With nothing more than his force of will, he directed the jet of raging flame against the highwayman Rolf, charring his arms and face to brittle cinders. Aeron allowed the searing heat to play against the toppling bandit until he vanished in a pillar of fire, then swept the jet around to scorch Rolf's companions. With a distant fragment of his mind, he noted that the flames were a shade of black or purple that made his eyes ache.

One of the highwaymen nearly escaped, but Aeron greedily drew power enough to beat the ruffian into the ground and blacken his flesh until it sizzled and smoked. When all four had stopped moving, he allowed the dark flames to gutter and fade, leaving a roaring, buzzing sound in his ears and bitter ice clinging to his bones. The world began to grow ghostly, and he looked down to see his body fading into insubstantiality. But dusk isn't near, he thought irrationally. The unearthly chill of the crossing blasted him, freezing the flow of blood down his back to a dark trickle. Aeron howled in pain as the shadow claimed him.

He opened his eyes and found himself standing in the phantasmal gloom of the twilight plane, looking at the hills and the burned-out tavern as if through dark, smoked glass. Aeron realized that he felt neither the cold nor the pain of his wound. He reached behind him and set his hand on the arrow shaft. As if he'd done it for years, he willed himself to intangibility and watched the arrow clatter to the ground, passing through the dark wisps of his body. He was part of the shadow plane now. There was no going back.

He turned in a slow circle, his thoughts sluggish and indistinct. He wasn't hungry, he wasn't thirsty, he wasn't cold. There was no pain, no urgency. He remembered that he'd been walking east, but it was hard to recall why he'd chosen that path. Closing his eyes, Aeron tried to decide what to do.

He could dimly sense a brilliant hint of power somewhere to the north. He turned his thoughts that way, trying to discern what it was that he felt, and suddenly in his mind's eye he saw the Shadow Stone, pulsing in its vaulted chamber beneath the ruined monolith. Its energies were intertwined with his, and it responded to his silent call, flaring into life and reaching out with an inarticulate demand that dragged Aeron ten paces to the north before he opened his eyes and realized that he was marching mindlessly in that direction.

From the cold ashes of his razed soul, the first stirrings of fear arose. "I'm not dead," he said, willing his feet to stop moving. "I'm not dead. Not yet. I don't know if I'm alive, but I know what that damned stone will do to me if I let it."

But that's the price you paid for your knowledge, Aeron, a voice inside his mind mocked. You wanted power, and you found it. Now you try to flee your fate?

"What fate? Oriseus deceived me. I didn't choose this."

You knew exactly what Oriseus offered, and you didn't shy away. He didn't deceive you. You deceived yourself.

"How can you say that? Who would want this?" Aeron deliberately turned his back on the insidious pull from the north and willed himself over the road. He hardly felt his feet strike the ground, and with every few steps, the gloom around him seemed to shimmer and he found that he'd covered hundreds of yards with a step. He decided that it didn't matter and continued to argue with the cynical voice. "He won't fool me again," he stated.

He'll have no need to. You're a slave of the stone. Where's your life, your substance? You're nothing more than a wraith, hollow, empty. The voice seemed to relish this thought. As long as you struggle against the darkness, you are a mere phantom, a ghost caught between the worlds.

Aeron stopped, unwilling to confront the bitter thought. "You're lying. I'll leave any time now. Dawn can't be far off." He realized that he was speaking to himself, yet the argument seemed to have a fearsome weight to it, as if his very soul depended upon the outcome. The stars danced and burned in frozen glory overhead, but Aeron ignored his surroundings. The internal battle was much more significant; anything that he saw or thought he saw around him was a mere manifestation of the contentious struggle within.

You begin to understand.

Aeron thought carefully for a long time, holding his mind to the task with iron discipline. "I touched the stone with my magic, and so it is my magic that is tainted."

Had you set your hand on the stone, as the others did, you would have been lost without hope of redemption.

"And it is my magic that keeps me here. I don't belong in the shadow land; no living man does. And so by daylight I've been free to walk the waking world. At night, the Shadow Stone grows strong enough to drag me into its own plane. And each day that passes, each night I walk in the realm of the shadow, my reality fades."

You are almost spent. You lack the strength now to return to the daylight against the stone's influence.

"I must expunge any magical power that I have left to me in order to eliminate the stone's hold." Aeron mulled that over. He still had a half-dozen spells remaining in his mind, spells he'd managed to preserve throughout his travels. The only way he could imagine to rid himself of magic would be to speak each spell, cast it here in the shadow, and dissipate its energies. When all the spells were gone, he'd have no magic for the stone to retain its hold on him. And he might escape the shadow prison that sought to claim him.

You will be left powerless. Your spellbooks remain in the college. And there is only one source of magic here for you. Each spell you speak must be powered by the stone, and therefore, with each casting, its influence over you will grow stronger. You will fall completely under its power long before you escape the plane of shadow.

"That," said Aeron, "will depend on me."

He weighed the options, thinking it through, but there was really no choice. The plane of shadow was devouring him slowly, dissipating his life in its endless gloom. He was certain to perish if he remained. The stone might or might not overpower him. His only hope lay in the course of madness.

He turned and looked around him. He stood on a long, open ridge, a dark line of woods off to his right, a dim ruined castle a mile or so across untended fields to his left. It was as good a place as any. Deliberately he closed his eyes and forced the knotted symbol for the spell of shielding to the forefront of his mind and set it free.

Streaming up from the barren ground, icy tendrils of blackness poured into Aeron's body, filling him with something hateful and cold. His mind reeled and his heart ached with revulsion, but he worked through the spell and discarded it uselessly into the night. He immediately selected the charm of blindness and stammered it out while his body convulsed and his blood ran as sluggishly as a filthy, choked sewer. His mind already reeled on the brink of oblivion.

You can't do it. The stone's overwhelming you.

"Not until I let it," Aeron hissed in response. He reached deep into his reserves of will, finding strength even beyond the limits of what he'd thought he possessed, and barked out the next two spells, enduring the cold, black rottenness that surged and seethed in his soul, forcing his mind above the rising tide of insanity. If he failed, his life was the least of the things he would forfeit.

Phantasms of terror and mist swirled around him under the lightless sky, drawn by the sorcery he unleashed. He was burning like a beacon on the hilltop, shrouded in a cold white fire that danced like will-o'-the-wisps in the marshes. He hammered his way through the next, a spell of disenchantment, and botched it badly . . . but it was spent, and now one last spell remained, a spell of illusion. With the last of his strength and sanity, Aeron gibbered the words, and the raging power of the Shadow Stone gave it form and then destroyed it.