~*-BBB-*~

He woke in an empty stone room. His immediate reaction was to search for plants with his magic, but as soon as he tried, he recoiled quickly. Wherever he was, it was surrounded by a black swath of nothingness - no, not nothingness. It was the same dark stuff that made up the monster in his dreams.

Slowly he remembered running from the creature on the path to Winding Circle. But it couldn't have been there. Could it? Unless he had been dreaming… unless he was still dreaming…

He pinched himself, hard, on the back of his hand. All it did was to make a section of vine tattoo wither and die, quickly replaced by another flowering one.

He looked around. The room was totally empty, and it was stone from floor to ceiling. Rocks, he thought darkly. If only Evvy were here. It was very dark, the only light through the keyhole of the door and around the hinges. He could feel no green things anywhere. He felt inside himself for his magical ties. He struggled to find them, where before they would have come to him as easily as breathing. When he did find them, he could barely feel them - Sandry, Daja, Tris, Rosethorn, Lark, Niko, Crane, and his shakkan, all faint and dying. What had happened to them? What had happened to him?

Don't panic, Briar, he tried to tell himself. This isn't like you at all. But he couldn't help it. The monster of his dreams haunted his waking thoughts. He kept thinking he saw it out of the corner of his eye, heard it at the edge of hearing, and it smothered his magic like a great black cloud.

Someone had caught him. There had been a mage trap…

But why? And who? He buried his face in his hands and tried to concentrate, tried to call out to his foster sisters. Daja? Sandry? …Tris? A pointless effort, since she was so far away, but it didn't seem to matter. Niether of the others answered. And there was no way to call Rosethorn without something green to help him. Even his shakkan, which he had known to support him magically from miles away, seemed unreachable.

If only he hadn't stopped carrying lock picks! There hadn't been any need, since he was always either at home or at the market. The great stone door looked solid and impenetrable. Or if only it was wood!

He shook his head. It did not good to dwell on his druthers. Focus Briar, focus. But it was hard. It felt like a dream, his thoughts were unstable and insubstantial. Except the cold floor under him was very real.

Then, from somewhere, he heard voices. He sat very still, arms around his knees, and listened hard.

"… if I say so myself."

"And is it - he - so very important, Raymus?"

"Of course he is, or I wouldn't have pursued the subject, now would I? Just you go up now and don't worry about a thing. You trust me, don't you?"

"Yes Raymus."

The voices sounded both similar to each other and familiar to Briar - a Bag sort of voice, posh. The main difference was that the one called Raymus was calm and assertive. The other one sounded nervous.

Briar stayed still to see if he could hear anything else, but it seemed to go quiet for a while outside the stone room. He took a deep breath. They aren't monsters, he told himself firmly. They're just people. People with guts enough to grab me - they're either really brave, or they haven't heard any of the stories that have gone around about me.

It seemed like hours until anything else happened. He passed the time reciting herb properties in his head, trying to clear his mind. Even meditation was difficult and exhausting, he couldn't get hold of his magic at all. And every time he closed his eyes, he found himself back in Gyonxe, or on the streets of Sotat, running for his life away from the dream monster.

Just when he had gone through every herb he knew for the third time and was about to start on garden flowers, he heard a key turn in the lock. He scrambled to his feet quickly and backed up against the wall. Perhaps when the door opened he could make a run for it.

The man who entered the room was the wispy-haired Westerner. Deep down he had suspected this, so he wasn't surprised, but then the man looked up and met his eyes, and Briar saw red pin-pricks of light behind the greyish-green of his irises. Terrified, he scrambled back, falling into a corner from which there was no escape. He was forced to stare up at the creature of his nightmares as the man looked down at him and smiled. "Good, good," the man said, and Briar heard in his speech a terrible roar. "Welcome, Briar Moss, if that is what you want to call yourself."

Fire and blood was roaring through Briar's brain. He couldn't speak, he couldn't even think.

The man seemed to be satisfied. "Don't fight it," he said gently, but all the gentleness was inaudible over the screams and flames his words seemed to conjure up in Briar's ears. "The more frightened you are, the easier it is."

Deep, deep down inside Briar, the deepest place where he kept his most desperate emergency magic, he felt a flash of anger. This man was doing this to him. Filling him with paralysing fear so that he couldn't speak, couldn't move. He tried to shake off the fear, but he wasn't quite angry enough for that.

"I said don't fight it," said the man, looking down at him with contempt. "That's better…" he reached forward, and Briar recoiled from that touch, but there was nowhere to go, and his head impacted on the stone wall with a painful crack. The man's pale fingers touched his forehead, and he felt a spark of magic. Then he felt something… go. It was hard to say what it was. It was like the feeling of having a headache and then having a Healer cure it, except the other way around… the loss was painful, no, it was agonising. He felt pain start to radiate out from the base of his spine to the top of his head, as though someone had lit a line of oil under his skin. He thought he screamed, once.

Then it was over, and he was lying, alone, on the stone floor again. It no longer hurt, but he had a terrible sense of loss, of emptiness. Automatically he tried to reach out to the girls, for some comfort, for some assurance. Nothing happened. It wasn't even that he couldn't reach them - nothing at all happened. He tried to look for green things. His mind stayed wholly inside his head. He could sense nothing outside his own body. He felt ill. Shakingly he sat up, and as he did so, something hideous caught his eye.

It was his own hand. Eyes widening, he raised both hands, unable to believe what he was seeing. Every one of the tattooed flowers and vines had shrivelled and died. They sat still and brown beneath his skin, like a normal tattoo, if anyone had ever wanted to paint dead things onto their body.

Daja? He called helplessly. Sandry?

Nothing. There was nothing outside him, nothing inside him.

His magic was gone.