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

      "When I die, you'll be the next head of the Varfarin," the Wizard Cormor said quietly.

      A log collapsed with a crack and hiss in the marble hearth, sending sparks flying. The Wizard Derwen, seated in one of the two padded chairs in front of the fireplace, ignored both the sound and the ember that barely missed his foot. "Why me?" he asked, his attention fixed on the man in the opposite chair.

      Only Cormor's head moved, but the ember returned to the fire leaving the edge of the carpet unsinged. "You don't feel yourself qualified?"

      Derwen shook his head. "Even today, with so few of us left, you'd have no trouble finding half a dozen wizards stronger than I am. So why choose me?"

      Cormor's austere face looked thoughtful. He fingered the large, egg-shaped crystal set into the hilt of the sword lying across his lap. "You have a right to know, but my reasons aren't easy to explain. He paused and Derwen watched the blue light in the heart of the crystal pulse with the beat of Cormor's heart. Cyrkarion, the Blue Crystal, one of eight living crystals created during the Age of Wizards, called the Sword of Cormor due to its setting, it was both source and symbol of Cormor's power. That power often frightened Derwen, but never more than now, when he had just been told that the title of Esalfar, the mantle of leadership of the Varfarin, would be his on Cormor's death. And Cormor was dying.

      Derwen's jaw clenched. Since Belis' death a little over a year earlier, Cormor was the last of the Great Wizards, the last survivor of those qualified for the Council of Wizards. Yet his death had been inevitable from the moment of hers. Cormor and Belis had been mind-linked, joined through Cyrkarion in a way that no one who had not experienced such a linkage could imagine. Without Belis, Cormor lacked a part of himself. He had no wish to live beyond the time needed to settle his affairs and that time was almost over.

      "It isn't true that I foretell the future," Cormor said, startling Derwen out of his musings. "Not even the gods do that." He raised a slender hand and the brandy snifter on the table by his chair floated up to where his long fingers could close about the stem. He took a sip and returned the glass to the table. "But I have been blessed by Jehan and shared his vision. The Varfarin, after all, was created to serve his will.

      "What the gods see are possibilities."

      "The multiple threads of fate," Derwen said.

      Cormor inclined his head. "Precisely."

      "So what possibilities does my becoming Esalfar bring into being?" Derwen asked, running a blunt-fingered hand through his hair. The room beyond the circle of firelight was dark. He felt himself isolated with Cormor in a moment of calm.

      "If I name one of the stronger wizards to succeed me, say Balek or Sura," Cormor said, "either one would do a decent job for a time, but neither of them is my equal. Nor would they devote enough time to seeking someone else, someone who could become my equal."

      "There's been no one your equal in two thousand years."

      Cormor raised a hand in protest. "There may have been many who could have been. We've tested perhaps ten percent of the children in Ilwheirlane, and our record is much poorer in the rest of Tamar."

      "You want the testing of children made a priority?" Derwen leaned forward. "Balek would do that, if you told him to, any of them would."

      "For a time, but the press of events would shift their priorities. After a few hundred years their search would falter." Cormor snorted. "After less than a hundred, more likely. Balek, Sura, all their paths lead to the same ends."

      "A few hundred years is a long time." Derwen closed his eyes. Beyond this room, this moment, lay a terrible of abyss of duty and responsibility.

      "We live a long time."

      "Are you saying it will take hundreds of years to find someone to replace you?" He heard a quiver in his voice.

      Cormor shook his head. "I don't know. My vision showed no dates. But I need you to do more than simply pursue a search for potential wizards. I need you to make sure, when you find someone who could be my equal, that person does become my equal."

      Derwen swallowed. "What do you mean?"

      The Esalfar's face twisted in an expression of regret and Derwen felt shaken anew by the lines of age and pain thus exposed, lines that had not been there the month before. He forced his attention back to his master's words.

      "It can't have escaped your notice that the study of wizardry isn't popular today?"

      "For good reason," Derwen said, grimacing, but at least the subject was a familiar one. "The uneducated fear us. They always have, of course, but since the awful destruction of the Bane, and exposure of the atrocities committed by Rav and his allies, their fear has grown. One can't blame them."

      "No. The Bane terrified me. The waste of it. Hundreds of kilometers of fertile land reduced to a poisonous desert, and most of the wizards on Tamar dead." Cormor sighed, his eyes full of regrets. "And since then there have been so few of us. We haven't been able to mingle with the people as we once did. The unknown is always more frightening than the familiar." He rubbed his forehead. Then, straightening in his chair, he swept his hand away as if pushing his thoughts aside as well. He focused on Derwen. "What if you find someone with talent, and that person doesn't want to be trained? What would you do?"

      Derwen stared back. "You can't force someone to learn wizardry."

      Cormor smiled. "Are you sure? I can think of ways it might be done."

      "What do you want of me?"

      Cormor shook his head. "It's not what I want. It's what the future of Tamar demands. You must be single minded and ruthless on the Varfarin's behalf. You must find someone with the potential to be my equal, no matter how long the search may take, and you must make sure that, when you have found such a person, he or she receives training, no matter what that person's personal views on the subject may be."