At the end of the Second Age of Tamar the Five Gods, the Lorincen, played with the dice of history. Tarat, self-styled ruler of the Gods, and Kyra, once the Chronicler, now the Destroyer, urged their worshipers, the larin, to war upon mankind.

      Miune, the father of mankind, could do little to ward off the malice of his stronger kin, but he knew his children's hidden strength. He taught his worshipers to hate.

      Maera of the Mists and Jehan, known as Player, sought a different path...

4243, 424th Cycle of the Year of the Lizard
Month of Cerdana

     "Rav did the right thing when he betrayed the Council and shared his knowledge with the isklarin," the Wizard Cormor said.

     "Rav did the right thing?" Elgan exclaimed.

     "In that one act, yes, he did," Cormor said. "Oh, the division in his loyalties tore him apart and he ended up sick and twisted, madder even than Agnith, but his first act of betrayal was both necessary and right."

     The two men sat in the library of Cormor's home in Ninkarrak, in the well-padded chairs in front of the fireplace. Cormor had come to enjoy his grandson's presence in the evenings of what he knew was his final spring. He would be dead before the end of the year and it was reassuring to him to be able to pass on some of his insights to his grandson who was so like him, and could understand his meaning.

     "And I suppose, knowing you, you told Rav that," Elgan said. Cormor smiled. "Of course I did. Not that he cared what I thought about anything. He was too tied up in knots by then. His family treated him abominably."

     "Was Rav born in Gandahar then, as rumor would have it?"

     "Yes," Cormor said. "In fact, his original name was Aavik Zaikar and he was the second son of a member of the royal family of Gandahar, and descended from Zezere Mekhar, the first of the isklarin wizards."

     "How could he have been allowed into Onchan?"

     "His family sent him to be raised by relations in Kailane, the Esparda family of Siara, anotherline of descendents of Zezere. Of course, they kept in close contact with him. They renamed him Avron Esparda and fed him a story about his mission being vitally important to the survival of Gandahar. All very moving, and designed for the mind of an eight-year-old," Cormor said bitterly.

     "Then they imposed a mind block on him, so he remembered almost nothing of his early life, and they sent him to Onchan as coming from Kailane. He didn't know any better. His only memories, what few they left him, were of Kailane."

     "How do you know all this?" Elgan asked.

     "Rav told me the story himself," Cormor said. "Actually, I supported his position several times against the majority of the Council, so he never hated me the same way he came to hate the Monitors, the Old Guard, as he called them."

     "So he managed to pass taking his oath because he didn't remember having any other loyalty," Elgan said. "When did he recall his childhood?"

     "Not for many years, nearly a century, when his training was almost complete. Of course, by then, he remembered little about his childhood, even the part spent at Onchan. Then, suddenly, when he went to visit what he thought was his boyhood home in a moment of curiosity, his adult mind was submerged in the complete memories and attitudes of an eight-year-old, with a compulsion to return to Gandahar and pour out everything he had learned about wizardry to his relations there."

     "Agnith's fires, I can see why you said he went mad. Having his own mind betray him, might drive anyone crazy."

     "Actually, he responded well to the original shock," Cormor said. "He was truly a brilliant and gifted man in his youth. He even recognized that what he was doing in teaching the advanced techniques developed by the wizards of the Council to the isklarin was objectively something that had to be done. It wasn't until centuries later, when he came to doubt his own reasoning, that he began to go mad."

     "What caused him to doubt himself?"

     "I believe the cause was basically a lack of identity. He grew up thinking he was human. Then he was made to believe he was an isklar, but soon came to realize he wasn't, and never could be recognized as such. Yet, in a sense he had already given up on being human. Eventually, he came to see himself as a wizard only, with no relation or connection to the lesser beings without his power and sight. When everyone not a wizard ceased to be real to him, then I think you could correctly call him mad. But he was a brilliant man. It was the recognition of his own madness that drove him completely over the edge."

     "But why did he create monsters?"

     "He saw himself as abnormal," Cormor said. "Therefore, he became fascinated by abnormalities. He studied the effect of every deformity he produced on the psyche of the person he was twisting. The longer he lived, the more extreme the distortions became, the more extreme they had to become for him to see a reflection of himself. Despite the things he did, you have to remember to pity as well as despise him. In a better world, he would have turned out quite differently."