A green glow, shimmering and shining, reached up from the floor of the audience hall and stained the white marble rail and balustrades to the unpleasant green of algae scumming on a still pond. A cold sheen of sweat broke out on her face. She had seen this light before, in dark dungeons in the late watches when her father had waked from nightmare.

Her hand on the cold marble rail, Alhana leaned over, looking down into the well, and mere she saw Lorac Caladon. He sat upon his throne, hunched over a little. He held something cradled in his hands, a thing from which that dreadful light emanated. The green glow shone upward, giving his face a terrible hue, a corpse's hue.

Alhana shuddered. Her heart pounding, she lifted her skirts and ran swiftly across the floor to the wide, winding staircase.

"Father!" she cried, her voice ringing in echoes around the gallery and into the well of the chamber below.

He looked up, but only slowly, as one who is roused from a deep sleep. His face held no color but that of the orb's green glow. With startling suddenness, his eyes flashed, like lightning leaping out from running clouds.

"Be still!" he called.

And he was her father. He was her king.

Alhana stopped midstep, her hand upon the cold marble banister, her foot poised to take the last step.

"Father?"

His voice an ugly snarl, he said, "Be still."

The light of the orb pulsed, like a malevolent heart beating.

Far away, up in the gallery, she heard the voices of servants talking to each other, a woman's raised in question, a man's enjoining silence. Alhana took a step closer to her father, down from the last stair and onto the floor of the audience hall.

"Father," she whispered, "Father, you frighten me. Are you well?"

He did not move, not even to look at her. Another step, and another, and now, by the last light of day, she saw her father's lips tremble. Why, this is the trembling of an old man, she thought, the thought itself like a whisper of treason.

Lorac old? Lorac trembling? Lorac-oh, dear gods, was he frightened?

The green glow faded, drawing back from the king's face, from the hall, and returning to the orb itself. Emboldened, Alhana took another step and then another. At last, when Lorac made no protest, she ran swiftly across the hard marble floor, her little slippers pattering now, her arm-rings jangling in metal's harshest voice. She ran, and she knelt beside him, the Speaker on his throne.

He sat in perfect stillness. His face, like marble, showed no expression, but his eyes, his eyes…

Alhana Starbreeze covered her father's hands with her own, gently. When he did not resist, she lifted the orb and set it upon the stand. In the moment she did, she nearly dropped it. The stand, once white ivory and shaped like two hands lifted in offering, had changed. It was the same stand. She knew it. She could see that, but something had warped it. Something had scraped and clawed it, and now it was not two hands at all, but one large, broad claw with five talons curled. Into those talons, into that claw, the dragon orb of Istar fit as neatly as it had always done.

"My child," whispered the king, her father looking up at her, "my poor Alhana."

His eyes were awash in sadness so deep, so terrible, that Alhana, seeing them, felt she would fall into them as into a drowning pool.

"Father." She touched his face and held it with both hands. Beneath her hands she felt a trembling, the flesh of his face quivering. It was, she thought in horror, in pity, as though he longed to weep but had lost the ability. "Father, please tell me. What is wrong?"

He looked at her from within the frame of her white hands, and now she saw that his pupils were dilated, grown so wide that they gave his eyes the appearance of being coal black. Alhana shivered, and she withdrew her glance in fear. But she did not withdraw her hands, for she feared that if she let him go, her father, the king of all the Sylvan Land, would fall away, spinning down into a terrible dark place.

"My child," he said, his voice quavering. "My child, the world is lost."

What spell had the orb cast to catch him? What spell out of doomed Istar worked here in Silvanost?

"No," she murmured, stepping back, her hands still on him so that he, too, must rise. "No," she said softly, urgently, her arm around his shoulders. How thin they seemed! How bowed down with care! "Father, the world is not lost. Neither is the kingdom. We have the gods on our side. We have E'li himself, and so we will prevail."

Lorac said nothing to agree or protest. Breathing shallowly, like a man in sleep, he allowed her to lead him down from the throne and up the long winding staircase to his chambers. They went in haste, or as quickly as Alhana could manage, for though she neither saw nor heard servants in the gallery, she did hear their voices in the various chambers they passed. She must not allow Lorac to be seen in this condition, not under any circumstance.

Once safely inside her father's suite, she found his chamberlain there, old Lelan, and gave the king into his care. Whispering and hushing, Lelan took the king to his bed and settled him there, sweeping all his careful arrangement of clothing to the floor and tossing the mahogany coffer into a corner of the room as though it were all some pile of leaves blown in with the wind.

"What has happened to him, Lady?" he asked, pulling the bedsilk up over the king's shoulders, daring from long affection to smooth the king's hair back from his face as he would a feverish child's.

Alhana shook her head. "I don't know. I found him like this." She said nothing of the Orb. "Tend him as best you can, Lelan, and be certain to say nothing to anyone. My father will come to himself soon, and we will see that he suffers only from lack of sleep and too much care. I don't have to tell you how deeply it would embarrass him to learn that news of this"-she groped for a word-"this discomfiture had reached anyone's ears."

Lelan bowed. "It will be as you say, my lady."

It would be, she knew, and that knowledge made up the full sum of her confidence as she walked out into the gallery again. Down in the audience hall where the Emerald Throne sat, where the Dragon Orb crouched upon the transformed stand, green light again pulsed. Very faintly it shone now, as though from a great distance.

By the light of that glow Alhana Starbreeze had the sudden vision of her own hands upon the crystal globe, her own fingers grasping the smoothness of the Orb, light shining through and showing what flesh hid-bones and muscle and even blood pulsing through veins. She saw herself lifting the Orb and carrying it all the way up to the gallery, there to lean out over the rail and fling this artifact of unholy Istar down to smash upon the cold marble of the floor below.

And yet, even as she longed to do that, she knew she would not. In some far part of her soul she knew that she must not. The Orb was not only an artifact of Istar, it was an artifact of Lorac Caladon's Test of Magic. The Orb and the King of the Silvanesti were inextricably linked.

The world is lost! So the king had whispered, so her father had groaned as he stared into the light of an orb that had seen the Cataclysm take Istar down into the sea and reshape the face of Krynn.

Alhana turned her back on the light pulsing like a long slow heartbeat, and she went along the gallery to her own quarters. There she sat in the embrasure of the tall window that faced northward. A wisp of fragrance drifted through the open window, the scent of morning in Silvanost, of the dewy herb beds in the Garden of Astarin, the pungent odor of boxwood, the sweetness of breads and cakes as the bakers trundled their wares to the kitchen doors of their customers. It all smelled too normal, so real and safe. And yet, not much was normal these days, and what was real- the war on the border, the refugees on the King's Road, a hungry horde, a shambling host-did not inspire her to feel safe.