The Gates of Night

CHAPTER 19

Tell me, shaper, and tell me truly, where did your journey begin?”

Lei’s thoughts whirled. The others had crossed without incident, and part of her wondered if this was all simply a formality, if a wrong answer existed.

The staff whispered in her hand. The words slipped away before she could grasp their meaning, but she felt fear. There was power here, and danger.

Where did my journey begin? Which journey?

She sifted through a dozen answers, thinking of riddles she’d learned as a child, of tales told of trickster spirits. Finally, she chose her answer.

“My journey began in my mother’s womb,” she said.

Her heart skipped a beat as she spoke, then the serpent lowered its massive head. Lei slid her staff into her bag. She wanted both her hands for this, and the last thing she needed to worry about was dropping the staff into the deadly water. She made her way up onto the creature’s back and stepped out onto the scaled span. She was halfway across when it spoke again.

“You have much to learn,” the serpent hissed. Though she was far from either head, the voice seemed to echo around her.

The bridge rose up beneath her, flinging her into the air. She reached out with her thoughts, trying to weave an enchantment that would slow her fall, but it was all too sudden and sharp. The wind roared, blood rushed through her-

And then she hit the water.

The light was blinding. Lei’s eyes had grown accustomed to the dim moonlight of the forest, and now brilliant light flooded the world.

Sunlight.

The air was warm, moist, but it was air. Where was the water? Lei reached down, or tried to. She could feel the warm breeze, she could smell the rich soil. But she couldn’t move. No, she simply wasn’t there. She could see the world around her, but she was trapped, a disembodied presence.

Where am I? she thought.

Wait. It was a woman’s voice, low and liquid, filled with deep sorrow. Lei had never heard the voice before, and yet it was immediately familiar to her. Despite the mournful tone, Lei found she was comforted, as if she’d just seen an old friend.

Who are you?

Wait, the voice said, and now Lei realized that it was a thought, more like a memory than a voice. Watch. Learn.

Lei’s vision cleared, and she knew where she was.

Xen’drik.

She didn’t recognize her exact surrounding. She hadn’t been in this particular clearing, she was sure of it. But there was no mistaking the land. The foliage around her was painted in vivid orange and yellow, colors so sharp that the trees and shrubs appeared to be on fire. This was the jungle where they had first encountered the drow, the region surrounding Karul’tash and the obsidian city Daine had spoken of. As she studied the ground, she saw a patch of darkness, a circle of smooth, black glass half-hidden beneath fiery orange moss. She heard sounds coming from behind her, people moving through the undergrowth, but try as she might, she couldn’t turn toward the sound.

Wait. Watch and learn.

The sounds drew nearer, closer with every moment. A figure stepped into her field of view.

It was Lei.

She was wearing her green and gold jerkin, and holding a wand of white wood in her hand-a wand Lei herself had never seen. Her eyes were hidden behind goggles, a complex array of crystal lenses bound to leather straps, and she was studying the ground. She stopped when she spotted the patch of black glass, and pointed her wand at the earth. The moss shriveled away, turning to dust, and a wide patch of black glass was revealed. “Here!” she cried out. Something was wrong. Her voice wasn’t Lei’s voice.

Another figure came forward from the jungle. It was a man, a tall young man armored in deep blue chainmail. He held a long gray staff in one hand. His skin was pale, his short, wavy hair brilliant red. Lei knew this man. She had seen him in a dream only days earlier. It was her father.

“Excellent, Aleisa,” he said, pausing as he reached the edge of the glass.

Aleisa! This wasn’t Lei at all. It was her mother. The sahuagin guide, Thaask, had told Lei that he had met her parents decades earlier, that they had come to Xen’drik in search of knowledge. Was this a vision of the past? It made no sense. House Cannith certainly had an interest in the secrets of the shattered land, but why would her parents have come alone? Surely Cannith would have sent a full expedition if there were knowledge to be claimed. Xen’drik was a land of many dangers, and if this could benefit the house, it would look after its own.

Watch and learn, came the voice.

“There’s immense power in the glass,” the woman said, and now Lei recognized that voice. “Are you sure of this?”

“Beloved, are you questioning my faith?” The man’s voice was cold, accusatory, but Lei could see the hint of a smile playing around his lips. Lei remembered her father as an intense, driven man, utterly dedicated to his work. He rarely smiled. “Do you distrust the gifts of our lord?”

“Of course,” Aleisa said.

The man-Talin d’Cannith-nodded, and now he truly smiled. “You are as wise as you are beautiful, my dear,” he said. “But I do trust in the grand design. I won’t die today.”

He reached into a pouch on his belt and produced a massive gauntlet, longer than the pouch was deep; clearly this was an extradimensional pocket, like Lei’s own bag. As he drew the object into the light, Lei could see that it wasn’t simply a glove but the hand of a warforged soldier. The design was unusual. Sharp points rose from each joint, and the tips of the long fingers ended in vicious claws. The wrist had been hollowed out, and Talin placed his own left hand into the socket. He began tracing patterns along the metal, whispering to himself. Lei couldn’t hear the words, but she could tell that he was calling on his skills as an artificer, weaving a magical pattern into the metal.

There was a hiss, and her father clenched his teeth. Aleisa rushed to his side, her hand on his arm. “Talin!”

His face twisted in pain, but intense concentration soon pushed away the agony. He opened his eyes, staring down at the hand, and the fingers flexed. He was controlling the hand as if it were his own. “Success,” he said. “Now give me the key.”

Aleisa rummaged through her own pouch and produced a flat metal disk. “I just hope you can remove it when this is done,” she said. “Luck has been with us this far, but I think Merrix would notice that.”

“It would be just the way of our guide to leave me bound to this thing,” Talin said. He pressed the disk against the palm of the warforged claw; when Talin removed his hand, the disk remained fused to the gauntlet. “But it is too early in the game, beloved. We will not be sacrificed so soon.”

Talin turned and embraced Aleisa. Lei wasn’t sure she could remember ever having seen them kiss, and the sight was both heartwarming and disturbing. For all his calm words, she could sense her father’s fear, something else she had never seen. Finally Talin pulled away from his wife and knelt next to the patch of glass. He looked up at her and smiled once more, then he pressed the warforged hand against the glass.

The air above the glass rippled with energy. The glass grew red with heat, collapsed in upon itself, and cooled. Now, in place of the obsidian circle, a set of glass stairs descended down into darkness.

Talin raised his hand, and cold fire wrapped his staff. In silence, the two began the descent into the passage, and Lei found herself drifting forward to follow them. The enormous steps and the height of the ceiling left no question as to the origin of this place. This was a compound of the ancient giants.

The air was still and silent. Aleisa took the lead, and she drew a different wand, darkwood bound with strips of red gold. Her goggles shimmered in the shadows as she studied the floor, and she flinched. “There,” she said, pointing at the floor ahead. “I’ve never seen a glyph with such power. Ah! It’s blinding!”

Talin came forward, the warforged fist held out like a shield. He stretched out his hand, palm first, as if pressing against a physical force. Once again, there was a ripple in the air. “Clear?” he said.

Aleisa nodded, and they continued through the hall. Soon the corridor came to an end, a tall archway opening into a vast chamber. Aleisa walked through the doorway, glancing.

The blade missed her by inches.

Watching from the hallway, all Lei saw was a section of the obsidian sword. Her mother saw her attacker just in time, and threw herself to the side as the blade came crashing down. As the sword rose again, Talin charged into the room, and Lei’s vision followed with him.

A giant, a tall warrior with jet-black skin and glistening ebon armor, towered over Talin. The giant held a glass sword in two hands. The blade flashed toward Talin, breaking the man’s staff and scattering glowing shards of wood across the chamber. Talin didn’t hesitate. Stepping forward and under the sword, he placed his human hand against the giant’s leg. A crackling filled the air, and Lei saw fissures run across the giant’s armor and skin. That was when she realized that the giant was a statue-an animated warrior. Her father struck at the magic that empowered the creature, as Lei had when she had fought warforged.

The giant emitted no cry of pain, just as it had given no warning when it launched its attack. It simply struck at its foe, and this time Talin couldn’t get out of the way. The force of the blow sent him flying through the air, into the shadows and out of Lei’s sight.

Aleisa howled as she threw herself forward, catching the giant’s leg in a lethal embrace. The creature shattered in her grasp, and chunks of obsidian rained down around and upon her. “Talin!” she howled into the darkness.

“I am here.” Pain filled Talin’s voice, but he kept his composure. Cold fire filled the room, surrounding Talin’s fist. His left arm hung limp at his side and blood flowed from a corner of his mouth. His armor was unbroken; clearly there was magic at work, and it had likely saved his life. “And behold, my love. We have found the treasure that was promised.” The glow surrounding his fist grew even more intense, filling the room with the light of day.

Corpses were scattered around the chamber, armored bodies affixed to the walls and spread across the floor. There were bodies of all sizes, from halflings to a few that must be ogres. Some were intact, while others had been dismembered. Lei drew closer to one of the corpses, her vision adjusted to the light, and she realized that these weren’t the corpses of men.

They were warforged.

She could see the fibrous roots emerging from the stump of a wounded soldier, the cold fire reflected in crystal eyes. There could be no question what these were, but the designs were unfamiliar. As Lei tried to examine the bodies, a terrible vertigo swept through her. Her vision blurred, and the light faded to darkness.

Mother! Lei tried to speak, but she had no body and no voice. She tried to resist the force that was pulling her into the shadows, but she couldn’t. As the world dissolved around her, her father’s words echoed in her ears.

“Our work can begin at last.”

Darkness.

No. Stone. Black marble. She was staring at a stone wall. The air was cool, but far fresher than that of the giant tomb. She was in a hallway, and she could see the cold fire lanterns embedded along the walls. There was no dust in this place, no cobwebs. This was no ruin.

What is this place?

Disembodied as she was, Lei couldn’t judge the scale. She didn’t know if the hall was built for giants, gnomes, or humans. She studied the bare walls, searching for any clue, some hint as to the purpose or inhabitants of the building. There was something very familiar about the barren hallway, something she just couldn’t quite grasp. Then she looked at the lantern, and a shock ran through her. The ball of cold fire was held with a cage of mirrored glass and steel, designed to intensify the magical light. It was a common Cannith design, and such lanterns could be found anywhere in the Five Nations. What caught her eye was the decorative point of the lantern-a lion cast in black steel.

Blacklion!

Lei spent her childhood in the Cannith forgehold of Blacklion, a center for warforged research and production hidden in the wilderness of Cyre. It was a lonely place for her. The Cannith artificers stationed at Blacklion, Lei’s parents among them, were absorbed in their duties and had little time for a child. Lei spent most of her time among the warforged. When the soldiers emerged from the creation forges, they underwent training before being sent out to the battlefield. Warforged learned quickly. Much of the knowledge they needed to perform their functions was carried on an instinctive level, and within a few months of training a warforged might prove a match for a veteran human soldier. During this time of instruction the warforged were much like children themselves, and Lei enjoyed the company of her metal companions. She even came to envy them. The warforged had a purpose, a place in the world, while Lei was just the little girl lost in the shadows of Blacklion.

A door opened, and a figure came into view. She was small and slender, a pale girl with coppery hair and wearing a long, blue dress. Her feet were bare, and she made no sound against the stone floor. Lei hadn’t seen this girl’s face in almost twenty years, but there was no doubt in her mind. She was looking at herself.

Watch and learn. It was the woman’s voice again, maddeningly familiar.

Lei drifted behind the silent child. She had forgotten how somber she had been. Lei studied her young counterpart. Nine years old, perhaps?

The girl moved cautiously down the hall. She might be silent by nature, but Lei could see that she was taking extra care to be stealthy. When a pair of magewrights entered the hallway, the child slipped into an open door, hiding until the researchers passed by. Where was she going? Lei tried to remember the layout of the building, but the passage of years had worn down her memories.

As the girl moved deeper into the forgehold, Lei heard noises ahead, the clash of steel on steel. Battle! For a moment, she thought that the building was under attack, but then she remembered the work that went on at the forgehold. Combat training. Blacklion had a virtual arena, where the warforged fought one another to draw their latent combat skills to the surface.

Lei knew what day this was.

Many levels of the forgehold were off-limits to her, butLei’s thirst for knowledge prodded her to see all of the forbidden zones, to learn everything that went on in the forgehold. She had memorized the patterns of the guards and magewrights, finding hiding places that would let her slip past patrols. She was usually caught, but every so often she managed to reach one of the restricted regions. As she had today.

She watched her younger self move closer to the source of the sounds. She entered an armory filled with racks of weapons and shields, and she slipped past a man who was checking the inventory. Creeping across the room, she walked through a large archway.

And onto a battlefield.

The war chamber mimicked conditions of battle. Physical props were combined with magical illusions to create scenarios for the soldiers in training. The girl was unaware of this; she knew only that this was a place that was forbidden to her. And so she was unprepared for the chaotic scene. She found herself in the ruins of a city, in the foundations of a building broken by a mighty siege engine. She was surrounded by rubble and dirt. The clash of steel grew louder. Lei’s curiosity drew her forward, treading lightly over the ruined ground. Soon she crouched behind a shattered wall. The sounds of violence were just beyond, and had she ever known battle, fear might have driven her back. Instead she peered over the wall, desperate to see what lay beyond.

Two warforged were locked in battle. One was a shock trooper, a heavily armored warrior built to drive deep into enemy forces. He bore a massive tower shield on his left arm, and held a morningstar studded with vicious spikes. As Lei looked on, he landed a solid blow on his opponent, denting his enemy’s armor and sending the smaller warforged staggering backward.

This opponent, a lighter model of warrior designed for stealth, was surely faster than his foe and should never have let his enemy close the distance between them, but he lacked experience, and he hadn’t realized how seriously outmatched he was in close combat. The young Lei gasped as the dark warforged landed another blow, a powerful stroke that sent his opponent crashing to the ground. The victor looked down on his foe, searching for any signs of motion; when his victim remained still, he strode off into the ruins, in search of a new enemy.

The girl scrambled over the wall and rushed to the side of the stricken scout. The morningstar had punched a hole through his chestplate, revealing a mass of metal and stone surrounded by torn tendrils. Watching as a ghost, the elder Lei could see that the scout was simply inert. While he was unconscious, his condition was stable and he was in no real danger. But the child didn’t know this. She only saw the wound, and she was certain the creature was dying. She reached out, desperate to comfort him, to save him. She laid a hand on the warforged, and she stiffened in shock. Lei remembered that moment, the very first time she had seen the web of energy that comprised the life and consciousness of the warforged … the day her dragonmark had appeared. It was strange to see it from the outside, to watch mystic energy ripple around the child’s hands and to see warforged’s damage fade. Within seconds torn tendrils had regrown, and gouged metal straightened itself and fused over the wound. Light flared in the warforged’s crystal eyes, and the child beamed as the soldier sat up and stared at her.

“Halt!” The voice echoed around her, louder than any thunder. “All units disengage!”

The child’s eyes widened as her surroundings changed. Much of the cityscape was an illusion, which faded to reveal the true arena of Blacklion. The walls and rubble were obstacles fixed to the ground, and the ground itself was a carpet, designed to feel like soil but clearly artificial in nature. Before she could move, she was caught in a brilliant pool of light.

“Don’t move!”

A man in a blue doublet stepped out of the darkness. The girl didn’t know that these events were closely monitored, or that magewrights were standing ready to repair the damaged warforged. The man stepped back in surprise as the warforged soldier rose to his feet.

“What have you done, girl?” he said.

Young Lei had no response. She didn’t know the answer. She was overwhelmed by the experience, and even the elder Lei found that she had no memory of what had happened next. She had passed out, awakening much later to find that she was the youngest Cannith heir to develop a dragonmark.

“Out of my way, Banon.” It was Lei’s father, older now than when she’d seen him in Xen’drik. Age had made him harder, and his voice carried cold authority. The magewright stepped away from the warforged without question. Talin bent down and picked up his daughter. “Lei,” he said. “Are you hurt, Lei?”

The girl went limp in his arms.

“She’s sick!” he said. “Banon, examine this unit. I’ll take care of my daughter. And don’t breathe a word of this until I speak to you, is that understood?”

“Yes, master,” the magewright said.

Talin carried his daughter across the arena, and Lei found herself following him. Her thoughts raced. She’d passed out. She knew that. It was stress, the unprecedented manifestation of her dragonmark. That was what she’d been told, what she knew to be true.

But when her father touched the girl, when he picked her up … Lei had seen the moment of concentration, and she’d seen the mystic glow around his hands, out of Banon’s view. She hadn’t collapsed on her own. Her father had done something to her. But what? And why?

Talin made his way out of the war chamber and into a storeroom. This room was filled with props used in the arena, objects that could be hauled out and cloaked with illusion to become trees, walls, and other obstacles. Lei’s father walked to the back of the chamber. He glanced around, making sure he was alone, and then shifted his grip on his daughter and placed his right palm against the wall. He paused, and then he stepped through the wall. An illusion! Lei was drawn after him, passing through the seemingly solid wall and into the chamber that lay beyond.

It was an arcane workshop, as well equipped as anything Lei ever seen in a Cannith facility. One wall was devoted to alchemy, with a vast assortment of herbs and fluids spread around bubbling beakers, alembics, and other tools. Ahead of her, a pylon rose from the floor, a stone pillar encrusted with glowing dragonshards and mithral inscriptions; while Lei could not divine its purpose, there was no question that this was an eldritch machine designed to channel vast amounts of magical energy.

Talin laid the little girl down on a long stone slab set into the floor, a table covered with runes of divination and conjuration. He adjusted a flexible cold fire lantern, focusing a beam of light directly on the child. Five other identical slabs were spread around this operating theater, and Lei felt a terrible chill. She couldn’t remember having seen this place in waking hours, but she had been here in her dreams. When she’d passed out in the sewers of Sharn, when she’d nearly died in the vault beneath Stormreach, she’d found herself here, lying on that same table where her father was now examining her younger self.

“What is it?” A woman stepped out of the shadows and rushed to the table. Lei’s mother. Older now, just like her father, but unmistakable. “What’s happened to her?”

“I’ve disabled her,” Talin said, his voice cold. “We have problems. She just repaired an inert scout in the battle room, and there were witnesses.”

“Repaired?”

“Repaired. Restored a critically damaged soldier to peak condition with a touch.”

“So soon? But this is more than we could have hoped for!” Aleisa’s voice was filled with amazed joy, but Lei’s father was still cold.

“Don’t you see? There were witnesses. They won’t rest until they have an explanation. And we can’t risk exposure so soon.” He looked down at the unconscious girl and shook his head. “We’ll have to destroy her. A freakish accident, a dragonmark arising before the body is ready-”

“Are you mad?” Aleisa shoved her husband away from the child. “This is our daughter!”

“I knew you’d be emotional about this,” Talin said. “But think of the greater goal!”

“Lei’s always been my greater goal,” her mother said. “I thought you understood that.”

“Aleisa.” Talin looked down at the child. “I love her too. You know that. And even I am amazed at what she has done today, and what it says of her potential. But we have always known this day could come. She is the most dangerous thing we have ever created, and if our designs are revealed, excoriation is the least of the horrors awaiting us. All that is flesh and blood must die, Aleisa, and she dies today.”

“No!” Aleisa said. “What of our faith? This is a challenge. And you would surrender? There must be another path, a way to emerge from this stronger than before.”

“There’s no time-”

“Hold.” Aleisa’s eyes narrowed, and now Lei could see the more familiar face of her mother, the calculating artificer. “You said that we can explain her death as the early manifestation of a dragonmark.”

“Yes.”

“What if she manifests the mark-and lives?”

“Explain,” Talin said.

“If we give her a mark, that explains what she has done. It gives us reason to begin her training at this unprecedented early age. Should she flare again, it will be dismissed as the talent of a prodigy, which is essentially the truth.”

“Yes,” Talin said. “For her to manifest the mark at this age … a historic event, but hardly one requiring a thorough investigation. I am humbled by your wisdom, my love.”

“It will take time to synthesize a mark that will meet all tests, but for now the outline will do,” Aleisa said. She sorted through a rack of arcane tools, twisted rods, and strange blades. “This should be sufficient,” she said, holding up a rod of ebony bound with brass and tipped with a dark dragonshard. “Where shall our daughter have her dragonmark, my husband?”

“Why, I think she should take after her lovely mother,” Talin said.

Aleisa smiled at that. “Prepare her, then.”

Talin turned the child onto her stomach, brushing her hair to the side. “Verentis ierjyx!” he said, and the power in these syllables tore at the air. The column in the center of the chamber burst into brilliant light, and runes covering the table were traced in lines of fire. The girl herself glowed, as if power were flowing through her.

Aleisa cut her palm with a silver blade. Blood dripped onto the floor as she gripped the ebony rod. “Now, my daughter,” she said. “Let my blood flow into you once more. Take this gift, and may it save us all.”

She pressed the rod against the child’s neck, and as she did so, Lei felt an agonizing pain as if her dragonmark were acid against her skin. She tried to scream, but she had no voice. The pain consumed her, and the chamber burned away in a burst of white light.

Consciousness returned. She was floating, falling.

She opened her eyes. She opened her eyes. After so much time as a bodiless presence, she was herself again! But where was she? There was pressure all around her, and she felt as if she were falling, slipping down through a still pool of water. But this water wasn’t pressing into her nose, mouth, or eyes. She breathed with no difficulty at all. And all around her, there was … nothing. White light.

Someone held her hand.

“You are in yourself,” a voice said. It was musical, inhumanly beautiful yet filled with terrible misery. The woman’s voice, the one she’d heard earlier. “You’ve seen the past. This is the now. Only you can decide what happens next.”

The air was like water, and Lei found she could push against it. She turned in place, and a woman came into view.

A woman made from wood.

The stranger’s skin was polished bark, dark as any night. Black leaves enshrouded her head, this inky foliage taking the place of hair, and cascading down to cover back and breasts. Even her eyes were wood, though they glittered with bright dew. She was beautiful, and though Lei have never seen her before, she was achingly familiar.

A woman of wood … a woman of dark wood …

“You’re the staff,” Lei breathed.

“Once I was much more,” the dryad said. “But now, the staff is all that remains of me.”

“Why haven’t you spoken to me before?”

“I have done all that I could. My spirit is bound deep within the wood, and song and whisper are all I have left. Yours is the only mind I can touch, and I can speak to you like this only because you have fallen so far within yourself.”

“Why me?” Lei said. “Why can you only speak to me?”

“I have no answers for you, but you drift through the river of knowledge. Have you learned nothing from what you have seen?”

The memories rushed back. Xen’drik. Blacklion. The blazing pain of the brand. “That wasn’t real,” she said. It couldn’t have been. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but this is a trick. You-you’re probably Lakashtai, trying to manipulate me the same way you did Daine.”

“This is no dream,” the dryad said. “And it is not my doing. I am here only because of the bond between us. The serpent is the Keeper of Secrets, and these are your secrets revealed.”

Lei’s head pounded. No ground lay beneath her feet, and she was still falling into the endless white. No escape from these terrible thoughts. “No. This can’t be real.”

“Of course it is. This is the answer to the questions growing within you. Why could you hear the voices trapped in the dream-chamber of Karul’tash? How did you escape death beneath Stormreach? How did you repair the shattered orb? And how can you speak to me? In any other hand, I would be cold wood. But you can reach within.”

“What am I?” Lei whispered.

“I do not know what you are,” the dryad said. “But you are not human.”

“No!” Lei reached back, placing her hand across her dragonmark. Memories tore at her mind.

She spoke of her desire for a daughter, whispered the sahuagin Thaask. It was a subject of sorrow for her, one of great difficulty.

Everything is an experiment, her father said. All that is flesh must perish. We knew that from the start.

Just remember, I always loved you, her mother said, then her voice grew cold. Do what you must.

Lei’s dragonmark burned beneath her hand. It will take time to synthesize a mark that will meet all tests, but for now the outline will do. The pain grew sharper, brighter, until she tore her hand away from the mark.

“What am I?” she cried, howling her pain into the white void.

“You are Lei.” The dryad still held her left hand. “You are what you have always been. Nothing has changed but your knowledge.”

Tears seared in Lei’s eyes. “No. Everything. Everything I thought … my mark … do I even have parents? Am I even alive?”

The dryad slapped her.

It was a gentle blow, cushioned by the thick air or liquid that surrounded them. But it still came as a shock.

“You think you know loss? I have lost more than you can imagine. My world was torn from me. And when I thought I was at my lowest point, when I thought I had nothing more to lose, I was bound to this staff, a prisoner in the last fragment of my beautiful tree. Once my voice shaped the night, and now I am but a whisper. So your illusions have been stripped from you. You have life. You have love, if you have the courage to seize it. You have been given the gift of truth, and the truth is a burden. So tell me, girl. Do you have the strength to rise, to pull yourself up? Or will you surrender and drift down into the darkness at the bottom of your mind?”

Lei gaped. “Who are you?”

The dryad smiled, but it was a grimace of pain. “I am the Heart of the Darkwood Grove, the last of the Darkwood Daughters. You stand in my hour of night, in a realm that once echoed with my song. I sought to escape my destiny, and I paid for that folly with all that I had.”

Curiosity warred with Lei’s self-pity. “What destiny?”

“I was to wed Torenas the Woodsman, youngest of the Nine Brothers of Night. The land beneath the Deepwood Moon was his as much as mine, and only in our union would he gain his true dominion. But I sought to escape this destiny. I wished to be more than a wood-wife, bound to live beneath a single moon. She promised to help me, and I, fool that I was, believed her words.”

“Who?” Lei said.

“She has many names, almost as many as she has faces. Thelania, the Queen of Dusk and Shadows. She is one of the mightiest spirits of this plane. I knew she would not act out of kindness, that she would help me only if it served her own goals. But I was impatient. She promised an escape, and I thought she might free me from my tree, give me the freedom my kind cannot have.”

“But she betrayed you.”

“She tore my tree from Thelanis, taking me from my beautiful night and binding me to your dry and colorless world. Worse yet, she gave me to Jura d’Cannith. I don’t know what dealings she had with him.” She looked away. “And that is where I failed. Perhaps I could have found some way to escape my prison, some way to redeem myself. But I gave in to despair. I surrendered to anger, and I turned that hatred against Jura. Perhaps, if I’d done things differently, I could have found the light within him. Instead, I drew out the worst within him, his own dark heart. And it cost me all I had left. I underestimated him. I pushed too far. He felled my tree and bound me within the staff, with magic I still don’t understand. And I cannot help but wonder if this was Dusk’s plan all along.”

“I … I don’t know what to say,” Lei said.

“Say nothing. It is my folly, and I brought it upon myself. But now you must make your own decision. Look down.”

The white void was no longer eternal. A black spot grew beneath them.

“The decision is upon you,” Darkheart said. “Fight for the sky above. Fight to rise through the waters and break the surface. Or surrender and fall forever into the darkness below.”

“And you?”

“This is your battle, and I have done what I can. You must make your decision alone, and you will need both hands to swim. Farewell, Lei. I hope that one day I will hold your hand in truth, and we will gaze together on the moon above.”

The dryad released Lei’s hand, and the instant wood left flesh she was gone. Lei was alone, falling toward the spreading shadows. The visions flashed through her mind once more, and she felt a sick sense of loss and betrayal. But there were other memories.

Jode’s laughter.

Daine giving orders in the camp at Keldan Ridge.

Pierce carrying her through the streets of Sharn after she’d been driven from Hadran’s house.

Daine holding her as their boat was tossed about on the waters of the Thunder Sea.

Whatever she was, whatever these awful visions meant, her life lay above her. Daine. Pierce. She would not let them go.

Struggling at first, then with increasing strength, she began to swim upward, away from the darkness and moving up through the light.