Her entire back was soaked with blood and she quickly became light-headed and dizzy. A moment later it occurred to her that she had not been engulfed by the creatures gathered on the dock. She looked up to see that the monsters had come as close as they could with any degree of safety.

The magic of the apparatus is fatal to them upon contact, Myrmeen thought. Only Sixx and the old woman were safe because they had recited spells of protection against the energies. Dymas had gone to Sixx's side even when he knew it would mean his death; Reisz's arrow had been unnecessary.

"Take her," Myrmeen said, assuming that Krystin was close. The girl appeared before the fighter and took the child from her arms. Myrmeen dragged herself to her feet and turned to confront Lord Sixx.

Behind them, the structures formed by the apparatus suddenly revealed an open center. In that void, a large, rolling cloud of nebulous energy appeared. At the center of the sphere that was forming Myrmeen could see a second round patch of darkness and understood that she was not merely looking at the absence of light, but at entropy, the unraveling of all physical principles known to humanity. The black dot at the ball's core grew until it resembled a pupil.

An eye, Myrmeen thought in shock. She realized that she was staring at the detached eye of something large enough to dwarf the docks, a creature that looked out with eyes of darkness and absorbed reality in its wake, changing the laws of reason to suit its own desires.

"Lord Sixx, it is time!" the first acolyte screamed.

"No," he hissed. "This one dies first."

Myrmeen drew her stolen sword, which she had taken from the shop they had looted, and advanced on the man, her legs nearly giving out with the exertion.

"Not that way," Lord Sixx said as he yanked her crossbow shaft from the cluster of eyes in his exposed chest. The Eyes of Domination flared. "Watch closely."

The five remaining eyes on his chest suddenly locked their gazes with Myrmeen's and changed color. All five suddenly took on the cast of her own eyes-deep blue with golden slivers-and suddenly she was no longer on the docks. The rain had stopped, and her wound had vanished. Darkness surrounded her.

She wondered briefly if she were dead. She knew that it could happen very quickly: an explosion so instant and devastating that she would have no time to become aware of her moment of death. In her mind she ran through a catalogue of other ways in which she could have been dispatched that would explain her presence in this noiseless, formless void.

"What's happening?" she cried. "Where am I?"

She recalled the eyes of Lord Sixx, the eyes she had seen in a nightmare. Suddenly she understood. He had used those eyes to transport her to another place, a land of the mind. None of this was real.

But how could that be? she wondered. It felt real. It tasted real. The sounds were very real. Music slowly drifted in her direction. Bellophat? No, that was impossible. He had been destroyed, his music stopped forever. She recognized the lullaby, played on a lute, one of her father's compositions.

"Help me," a distraught voice called from behind her. She turned, fairly certain that what she would see would be a horror that would inflame her nightmares for years, should she survive this encounter and escape this place.

Her father was there. His body had been pulled apart, stretched to impossible elasticity as it had been in her dream. But this time his face and chest were still intact, while the rest of his body had been ripped to steaming bands of muscle, bone, and bleeding tissue.

"I went there because you were hungry," he sobbed. "I didn't want to die. I wouldn't have if not for you."

She was not moving. Her legs were not in motion, but she was getting closer to the web. In a sudden, instinctive burst of understanding, she knew that this gibbering creature before her was not her father. It was nothing more than a nightmare Sixx had dredged up from her past. This isn't real, she thought. Sixx is trying to get at me though my weaknesses, my fears. But I'm tired of being afraid. I'm sick of feeling guilty.

Sixx could shape this place to suit his needs. She understood that if he broke her will here, he would control her forever. And if he murdered her in this place, she would die in the real world. A smile came to her face, because she knew that it also worked both ways.

"I've had enough," she said, pressing her hands together as if she were clutching a sword. Suddenly a long, burning silver shaft sliced itself from the darkness and she felt the weight of her phoenix armor.

/ want to make the monsters go away, a voice from her locked up memories called. Myrmeen identified the voice and realized that what she had told Krystin was wrong; her father had not spoken those words, even though he had loved her very much and would have echoed the sentiment, given the chance. It had been her second husband, the man she had loved until the day he died, though she had not realized that until this very moment. He had been the one to forge this armor. He had given her the strength to wall herself up emotionally until she was ready to deal with the horrors of her past, ready to face her private pain.

Staring at the bastardized image of her father, she knew she had faced it already. She had dredged up all the terrors she had been hiding from, confronted them, and survived. What was before her now was nothing but a lie, an illusion of the mind and the heart.

She had been a victim. All of her life she had blamed herself for tragedies that were beyond her ability to control. She had not sent her father off to be murdered. She had not asked to have her daughter stolen from her.

Myrmeen raised her sword and cleared her mind. She no longer heard either her father's music or his pitiful wails. The man he had been would never have cried in this way. He would have met his end with dignity. Staring into his eyes, she planted her legs firmly, held the sword parallel to the unseen floor beneath her, and held out her left hand, assuming the first position of defense that the man who had given her the name Lhal had taught her.

The screaming monstrosity racing toward her no longer resembled her father. It had dark hair, a widow's peak, and eyes covering its entire body. The creature was not a mere construct that Sixx had created to fool her, it was Sixx himself in disguise, terror painted upon his face. He had exerted too much power and could not arrest his flight as he raced toward Myrmeen. As Sixx thundered close, Myrmeen shifted her weight and thrust the sword forward, impaling the screaming figure.

An explosion of blood engulfed her senses, and she suddenly found herself back on the docks, moving in midstride, Lord Sixx's scream echoing in her ears. The dark man was before her, his many eyes glazing over in shock. Myrmeen stood as if she still held the sword, and Sixx's chest had been mangled, blood streaming from a terrible wound that had been opened on the psychic landscape. She had no idea if such an injury would have harmed him in this reality-he might have laughed at being impaled-but this wound was different. This one he had suffered within his mind, and even he could not argue with its results. Each of the man's eyes turned blank as he fell and struck the ground.

Lord Sixx was dead.

"You're too late!" the first acolyte howled as she held up the apparatus. "You're-"

She stopped, a stream of blood spewing from her mouth as a sword sliced her heart in two from behind. A gloved hand reached forward and snatched the apparatus from the woman as she sank to her knees, the remaining acolytes mimicking her motions. Myrmeen stumbled forward another step as she saw the laughing, burned face of Reisz Roudabush, his blood-drenched sword in one hand, the apparatus in the other.