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vicinity. As he drew closer to the dalelord, Cyric thought about exactly how quickly he could draw his dagger and slit Mourngrym’s throat.
    Mourngrym Amcathra felt a slight rush of air at his back, but when he turned to see what had caused the breeze, he saw only the back of a lean, dark-haired man vanishing into the crowd.
    Once again lost in the throng of excited townspeople, Cyric contemplated why he had changed his mind at the last instant and spared the life of the man who had condemned Midnight to death. There were better ways to honor his debt to Midnight and make these contemptuous imbeciles pay, Cyric thought. Besides, the crowd would have torn me to pieces. And I’m not ready to die quite yet.
    Quite the opposite, the thief thought. Quite the opposite.
     

     
    The God of the Dead reached for the shard of red energy with his bony right hand. The fallen god chuckled softly as he held the fragment next to the foot-tall obsidian statue of a man he clutched in his left hand. There was a flash of brilliant white light as the statue absorbed the energy, and Lord Myrkul looked at the faceless figurine. A red mist swirled inside it violently.
    “Yes, Lord Bane,” the God of the Dead rasped through cracked, black lips. “We will have you whole again soon enough.” Myrkul chuckled once more and stroked the smooth head of the statue as if it were a small child. The mist pulsed with an angry red light.
    Myrkul looked around and sighed. Faint images of the real world hung in the air around him. The farmer’s home in which he stood was dark, dirty, and bleak. The low-beamed ceiling was black from the greasy smoke of the peasants’ cooking fires. Rats occasionally scurried across the floor, racing between the legs of the warped wooden tables and splintering benches. Two people lay asleep under stained furs.
    Lord Myrkul, the God of Decay as well as the God of the Dead, rather liked this place. It was like a tiny, unintentional shrine to him. In fact, it upset Myrkul that he couldn’t experience it fully. For Myrkul was in the Border Ethereal Plane, an area parallel to the plane where the Realms and its people existed. From the Border Ethereal, the things Myrkul saw around him - the furniture; the vermin; the grimy, sleeping peasants - appeared only as phantasms. And if the snoring farmer and his wife had been awake, they wouldn’t have been able to see or hear Myrkul.
    “If only they could see me,” the skeletal man complained to the black statue. “I could frighten them to death. How pleasant that would be.” Myrkul paused for a moment to consider the effects his avatar’s visage, complete with rotting, jaundiced skin and burning, empty eye sockets, would have on the humans. “Their corpses would make this hovel complete.”
    Energy crackled and arced from the figurine. “Yes, Lord Bane. The last shard of your being isn’t far from here,” the God of the Dead hissed. Myrkul cast one glance back at the hovel as he walked through the insubstantial walls. When he got outside into the ghostly moonlight that shone down upon the countryside south of Hillsfar, the God of the Dead shuddered. The filthy hut was much more to his liking.
    Pulling the hood of his thick black robe over his head, Lord Myrkul stepped into the air as if he were climbing an invisible staircase. Gravity had no effect on him in the Border Ethereal, and it was easier to see his prize if he looked for it from a vantage point high above the ghostly hills and houses. After he had climbed a hundred yards or so straight up, Myrkul could see the final fragment of Lord Bane glowing in the distance.
    “There lies the rest of the God of Strife.” Myrkul held the statue up and faced it toward the pulsing shard that rested over a mile away. Tiny bolts of red and black lightning shot from the figurine and bit into the God of the Dead’s hands. Slivers of pain raced up the avatar’s arm, and Myrkul could smell burning flesh.
    “If I drop you, Lord Bane,