The magic beckoned me. To refuse was to die. I strode across the bridge and walked into the stone room.

Plain walls greeted me, devoid of any ornament or decoration. The room was just a hollow box of stone with a simple stone platform at the far end. But on the floor, in the center of the room, something magic waited. It started as a long pale mass rooted to the floor, and like a coral spreading from a common root and splitting into dozens of branches, it too spread out, growing out into a forest of pale protrusions. They glowed pale blue and purple, some as tall as me, some short, the size of my hand, but all sharp and dripping magic that swirled like tendrils of smoke. This looked so familiar . . .

The magic pulled me forward. I followed it, circling the mass, toward a platform at the far wall. I walked up five stone stairs, each a foot tall, and turned. The odd magic coral lay below me on the floor. In my head, I cleaned the main mass of protrusions, trying to see the form beneath.

Magic swirled at the other end of the coral.

The contours of what lay on the floor suddenly made sense.

A skeleton.

An enormous skeleton, at least nine feet tall. Its ribs curved up, its bones stretched, distorted, each bearing branching antlers of pale metal, but it was a human skeleton.

The magic snapped and shone like a length of silver silk suddenly stretched taut. A woman appeared above the skeleton, a translucent shape hovering above the bones level with me. She had dusky skin and big brown eyes. Gold colored her full lips and dusted her eyelashes. Blue-black hair cascaded down her back in soft curls. She wore a diadem of thin gold, so light and intricate, it looked spun rather than forged. Two golden winged serpents, crafted with meticulous detail wound around her arms, their spiderweb-thin wings cradling her wrists.

She looked like me.

No, wait. That was wrong. I looked like her.

Pressure ground on me. The magic of Mishmar waited like a colossal hammer poised above my head. If it fell on me, it would crush every bone in my body.

The magic drove me down. I sank to my knees.

I reached into my clothes and pulled out pieces of broken Slayer wrapped in a cloth. They matched the skeleton below perfectly. Same pale substance, neither metal nor bone, but both. A pale purple radiance emanated from Slayer’s blade, matching the bones below.

The magic ground against my mind and I heard the same word whispered over and over in my head.

“Z’emir-amit. Z’emir-amit. Z’emir-amit.”