Another door opened on the far side of the room, and four burly guards, their meaty fists clenched around chains, dragged a snarling, naked man into the room by thesel’dorcollar clamped around his neck and the manacles that shackled his wrists and ankles. His pale skin shone with a faint luminescence. Dark blond hair hung about his shoulders and face in matted tangles. The moment he caught sight of the woman on the table, his body went still as stone. His head came up sharply, whipping the hair back away from his face to reveal black Azrahn-filled eyes and a scar that tracked from the corner of his mouth to his left ear. His nostrils flared like those of a wolf scenting its prey.
Beside Ellysetta, Gaelen stiffened and drew in a hissing breath.
“You know him?” Rain asked.
“Korren vel Dahn. One of the Brotherhood. Six hundred years ago, I sent him into Eld to find the Mages’ lair, but he never returned.”
“Well, looks like he found it,” Gil muttered.
In the scene unfolding in the mirror’s mist, Korren lunged for the woman on the table. His body had reacted to her presence with unmistakable intent. Ellysetta gasped and turned her eyes away as thedahl’reisenfell upon the barely conscious woman. Rain’s hand tightened on hers, and she felt the disgust and shame roiling through him as he forced himself to watch the creature who had once been an honorable warrior of the Fey commit his unspeakable act.
“May his soul burn in the Seventh Hell for all eternity,” Bel whispered in horror.
“Do not judge him so harshly,” Hawksheart said quietly. “It took two hundred years to break him, and madness can turn even the best of men into beasts. He wasn’t the first and he was far from the last.”
Hawksheart’s soft-spoken words made Rain flinch and tighten his grip on Ellysetta. With her face pressed to his throat, she could feel his recoiling horror as clearly as her own. «You could never do such a thing, shei’tan,» she assured him.
«I could no longer, it’s true,» he answered. «But before your soul called mine? I slaughtered millions without remorse. What would one more foul crime have mattered?»
«It would have mattered, and you would not have done it.»
His lips touched her brow in a tender caress. «Korren’s deed is done. You can look again.»
Ellysetta turned back in time to see the woman Korren had raped walking with blank-eyed docility behind several servants. Ellysetta scowled at Hawksheart. “Why are you showing us this? That poor creature is not the woman who gave me birth; nor is Korren vel Dahn my sire.” She’d seen the two shadowy figures of her parents in a dream beside the Bay of Flames a month ago, and neither the unconscious woman nor her rapist could have been one of the couple revealed to her.
“Anio,they are not. She and vel Dahn were but two of many unfortunate souls imprisoned by the High Mage of Eld.”
The scene in the veil of water swirled out of focus. When it cleared again, they saw the same woman strapped to a birthing table, her face flushed with recent exertions, while the white-haired High Mage of Eld held her newborn son in his arms and spun a swirl of Azrahn-laced magic that drew faint sparkles of answering magic to the surface of the baby’s eyes.
“We already know he’s been trying to breed a Tairen Soul,” Rain said.
“Look more closely,” Hawksheart advised. The screen shimmered and the woman on the birthing table became a different woman, this one a blond, green-eyed Elf, and the child in the High Mage’s hands became a smaller boy crowned with a shock of thick black hair. A moment later, a black-haired woman with deep blue eyes wept as she reached for her son. That mother and child became another, then another and another.
“Not all of the individuals you see are Fey. He’s been breeding you, yes, but he’s been crossing other magical bloodlines as well. Elvish, Fey, Feraz, Eld.”
“Why?”
“To create something stronger…something deadlier than even you, Worldscorcher.”
Rain’s grip tightened around Ellysetta’s fingers. “Ellysetta?”
“She was his first success, though she did not come from his experimental bloodlines.”
Tension fell over the room. Unguarded thoughts—mostly from Rain but from the others as well—whispered across her mind. Concern edging on fear pressed against her as the warriors digested Hawksheart’s revelations. Rain and Ellysetta were the most powerful creatures they’d ever known. If the Mage had created something even stronger than they…
“There are others?” Tajik growled. “Like the Feyreisa?”
“There are others,” Hawksheart confirmed. “But none yet who have successfully come into their full power.”
“He must be stopped,” Bel said.
“Bayas,” Hawksheart agreed. “He must.”
“And yet you and the Elves will not help us,” Rain said in a hard, flat voice.
“We cannot.”
“Convenient.”
