She issued a mental command of dismissal through the relic.

The link jerked and parted, gone. Nogah took an involuntary step back.

The eye finally blinked. A basso scream blasted through the hall: Gethshemeth's voice.

"You misunderstand my role."

Each word was so loud it was like a separate assault. Nogah sputtered. "I… you… you are here because I commanded your aid…" "No."

The negation was like a gate crashing down, cutting off escape.

"I am here for what you retrieved for me from below."

"The stone is mine!" yelled Nogah in sudden understanding, clutching it and pulling back. "I summoned you, and I can dismiss you. Leave me!"

The tentacle tip swaying before Nogah lashed forward and struck her with the strength often monitors.

She blacked out. A moment later, consciousness blinked back. She was in the air, tumbling head over flippers. She didn't have the Dreamheart. "No-"

A wall arrested Nogah's trajectory. If not for her residual claim on the relic's power, she would have died in that instant.

As it was, she slid to the floor and crumpled into a heap. She could only blink as the kraken's tentacle tip encircled the Dreamheart. Tentacle and relic retreated up through the hole in the ceiling.

"That which was ancient before the world breathed is now mine."

Nogah tried to rise, collapsed. "Divinity itself is now within my reach." Nogah sobbed.

The rain sputtered a while longer, then stopped. It hadn't been enough to douse the wildfire that blazed to the south, burning a swath through the seedling pines of Gulthmere Forest. In some places, the fire flared so bright it cast orange highlights on the low clouds. Winding columns of smoke and soot twisted up toward those same clouds, merging into a single, ashen morass.

Raidon Kane coughed in the damp, sooty air. He wondered how far he had traveled. Not far, given his condition. Then how long had it been since he staggered west from Starmantle's crazed gates? Plaguechanged ghouls nearly ended him there. One tried to eat his leg. Raidon worried more about the creature's claim, that the monk was "spellscarred."

His exhaustion was a physical weight lying on his back. He was feverish, and his damaged foot had at last gone numb. His body's overwhelming fatigue tried to convince his mind that an immediate nap was the best possible choice.

Raidon struggled to crawl onto a large outcrop. He imagined it would be more defensible than the plain. He'd seen jackals sniffing around, and he worried other predators might be trailing him from Starmantle. Undead predators with too many mouths.

The rain made the outcrop slick. He kept losing his grip. Even when he found a good hold, the piece crumbled, sending him sliding back toward the ground.

Once a small ledge broke under his weight to reveal a cyst of red spiders, each the size of one of Raidon's hands. The wildfire gleamed ominously from their scarlet carapaces. The arachnids clacked oversized fangs at Raidon, and then scurried away in a single line like a tendril of blood.

He was nearly to the top. Then a spasm in his acid-burned foot caused him to backslide. He slid down half the distance he had just so laboriously climbed.

"By Xiang's seven swords."

Raidon's concentration was absent. He couldn't summon the mental discipline necessary to heal his wounds. The skin from his foot and leg was peeling away, and blood constantly oozed from the raw wound. Dirt crusted everything. Infection had likely already set in.

Raidon tried to push aside concerns over his injury. He couldn't worry about that now. He needed sleep, and a safe place for it.

A new pain seared. The nerves in his lower leg were not quite dead. The sting sawed right through the shreds of his focus. Raidon slid all the way back down to the outcrop's base, scraping skin from his fingers and forearms.

He lay face down in the mud, coughing into the cruel earth that apparently had decided this day was to be his last.

Would that be so bad, he wondered?

"Try again, Raidon," came a voice from nowhere. "You have nothing more to lose."

The monk raised his head from the mud to glance weakly around. He was alone.

Of course. As his mind gave up its sovereignty over reason, he supposed chimeras would appear to bedevil him.

But the phantom voice had a point.

Unless he discovered the strength necessary… well, death would claim him. So why not try again? One more hard effort, he told himself. After that, he could rest, hopefully enough to lift the exhaustion that hung on his limbs and eyelids like ballast.

He endured another fit of coughing that threatened to scrape his lungs right out of his chest.

What was it the elders of Xiang Temple taught?

"The usefulness of a cup is its emptiness," he whispered.

Nothing could help him now but his own force of will. Anything was possible, or nothing.

He prepared for a final effort.

Waves flashed past the prow. The water moved independently of the ship, giving the illusion the craft moved more swiftly than its true speed. The vessel was four days and four nights out of New Sarshel's port. The sky was cloudless, and stars in the millions studded the heavens, a plethora of riches hinting at distances and ages vast beyond comprehension.

An elaborate figurehead hung on the pirate ship's stem, below the bowsprit. The figurehead was a half painted, half sculpted woman with shimmering green scales in place of clothing. She leered into the night, her eyes unnaturally brilliant. The figurehead gave the ship her name, the Green Siren.

The Green Siren did not fly its true privateer colors; it still ran under the flag of Marhana Shipping.

A tall man cloaked in what seemed darkness stood at the ship's prow, above and slightly behind the figurehead. The edges of his cloak flapped in the wind, echoing the movements of the much larger sail luffing and snapping above.

The man withdrew a small, dull tin from his cloak. The tin contained death. A long, slow death, popularly conceptualized as a one-way trip down an imaginary road. A crimson road, red like the eyes of those who used what was inside the tin.

The man's eyes were not red, but he was most certainly a traveler. He owed his lack of symptoms to his pact with the Lord of Bats.

It had seemed like a good deal at the time, reflected Japheth.

He carefully removed the tin's lid. Inside lay nestled his supply of traveler's dust: tiny roseate crystals, each slightly larger than a grain of sea salt.

Shielding the contents from the wind with his forearm, he plucked forth a crystal.

Japheth tilted his head back and, with practiced grace, dropped the grain into his left eye. "Lord of Bats, protect me," he whispered.

Japheth learned of the entity called the Lord of Bats when he was an acolyte librarian working the back stacks of the many-towered library of Candlekeep. In the confusion and turmoil following the Spellplague, and later, the Keeper of Tome's mysterious disappearance, the magical wards that protected the sensitive and dangerous scrolls and tomes from casual perusal in Candlekeep failed for some time.

The aftermath of Mystra's murder also marked the period Japheth put his first tentative foot on the crimson road.

Back then, no one yet realized that, once addicted to traveler's dust, an early death was inescapable for the user, regardless of whether it was quick or prolonged.