And now he saw his daughter, shown to him in the glass, his Alhana Starbreeze, standing at the prow of Wings of E'li, his flagship, his pride. The salt winds blew back her hair, a dark pennon sailing against a leaden sky. She lifted her hand to shade her eyes against the limitless horizons.

Lost! She is lost!

His heart twisted, wrenching in his breast, and he saw all the fleet behind his flagship, straggling out and losing their way, some turning east and some north. The wind in the sails roared, and it moaned down the ratlines, humming in the ropes like mourners at a funeral.

The world is lost! So said the wind, so said the voice of the orb.

"No!" cried the king, sitting back from the orb but never taking his hands from it. "Show me no dark visions! Make good your promises, the ones you tempt and tease with."

The green light pulsed, a heart beating in stone, a mind roaming and questing always, touching his and dropping back, then touching again.

Very well. You have been a long time admitting your wish, Elf-king, but I am here to grant it. Now heed, and heed me well! What you want can be, and I will be the agency of its birth. You need only dream.

Only dream. Lorac sat closer to the crystal globe again, letting himself touch the green glow with his mind. Only dream. He closed his eyes, and yet he saw the beating light.

Now you must trust me, isn't it so, Elf-king? You must trust me as once I trusted you.

A shiver of memory rippled across Lorac's mind, across the green glow and the mind of whatever being touched him through the crystal.

Dream, Lorac Caladon. Dream of the world you will save, dream of the people who will go all their days touched by your vision. Ah, dream, Elf-king.

"Who are you?" Lorac whispered.

In his mind, in his heart, he felt as though someone had smiled upon him. Warmth filled him, bone and blood, and it seemed to him then that he sat in a garden on the first day of spring when breezes are perfumed with the waking of the world. He heard his heart beating, and the green light pulsed in perfect rhythm to match.

I am he who will save your lost kingdom, Elf-king!

Until now Lorac Caladon had been very careful not to engage the mind he sensed living in the orb, very careful not to extend his own magic to touch the magic within the crystal sphere. This was, after all, an artifact out of Istar, and it was a thing that had lived in older days than even those of the Kingpriest. Still, he dared now what he had never dared before, what all his training and all the wisdom of his many long years had cautioned: Do not engage the magic of such a thing as this dragon orb. Do not, unless you are certain you can control it.

He touched the magic, and as his hands grasped the orb, he felt it running in him, eager and swift.

I am yours, said the orb, like a woman sighing in her lover's bed, like the shore to the sea.

"You are mine," whispered the elf-king, his face hollowed by shadows, made unwholesome in the green light.

Unwholesome, green, and sickly… but when he saw his reflection in the orb, he saw himself not as unwholesome, not as one whose shadow-sculpted face most resembled a skull. When he saw himself in the orb, King Lorac Caladon saw a young warrior with a shining sword girded on, a king to save the land, a father to rescue his children from the dark terrors of the night. A soldier of E'li, of Paladine the Eternal Champion!

In the globe, in his mind, the elf-king lifted up his sword and all the light of stars, the light of the red moon and the silver, chased down the steel, running like water and blood.

Beneath his hands, the orb shifted size, growing, swelling, so that he must extend his arms now to keep his hands on it, wide as though to embrace it. In the crystal he dreamed himself a golden warrior in the heart of his kingdom. All around him in vision he saw the forests and glades, each tree gently shaped and coaxed, grown by the devoted elves of House Woodshaper, those whose blood knew the blood of the sprits of nature. He saw the mighty Thon-Thalas running down to the sea, surging past the cities and the towns, running past the towers of his people. In Silvanost, the precious jewel upon the breast of the Sylvan Lands, the temples to the gods shone pearly white in the streaming sunlight, clustered round the Garden of Astarin. His heart swelling with love, Lorac Caladon cried:

"We are the children of the gods! We are their firstborn, their best beloved! We are what gods meant all the mortals of the world to be, and we are most deserving of their love!"

He shouted it, that shining warrior, and he never blushed to wonder whether he was wrong. How could he be? Centuries of lore had taught him this creed, and when he looked around him, in waking and in vision, he saw the proofs of lore everywhere.

"For the Sylvan Lands!" cried the warrior, his yellow hair blowing back, his eyes shining.

Behind him where he did not see, in the tiniest corner of his vision, his saving-dream, a small corruption throbbed, a darkness on the land like the first small spot of disease upon the lung of a fair young queen. Unseen, unfelt yet, still it was there and quietly killing.

In the Tower of the Stars, the elf-king howled high to the heavens, shrieking to the gods. So loudly did he scream that the echoes of his agony rolled 'round and 'round his circular walls, like thunder never-ending. So long did he scream that his throat began to bleed, and he would have choked on the blood, but that was not to be permitted.

Out from the orb leaped a dragon, wings wide, fangs gleaming, he who had been prisoned there since before the days of Istar's glory, who had watched as a kingpriest thought he might like to become a god, who had found a way out of the destruction to come by whispering his dire warnings and false promises to a young mage flushed with his first glory, to Lorac Caladon. He had heard Takhisis call her dragons and wake them. Like fire in him, the sound of the goddess's call, like flames running all through his mind and his soul. Awake! Awake! My dragons, awake! But, enspelled and unable to find a way out from his crystal prison, Viper had remained trapped-until now.

The touch of a reptilian mind, cold and dry and with no other feeling than death-lust, froze the mind of Lorac Caladon, making motionless his hands. He could not scream. He could not breathe. He felt that mind twine around his like a snake around the limbs of a helpless child. His heart had no prayer. Fear felled faith. His soul turned chill, and the magic in him writhed like something dying.

And then-in an instant!-that dragon-mind was gone from his, the grip broken. Lorac breathed, but only once. Then came another mind, a stronger one, and this one seized him heart and soul in a taloned grip the like of which Viper could not hope to achieve. Too late, too late, he knew he had opened the magic of the orb and that was like opening a door. Another dragon, this one stronger, this one crueler, came rushing in. Viper roared, but the sound of his fury was already distant, the beast banished. In the soul of Lorac Caladon, a voice whispered words, like fire rushing, like wild wind in the winter-bare forest, the voice of another dragon.

Now you may scream, my little mageling-king!

Lorac did scream, so long and so hard that at last he became voiceless. Yet, unvoiced, still he screamed, and all his dreams of the golden warrior come to save his kingdom turned into nightmares, dreams grown so hideous as to sow the seeds of madness into a mind once celebrated for wit and wisdom and cunning.

He did not scream wordlessly, and he did not howl as beasts howl in the wilderlands. He screamed the words he had learned at his mother's knee.

"We are the land, the land is us!"

And so-it must be, it must be, for the mightiest mage of the Silvanesti spoke in the fullness of his magic-the insanity of the king fell upon his land and every living thing became warped, twisted in body, twisted in soul, imprisoned within the nightmare of the king as Lorac Caladon fell spiraling into despair.