The blue light carries her through forests and over mountains and plains and across rivers and lakes. None of them look familiar. There is a fresh sense of urgency to the light’s movement. A fortress flashes past, dark and scarred and jagged, and then something else—something she cannot identify—vast and circular and menacing. Down she sweeps through an opening in the earth, down into depths so dark she can see almost nothing. A flash of stone steps startles her, what appears to be a passageway follows, then a cavern, and then something massive and alive that stirs in recognition of the magic’s intrusion.

And finally she spies a small metal box on which is carved a crest of crossed blades athwart a field of wheat with a bird flying overhead.

An instant later the blue light fades, the magic dies away, and she is back in her forest sanctuary staring out at the sunlit sweep of the Elven Westland.

She stood where she was for a moment, still caught up in the swiftness of her journey, stunned by the abruptness of her return. She stared out across the plains west from her vantage point on the heights, knowing she must remember everything.

It was all a jumble of images, but she knew she had to sort those images out, had to place them in sequence and store them carefully.

She was attempting to do so when she sensed movement behind her.

She turned just as the five black-garbed figures came at her out of the trees. They carried iron bars and wooden cudgels, and there were too many of them. She would have been finished if she hadn’t still been holding the Elfstones. Her fear and desperation triggered their magic instantly. A fireball of blue light exploded from her clenched fist and hammered into her attackers, stopping them before they reached her, tossing them aside as if they weighed nothing.

She hesitated only an instant before bolting for freedom.

It was an instant too long.

They lay scattered about her in various stages of semi-consciousness, and she had thought to get past them before they could recover their wits. She ran hard, dodging bodies and limbs, but she missed noticing the man who had been farthest away from the blow dealt to the others. He was on his knees, crouched and ready as she sped past him. She was well within reach of the iron bar he gripped, and he swung hard at her as she fled, the bar connecting with her left leg. She went down screaming in pain, her shinbone broken, and he was on her instantly.

Sitting astride her chest, pressing the bar down hard against her throat so that she could not breathe, he whispered. “Give me the Elfstones. Quick now, or I’ll break your neck, too.”

Her air cut off, her body pinned, black spots obscuring her vision, she opened her fingers.