Sifting through the layers of shivering stone, a dark sand tumbling through the porous volcanic rock, Takhisis growled and muttered.

The-least likely of saboteurs. A fossil of an elf and his cringing people.

Wluie-her eyes had been elsewhere, her powers diyerted:

The dark salts settled in a lightless chamber, then rose in an eddy of underground-wind, rattling eerily against the porous rock, sifting and stirring through the subterranean blackness.

The opals were lost to her now, the mines caved in and closed to her slaves and minions.

There was enough of the glain dust to bring her into the world. Not in the form and the strength she would like, and perhaps not for the thousand years she had yearned for and craved.

But fifty years. Perhaps a hundred. Enough to punish all those who had foiled her.

It would be enough.

But meanwhile the Lucanesti would pay for the time she would lose. Pay dearly and in kind, with the time they had remaining.

* * * * *

Gasping for air in the collapsing tunnels, Spinel led a handful of the Lucanesti, mainly children, toward a wavering light-the last of the entrances, supported and protected by the young elf Jargoon.

The amber torchlight was soft, almost silky/ through his lowered lucerna, and the children daneed at the edge of his vision, their dark robes flickering like blades of translucent fire.

Somewhere below, Spinel prayed, Tourmalin was guiding the rest of the elves-the most skillful sappers and miners-toward thejsame entrance, the same faint source of light and air. Breathing a last hopeful petition to Branchala, the old elf followed the dodging, visionary light through the winding and crumbling corridors.

Sabotage had been easy. The Kingpriest had little regard for safety, and the whole network tumbled in upon itself in a vast, subterranean chain reaction. Already dust was rising from the lower corridors, and Spinel urged the younglings on, lifting a frail little elf-maid to his crusted shoulders and carrying her toward the entrance and freedom.

"Where are we going?" she asked, and asked again as the corridor snaked up through thick, glassy layers of obsidian.

Spinel soothed her with a faint, musical cooing, reached up and stroked her shoulder with a knobby hand.

He must protect these children. The fate of the Lucanesti lay in their futures.

^ Spinel calmed the children, stepped over the body of a battered Istarian sentry sprawled at the intersec shy;tion of two collapsed tunnels. It was apparent that Jargoonjiail been hard at work, and judging from the face of the poor Istarian, the elves had been enthusiastically merciless.

Holding his breath, the old elf rushed up the corri shy;dor, past another felled sentry, and another. Now the entrance to the mine was fully visible, a bright arch in the receding gloom some hundred yards away.

Spinel quickened his steps.

But where was Jargoon and his company? Spinel looked to the side tunnels, all collapsed and filled with rubble.

There was no sign of the other elves.

* * * * *

Long before the Lucanesti were brought to the cav shy;erns below Istar, before the long line of Kingpriests

and the city itself, a race of creatures ruled the intricate underworld of obsidian and brittle pumice and ages of dark voldanic gems.

The spiritvnaga had guarded these recesses dili shy;gently, jealously, hoarding the jewels, the precious metals-any stone that caught their depthless, glit shy;tering eyes-and guarding their riches out of sheer and aimless greed.

When the elves had come, the naga had fought against their invasion, and the nightmares of Lucanesti children were soon peopled with these monsters. Enormous serpents with passionless, blank human faces became the villains of a thousand elven legends, and every catastrophe from famine to collapsed tunnels was seen as the doing of the naga. Most importantly, the beasts practiced a rough and villainous magic, armed with an array of spells that blinded and stunned their unfortunate victims, so that the creatures might approach them and, using a magic more ancient and despicable still, drain their prey of all moisture, leaving the elves a mocking heap of opalescent bone.

Sinister and marginal, the spirit naga were a mys shy;tery to the Lucanesti, to the Istarians, to dwarf and druid as\well.

But nojt to Takhisis.

Long ago the goddess had found them and made them her minions.

The time had come to deploy them.

Now, an ancient naga crouched in the shadows beside the last clear entrance to the Istarian mines, hissing with hungry anticipation. The sinuous, scaled form flashed once in the rubble.

It was answered by another movement in the darkness on the other side of the entrance.

Which was enough for the old elf to understand.

Two of them. And no sign of Jargoon.

The monsters would make short work of the chil shy;dren, here at the edge of freedom, unless …

How did the words of the chanting go? It had been a hundred years since he used the spell, four hundred seasons with his thoughts on tunnels and corridors and hidden veins of opal.

Yet it was there, if he mined his memory wisely.

Slowly, Spinel lowered the elf-child to the tunnel floor. A faint rumbling from the rocks let him know the naga awaited them, had begun their long and treacherous incantations.

"Culet," he whispered to the little elf-maid. "When I tell you to run toward the light, you will do so. It is a game we can play, you and I, but remember to keep running when you reach the light and the wind. The rest of the people will follow."

Two of the older elf-children exchanged troubled glances, andthe corridor filled with the sound of a dry rustle, like something crawling over a century of leaves.

"Do not concern yourselves with me," Spinel assured them, affecting bravery, confidence, hoping his voice did not betray him. "You will follow Culet on my signal, and I shall join you later."

May the gods grant that reunion, he thought, his gaze flickering over the stirring darkness, the deep muttering in the rocks.

Slowly his arm encircled the elf-maid. Spinel guided her to the forefront of the company and, with a last, quick embrace, pushed her forward and away from him.

"Now!" he commanded, and the girl ran dutifully toward the light, the others following. Spinel ran with them, his old, stony bones creaking with sud shy;den movement, and there, at the entrance to the mines, he turned to face the waiting creatures.

Mouthing an old elven incantation, Spinel stood in the opening, and a globe of amber light formed around him. As each child, each youngling passed through the glow, it was as though they were cleansed and delivered. Shielding their eyes, they burst into sunlight and fresh airland a new, unex shy;pected life.

The nagas, unable to penetrate the amber glow of magic, groaned angrily in the darkness.

Finally, the last of the elf children leapt free of the mine. The light around him fading, Spinel prepared to follow, but the incantations, faint during his own swelling magic, grew louder and louder still.

Blocking out thought, and will, and memory.

Wearily, he took a last step toward the light, and his unveiled eyes looked longingly at the rockface, a patch of green and a spray of wildflowers in the midst of the black obsidian.

Gentian, he thought. And I had almost forgotten.

The monsters slithered into the light, blockingxthe entrance, Rising and arching, their pale, human› faces expressionless, they chanted the last of the spell to the humped, opalescent pillar at the edge of the cavernous dark.

Spinel became one with his ancestors and the earth that covered them.