"Anio, they are not. She and vel Dahn were but two of many unfortunate souls imprisoned by the High Mage of Eld."

The scene in the veil of water swirled out of focus. When it cleared again, they saw the same woman strapped to a birthing table, her face flushed with recent exertions, while the white-haired High Mage of Eld held her newborn son in his arms and spun a swirl of Azrahn-laced magic that drew faint sparkles of answering magic to the surface of the baby's eyes.

"We already know he's been trying to breed a Tairen Soul," Rain said.

"Look more closely," Hawksheart advised. The screen shimmered and the woman on the birthing table became a different woman, this one a blond, green-eyed Elf, and the child in the High Mage's hands became a smaller boy crowned with a shock of thick black hair. A moment later, a black-haired woman with deep blue eyes wept as she reached for her son. That mother and child became another, then another and another.

“Not all of the individuals you see are Fey. He's been breeding you, yes, but he's been crossing other magical bloodlines as well. Elvish, Fey, Feraz, Eld."

"Why?"

To create something stronger ... something deadlier than even you, Worldscorcher."

Rain's grip tightened around Ellysetta's fingers. "Ellysetta?"

"She was his first success, though she did not come from his experimental bloodlines."

Tension fell over the room. Unguarded thoughts—mostly from Rain but from the others as well—whispered across her mind. Concern edging on fear pressed against her as the warriors digested Hawksheart's revelations. Rain and Ellysetta were the most powerful creatures they'd ever known. If the Mage had created something even stronger than they...

"There are others?" Tajik growled. "Like the Feyreisa?"

"There are others," Hawksheart confirmed. "But none yet who have successfully come into their full power."

"He must be stopped," Bel said.

"Bayas," Hawksheart agreed. "He must."

"And yet you and the Elves will not help us," Rain said in a hard, flat voice,

"We cannot."

"Convenient."

The Elf king's eyes flashed. "It is anything but." A muscle jumped in his jaw. "To know a future that you cannot change—that you must merely stand by and witness—to know what must happen and which people you love must suffer or die, and know you must not—you cannot—do anything to stop it... that is neither convenient nor easy, Worldscorcher. Foreknowledge is the gods' most excruciating form of torture."

"So you say," Gil sneered, "but which of your own loved ones have suffered lately?"

Hawksheart's expression became a mask that seemed carved of smooth, impermeable Sentinel wood; golden, silent, and emotionless. Except for the burning green fire of his eyes. His hand swung gracefully out, and the elegant, tapered fingers gestured. "These."

In the shimmering veil, a new image took shape. A pair of lovers cast in shadow, their skin glowing faintly silver in the darkness. The man tall, broad shouldered, the woman slender and elegant beside him, her hair a mass of gleaming curls that spilled down her back in fiery waves as his powerful arms clutched her tight. Ellysetta's heart skipped a beat as she recognized the couple from her dreams that night by the shores of the Bay of Flames.

Her parents. The tormented souls who had given her birth.

Darkness slashed across the image, and a new, grim picture of the man who was Ellysetta's sire replaced the other. He hung limp and bloodied from thick black metal chains. His head drooped on his chest, and the matted tangle of his black hair draped around his face like a ragged shroud...Slowly, he looked up, paralyzing her with the blazing green gaze that filled her vision .. . pupil-less, radiant green wells of power ... tairen's eyes.

Rain and every member of Ellysetta's quintet went still, and silence fell over the chamber. The only sound came from the low chant of Elvish words that seemed to rise from the wood of the chamber walls, as if the Grandfather Sentinel tree were alive and speaking in the low murmur of a host of voices.

To the right of the man, another scene took shape. Within a bright, well-lit room, the flame-haired Fey woman lay strapped to a birthing table. She was screaming, her beautiful face creased in anguish as a woman hurried away with a small, swaddled babe. Sensing his mate's grief, the chained man roared and lunged against his bonds in helpless fury.

"Blessed gods." Gaelen's stunned voice—barely more than a whisper—was the first to break the silence.

"But they died," Bel protested. "They were lost in the Wars."

"You know them?" Ellysetta flicked her quintet a quick glance and saw the stunned recognition on their faces. "Who are they?" She turned back to the images of the man and the woman—strangers, yet somehow so familiar—who had given her birth.

"The man is Shannisorran v’En Celay." Gaelen's voice was hoarse. "The fiercest warrior ever to walk the Fading Lands. He was my chatok in the Cha Baruk. The woman is his truemate. Her name is—"

"Elfeya." Tajik sank to his knees. His nails scored bloody lines down his face. "My sister." His hands, his face, his entire body was shaking, and power gathered around him in swirling waves. "The Mage has her? The Mage has my sister?" Slowly, fists clenched, he faced the Elf king. His eyes had turned to blue flame, and magic flared about him in a flash of near-blinding green light. The ground rumbled and shifted as Tajik's Earth magic shook the great Grandfather Sentinel to its deepest roots. "You knew," he snarled.