Fear whispered, By what?

When he thought his legs would carry him not another step, the staircase simply ended before a broad wooden door. Two torches stood in brackets on each side of that door, their flames like orange pennants waving in a breeze Dalamar did not feel. He did not look around to see why the fire flared. He did not look up or down or back. He could not, for he stood now in front of a door he had, indeed, seen before. The doorknob shone, polished silver in the torchlight. Shaped like a skull, the eye-sockets filled with the gleam of firelight, that knob invited his grip.

The quickening of his pulse became the drumbeat of his heart, a rhythm of excitement ran in him like magic itself. He'd stood here before, in a vision shown him by the polished platinum mirrors in the Circle of Darkness. While clerics and Wildrunners, a prince and a princess waited to mete out to him the exile's fate, he had seen this door, this very handle shaped like a skull. A sound came from the darkness, from behind, beside, before. The grating of chain on stone, the quiet creeping of judgment and revelation. So hard did his heart beat now that Dalamar wondered whether the hammering could be heard throughout the Tower.

He took a breath to steady himself.

Every moment he'd spent on the road away from the White elven magic and into the darker realm of Nuitari's magic had led him here, like inexorable steps upon a foreordained path. He reached for the silver skull. His hand closed round it, his thumb sought and found the smooth round depression of an eye-socket. He composed himself. By sheer force of will, he drove from his mind every thought, each trace of memory of the moment he accepted his mission for the Conclave. It was worth his life, perhaps his soul, to hide that, and he had no magic to assist him. Neither would he know if he succeeded until the moment he failed.

And if he failed-!

He must not think of that. He must not permit even the smallest thought of failure.

He gripped the silver skull, then pushed gently inward. The door opened, as in his vision it had. Light poured out, golden, flooding the corridor, and heat came with it as though someone within could not feel the warmth of the summer night but stood always in winter, shivering against cold. Dark against that light, a slight young man stood. He wore a robe of simple, unadorned black wool. The hood was thrown back, revealing a face Dalamar had never thought to see, even in nightmare. It was not the golden skin that set his nerves to jangling, nor the white, white hair. It was the eyes, the pupils dark as moonless midnight, each shaped like an hourglass.

"He calls himself the Master of Past and Present," Par-Salian had said. In the name of all gods, Dalamar thought, it is no wonder that he does.

Dalamar's heart stopped. Between one beat and another, it stilled. In the stillness, in the silence, the voice of his soul whispered. What will you do for magic, Dalamar Nightson? How far will you go to find it, to nurture it, to claim what is yours by right of talent?

This far, he said, looking into the hourglass eyes of Raistlin Majere, feared by the three most powerful mages of Krynn. This far. If Nuitari wills, farther even than this, for I have no place but in magic, I have no heart but that which beats to magic's song. It was ever thus. It will ever be thus, and I have given up much, but that does not mean I will not give up more to grow even stronger in the art of sorcery.

"Shalafi," he said, inclining his head in a modest bow. "I am come, as you have agreed."

As though he could see with his hourglass eyes every moment of Dalamar's past, every thought he had now, each step he would take until whatever day would be his last, Raistlin Majere smiled, a cold, cunning smile. In the space between one beat of his heart and another, Dalamar felt himself weighed and judged. Raistlin stepped back from the threshold with a small, almost mocking bow.

Come in if you dare, said that gesture.

The sound of a chain dragging on stone yet rang in Dalamar's heart, the platinum chain that had wrapped round his ankles, his legs, his heart in the Circle of Darkness. By that close chain, others had judged him guilty of crimes of magic and crimes of worship. By that bitter embrace, he had judged himself strong enough to accept what pain he must in order to have the magic he could not live without. He heard the scraping of the chain as he stepped across the threshold, as he entered the chamber of the Master of Past and Present. Into the world of a dark mage, into a world no one knew and the wise feared, Dalamar Nightson walked with his heart singing, and it was though he had come home.