Resolutely he turned his back on the skull and started to walk. Soon he found the iron framework of an old stairway, and he didn't even pause before starting what he knew would be a long climb. Ascending steadily, he held the torch in one hand, except during the most difficult parts of the climb. Then he clenched the narrow, unlighted end of the brand between his teeth so that he could use both hands to scale steadily upward.

He stopped once, startled by a distant sound. Listening, he discerned a thumping pulse, like the beating of a heart. As he strained to locate the sound, he saw a sudden image: a greenish stone, red lights flaring within the gem in cadence to the mysterious heartbeat.

Once again he suppressed a shiver a fear, knowing without understanding that fear was a strange emotion to him.

After the iron stairs there were more corridors, and a room where there was water. He stopped here, grateful for the drink, and took the time to fill both of his water-skins. He remembered that, beyond this ruined labyrinth, he would find very little water.

But how could he know this and not know where here was?

Finally he emerged beneath the muted blue of a clear sky fading softly after the sunset. He was not surprised that the great edifice behind him rose so high, nor that it was cast so perfectly into the shape of a great skull. Now he knew that this place was called Skullcap.

And then he had another vivid impression as the skull that he had left underground seemed to rise into his mind. He stared into those black, empty sockets and shivered under the feeling that it was still watching him.

"But who am I?"

He found the answer when he collapsed for rest in a shallow ditch. Under the fading light of day, he pulled out the contents of his pack. There was the hardtack-he remembered exactly what it tasted like, but he didn't know where it had come from. He found a soft fur cloak and knew that it would be useful on a colder night than this.

And he found an ivory scroll tube that was certainly one of his prized possessions. Within the cylindrical container, he found several maps and pieces of parchment with strange symbols and indecipherable notes scrawled across them.

At the top of several of the sheets, he discerned two words: Emilo Haversack. Taking a stick, he scribed the symbols into the sand, and he recognized that the words on the parchment had been written by his own hand.

"My name is Emilo Haversack," he declared, as if the repeating of the words would make the truth that much more evident.

But still, how had he come to be here?

And where were the rest of his memories?

For a long time he had done nothing, been no one. This was his protection as it had been in ages past, a tactic for use when those who sought his life for crimes real and imagined became too powerful. And so he had escaped the vengeful, had given pitiful humankind the false notion that he was finally and irrevocably slain.

He recalled the fateful casting, the mighty spell that should have yielded passage to the Abyss, allowed him to challenge the Dark Queen herself. Instead, the enchantment had erupted in violent convulsion, tearing him to pieces, destroying him.

Indeed, by now the whole world must believe that he had been killed.

But he had only been hiding.

How long had he lurked here, so far beyond the ken of humankind? He didn't know, really didn't care. As ever, he trusted to certain truths, knowing that the nature of human, dwarf, or ogre would eventually accomplish his task. The folk of Krynn tended to be violent peoples, and he needed their violence to give him flesh and blood and life.

Finally violence had been done, and the gift had been given. Again his essence was cloaked in flesh, the blood pulsing through a brain that, while it was not his, had been given to him to use. He could not discern immediately whether it was a human or perhaps a dwarf or even an ogre that had bestowed this gift upon him. Nor did he particularly care. He could make any of these peoples his tool, use whichever body was offered him until he could exert full control, reclaim his rightful place in the world.

So he had been content for a measureless time merely to rest within this mortal shell, to absorb the life and vitality of the body that gave him home. He did not need to take control, at least not yet, for he was still weak, still unready to reveal himself to the enemies who, experience had shown him, always lurked in the eddies of time's great river, waiting for his reappearance, for a chance to hurt or kill him.

Such enemies waited with vengeance and treachery in mind, and they sought him out whenever his presence became known.

And always he had killed them. He won because he waited until the time was right, and the same wisdom that had guided him then told him now that the time was too soon. He was content to let his host wander this far-flung corner of Ansalon, and the timeless one paid little heed to that body's travels or to its intentions and pleasures. For all this time he, the spirit of the ancient archmage, would grow stronger, would wait for the right moment to strike.

Gradually his vitality returned. He began to feel warmth, to sense desires such as, initially, thirst and hunger. And then later he knew stronger, more deeply ingrained lusts, cravings for power, for lives, and for blood, and these desires confirmed for him that he was ready once more to plunge his life back into the great river's flow.

Finally the time had come for him to emerge from hiding, to once more claim the prizes-in treasure, realms, and lives-that were rightfully his. He would take a new body, find the flesh of a strong young man, as he always had before. And he would once again claim the world of which he had once been master, in fact if not in public knowledge.

He shifted then, steeling his essence toward the mind of the man-or dwarf, or ogre-who was his host. He was ready to seize control, to destroy the host's intellect, to make the mind, the body, the life of this person his own.

But something was wrong.

The will of Fistandantilus surged more strongly, and he sensed the host body's agitation, its ignorance and its fear. This was the time it should begin to respond, when the will of the archmage would vanquish the hapless individual who was doomed to become fodder for his future life. Again he surged, twisting, driving the force of his mighty presence, the vast power of his magic, the full awareness of the hundred or more souls he had devoured during the long course of his rise to power.

And once more he failed.

His host was not responding to his will. He could sense the coil of mortality, the flesh and being of a person. But there was a capricious, free-spirited mentality in this host that would not yield to his great strength- indeed, it seemed to delight in thwarting his attempts to assert control.

His immortal essence had come to rest, as always before, in someone who could bear it, unawares, through the world. But now he desired to claim the host for his own, to consume him in the process of restoring himself to might.

Yet the host would not respond.

There were times when the power of the ancient arch-mage would reach out, seeking with ghostly skeletal ringers to lodge in the brain, or the heart or guts, of this unsuspecting person. But at best those grasps were fleeting, with the stuff of control always slipping away.

The essence of Fistandantilus settled back in frustration, and inevitably the knowledge that he was being thwarted brought a rising sense of rage, a murderous intent that should have erupted in a burst of magic, sizzling the flesh and searing the brain of the unwitting host.