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ago. But now, to begin, simple intent was enough. In a sense, a promise.
    To any senses but those of the Endarkened, the chamber would have been unremittingly black. Savilla saw, not colors precisely, but a thousand shades of darkness, hues that no other race had words for. The darkness showed her a chamber carved of the living rock. Every inch of the walls and ceiling was covered with deeply-incised symbols in the ancient Endarkened script. They did not run in neat rows, but swirled along the rock, dipping and arcing, as if perhaps they had once been straight, and Time itself had bent the lines of writing, while leaving each etched symbol sharp and clear as the day it had been cut into the rock. As if what was written there was too horrible for even Time to touch it.
    In the center of the chamber there was a long hollow spike of obsidian that stood as high as Savilla's heart. It tapered to a needle-fine point, and looked as delicate as any of the glass knives in Savilla's own torture chamber, but she knew from experimentation that nothing she could do would chip or break it.
    There were a hundred ways to kill someone with the obsidian spite.
    Impale a victim upon it, and they could die as quickly or slowly as Savilla wished. The chamber enjoyed the slow deaths, as was only to be expected. But most of all it enjoyed the deaths she brought about when, as a living victim writhed, impaled upon it, she struck the obsidian shaft with one of the round smooth black stones that lay scattered about the floor of the chamber.
    Then the entire chamber rang like a crystal bell, the glyphs upon the walls blooming into dark fire. The victim died at once — but not painlessly. No. That death was the most agonizing of all, as if every iota of pain it was possible for one frail mortal shell of flesh to experience were somehow compacted into one single moment.
    Those bodies simply vanished.
    But those executions were not without cost to Savilla, for when she engineered such ultimate communions for her victims with the obsidian spire, she felt everything her mortal victims did.
    A high price.
    But it will be worth it, to allow He Who Is to return to the world once more.
    The last time Savilla had left the chamber, it had been littered with bone and decaying flesh. All that was gone now, dissolved by the strange alchemy of the Black Chamber. All that remained were the scattered stones upon the floor, the spell-runes upon the walls, the obsidian spire itself.
    Once begun, once promised, Savilla could not stop or turn aside. At best, she could delay, and delay would come at a price.
    But she did not wish to delay.
    She would prepare the way. She would gather the power. He Who Is would enter the world once more, and reward the one who had made it possible.
    And destroy all His enemies.
    Savilla placed her hands atop the obsidian spire, and pressed down. The point pierced both her hands. She saw the glistening black point break through her scarlet skin, and saw the dark blood well forth around it. Her body shuddered faintly with pain, her great ribbed wings trembling and unfurling.
    All around her, the chamber sang faintly in approval.

Chapter Two
    Against the Odds
    NO MATTER HOW desirable it might have been to keep what the Wildmages had learned confined to the High Command alone, Kellen quickly discovered that wasn't possible. Almost the first thing he'd learned when he'd first met the Elves was that they gossiped as naturally as they breathed, and that gossip flew through an Elven city — or an Elven war-camp — as swiftly as summer lightning. "Everyone knows," Idalia said succinctly.
    She'd come to his pavilion the morning after he'd seen Redhelwar. Isinwen had undoubtedly asked her to come — at the moment, Idalia was the only Wildmage Healer they had.
    Kellen had slept for the rest of the day and through the night as well, and awoke feeling much stronger. Not fully recovered, of course, but if the Gods of the Wild Magic — and the Enemy,