That was the theory, at least. Questor had never had the opportunity to test it.

The mist swirled and stirred within the great forest trees, its trailers twisting like snakes. The mist had the look of something alive. There’s a cheerful thought, Ben chided himself. He stopped before the mist, regarded it warily, took a deep breath to steady himself, and started in.

The mist closed about him instantly and the way back became as uncertain as the way forward. He pushed on. A moment later, a tunnel opened before him—the same vast, empty, black hole that had brought him across from the old world a year earlier. It burrowed through mist and trees and disappeared into nothingness. There were sounds in the tunnel, distant and uncertain, and shadows dancing at its rim.

Ben’s pace slowed. He was remembering what it had been like when he had passed through this tunnel the last time. The demon known as the Mark and his black, winged carrier had come at Ben from out of nowhere; by the time he had decided they were real, they had very nearly finished him. Then he had practically stumbled over that sleeping dragon …

Slender shapes darted at the fringes of the darkness within the trees and mist. Fairies.

Ben quit remembering and forced himself to walk more quickly. The fairies had helped him once, and he should have felt comfortable among them. But he did not. He felt alien and alone.

Faces materialized and vanished again in the mists, sharp-eyed and angular with hair the consistency of willow moss. Voices whispered, but the words were indistinct. Ben was sweating. He hated being in the tunnel; he wanted out of there. Ahead, the darkness pressed on.

Ben’s fingers still clutched the medallion in a death grip, and he thought suddenly of the Paladin.

Then the darkness before him brightened to dusky gray, and the tunnel’s length shortened to less than fifty yards. Indefinable shapes swayed unevenly in the half-light, an interlacing of spider webs and bent poles. Voices and movement in the walls of the tunnel gave way to a sharp hissing. A sudden wind rose and howled sharply.

Ben peered ahead into the gloom. The wind whipped at him from the edges of the tunnel’s end and carried the hissing sound into his face with a wet, stinging rush.

And there was something else …

He stepped from the tunnel’s shelter into a blinding rainstorm and found himself face to face with Meeks.

… AND MEMORIES

Ben Holiday froze. Lightning streaked from skies leaden and packed with low-hanging clouds that shed their rain in torrents. Thunder boomed, reverberating across the emptiness, shaking the earth beneath with the force of its passing. Massive oak trees rose all about like the staked walls of some huge fortress, their trunks and leaf-bare limbs glistening blackly. Shorter pine and fir bristled in clumps through the gaps left by their taller sisters, and the rugged slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains lifted darkly against the nearly invisible horizon.