second he thought that he might pass out from the strange lightness in his head, then it passed. The wounds healed over to leave only the faintest of scars traced across the skin.

"Now," Achalos told the drow sternly. "Let us have your part of the bargain."

What Achalos saw frightened him, shook him so badly that when the descent into the Hells was over he was still shivering as if caught by a chill. Now that he knew where to find Kalesra, it seemed to him that his chances of ever reaching her were almost impossibly small. The Nine Hells. Even for a worldwalker like Kalesra, journeying to such a place was a frightening prospect. Achalos was not sure how he would even reach the Hells—and furthermore, considered his likelihood of surviving long there to be exceedingly slim. This was where Kalesra was strong and he was not. He had lived his life in the green embrace of the forests, going among the pack of "civilized" men who inhabited towns and cities only to observe and learn more of the nature of Man—much in the same manner that he might observe some wild beast in its habitat to glean a better understanding of its behavior. He knew his fellow men well—too well, he sometimes thought—and he knew himself and the nature of the physical world and its creatures. But beyond this sphere of knowledge, he was lost. He could barely comprehend how one could know the planes as Kalesra did, have every detail of the far and varied places she had visited stamped indelibly in her mind. She lived in the planes, all of them collectively, even as Achalos lived in the domain of Nature. They were her environment. It was strange, a difficult concept to grasp. She was like the nomads of the eastern deserts whose homes were not the places where they stopped in the course of their journeys but the journey itself, the endless wandering from place to place.

Achalos sighed. His case was hopeless in more ways than one.

He had to find someone who could do one of two things—send him to the Hells after Kalesra, or summon Kalesra back to the Prime. The latter seemed like the better choice by far, but he was not sure if it were even possible. Cha'Yessa was something of a dabbler in planar lore, but he was loath to ask her for anything else. She had already proven herself to be a serpent, and Achalos was duly wary of her poisonous bite. He searched his mind for someone else who might help him, someone reasonably near and reliable. He scarcely had any dealings with his fellow humans, other than the druids who served under him and beside him, but still, he had his connections. After a bit of deep thought, a single name emerged clearly from the confusion in his mind: Hazzekh al'Koru, a Harper with considerable power and an equally considerable love of meddling.

Kalesra was wearied when she and Ruash emerged at last from the series of vents and pipes that crawled this way and that through the labyrinthine bowels of the prison. For hours, they had been traveling in moth form. It was certainly preferable to being caught, but it was tiring to keep up such a brisk pace for so long. Kalesra could not remember the last time she had eaten. As she crawled wearily out of her moth shape to huddle in the airspace above the block of cells and barracks, her limbs were cramped and aching and her stomach was complaining awfully. There was nothing that she could do about the discomfort, either. This is what irked her. She had escaped from her cell and come all of this way just to climb into a cramped space where making the slightest sound could put her in danger, and try her best to sleep for an hour despite the turmoil in her exhausted mind. At least she was on her way to somewhere. She tried her best to remain optimistic.

A thought came to her, and she cast a few minor spells to block anyone from hearing noises that might issue from the crawlspace—both physical and mental. Ruash nodded.

"Clever," he said approvingly. "I wasn't looking forward to hours of enforced silence."

"Neither was I," Kalesra agreed. "Tell me. How far are we from being out of here? I can't bear it. Even when all is quiet enough, the voiceless screams of the tormented and the lost echo in my mind. 'Tis all that I can hear right now. The constant uproar of the damned." She shivered. "I want to be away from this place. I want it so badly. I should look on the bright side though. At least it isn't like Baator where they put tattoos all your body with searing magic until you feel like vomiting your damned guts out and then play their game of seeing how many times they can kill you and bring you back before you loose your mind." Her tone was light, conversational. "That is to say, I've been in worse places. But for some reason they did not indulge in torturing me here. I suspect that their…Lord Whatever-His-Face-Is wants something from me. He must have a personal interest in me, because whatever is preventing me from shifting has all of the power of the Hells behind it. Sometimes I wonder what I ever did to get on the bad side of the Prince of Lies—or what I did to get on the bad side of any of the endless number of Powers whose bad side I'm on. I swear. Kicked all about the planes by some mad demon, put in the lockup by the Lord of a Thousand Atrocities himself, and mouthed off at by Tyr, all in the same relatively short period of time."

Realizing that she had been babbling, she fell silent all at once.

"We'll be away from the prison soon enough," Ruash reassured her, "if we can get past the Warden. It's after that point that matters become complicated. I am not yet entirely sure how to go about leaving this plane. We're both trapped, it seems."

"And you…" Kalesra mused. "What are you? It seems like a rude and stupid question, I know, but it also happens to be a good one."

"I?" Ruash said wryly. "I am a fallen god whose followers have all betrayed him. An anachronism from another age. It seems that I have been given another chance, at least at mortal life, but so far I have done nothing to make good of it."

"A dead god, hmm?" Kalesra asked. "You could be a stark raving lunatic, but…I don't really think that you are. I have little incredulity left to my name after all that I've seen. I don't think that I'd be surprised if Loki Himself came right down here to spank me in person for something I'd done to offend him. That doesn't mean that I'm not taking your claims with a grain of salt, mind you, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt."

"I'm flattered," Ruash muttered sardonically. "Lie down now. Try to get some sleep."

"You should do the same," she suggested politely. Ruash shook his head, a smile quirking the edges of his mouth.

"I don't sleep," he replied.

INTERLUDE:

A dream…

A dream takes her in ethereal hands, lifts her spirit from its cage of flesh and guides her through a corridor of strange memories. A whisper plays in her mind, a whisper, soft and clear, dancing beneath the surface of her thoughts with a steady babble of words spoken and unspoken. There are fire worlds, ice worlds, metal worlds, dream worlds and worlds that only tend to exist. They float now, before her vision—islands—and then they coalesce and meld and shift and crumble as she stands motionless and the multiverse spins around her. For a moment the worlds hold her in a fiery embrace, whispering, burning the places in her mind where they touch with searing fingers. Then she falls.

She knows not how long she falls, only that now the planes are standing still and she is passing downward. Worlds are uncoiling, the sky is dark/chill/fire/bending/starry/living/shifting/dying. She knows nothing. She knows everything. Her soul is descending.

She stands in a room of stark walls and hard shadows. She is alone, but now there are doors—doors with faces and sounds, doors with no room beyond, doors with emotions written into the solid planks. There is a rush of wind and she has moved herself to stand before one door, a tall portal whose color can be expressed only as a gentle noise. She steps through.

She remembers. She remembers Achalos, the earthy smell of him, his spirit steadfast and adamant, his voice. She remembers stars that cannot be seen from the Prime, stars that are not stars at all but gods and worlds and living creatures. She remembers the Lady of Pain, and standing transfixed before her as she reads her soul and opens it harshly with a claw of violent will. She remembers Ixxmaal. She remembers that it/he cut so many more memories from her mind with a surgeon's cold precision and hid them away, hid them somewhere unreachable. Secrets. She remembers the demon's secrets but she cannot remember where to find them. They are lost. They are hidden. If she could find the First…if she could find the First, she would know…But a sudden fear takes her, for she fears the First, fears the way his name makes her shiver. She does not know what he is, she is not sure, but she knows where to find him. The First…

She wakes screaming.

Achalos woke as the blush of early dawn was spreading itself across the eastern sky, a fleet of silent clouds just drifting in on the light breeze to rake their wispy fingers through the reddish air. The sun rose soon after. A single blot of blood ascended on the pale-feathered wings of clouds, it pulled itself above the edge of the horizon to begin its journey through the heavens. The druid had his own journey ahead of him. Stiff, full of the usual aches and a few new ones, he forced himself out of bed.

Esmelteran. That was where they would go. The mage guild was there, and the Harper Hall. Achalos could not be sure that the planewalker whom he sought could still be found in the city, but from where he seemed to stand at the moment, it was his best and perhaps his only choice. Hazzekh knew the planes. Perhaps he did not know them as well as Kalesra, for other than a short jaunt to Mechanus and an even shorter-lived trip to Sigel, most of his knowledge came from research rather than experience. This, however, was no less than what Achalos needed. He was not very well going to convince even a reasonably good friend to go traipsing off to the Nine Hells on a lark. That was not the intent. He only needed someone who could send him to another plane—or bring another back—and this was precisely the Harper's area of expertise.

Now, a discussion was in order. He woke Col and Deyah and Cha'Yessa and called them together in the shady clearing. They sat around the remains of last night's campfire, looking cross at being awake and rather more eager for breakfast than for conversation, and Achalos cleared his throat. The gesture was unnecessary, for everyone was already waiting impatiently to hear what he had to say and be done with it, but their attention seemed elsewhere. Their eyes snapped a bit more into focus as he began to speak.

"I'm going to Esmelteran," he began. "I have a friend there, a Harper—" at this, Col's lip curled a bit, "—who may be able to help me reach Kalesra in the Nine Hells. I will not ask any of you to follow me into the Hells, if that happens to be the necessary thing. In fact, I forbid it. I do not know what your own plans are, but I have no objection to you accompanying me to Esmelteran. Whatever the case, our paths will soon run apart. I thought that you should know."

Deyah stood up with a deep frown.

"Now, you can give as much advice as you like," she snapped, "but that doesn't mean I have to listen. If you go to the Hells after Kalesra, I'm going too."

There was a flurry of angry voices rising in argument and protest. Achalos' won out.

"Why?" he demanded sternly. "What is it to you?"

"The first part of my life had no purpose or meaning to it," she said fiercely, "because I was afraid to make my own decisions, afraid of being hurt or rejected. If I can't choose what to do or what not to do all on my own, then I might as well just kill myself. Saving Kal is the right thing to do. I don't have any better explanation for it than that, and I don't need to. You aren't going to give me orders and expect me to listen to them."

"Ah. Suddenly you're a rebel, bold and afraid of nothing. You've discovered your freedom. Well, I will not grudge you your independence, but I will warn you. You're being foolish. You have no sense what is and is not appropriate. If you believe that the only way to give your life meaning is through constant efforts to throw it away for the sake of others, you're wrong. I have been a servant of the Balance for far longer than you have been alive. I have a great burden of power and responsibility, and accordingly, the Balance protects me—yet even I would fear a journey to the Hells. You are a child. Your power is in its infancy. You could not survive planar travel, nor have you the means to survive in such a foreign place. Could you breathe air choked so thickly with sulfur and acid that it scorches the lungs with each breath? Could you walk upon ground that would burn through the soles of the thickest boots in a matter of seconds? Would last one moment, when the fiends that swarm constantly across the burning landscape can clearly see you to fall upon you and tear you to shreds?"

"I—" Deyah stammered. Achalos nodded.

"As I thought," he said quietly. "If you could be of help, I would bring you if you wished it—but you cannot. And anyhow," he stretched his stiff arms, "I have no way of even knowing if that sort of drastic action will be called for. We shall have to see when the moment arrives."

Deyah nodded, but she had a stubborn look in her eye that Achalos did not care for. This was the sort of fish, he thought irritably, that one throws back in before it's too late. As soon as this thought had come to him though, he was forced to take it back. Deyah was well-meaning, just a bit willful. The druid was glad that she seemed to be getting ahead of all of her troubles—but then, he could not really be sure that she was alright after all. The mention of suicide, however casual and seemingly unmeant, had set off a few alarms in his perceptive mind. The girl needed watching closely. If someone didn't look after her, she would burn herself up in a misguided effort to prove her worth and then find herself in an even more desperate situation than before. What she needed was proper instruction in the use of magic—however, getting her to agree to something like this would prove a painful trial. She objected immediately to anything that anyone with any authority suggested, whether it was reasonable or not. Stubborn, the druid thought. That was the only word for it. Stubborn.

"And you?" he asked Cha'Yessa. "What will you do?"

"We shall see when we reach Esmelteran, shall we not?" she snapped with a bit of tenseness in her smooth voice. Achalos bristled a bit. He was going to have to get rid of her soon, before she turned like a trampled serpent. She treated Deyah with such careful calmness, even while behind her back she replaced the icy politeness toward Col with open viciousness. Deyah thought of her as "tame". There was a danger there, for there was no such thing as a tame drow. Cha'Yessa would not long abide a cage, no matter how it benefited her. Whenever came the opportunity, whenever came the turning moment, the instance wherein advantage lay in control rather than subtlety, she would shift at once to her darker side. Woe, then, be to her "keeper". She was not capable of mercy. She could not sympathize, only calculate. She was the product of a race long trapped in darkness, their minds clouding over with the filth of vicious thoughts and selfish motives as the ages passed and their bodies remained young. The drow had been shaped by the evil that they themselves had created, until what remained of a proud race was a degenerate cesspool of twisted and broken minds, all striving with a killing fury for the same goal—power. This internecine clash of one creature against the other was mirrored in the microcosm of each drow's mind, burned indelibly in the delicate flesh of the soul, its purpose seeking perpetually to grasp the prisoned spirit in its bond of inescapable avarice and ambition.

Achalos knew that there were dark elves who claimed to have renounced their shadowed heritage. It was a denial. It was a lie. The taint was there still, writhing in the blood, the small teeth gnawing agony into the soul. It could not be removed. It could not be erased. It was a constant of existence, a truth, essential and inexorable. The attempt to escape by denial was a futile one—for only acceptance could cleanse such a potent stain. To turn one's back was to invite attack from behind. The nightmares would catch you, would pull you down to hell no matter how hard you struggled to escape them. They would always find you eventually. They would always find you. You could hide from them but it did no good. They were not mortal things susceptible to simple deception, but creatures born of your own spirit and blood, fleshless wraiths of demon things with eyes that pierced the depths of the soul. You created them They wanted you, you had spawned them with each misstep and each breath that you had stilled, and they needed you. They would never lie down, would never still their seeking after your fragile sanity. You would die first, or you would accept their existence without grudge or question.

How well Achalos knew this. How familiar he was with dark things, with the malevolent offspring of his own mind; how well acquainted with self-created horrors. The path that he walked had at times fallen into shadow, grown sordid with the dirt of transgressions that yet tainted his soul. The Balance was the only thing that gave him the strength to confront the demons that prowled the dark places of his mind. Without it, when the question came as it always did, the question of whether there could ever be redemption for a creature who had strayed and fallen so many times, he would have found himself with only a darkening void of uncertainty for an answer.

The druid leaned forward a bit, the slightest edge of ice cutting through with his gaze as it fell sharply upon Cha'Yessa's impassive features.

"You walk a narrow and unbounded road," he threatened softly. "Watch that you do not fall. The crevasse that awaits you is a steep one."

She smiled at him coldly, disdain playing the haughty countours of her face to their greatest advantage. She was measuring, contemplating. The appraising way her eyes ran along the length of his body gave him a tense unease. It seemed that she was moving invisible hands this way and that across his skin with uncomfortable pressure, now and again moving to search the hidden places of his mind as well. He could not help but shiver a bit. This woman possessed little in the way of raw power, but she knew the business of hatred and rivalry well. She was born to it, had breathed it and been fed upon it. She was nervous, but she was not intimidated, and a confident foe was always more to fear than a meek one.

"From time to time," she whispered back, "a man falls into the very hole that he has dug himself."

Achalos narrowed his eyes.

"Am I to take that as a threat?" he demanded. Cha'Yessa's face went blank, smooth as stone.

"Take it however you please," she drawled. Left at a dead end, the druid let this pass with a growl and an agitated shake of his head.

"We'd best be on our way then," he said in a louder tone than he had been using. "Strike camp."

"The First." Kalesra's voice was harsh with sleep, but she managed the words in a thick-tongued slur. "The First. The First, the First..."

"The First," Ruash echoed musingly. "Tell me. Tell me about your dream."

For a moment she could manage nothing. She was weary, and cold, cramped in the dark crawl-space and feeling drained after three hours of troubled and restless sleep. It was all she could do to find the right words.

"It is...it's impossible to recount," she said with a sleepwalker's distracted voice. Her mind was roving still. It moved here and there, settled now and again in a dark crevice to prowl through the memories. The mind-beast was darkly frustrated. It railed against its cage full of the impotent fury of being unable to give impressions form in words. She shushed it, but it would not be still.

"Tell me about the First," Ruash said. Kalesra grasped about until her mind caught hold of what she was searching for.

"I know where he is," she said after a moment's hesitation. "I know where he is and I know that I was familiar with him once, but I...I can recall nothing now. Only hints of things. Pieces. Bits of a puzzle."

"Tell me."

"Damn it Ruash, there's nothing to--"

"Tell me." His voice was very firm and final, and she could find no argument to throw against his determined countenance. She sighed.
"He knows who I am," she told him. "He wants me to seek him out. He has been searching for me, because I have something that he wants. I would avoid him, but I...I can't. It's like trying not to turn your head when you hear a voice speak your name. I have no choice."

"He is linked to you in some way," Ruash replied darkly. "He controls you. He has some sort of power over you."

"Aye. I feel it. It grows steadily stronger."

"You think that he has something that you want, as well."

"I know it."

"How do you 'know' this, Kalesra?" he demanded. "How, when this creature has such an iron grip on your mind, can you be certain that such a notion has any truth to it? How can you be sure?"

"I can't be sure. I'm not sure of anything. I am stumbling blindly about in the dark. What else is there to do?"

"Stop for just a moment. Consider. Weigh the consequences of your actions in your mind."

She gave him a long look. The lines of her face had become more severe lately, lending her a look of regal weariness that settled about her face when she frowned to consider something.

"There is no time to think," she sighed. "I must follow the current wherever it leads or let it drown me."

Ruash seemed dissatisfied, but he said nothing to this effect. Instead, he stretched his lanky body out with a small noise of protest that was echoed by the cracking of stiff joints, and said, "Then let us be on our way and about our business."