"You are not making yourself a master of your words."

  Blays pointed up into the sky. The Eye of Rathar was aglow now, a thin green light suffusing its iris and sclera. "That thing, that Eye, where did it even come from?"

  "The Becoming," Dante said.

  "Really? Does it look like anything else from the Becoming?"

  "It kind of looks a lot like Nolost."

  "They're both kind of foggy, I guess. But that's about it. Otherwise it looks a lot more like something from the Realm than the Becoming."

  "So Taim sent it to stop us instead of Nolost? So what? They both want the same thing in the end."

  "No, no, no." Blays clutched his head with one hand, a pained expression folding over his face. "I don't think I can explain it. But maybe I can show it."

  Blays shuffled toward the ledge, extended his right foot, and tried to touch it down. He blinked and waved his arms wildly for balance when his toes found nothing but empty space.

  He righted himself and stepped back from the edge, crestfallen. "But I was so sure."

  "Blays, will you just tell us what you mean?" Dante said. "You're talking like a crazy person."

  "That's because I feel like a crazy person! That Eye has the power to destroy the world if it catches sight of a single person, and it just so happens to show up out here where we are, where there aren't any other people?"

  "They know we're the biggest threat to them. They sent it to find us in specific."

  "But that doesn't make any sense! If the point is to destroy Rale, it doesn't matter who it finds. Really, going after us is the worst idea, because we might actually stand a chance of stopping it. It would be much better off spotting a little child, or an old deaf and blind man who doesn't even know what's happening."

  The ring of emptiness continued to expand away from them. It was now hundreds of yards across, such a vacuum of nothing that it was hard to look at.

  "You said you couldn't raise a pillar of earth to reach the Eye, because anything that high and thin would just collapse." Blays motioned to the grass underfoot. "How tall d'you suppose this thing is?"

  "He is not altogether wrong," Gladdic said. "Now that he has put words to it, does it not feel, in part, like a dream?"

  "I think it's more than a dream. I think something wants us to throw ourselves down into that pit."

  "But it's just the opposite," Dante said. "If we take the great leap, we stop Rale from getting erased. Something is deceiving you into arguing that we shouldn't save the world. Nolost has poisoned your mind."

  Blays grabbed his head again, this time with both hands. "I do feel like something's in here with me. Something that wants me dead. Something that would find it very funny if I were to do the deed myself."

  "Were you listening to anything I just said?" Dante stepped forward and grabbed the front of Blays' cloak. "You're confused. That's just what it wants you to be—so that it can finish its job. We have to sacrifice ourselves. Right here and right now. Before it can finish convincing us to let the world die."

  Blays took a step back, pulling his cloak free from Dante. He flinched, eyes narrowing. He looked behind himself, frowning, then took a second step back. And flinched again.

  Blays straightened, taking a deep breath. A look of clarity swept across his face. "All right, we'll sacrifice ourselves," he said, moving to the far side of the pillar. "But I'll go first."

  "Why are you going all the way over there?" Dante lurched toward him. "Are you lying to me?"

  Keeping his eyes locked on Dante's, Blays put one foot out into the abyss. Holding steady, he lifted his other foot from the platform and stepped out into the void as well, so that he had left the islet of grass entirely, and was now standing on nothing at all.

  "How are you doing that?" Dante said. "Are you shadowalking or something?"

  "He is right," Gladdic said. "We are being deceived."

  Blays stepped back onto the platform. "Now the really scary question. Can we stop whatever's deluding us? Or are we stuck like this forever?"

  "I don't understand," Dante said. "Tell me how you just stood on empty air!"

  "Because it's not empty air, it's solid ground. We can't trust anything our eyes are showing us right now. It's up to you two to figure out how to bring us back from this madness."

  Dante pressed his fist against his forehead. "But what you did can't be real. It has to be another trick of the mind."

  Blays stepped toward him and put a hand on Dante's shoulder. "Just trust me. All you have to do is look."

  With terrible effort, Dante nodded his head. Feeling dizzy, he sat in the middle of the grassy platform and closed his eyes. He didn't even know what he was supposed to be looking for. A haze of nether enveloping them that he somehow hadn't noticed a speck of before? Invisible trickster imps flying around them and stabbing them with tiny mind-poisoning pitchforks? He could feel the turf under him. He could feel the wind on his face. And he would see, if he was to crack open his eyes, the frightening void surrounding them and still growing larger by the moment. How could all of that not be real?

  The nether looked normal. So did the ether. He shifted from his external surroundings to the interior of his own head. All looked well there as well.

  He opened his eyes. Gladdic was summoning pinches of ether and scattering them through the air. Worth a try, and so Dante imitated him with shadows. Nothing. Grudgingly, because Blays would insist he do so if he didn't, he double-checked the nether both within and without him.

  "I'm not seeing anything," he said. "Gladdic?"

  Gladdic looked out at the disappearing world: the emptiness now stretched for half a mile on all sides. "All appears normal. Within the ether, at least."

  "There's nothing in the nether, either. I'm not sure what more we can do."

  "Why don't you look again?" Blays said.

  "Because I already did that."

  "Well, I'm not supposed to be able to walk across thin air. You're missing something. You have to look again."

  Dante sighed and did so, making sure that he was thorough, so that Blays could have nothing left to object to, and they could finally sacrifice themselves before too much more of the earth was gobbled up. As he worked, a swirling draft blew up from the void. He thought he could hear the voice of Cally in it, and Larrimore, and his father.

  "I've checked everything," he announced. "There's nothing there."

  "But that doesn't make any sense." Blays' disappointment was almost childish. Then he brightened. "But if something's tricking us, maybe it's also tricking you so that you can't see it!"

  "Enough!" Dante found himself roaring. "You're just rationalizing now. And you're not going to stop doing it. The time for words is over."

  "I am not so sure that Blays is wrong," Gladdic said. "However, if he is right, none of us will be able to see it. But there may be one who can: the light of life."

  Dante quirked his brows. He'd forgotten the light was even with them. It seemed perfectly content to be ignored, quite possibly because it had gotten so much practice at that during its long captivity within the Vault of Salvation.

  "This is the last what-if," he groused, reaching into his pocket. "Then we're going to do what we all know we need to do."

  He withdrew the light. It seemed dimmer and smaller than when he'd last seen it, but it swiveled about to "face" him alertly enough.

  "Can I be of help?" it said.

  "Maybe," Dante said. "This might sound a little insane, but can you see anything unusual about us?"

  "Oh, well yes. Your eyes—they're all black."

  "What?" Dante said. "No they're not."

  "I don't see how you can know what your own eyes look like."

  "Because if they were, Blays or Gladdic would have noticed."

  "Perhaps," the light demurred. "But perhaps they can't see it because their eyes are all black as well."

  "What!"

  "You said you'd looked inside your mind," Blays said. "And you looked in the nether around you. But did you ever look inside your eyes?"

  "I didn't have any reason to," Dante said. "This can't possibly be right. Just wait and see."

  He closed his eyes and maneuvered his mind into the nether within them. And shouted in a combination of shock and disgust. The nether was moving about much more actively than it should—and it was filled with tiny, twitching, shadowy creatures.

  "There's something in our eyes," he managed to get out.

  "The nether?" Blays said. "What's wrong with it?"

  "It's crawling with little tiny bugs. With tentacles."

  "I immediately regret asking."

  Feeling faint again, Dante sat back down in the grass. "I have to kill them. And I have to find a way to do that without blinding myself."

  "There's no need," the light said placidly. "I can take care of that for you."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I am one of Arawn's own servants. I know how to heal a mortal."

  Dante stared at it, then nodded. He closed his eyes. He could feel the light entering his eyes and he didn't like it. He was so used to healing himself that having another sorcerer do it for him felt like watching a stranger take up the saddle of his favorite horse.

  One quick movement. So skilled and clean he couldn't even tell what the light had done.

  "There," the light said. "It is done."

  Dante opened his eyes. And was glad that he was sitting, or else he would have fallen over. The aching void was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the Eye of Rathar. Instead, they sat under some trees, at the very edge of a sheer cliff that fell for three hundred feet before reaching the valley below.

  The three of them looked at each other in wonder—apparently the light had cured them all at the same time—and then all began to speak at once.

  "The ledge was real." Dante felt sick. "And if we'd walked off it, we'd have died thinking we'd just done something wonderful."

  "It was all a new plague of some kind?" Blays rubbed his eyes. "But how is that even possible if it was only in our eyes? I didn't just see things that weren't there. I heard them, too. Smelled them. Felt them."

  "The eye is connected directly to the brain by a cord. It could be that the cord, or even the eye itself, is actually part of the mind."

  "That is far from the most pressing question," Gladdic said. "What you should be asking yourselves is this: When exactly did this plague begin?"

  "Uhh," Blays said. "You don't think it was…today?"

  "Perhaps. Or perhaps it began a week ago. Or a month ago. Or it was the very first plague sent upon us by Nolost, and everything we have seen since then has all been a feverish dream."

  "It doesn't have to stop there," Dante said. "Maybe it was a curse laid on us by the gods for trespassing into their lands back when we came for the Spear of Stars."

  "Then only some of it was an illusion, because I've still got the spear," Blays said. "Come on, there has to be a way to figure this out."

  Dante tilted back his head for a look at the sky. "Judging by the orange lightning up there, Nolost was real all along, too. Damn. That means we still have to save this place. Ah, speaking of." He shifted his sight. "The lich is still outside the mine. And he's completed a lot more of his ritual to destroy the Prime Body. Let's try to figure out what the hell just happened while we're on the move."

  The lich, in fact, had completed his ring of ether. This was now centered, arranged horizontally, around the withered body, floating a few inches above the ground. The lich had produced seven white candles from somewhere and these were burning with black flame. He was currently squeezing more of his luminescent blood into the mouth of the corpse.

  "I do not believe any of the people we have seen or heard in these hills was real," Gladdic said. "For this place is said to be unpopulated, and they were not even Tanarians."

  "So it's been going on at least since we crossed out of the swamps," Blays said. "Those things we fought there at the Crossing, they were like something out of a dream, where you're hacking and hacking at the enemy with your sword, but it doesn't even draw any blood."

  Dante glanced down at his left hand and rubbed the side of it where he'd cut off the fingerling that had sprouted there. Was the flesh there as pink as it should be, if he really had cut off and healed a growth? He wanted to believe that it wasn't.

  "That's probably when the illusions started," he said. "I don't remember anything double-strange from the swamps. Except the light of life."

  "I am not double-strange," said the light.

  "You're a talking ball of light that accidentally created one of the most powerful villains Rale has ever seen. You're a little strange. But you just cured us, so you must be real."

  "Unless we didn't actually get out of the illusion," Blays said, "and it just deluded us into thinking we did."

  "I refuse to think about that. Point is, the illusions probably only started a couple of days ago. But we can't be sure of that. So let's keep it in the back of our minds that things that happened prior to that might not have been real either."

  "Well, I sure hope that all of the business with the Chained God was real. Otherwise we're wasting the last few days we've got out here on a mad rabbit hunt."

  The terrain had been more or less the same since their arrival in the hills—except, of course, for the probably mostly phantasmic people, beings, and events they'd run into—but the landscape now leveled out into a highlands of flat and mostly grassy valleys interrupted by rapid and dramatic spikes of rock that hosted trees wherever it wasn't too steep to hold soil. The valleys were veined with a great many brooks and streams that fed the swamps below.

  They stopped at a stream to refill their water skins. The water looked beautifully pure, but even the clearest of water could wind up flushing your guts out, and so Dante drew on some nether to cleanse it. As he did so, a string of red light reached up from the water, flickering a few times, and snapped at his face.

  He jerked his head to the side. The red string vanished. He glanced at the others, but they were talking about the clouds, which were blackening like they might suddenly start shooting crimson lightning down at the ground.

  "Light," he said, fishing it from his pocket. "My eyes—they aren't all black and white again, are they?"

  "They appear perfectly normal," said the light.

  "Good. Just checking."

  He put it back in his pocket and jogged northward. They were just a few miles from the lich and he was starting to think they might actually reach him before he finished his rituals. He appeared to have wrapped the Prime Body in multiple layers of wards so that even if someone were to ever find it in the tunnels of the abandoned and once demon-haunted mines, they would have a hard if not impossible time destroying it. There would be quite a lot of irony if the lengths he'd gone to to keep himself safe were about to lead to his death at their hands.

  At that moment, the lich was feeding rivulets of ether into the veins of the corpse. Pale steam—or perhaps it was smoke—rose from its dried-out skin. He was getting close.

  A few minutes later, Dante and the others nearly fell down a crevasse his scouts had missed in the darkness. It looked as though it would only take a few minutes to detour, but if the lich really was about to complete his ritual, then that was a few minutes they couldn't spare. Especially when all Dante had to do to cross the crevasse was to reach into the earth, take hold of the nether there, and extend it forward to—

  His land-bridge was only a third of the way across the gap when red sparks sizzled up from the fresh stone. They flashed erratically, then slammed together into a single lance and flew at Dante's head.

  Running backward, he scrambled for the nether, packing it into a hasty bolt and flinging it at the incoming one. More of the sparks flew from his own bolt. It impacted the red lance a moment later, but the bolt had already frayed enough that it only weakened the lance rather than destroying it. And the second batch of sparks was also collapsing into a lance that jumped toward him as well.

  Still backpedaling, he slapped together more shadows and sprayed them at the incoming attacks. Yet they came apart too, shooting red sparks everywhere. His throat closed as he understood the trap he was in. The more he fought to save himself from the strange sparks, the more attacks he would create against himself.

  More light seared across the night. But this was the color of stars. Blays thrust his spear in front of Dante just before the red lances could strike him. They swerved to the weapon, spiraling into the purestone.

  Like that, it was over. Blays drew himself upright, keeping the spear ready. "Now what the hell was any of that?"

  "A reaction to the nether," Dante said, breathing hard. "A new plague of some kind. It must have manifested to replace the one we just dispelled. Keep that spear out, will you?" He pulled forth a sliver of ether. It unraveled into red sparks as well, but Blays waved the Spear of Stars at them, absorbing them. Dante laced his hands behind his head. "The ether, too."

  "We cannot employ our powers without being killed for it?" Gladdic said. "Then we have no hope."

  "Not true. Blays can still kill the lich with the spear. And if he tries to use his powers to fight back, he'll just do our work for us. Besides, he's using loads of ether right now and nothing's happening to him. I noticed this start to happen a few minutes ago, but the response was much less aggressive. It only became dangerous over the course of the last mile or so. Whatever this plague is, it seems highly localized."

  "That is a comfort. A rare thing in these times."

  They hustled around the crevasse and into a broad valley flanked on both sides by sharp blades of rock. A shelf of hills rose beyond the valley and in these hills was the mine. Dante watched through his scouts as the lich finished sending ether into the veins of the corpse and stood back. For a moment he was afraid the lich had finished poisoning the Prime Body, or burning it out from the inside, or whatever result this process was supposed to obtain, and that it was about to crumble into dust, taking the lich with it.

  But the lich was only observing the results of his work. For he then drew a knife, placed it over his heart, and drove it deep into himself. His lips pulled back in a rictus grimace. Slowly, he withdrew the knife. Glowing white blood spilled from the wound. He caught this in a bowl he'd produced from a pouch on his belt, then drew his other hand across the wound, sealing it.

 

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