"Open it!" Azalin ordered.

I heard him more in my mind than with my ears and quickly launched into the final phase of the spell. The image rippled and held, growing larger until it was life-sized, and then I knew it was now a true doorway-and open.

To daylight.

I could survive it if I had to; there were trees present where I might find temporary shelter. If necessary I could bury myself in the ground before the burns became too severe. While unconscious I'd be at Azalin's mercy, though. A risk I'd just have to take.

He shouted something, but I could no longer hear clearly; the roar managed to increase that much more and took on a teeth rattling high-pitched yowl. I called out the last of the incantation and saw Azalin hoist himself up on the edge of the circle. Through the vision in the sphere I could dimly see him standing on the wall.

I felt the control weaken as his attention wavered. The whole chamber rumbled with it as though the earth itself shrugged.

The green land faded, went suddenly hazy. The door was still open; I knew it to be open.

Azalin set himself, then leaped toward it. Toward… mist. The Mists. The Mists were flooding the bright sphere.

His momentum suddenly ceased; he hung in the core of the sphere like a fly in a web, slowly turning and tumbling out of control.

The sphere began to grow and became too bright to look at. The noise went beyond hearing, beyond bearing. I made one last effort to hold it together, knowing it would be useless; things were quite outside my control. The future as revealed by Ilka's crystal was about to become the past. My last spell exhausted, I dropped and dove for cover against the outer wall of the circle an instant before the blast ripped through the chamber.

The force of it rushed over me, slammed into the sigil-covered walls and ricocheted in a hundred directions at once. The glass containers were the first to go, their liquid contents shooting up in noisome fountains just before they shattered. Shards flew everywhere like arrows; I covered my head with my arms and braced against the thousand bites of lancing pain where I was struck. But that wasn't nearly as bad as the fireball.

I didn't know what it was at the time. It came too fast to comprehend. I heard a terrible deep booming above, like a huge hammer beating insanely upon a giant's drum. The sound was such that I thought my head would burst from it. I cowered and tried to turn into mist to escape it, but my body stubbornly held to its man-form. The energies tearing through the room must have disrupted my shape-changing ability. The vast, now out of control forces pressed me down against the hard floor as though to crush me to pulp, then atop that pressure came a wave of searing heat. It could not have lasted more than a second, but years might have passed in my perception of things.

Then silence. Absolute silence. I was sure that I had gone deaf.

When I finally dared to open my eyes to the present reality and move, the stillness was almost palpable, the air a thick, milky fog which rolled lazily about me. It was not the Mists of the borders, though, but rather steam rising from the escaped liquids where the last of them boiled away on the stone floor. With some relief I found that I could hear their bubbling hiss. My normal hearing was unaffected; it was my sense for magic that had been overburdened from the excess stimulation. My head rang from it, but I seemed otherwise unharmed. The many cuts I'd taken from the flying glass were healing, and I'd been spared from the horror of the fire by a special protective ring I always wore. As for the rest of the place…

To describe the room as a shambles would have been a dreadful understatement The only thing standing was the round wall and the tower itself, all the rest was so smashed as to be past recognition. Anything that was wood was charred nearly to dust, broken splinters of glass were melted where they lay. The sigils were no longer bright silver, but tarnished blacker than midnight to match the smoke-painted walls. Above, the round window was gone, the lead that had held the vanished panes of glass in place still hot and dripping into the stone circle.

I shakily sat up and looked around for Azalin. He hadn't made it through the opening. He hadn't made it at all.

His body lay near the west wall where the energies must have flung him like a leaf in a windstorm. His clothing was torn and shredded, but that was the least of the damage. The explosion had apparently sucked the life right from him, leaving behind a desiccated husk. He most resembled one of my skeletal servers, but with only slightly more flesh clinging to his bones. I saw the pattern of his ribcage, the outlines of his shrunken heart and lungs, the knobs of his joints. His face was the worst, his hawk-like features shriveled and dried, lips drawn back from the teeth with death's universal grin, the flesh on his skull cracked like old parchment dotted with matted tufts of sparse hair. The stench of full blown decay filled the room, overpowering all others.

There was no bringing him back. What few priests remained in Barovia had no power to restore life to the dead, and I had no spells that would help him. It would seem I would only have another servitor to add to my palace guard.

Damnation. So much work and for nothing. What had gone wrong? The Mists. It must have been the damned Mists.

Ever and always the source of my woes, the filthy stuff must have intervened and totally disrupted the workings of the spell. Azalin had advised me to perform a severance ceremony, but I'd chosen not to do so. I held to the idea that if I went through the portal, then Barovia would be dragged along as well in order to rejoin its original plane-if it had indeed even been the original plane. I had long suspected that many alternate realities existed, some varying greatly and some astonishingly similar. Azalin had met my theory of bringing Barovia with me with hearty contempt, but he was willing to allow me my way, having thought that at least he would be able to leave unhindered. Perhaps the world we had seen was so dissimilar to Barovia that they had somehow repelled one another. Perhaps I should not have been so stubborn. Damnation a thousand times over, I snarled to myself, furious, but weary right to my soul.

I would have to start again. Tired as I was now, I knew I would make another attempt. Azalin had done a monumental job of research, laying groundwork I could use, only I would first have to trace through each step to find out exactly what had gone wrong. It might take months, even years without his help, but so be it, somehow I would-

My disappointed and angry musings were interrupted when I heard a stirring from the direction of Azalin's body and turned to see what it was. My eyes widened and the hair on my neck rose.

It was moving-the wretched, decaying thing was moving. I sat frozen still as stone from the shock and waited for him to start screaming, for he would have to be in unthinkable agony from what had happened to his body. No sound came from him, though, only the spidery scrabblings of his hands brushing the stone flags, and the scrape of his exposed bones. His movements were feeble, groggy, as mine had been a few moments earlier.

Then the air about his withered body shimmered. The flesh clinging to his face filled out, became whole and healthy again. His features restored themselves back into their usual lines, though his eyes were shut. The skeletal body swelled to normalcy; the torn and dusty rags knitted themselves together, became rich velvets and furs once more, the leather of his belt and boots returned to looking new and supple.

Appearance only. This was illusion, the one he so carefully and constantly maintained, and now I understood why. The realization of what I was watching slowly began to dawn upon me.