The Dark Queen hovered in the upper chambers of the opal mines. A black dust whirling in the stag shy;nant passages, she heard the rumbling deep in the ground and rejoiced.

What difference did it make that the mines col shy;lapsed? That the elven younglings had escaped?

Most of the Lucanesti were far underground, easy prey for rockslides and spirit naga. As for the rest…

They would suffer the most in her impending return.

For now was the hour, when the Kingpriest chanted and the glain dust, the godsblood, filled with her fierce and abysmal life.

This did not go according to her schedule. Had it not been for that impudent ancient elf-the one who lay stony dead at the very edge of light and free shy;dom-she could have planned all things in her own time.

But now, the remaining opals darkly glittering in the depths of the earth, far from the grasp of her minionsTitwas as good a time as any. And a time to demolish the twenty or so remaining Plainsmen in the southern passes, the fool of a slave, the bard- the lot of them.

As though a wind rose from the deepest recesses of the planet, the dark dust rose and sifted through the cracks in the earth, merging into a hulking black cloud, sprouting tail and talon and tattered wings in its headlong flight for the lofty parapets of the King-priest's Tower.

When the windows spoke to him, clouded in smoke and approaching evening, their message was urgent, angered.

Now is the time, they told the Kingpriest. Your bride awaitsryou in the collected dust.

But he no longer believed the voices. It was fear that prompted his magic, rather than hope and desire. Sifting the glain dust through his trembling hands, he began the first of the incantations, his breath enkindling the dust, spangling it with a harsh, artificial light.

I must not fail, he thought. Bride or no bride, I must do the bidding of the voice.

He did not notice the clouckpf smoke and sand until it surrounded him, pouring through the stained opalescent windows and filling his chamber with a thick, choking haze.

Then the dust in his hands rose and mingled with the blinding air.

You have done your part, the voices proclaimed. I will let you live for now.

He knew better than to ask for the woman, the bride-the beautiful girl crafted of dust opalescent and promised him years ago by the dark voice in the clerestory. She would not come. He knew that he had been deceived. Duped and humiliated, weaker than he had ever imagined himself to be, the King-priest watched helplessly as the cloud darkened and solidified and poured out the opened windows.

* * * * *

Emerging from the temporary stonesleep that had saved him from Takhisis's anger, Stormlight watched from the foot of the Tower as a new whirlwind stirred on the balcony.

Dark sand eddied and rose, and within it the flat, opaque dust of the glain opals. The elf saw three shapes intertwined in the heart of the cloud: Tamex and Tanila, their amber eyes glittering with a strange, reptilian identity…

And the other one, bearded and long-haired …

The one with sea-blue eyes.

The shapes were insubstantial, ever shifting, sometimes indistinguishable from each other, sometimes individual and distinct. He watched, horror-stricken, and he knew, as the sand and opal dust rose into an enormous, boiling cloud above the tower, that his old friend was no more and that the fabled city they had sought together was nothing but glittering, hollow marble.

"Beware, Istar," he whispered, retreating through the streets toward the gate, the burning fields, and the people beyond who were his care and charge.

"Beware in the years to come. For the ground is unsteady."

Larken watched in alarm as the storm rose over the city.

A deep, brooding shadow settled on the tallest of Istar's towers, and above the marbled horizon swirled a shapeless cloud, shot through with wind and lightning.

Suddenly, the cloud took form and settled on the spire, dark wings emerging from the whirling chaos. Now a tail, now a thick, muscular neck and a strong reptilian jaw.

With a cry, Lucas vaulted into the air. Wheeling once above the mouth of the pass, he shot south ahead of the building storm. In dismay, Larken watched him fly-watched her people scatter in fear and panic.

Now a dragon perched atop the Kingpriest's Tower-a dragon of cloud and spinning sand. Slowly the wings began to flutter and fan, and Istar Lake buckled and rolled as a fierce wind passed over it. The clouds above the stormy image wheeled about it like indignant desert birds, and the air itself buckled in sheets of violet lightning,

in a hundred whirlwinds racing throughout the northern sky.

What is it? Vincus signed to the bard.

Nothing. Nothing but a storm.

But the shape, Vincus insisted, his dark hands emphatic. It looks like …

Nothing, Larken signed. Nothing more than sand and old malice.

Then the raging wind rushed over them all.

Far worse than the sterim in the central pass, Takhisis's vengeance was swift and powerful. The alder trees were torn from their roots and hurled against the walls of the pass. Their crash and splinter and the cracking of rocks was deafening: all around Larken, the Plainsmen sought cover, as the wind tunneled through the Western Pass, whipping down into the plains and the desert beyond.

Now, in the ear-splitting racket of wind, in the breaking of nature, Larken took up her lyre.

The wind buffeted her frail song back to her, and, breathless, she stood in the mountain pass as the world uprooted around her.

In the midst of chaos, she found herself peculiarly calm. There was a passage-a way past the shriek shy;ing wind and the devastation. And she knew that the answer lay somewhere in her memory.

"Something perilous," Stormlight had told her. "And altogether new."

She touched the lyre's strings, gathered her last shreds of courage and hope, faced the stormy dragon and began to sing. \

Fierce, driving sand clawed at her throat, and the wind took away her breath. Her voice flowed through the lyre, inaudible above the clamor, and yet she continued, singing despite the fact that no one could hear her, not even Vincus, who stood clinging to her, holding them both down, his face averted from the driving wind.

She could not even hear herself.

My song will not abandon me, she thought. It is the last thing I have against this chaos. And I will sing it until the world breaks in two.

So the song of the bard warred against the shriek of the wind for a long hour, while a dozen Plains shy;men huddledJix alarm and forks of lightning flick shy;ered through the distant wings of the dragon. Twice Larken lost her footing-once she even fell, but Vin-cus's sinewy arms hung on to her, his dark head bent above her trembling shoulder as he stood in the wind like a strong rock in the sterim.

Through it all Larken kept singing, sending all the verses and music she knew into the relentless assault of the wind, composing new melodies with a wild and reckless invention.

Then, slowly, the cloudy dragon drew itself up and sailed high above the Kingpriest's Tower.

As it took to the air, a wave of immeasurable silence-a last calm before the final, strangling tem shy;pest-rolled forth over the lake. The cloudy dragon followed, a swirling figure of sand, its broad wings beating slowly over the dark waters.

In that sudden silence, Larken, still singing, dis shy;covered that no sound came from her throat-none but a faint, exhausted rasping.

It is over, she thought, still trying to sing, opening her^ eyes and cradling the lyre like a sleeping child. I have done I can all to stand against the beast.

Then, in the flash of a second before her last frail note slipped into fear and despair, as she held to her song with her ruined voice, the cry of a hawk frac shy;tured the expectant silence.