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then galloping back—one stride, two—and leaping high into the air, wings beating furiously to get the pair up above the trees. A sheer sense of wrongness guided horse and rider, a perversion of the natural order, a darkness to the area where stood the emerald witch.
    “Arawn,” Brielle said quietly, respectfully, her name for this ultimate of specters, and truly she was surprised and confused, for though she knew that Thalasi’s meddling with the universal powers had wounded her and all the magic users of Aielle, she had thought herself strong still, and in the best of health. “Has me time so passed by, then, that I did not even expect ye?”
    “I came not for Brielle,” the embodiment of death informed her.
    “For whom then?” Brielle dared to ask, though she knew that death was a personal event, one in which she need not be informed. “For Bellerian, who is old?”
    There came no answer, the specter standing impassively, leaning heavily on its long sickle.
    “For Belexus, then?” the witch prompted fearfully, and she knew as soon as she heard the words leave her mouth that, if that was the case, she truly didn’t want to know!
    The specter tilted its hooded head, regarding her curiously.
    “If ye mean to take Belexus, then know ye’ll be fighting meself!” Brielle declared, though she understood her claim to be a foolish and impossible boast, for she could no more battle Death than she could burn down Avalon. They were the same, this specter and her forest, both embodiments of the natural order of the universe, and Brielle drew her power completely from that very order. She could not fight Death; she, above all others, who served the First Magic, the school of Nature, could not hope to battle that most elemental of all beings.
    “Yer pardon,” she said, and she respectfully lowered her gaze.
    “I have come not for Belexus,” Arawn replied somberly—the only tone Death ever used, Brielle thought. “You should fear, though, if you care for him, that perhaps he comes for me!”
    The witch looked up curiously, not understanding—until she looked past Death to see the ranger swooping in on Calamus, flying straight for the specter’s back. Belexus had no sword drawn, though, and seemed to be looking only at the witch, his expression as much of curiosity and relief as anything else.
    “He canno’ see ye,” Brielle remarked, and of course, it made sense. Only the wizards had such insight, and no mere human or even elf could see Death until that final moment, the time of passage.
    “And fortunate that is for him,” Arawn remarked. “I am of no mood to tolerate the foolishness of lessers.”
    Brielle sent her thoughts out then, on sudden impulse, flooding the mind of Calamus, letting the winged horse know that she was not afraid, and more important, that this was not his place, and certainly not the place for Belexus. The ranger was just preparing to slip his leg over the mount and drop to the ground running when Calamus angled his powerful wings and broke the swoop, rising steeply into the night sky.
    Brielle heard the ranger’s protesting calls, calls fast diminishing as the wise pegasus, heeding her telepathic commands, carried him far away.
    “Then who?” the witch asked of Death when that crisis was passed. “If I might be knowing. And if not, then why have ye taked the time to stop and visit?”
    “Visit?” the specter echoed, a hint of incredulity slipping into the edges of its grave tone. “No, Jennifer Glendower,” it said, using Brielle’s older name, the name she had been given by her mother and father those centuries before—before
e-Belvin Fehte
, the killing fires, before the dawn of Ynis Aielle. “I have not come for any—in these dark times, they easily enough come to me.” A rasping sound—a sarcastic chuckle?—emanated from the specter, sending the hairs on the back of Brielle’s neck dancing. Death was the most serious and somber being in all the universe, the one