It is their name, Hope said. Do not move. Teela can avoid what is to come; I must protect you. It is not you personally they seek, he added.

No, she thought, as her arms began to glow. It was the words they sought. The marks of the Chosen.

Yes.

“Why?”

They will not find what they seek in the Shadow.

The Shadow, the Adversary of old, lifted a limb—not a hand, it was too shapeless for that. The darkest vines, the ebon vines, stopped their grasping search then; they came to the Shadow, whose limb was the same color, almost as if they were part of the Adversary himself.

He spoke. Kaylin lifted her hands to her ears—or would have, if Hope weren’t in the way of one of them. This was not a language she recognized; it was an echo of, a distortion of, something familiar. A wave of nausea struck, as if she had, without warning, entered portal space.

Hope bit her ear.

The shock of pain swamped nausea as he smacked her face—hard—with his wing. What Terrano had attempted, the Shadow finished. The darkest of the vines, the ebon ones, were...absorbed. Or devoured.

“Yes,” the Avatar of the High Halls said. “It causes some discomfort. But I can now absorb the rest of the mass.”

“What did you need Terrano for?”

“To see it, Chosen. To see it, to begin the disentangling of it. Neither my friend nor I would have noted what was done, for Azoria entwined perfectly the elements of two things that otherwise could not coexist. It was masterful.”

Kaylin had an entirely different word for it.

“Yes, it would have been considered an abomination. But the Ancients understood that if they created, if they gave their creations some freedom of will and thought, they might grow in directions of which the Ancients themselves could not conceive. Almost, I am in awe.”

It was a dark awe—the other side of horror.

“What was the...spell meant to achieve?”

“You will now see for yourself,” the Avatar replied. He gestured at the bulging, distorted canvas, and it continued to stretch, the image now pulling away from the canvas on which it had been painted, the flat dimensionality of the figure stretching and shifting in place to become an actual person.

No, not a person. A perfectly preserved corpse.

“I am grateful that we sent the Consort away,” the Avatar said.

Kaylin was certain that the Consort had seen her share of corpses. A long dead Barrani woman—one whose death had probably occurred before the Consort’s birth—would be unlikely to upset her.

“You do not see as she does. If you can fulfill her function in an emergency, what you see are the words, as if they were the marks that adorn your body.”

“What would she see?”

“A vessel,” he replied, voice soft. “A vessel emptied of that light, that life.”