In the ensuing silence, he heard a series of gasps and sharp intakes of breath. He could feel the tension and shock radiating from all quarters. He opened his eyes in response. He stood at the edge of a massive crater, shallow but so broad it stretched away down the slope of the mountain farther than his eyes could see. Everything that had occupied that space had vanished—the whole of the Elven community. Gone, every last vestige. As if a giant’s hand had reached down into the earth beneath it and scooped it away. He stared in disbelief at the scar that remained. At the emptiness. Even knowing what had happened, he could not bring himself to believe what he was looking at. Nothing remained. His friends, his family, his home—virtually everything he knew from the whole of his life had vanished.

In the palm of his hand, the Loden Elfstone glimmered faintly. He could see traces of movement in its depths. Life.

His sense of loss collided with his sense of responsibility, and for a moment he was so overwhelmed he could not move.

Then Simralin was next to him, the Elven Hunters had closed about, and the Knight of the Word, Logan Tom, was saying, “We have to go. Quickly!”

EVEN SO, even though they started away almost as soon as Logan Tom urged them to, they lingered long enough to look back on the beginnings of the battle between the Elves and the demons. The enemy hordes appeared almost instantly, flooding out of the woods below the crater, thousands strong, a river no dam could hold back. Once-men, Logan Tom had called them. They were wild, unkempt things, humans turned into dark imitations of themselves, more animal than man or woman. Ragged, dirty, brandishing everything from lengths of pipe and jagged sticks to automatic weapons, they shouted and screamed their incoherent words of rage and frustration. They never slowed as they reached the crater’s rim, but simply kept coming, sometimes stumbling over its edge. Those that fell either rose quickly or were trampled by those that followed. A surging mass, they spilled into the bowl of the crater in a flood. When they were halfway across, the Elves, concealed in the trees on one side, counterattacked. Hundreds of arrows tore through the demon ranks, a deadly rain out of the sky. They died by the scores, screaming as they fell, slowing those that followed and making them better targets for the hidden archers. At first the enemy could not understand what was happening. Even when they did, they could not determine the source of the attack. Hundreds more died as they slowed within the killing bowl of the crater, turning first this way and then that, easy targets for the Elven archers. Some fired their automatic weapons blindly into the trees. Some fired them into their fellows. The chaos and slaughter were indescribable.