The priests had always said the quickest path to solving such unsolvable questions was "soul searching," so the young dwarf did just that. He turned his vision inward, to hunt for what he imagined his soul to be. If there were something wrong with him, as his father seemed so convinced, surely the flaw could be found here. But Azrael didn't find his soul. He found only the dark.

It whispered to him in a voice that sounded very much like his own, only without the edge of anger and resentment he'd grown so accustomed to hearing from himself. He'd long ago forgotten exactly what the dark said to him. He knew, though, that the words had made more sense than anything his parents or the clan priests or anyone else had ever told him. So he acted upon them.

Azrael liked to think the blow came as a particular surprise to his father, since the old man always said his son was never any good with tools.

The dark didn't tell him to complete the slaughter of his family. It didn't have to. Azrael understood the instant his father's corpse finally stopped jerking and twitching that he had found his calling. The blunt fingers his mother had always disparaged as useless for any sort of delicate craft work proved more than adequate to snap her neck. He might not be strong enough to work a bellows for hours on end, but his kin were too slow and muscle-bound to catch him when he fled into the narrow tunnels that channeled waste from the vast underground city.

The dark spoke to him again in the lightless labyrinths outside the city, as he hid from the Politskara, those much-feared police who were hunting him for the murders of his family and anyone else he'd managed to ambush in the months since his father's demise. In return for a promise to destroy beautiful Brigalaure and all who dwelled within her jeweled walls, the dark gifted Azrael with lycanthropy. He'd heard of werebeasts before, but the stories told about them always referred to their powers as a curse. Azrael couldn't imagine why. The transformation was agonizing at first, but he'd grown accustomed to the pain. At times he even enjoyed it-and the abilities he gained were well worth the discomfort. Only once did Azrael wonder if the dark had betrayed him. After a year or more of hunting the hapless inhabitants of Brigalaure, the werebadger grew bored. He fought the boredom, for it seemed to him a sign of ingratitude, but couldn't banish the taint from his thoughts. The dark, he knew, could most certainly read his mind.

It was at a moment when the boredom was strongest that the dark transported Azrael from Brigalaure to the cursed domains through which he had roamed ever since. At first he bemoaned his fate, certain his boredom had earned the dark's wrath. It had offered him no choice in the matter of his relocation. One moment he crouched in a cavern outside Brigalaure, wondering about the mist that suddenly surrounded him. The next instant he stood in a dreary land called, appropriately enough, Forlorn.

He loathed that land, which lacked Brigalaure's beauty and its happy population-not that he valued either thing for itself. Without beauty, he had nothing to defile. To a people who know little of joy, fear and pain are merely a slight degradation of their usual monotonous melancholy.

His subsequent home in Gundarak proved to be no improvement at all. The vampire lord who ruled that place practiced the sort of sweeping, unsophisticated butchery that left Azrael little to do. The careless carnage also offended his nascent aesthetic sensibilities. If murder were an art, Duke Gundar was a hack of the lowest order. Being surrounded by the duke's clumsy slaughter day after day, Azrael was so profoundly unhappy that he even considered ending his own life.

It was then that the dark, silent for so long, spoke to him once more.

Half-heard whispers, voices from the moon-shadow of a corpse-dangled tree, led him from Gundar's domain into the realm of Barovia. Joy and terror mingled there in startling ways. The master of that place, Count Strahd von Zarovich, painted both emotions across his land with broad, bold strokes. When the sun shone, the happiness of the Barovians was almost palpable. When night descended, fear washed across the land and replaced the day's bright colors with a thousand somber hues. This, the dark told Azrael, was the sort of world he could fashion.

Finally, the dark provided the dwarf with the means to that end. The dark gave him Lord Soth. Azrael hadn't recognized their meeting's true purpose, not at first anyway. He only recognized Soth's raw power and quickly cast himself in the role of servant. It was a natural mistake.

In his homeland, the Knight of the Black Rose had been a murderer on a scale Azrael could scarcely imagine. Given the chance to prevent a world-rattling cataclysm, Soth refused. He let his anger and his jealously turn him from his gods-given mission. As a result, thousands upon thousands perished. This was a crime worthy of infamy, one that made Azrael's few dozen murders seem paltry.

Or so it had seemed at the time.

Now, after years of watching the death knight loiter on the throne like so much discarded scrap metal, Azrael thought differently. Soth was weak, incapable of ruling his domain. Even his crimes betrayed his deficiencies. He had not murdered those countless victims of Krynn's Cataclysm. Rather, he merely allowed them to die. He could no more claim credit for those lives than Azrael could add the victims of the White Fever to his tally.

With that recognition of his master's weakness Azrael came to an even more profound realization: Soth was a pawn. The dark was using him to provide its true heir a kingdom, a suitable canvas upon which Azrael could paint his masterpiece of terror. The domain of Sithicus might have formed around Soth, but it was intended for him. All he needed to do was usurp control of the kingdom from its inattentive lord. That was just what he planned to do.

First, though, he would deal with a stone that had been rattling about in his boot for decades.

"No one is to open this," the dwarf said. He patted the lid of the chest that lay in the middle of Ambrose's shop. "Someone does and I'll chop 'em up for Nabon's dinner, right?"

Ambrose nodded glumly. "I wish you'd find another way. Involving me in a double cross of the Vistani-"

"I've watched over you since the accident, haven't I?" the dwarf replied. He reached up to pinch one of Ambrose's fat cheeks. "No fear, shopkeep. They won't blame you for the tainted goods. 'Sides, I've got too much time invested in you to let a troupe of half-wit pickpockets and whores slit your throat."

Ambrose turned away, shoulders slouched. "I wish they would," he muttered.

"Wouldn't do a bit of good," Azrael said flatly as he climbed onto the chest. He laid a rough hand on Ambrose's shoulder and spun him around. With one fat-fingered hand he grabbed the man's face and drew it close to his own. "You're not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you?"

The reply Ambrose managed to spit out was garbled, but it satisfied Azrael. The dwarf pushed the shopkeep away.

"Smart man," Azrael rumbled. "That girl up there is counting on you, shopkeep. You cross me and I've got no reason to stop the pit bosses from putting her to work." A leer split his ugly face. "I'm certain they could find something for her to do. Her mind may be shot, but she ain't half bad looking-for a human."

The reference to Helain silenced Ambrose. With a snort of laughter, Azrael leapt down from the trunk. His iron-shod boots had blighted the intricately carved foliage on the lid with scratches. "Just tend to your business, shopkeep, and know that you're on the right side in this little game."

"I still don't know what you're trying to win," Ambrose said.

"The only stakes that matter," Azrael replied. "Everything."