The tremors hadn’t started because he’d spent too much energy claiming Den Brodson’s soul. They hadn’t started because Shannisorran v’En Celay landed a lucky blow. He’d been weakening steadily since the night two weeks ago when he’d found Ellysetta Baristani in the realm of dreams and tried to force his second Mark upon her. She’d fought back with a ferocity he hadn’t anticipated. The Fire she’d summoned had reached across the barriers of the dream-world and scorched him in the physical realm.
And mixed in with that Fire had been something else. Something that struck deeper than a few layers of scorched flesh.
Despite his multiple visits to Elfeya v’En Celay and the daily ministrations of her healing hands, he had yet to completely recover. He was finally coming to realize he never would... at least, not in this form.
Age was finally outpacing magic. The time of his next incarnation—so long postponed by Elfeya v’En Celay’s impressive talents—could no longer be held in abeyance.
Death was drawing near.
Shadows rot Kolis’s soul!The Sulimage’s ineptitude in Celieria City had cost Vadim dearly—the price far more than Celieria’s discovery of Eld’s secret aggression and the loss of a valuable Fey captive.
A Mage, when the time of incarnation came upon him, needed a new vessel to house his soul. Only the strongest, most magically gifted vessel would do, because though a Mage’s memories andknowledge transferred to his new body during the incarnation, his powers did not.
Over the millennia, more than one High Mage had ousted his most dangerous rival not through direct combat, but rather by waiting for the time of his enemy’s incarnation, stealing his chosen vessel, and replacing it with one of the rival’s powerless mortalumagi.Once reincarnated, the Mage’s helpless new form could then be effortlessly mined for all its centuries of precious knowledge before the pitiful living husk that remained was left to wither and die in the obscurity of captive servitude.
The greatest High Mage ever to rule Eld had no intention of meeting such a fate. Long ago, before the Mage Wars, before the scorching of the world, the germ of his grand idea had formed and taken strong root. Since that moment, every day of his life had been spent in pursuit of his dream.
Ellysetta Baristani was Vadim’s greatest creation, the culmination of all his long, painstaking centuries of experimentation. She was his child, born of Fey flesh but tied to pure power through Vadim’s most skillful manipulation of Azrahn’s darkest secrets.
She was the Tairen Soul vessel whose birth he had engineered to house the next incarnation of his soul.
Through her, he could have what no other Mage before him had ever had: the pure, limitless power and destructive force of a tairen and—best of all—the immortality of the Fey.
And Kolis had let her slip through his fingers.
Vadim’s hand was trembling again, but this time from fury. He forced himself to calm. He was the High Mage, a man who mastered adversity rather than succumbing to it. He would continue with his efforts to recapture Ellysetta Baristani—she was the ideal candidate to serve as his vessel—but Vadim had always been too wise a Mage to hold all his coin in one purse.
He had succeeded with Ellysetta Baristani. He could succeed again.
The Fading Lands ~ Eastern Desert
As the Great Sun began its descent towards the western horizon, Ellysetta caught sight of a city rising from the flatness of the distant desert.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
“That is Lissilin, light of the east,” Rain said. “Our destination for tonight.”
Lissilin, which they reached before twilight cast the Rhakis into shadow, was another abandoned city of the Fey. Like Elverial, there was a haunting beauty to the place, the otherworldly grace of the immortal Fey evident in every curving archway and artistically carved stone wall. Unlike Elverial, however, there was no sense of a sleeping city waiting for its inhabitants to return. Life had left Lissilin. Its gardens were parched plots of sand, its buildings and fountains the dry, sunbaked bones of a dead city.
Ellysetta felt a deep sense of sadness as she walked through the empty, sand-blown streets. “How many Fey once lived here?” It must have been many. Lissilin was no mere village.
“Twenty thousand,” Dax supplied the number.
She winced. “Where are those people now?”
They had reached the center of the city. Five thoroughfares converged on a pentagon-shaped center dominated by a large, dry fountain filled with a half a dozen stone tairen. Once, no doubt, this had been a beautiful, lush park as lovely as the cherry-tree orchard at the base of Teleon.
Rain met her gaze, his own bleak. “Gone.”
“Dead?”
“Most. The rest moved to Dharsa when they realized Lissilin was fading.”
Ellysetta glanced around at the dry, abandoned buildings. So much beauty lost. What a terrible, sad waste. “Of all the cities in the Fading Lands, how many are still inhabited?”
He drew a deep breath and let it back out as a heavy sigh. “Afew Fey still live in Tehlas and Blade’s Point, and a few live alone, but only Dharsa still thrives.”
Only Dharsa. In all the vast kingdom of the Fey, only Dharsa was still populous.
