She stood before a memory. The gates of Candlekeep, her childhood home, yawned wide before her. The twin crimson standards of the great library hung limply on either side of the entrance, but the doors were gone. The guards were gone. The sights and sounds and smells of childhood were gone, from Hull’s good-natured shouting…

This was bad. Inolin sat on one side of the room’s double bed, trying to control the ever-growing agitation inside her. Phaere and Veldrin had been gone nearly two hours, and the more time that ticked by, the more nervous she became. The Despana guards, in contrast, were as calm as a frozen lake. They’d…

A faint glow of reddish light manifested in the darkness. It grew slowly, gradually absorbing the blackness until there was nothing else left. In the middle of the red appeared a sliver of white. She blinked; the sliver expanded into a round globe for a split-second before winking out of existence entirely. Another blink and…

“There it is.” The strong, proud walls of the De’Arnise keep jutted out of valley, a silent stone warden overlooking a sea of ripe, golden grain. From this far away the main castle seemed small, almost overwhelmed by the press and crowd of surrounding farmland. Here and there were tiny specks of movement: peasants and…

It was a twelve-hour journey by foot to Athkatla: they made it in five, thanks to two fresh geldings and Imoen’s judicious use of haste. They reached the city gates just as the last sliver of sun disappeared behind the horizon. The long shadows of evening melded into a single swath of omnipresent darkness as…