Javelin felt a lot less sure of himself as he left.

The Child of Dark had smashed all the mirrors in her quarters in the Grolim Temple at Balasa that morning. It had begun to touch her face now. Dimly she had seen the swirling lights beneath the skin of her cheeks and forehead and then had broken the mirror that had revealed the fact to her—and all the others, as well. When it was done, she stared in horror at the gash in the palm of her hand. The lights were even in her blood. Bitterly she recalled the wild joy that had filled her when she had first read the prophetic words:

"Behold: the Child of Dark shall be exalted above all others and shall be glorified by the light of the stars.' But the light of the stars was no halo or glowing nimbus. The light was a creeping disease that encroached upon her inch by inch.

It was not only the swirling lights, however, that had begun to consume her. Increasingly her thoughts, her memories, and even her dreams were not her own. Again and again she awoke screaming as the same dream came again and again. She seemed to hang bodiless and indifferent in some unimaginable void, watching all unconcerned as a giant star spun and wobbled on its course, swelling and growing redder as it shuddered toward inevitable extinction. The random wobble of the off-center star was of no real concern until it became more and more pronounced. Then the bodiless and sexless awareness drifting in the void felt a prickle of interest and then a growing alarm. This was wrong. This had not been intended. And then it happened. The giant red star exploded in a place where that explosion was not supposed to happen; and, because it was in the wrong place, other stars were caught up in it. A vast, expanding ball of burning energy rippled outward, engulfing sun after sun until an entire galaxy had been consumed.

The awareness in the void felt a dreadful wrench within itself as the galaxy exploded, and for a moment it seemed to exist in more than one place. And then it was no longer one. "This must not be," the awareness said in a soundless voice.

"Truly," another soundless voice responded.

And that was the horror that brought Zandramas bolt upright and screaming in her bed night after night—the sense of another presence when always before there had been the perfect solitude of eternal oneness. The Child of Dark tried to put those thoughts—memories, if you will—from her mind. There was a knock at the door of her chamber, and she pulled up the hood of her Grolim robe to hide her face. "Yes?" she said harshly.

The door opened, and the archpriest of this temple entered. "Naradas has departed, Holy Sorceress," he reported. "You wanted to be told.''

"All right," she said in a flat voice.