The images came quicker now, and Willow fought again to slow them so their meaning would not be lost. Her breath came quickly, as if she had run a great distance, and there was a bright sheen of sweat on her face.

The voice cried out in her mind again.

The High Lord’s power was lost to him and therefore lost to me! I could not be set free!

The voice was almost frantic. The images whispered urgently. The dreams that had brought Willow in search of it were a mix of truth and lies, dreams from both wizard and fairies … Fairies! Her dreams were sent by the fairies? … All must come together so that truths could be revealed and the power needed could be summoned—so that Paladin and wizard could meet and the stronger prevail, the stronger that was also the good, and then the books of magic could be, finally and forever, could be and must be …

Something intruded, other images, other thoughts imprisoned within the black unicorn for countless centuries. Willow stiffened and her arms locked about the sleek neck. She felt the scream rising within her once more, uncontrollable this time, madness! She saw something new in the images. The black unicorn was not a single life, but many! Oh, Ben! she cried soundlessly. There were lives in the images that struggled and could not break free, that yearned for things she could not understand in worlds she could not imagine. She shook with the emotions that ripped through her. Souls imprisoned, lives held fast, magics torn away and used wrongly—Ben!

Then there was a sudden image of the missing books of magic, locked within a dark, secret place, a place filled with the smell of something evil. There was an image of fire burning outward from one of those books, burning with the intensity of life being born anew, and from out of that fire and that book leaped the black unicorn, free once more, racing from the dark into the light, searching …

The voice cried out one final time.

Destroy the books!

The cry was one of desperation. The cry was almost a shriek. It blocked away the images; it consumed everything with its urgency. The pain it released was intolerable.

Willow’s scream finally broke free, rising up against the sounds of battle. The sylph tore away from the black unicorn and stumbled back, almost blacking out with the intensity of what she had experienced. She dropped to her knees, head bent against a wave of nausea and cold. She thought she must die and knew in the same instant she would not. She could sense the black unicorn shuddering uncontrollably beside her.

The words of that final cry were a whisper on her lips.

Destroy the books!

She rose to a half-crouch and screamed them out across the battleground of the little clearing.

The words were like tiny wafers of paper caught in a windstorm. The Paladin did not hear them, consumed by the fury of the battle he fought. Meeks did not hear them, the whole of his concentration given over to directing the magic he had called upon to save himself. Questor Thews, Bunion, Parsnip, Fillip, and Sot, abandoned by their demon imp captors, were lying bound and gagged at the clearing’s far edge.