did he scream that his throat began to bleed, and he would have choked on the blood, but that was not to be permitted.
Out from the orb leaped a dragon, wings wide, fangs gleaming, he who had been prisoned there since before the days of Istar's glory, who had watched as a kingpriest thought he might like to become a god, who had found a way out of the destruction to come by whispering his dire warnings and false promises to a young mage flushed with his first glory, to Lorac Caladon. He had heard Takhisis call her dragons and wake them. Like fire in him, the sound of the goddess's call, like flames running all through his mind and his soul. Awake! Awake! My dragons, awake! But, enspelled and unable to find a way out from his crystal prison, Viper had remained trapped-until now.
The touch of a reptilian mind, cold and dry and with no other feeling than death-lust, froze the mind of Lorac Caladon, making motionless his hands. He could not scream. He could not breathe. He felt that mind twine around his like a snake around the limbs of a helpless child. His heart had no prayer. Fear felled faith. His soul turned chill, and the magic in him writhed like something dying.
And then-in an instant! — that dragon-mind was gone from his, the grip broken. Lorac breathed, but only once. Then came another mind, a stronger one, and this one seized him heart and soul in a taloned grip the like of which Viper could not hope to achieve. Too late, too late, he knew he had opened the magic of the orb and that was like opening a door. Another dragon, this one stronger, this one crueler, came rushing in. Viper roared, but the sound of his fury was already distant, the beast banished. In the soul of Lorac Caladon, a voice whispered words, like fire rushing, like wild wind in the winter-bare forest, the voice of another dragon.
Now you may scream, my little mageling-king!
Lorac did scream, so long and so hard that at last he became voiceless. Yet, unvoiced, still he screamed, and all his dreams of the golden warrior come to save his kingdom turned into nightmares, dreams grown so hideous as to sow the seeds of madness into a mind once celebrated for wit and wisdom and cunning.
He did not scream wordlessly, and he did not howl as beasts howl in the wilderlands. He screamed the words he had learned at his mother's knee.
'We are the land, the land is us!'
And so-it must be, it must be, for the mightiest mage of the Silvanesti spoke in the fullness of his magic-the insanity of the king fell upon his land and every living thing became warped, twisted in body, twisted in soul, imprisoned within the nightmare of the king as Lorac Caladon fell spiraling into despair.
The Nightmare King went out from his palace, his Tower of the Stars, and before him his guard of Wildrunners ran screaming, their faces etched in horror, their eyes the eyes of those who stand at the brink of the Abyss, the dread of damnation opening before them, the bone-white hands of the Dark Queen reaching to snatch them. In prayers one hears of that place-Save us from the Abyss, O E'li! Turn our step from there, O Guardian of Light! — in the darkest hours of night one imagines it. These, the flower of Lorac's army, the ones who would not leave their king no matter the danger, these saw the Abyss, that place in which dwells the darkest of goddesses and all the torments she can devise, torments for the body, the flaying of flesh, the shattering of bones, the blinding, the mutilations, the rivers of blood and fountains of tears. He showed this to them, with his merest glance he shaped it like their worst fears, their most secret dread. Wailing like demented children, they fled him, the Nightmare King. He laughed to see them flee, laughed to feel their madness running in him as though it were the blood running in his veins.
As the first winds of winter blew around him, cold and clawing, he turned to look at the Tower of the Stars, the shining beauty of masonry and magic, made in the days of Silvanos and raised up as a seat of power from which the line of that storied king had ruled in majesty for centuries. His glance made the marble run as the wax of a candle melts. The turrets rumbled, and the tower bent and twisted as though it were an old man writhing in grief.
The Nightmare King laughed, and he turned his back on the place of power. Howling as banshees howl, as the mad howl, he strode through the Garden of Astarin, and everywhere he went harm followed. Birds fell dead, small bundles of bone and feathers. He trod upon them and they woke, savage creatures dragon-shaped, with needle teeth and a lust for blood, their feathers changed to scales, their hearts to malignance. He touched the plants as he walked, moonvine and winter jasmine, the thorny rose and the winding wisteria. In this first hour of winter, they bloomed, their flowers the color of bruises and blood, their fragrance vileness and pestilence. The Nightmare King's shadow fell upon the boxwood, and the hedges collapsed, taken by disease; blighted, they fell into piles of brown bubbling slime.
Singing a madman's song, he went into each of the temples and made the marble walls melt. The altars collapsed under his merest glance. Wands of incense turned putrid. Scrolls burst into flame, and the smoke of those burnings rose up to a sky the color of bile. The houses of the lords and ladies collapsed. The homes of the humble ran like molten lava. All this because the Nightmare King cast his glance upon them.
He went walking through his kingdom, the golden warrior debased. No more the straight-backed king, the wisdom-bearer. No more the lover of the land. His thoughts were poison. The sky above his kingdom turned to roiling green, and when the rains came, they fell as acid, hissing and burning. Each stream he passed turned to blood, running into the mighty Thon-Thalas until that river itself became a red-running artery. He went in despair, in hatred, his mind ruled by the will of a venomous green dragon. The flesh rotted from his limbs, the hair fell from his head so that shining patches of skull gleamed in the green light.
As fell the king, so fell the land. In every part of the Silvanesti Forest, the trees that had been so lovingly tended by the elves of House Woodshaper bent and bled, sap running from them, leaves falling, bark peeling as though they languished in disease. In the forest the deer fell dead. In the river the fish became monsters, fanged things, growing legs and arms and crawling up onto the land.
The Nightmare King strode wide across his kingdom, turning everything to dying. A long, slow dying it was, for this nightmare that rode Lorac Caladon came from a dragon who knew the devices of the Dark Queen well. Cyan Bloodbane was his name, and he had spent time in the Abyss, learning his trade.
Each, dragon and Nightmare King, heard the howling of the land, the screaming of the trees, the shrieking of the birds and animals as Lorac's nightmare caught them and broke them, making from the ruin creatures more horrible than any outside of dementia. They reveled in it, drunken with their own rage. And they heard the wailing of the mortal folk, caught in the terror. Some of them were elves, others were not.
It must not be said, though, that in his madness the elf-king failed of his promise to rid the kingdom of the dragonarmy of Takhisis. Lorac Caladon, who had ruled the Silvanesti for six times as long as the span of the longest-lived human, kept his promise.
Phair Caron rampaged through his land, burning and killing, seeking the fair city of Silvanost. She had endured losses in her battle against Lord Garan's army, not the least the mage who was her finest captain. He was gone, his avatar killed and changed to dust, his mind returned to the prison of his ruined body somewhere far away. She cursed the loss and cursed the mage, but she eased her rage in killing. And so, it was in a small town on the Thon-Thalas that the hand of Lorac Caladon found her. She paused in the slaughter of children and felt herself fall, fast and hard, into a dark and terrible place.
Falling, she had not the wit to wonder whether her mind was whole. When the fall ended, she had no wit at all. She stood, not in a ruined elven village, but in Tarsis, the city of her childhood. She stood outside the doors of the brothel in which she had, at need, earned the money it would take to keep her little sister alive, fed and clothed- and out of this very place. Not far from here, some streets over, across the boulevard that marked the territory of whore from that of the finer folk, she had scrambled in a gutter for an elven coin.
All around her she heard laughter and rough music. She heard men growling and roaring like animals. The voices of women rose up in shrieking laughter and fell low in sobbing, and still the men came in and out of those rough wooden doors, entering eager, returning sated. She knew the place. She went a step forward and then another, like a child tiptoeing to the door she'd been forbidden to enter. She knew who ruled beyond that door. She knew-
The door opened wide. A woman stood upon the threshold, dressed in black silks thin as gossamer and artfully torn to look like the rags of a gutter-girl. Her golden hair spilled down her shoulders, her face the canvas of some demented hand that had painted upon it with rouges and kohl to make her white cheeks red and her pale eyes dark.
'Phair!' cried the woman in drunken laughter. She opened her arms to welcome in yet another man to the
