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  Finally, after a seeming eternity, Zabayus Tarn steps back to examine his handiwork. A tunnel of sorts has been hollowed out of the base of the great megalith, a ragged depression just wide enough to allow him to enter if he crouches down and shimmies in with his legs folded under him. He uses the haft of the greathammer to sweep the pulverised stone and rubble out of the space he’s made, then wriggles into the narrow aperture.

  It has to be here. Somewhere. He’ll tear the whole, great boulder down if he has to, never mind that it’s as tall as a mega-gargant and half-obscured by the collapsed roof it fell through.

  As he feverishly sweeps aside the rubble with the hammer’s ferrule, he suddenly hears a strange sound: a clattering, clearly metallic ring. It comes not from within the little space, but behind him where the rubble that he tossed has hit the dais and scattered.

  Zabayus Tarn shimmies out, crawling around on the dais among the sharp, still-hot rubble, sweeping his gloved hands back and forth in search of–

  There!

  He finds it, half-covered with old stone and bone dust fossilised into a rough, uneven crust. Staring at the curious formation in his hand – a ring of something dull and metallic, clodded with stone and compressed earth – Tarn begins to feel a giddy elation. He slams his prize down upon the stone floor. With each impact, more of the crust falls away and more of the treasure is revealed.

  It is beautiful despite its simplicity: a simple, blood-gold diadem, inscribed with the small, subtle marks of a long-vanished alphabet. For a long time Zabayus Tarn kneels there in the dark, lampwand throwing garish light and long shadows around him; he studies the treasure in his hands, located and unearthed by virtue of his faith, his scholarship, his courage, even his sweat and blood.

  Does it still contain the power that Xymarkias poured into it?

  Part of him, no doubt, recoils at the idea of simply placing the diadem upon his head. He is no fool. If the object once drove a Lumineth mage-lord mad and destroyed his kingdom, how treacherous and intoxicating must its power be? And yet, he cannot deny the attraction of such surrender. What good will it do him, to retrace his steps through this subterranean ruin and scurry back through the desert to the city by the Piercing Lakes where his magical laboratory waits, only to find, upon returning, that the diadem’s power was already long-spent? That it offers him nothing at all?

  No. Better to test the thing here, in this deserted place, where only he is at risk. If the diadem destroys him, so be it: at least he will die alone and take no innocents with him. But if it proves to be as powerful as he suspects…

  Drawing a deep, slow breath, Zabayus Tarn tosses his hat aside and places the diadem of Xymarkias upon his sweaty head.

  For a moment, only a moment, the diadem seems not to fit, clearly fashioned for a head shaped differently from his own, and to very exacting specifications. But then, miraculously, it seems to loosen, to expand and remould itself. It settles into place around his temples as though it has been made for him.

  And with that yielding, the diadem opens its secrets to him.

  It is painful at first: the shattering of a dam. For an untold interval – minutes, hours; time loses all meaning – Tarn is assailed by thoughts and impressions not his own. He is launched high into vasty heavens, tumbling through magical riddles and strange geometries made manifest. He is dangling above horrid, hungry abysses containing secrets he never could have imagined. In that terrifying, seemingly endless interval, Tarn thinks that his consciousness – his mind and soul and very essence – might be blasted from existence by the strange, unidenti­fiable demiurge that inhabits the diadem.

  And then, just as suddenly as it came upon him, it subsides. The tide recedes. Once more he is Zabayus Tarn, alone in a dark, ruined city untenanted for a thousand years.

  And the diadem, now awakened, is his. So long as he possesses it, nothing can stop him.

  ‘At last,’ he says to no one. ‘The age of the Eclipse – the epoch of the Black Sun – is upon us. And this, this pretty little bauble, shall be the instrument of the great change to come.’

  ‘It is quite handsome,’ a stranger’s voice says in the gloom of the ruined, half-collapsed throne room. ‘I fear, however, that it shall only bring you grief.’

  Zabayus Tarn spins towards the sound of the voice, searching the darkness for its owner. When he finds that he can see nothing beyond his immediate surroundings – he’s cast his lampwand down some distance away – he decides to warm up his new trinket with a purely utilitarian task.

  Tarn imagines a colony of small, brightly burning stars in the air between where he now kneels and the chamber’s entrance. In answer, the diadem shivers ever so slightly upon his brow. Long-dormant power courses through it – through him. The stars appear, hundreds of them, drifting lazily, bathing the half-collapsed chamber in a soft, white-gold light that banishes the deepest shadows and reveals Tarn’s unwanted visitor – or rather, visitors.

  There are three of them, standing in tight formation near the chamber’s arched entrance. At the fore is an aelven female – Zaitreci, if he is not mistaken, identifiable by the dark crimson skirts she wears beneath her golden battle armour, as well as the shimmering, frost-blue lunar runes engraved upon that armour. Her skin is pale tan, her eyes the colour of two deep, flashing, red-brown garnets. She might be a young adult, barely out of adolescence, or a seasoned loreseeker, well into middle age. Her ancestry and the long-lingering appearance of youth common among aelf-kind make guessing her age impossible. She holds a pale, elegant wraithwood staff in her hands, capped by a small crescent-moon headpiece housing a tiny, scintillating fragment of aetherquartz. A slender sword hangs sheathed on one hip.

  At her elbow stands another aelven spellcaster – male, pale-skinned and raven-haired. This fellow is rather harsh of aspect – scowling, almost sneering – probably not Lumineth at all. He, too, holds a wizard’s staff at the ready, polished black steel and bearing at its summit a glowing purple amethyst.

  The third member of the party is, like Zabayus Tarn, human: a man of youthful but rugged countenance, with thick, curling auburn hair and a handsome, square-jawed face. His staff sports a fearsome golden lion’s head, the creature’s flashing eyes in fact two magically bestirred rubies.

  The aelven female steps forward.

  ‘Remove the diadem and leave it here,’ she says flatly. ‘Do so and there will be no trouble.’

  Tarn’s head cocks in disbelief.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asks. ‘How did you find me? Find this place?’

  ‘Immaterial,’ the aelven female says. ‘Will you comply?’

  No. He will not.

  Tarn summons an image of what he requires in his mind – the enormous, swiping hand of an angry gargant, slamming hard against these would-be thieves. To unleash his will, he stretches out his hand. Pure, unbridled kinetic energy – an invisible wall of force – blasts outward, causing every carven pillar, crumbling wall and engraved flagstone in the throne chamber to shudder.

  In answer, the aelven witch raises her staff, levels it before her, and throws up an unseen shield. Her companions do the same. The shockwave sweeps right over them like a white-capped river sluicing past immovable boulders. When the spent force slams the outer wall of the chamber, there is a thunderous shudder and small fragments of cracked stone rain down upon them.

  The mountain groans ominously.

  ‘Who sent you?’ Tarn demands. ‘I’ve worked too hard and too long to claim this prize only to hand it over to the likes of you!’

  ‘You’ve searched hard and long, truly,’ the aelven female says, advancing again. ‘And you’ve shown great skill and daring. But I tell you, Zabayus Tarn, the power you’ve claimed is not power you can wield for long. It will destroy you.’

  Her tone is of eminent reasonableness – one friend advising another, or a low-key diplomat arguing with a peer.

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ Tarn says, dreaming up another surprise for her.

  She stops a short distance from the dais steps.

  ‘My name is Thelana Evenfall,’ she says. ‘A loreseeker of the Lumineth. I have come here to apprise you of the folly of your ambition. If you leave here with that diadem, it will destroy you – and possibly all life in the Mortal Realms.’

  Tarn has heard enough.

  With all the power of his will, he summons a ball of pulsing, plasmic energy from the aether. The sphere – a marriage of searing heat and pure, undiluted, destructive power – grows in the palm of his hand and he drives it hard and straight towards Thelana Evenfall.

  The aelven witch raises her wizard’s staff. There is a loud pop and a bright explosion as the crackling energy flares and dissipates in the air.

  Very well, then. Something far more deadly.

  Tarn reaches out with his mind, and brings the flagstones of the floor to life.

  In an instant, a quintet of tall, lumbering stone giants tear themselves free from the floor of the chamber, trailing dust and dirt and broken shards of the bedrock. They are tall, awkward and malformed, but they move according to Tarn’s iron will. The chamber rocks with the loud, terrible thunder of stone scraping stone; of huge, rocky feet stomping and shuffling; of stony, dusty voices crying in idiot aggression as they charge towards the three unready wizards.

  The handsome human is the first to face the fury of the stone giants as two lumber towards him and reach with eager, blocky hands. The square-jawed wizard scrambles for a place to make a stand, but his two blocky adversaries have him caught in a pincer. The young sorcerer stands, his back against the chamber’s outer wall.

  Before the human wi
zard can find some solution, an escape, Tarn’s attentions are torn away as two more of the brutes close upon the second aelven wizard – the dark-haired male with the sullen look about him. As the Darkling aelf retreats, he conjures balls of flashing green plasma-fire out of the air and hurls them towards the advanc­ing giants. The fireballs slam into Tarn’s blocky creations, exploding on impact. The fire burns hot, slagging wide swathes of their bodies and leaving glowing, superheated scars upon them – veins of bright red and sputtering green – before cooling and dimming to smooth, heat-blasted black, but none of the fireballs slow their steady advance.

  The giants keep coming. The Darkling wizard’s options narrow.

  A screaming roar and a stench like scorched air draw Tarn’s attentions from the aelven and human wizards to the witch who leads them. Clearly, she has a different bag of tricks up her billowing sleeves. She unleashes bright skeins of aether-lightning upon the stone giants, choosing the novel strategy of hitting each in turn with a full-power blast instead of trying to split the power differential between them. The giants are slowed by her attacks, each bending and thrashing under the weight of the lightning as it tears into them, immobilising one, forcing another backward as its partner manages to advance a shaky step or two before suddenly finding itself bearing the brunt of her onslaught.

  Curse her! The witch is powerful.

  It occurs to Tarn that now would be a good time for him to make his escape, while the wizards fight for their lives. A clear line of egress presents itself between the warring parties. Hastily looking to his adversaries, Tarn sees them safely distracted: the young wizard unleashing short-length waves of aelemental force from his staff that travel through the floor of the chamber, each shock sending the stone giants reeling; the witch’s fierce lightning and the aelven wizard’s searing green fire dazzling Tarn’s vision.

  Tarn leaps down from the dais and dashes for the exit.

  The Lumineth female sees him. Before he can attend to her, she unleashes a burst of lightning from her staff that strikes one of his nearer stone giants and sends the creature staggering backward – right into Tarn’s path!

  There is no way to arrest his motion, to change his course.

  Thus, Tarn does all that he could think to do: he wills the toppling stone giant out of his path. As the great lumbering form falls, it turns to dust and sand, and he dashes right through the billowing cloud of its remains, breathing in a great gout of dust that induces a terrible coughing fit.

  Off to his right, the Darkling wizard loses his ongoing battle with the two stone giants that have cornered him. One closes its enormous, rocky fingers round his throat while the other grabs his waist in its shovel-like hands. As the aelven wizard shouts and struggles, the two stone giants pull and the wizard is torn in half. Blood and viscera paint the floor of the chamber.

  Tarn registers the shocked face of the young human wizard – his terror, his disgust, his fury – then sees him make a breakneck decision. The human wizard rushes forward in three long steps, threading a narrow gap right between two closing stone giants and dashing past them before they can arrest his flight. Clearly, his friend’s sudden, ­horrible death has made him daring.

  Tarn knows the young wizard is about to unleash some powerful, magical attack. Through the diadem, he unleashes a massive shockwave that drives back everything in its path. The air itself scuds in a rushing, white wall as the floor and ceiling before him buckle and crack. The young wizard throws up his staff and attempts a warding spell, but he is too late – the shockwave sends him rocketing across the chamber in a balled-up heap. To Tarn’s consternation, he also notes that his shockwave strikes two of his stone giants, pulverising both into rubble.

  But he does not slow. There, right before him – there is the doorway! There is his escape. If he can just get back out into the passage and leave this chamber and his enemies behind him…

  Suddenly, a bright flash – a flash so bright that Tarn reflexively raises his arm to shield his eyes. He hears stone crack and explode. The world is a hail of rubble and rushing wind. One of the stone giants has exploded. The outrushing, explosive force of its demise hits Tarn from the right and sends him reeling. He hits the floor, rolls, bounces over something hard. Before Tarn can make sense of what is happening, he slams hard into the wall of the chamber and feels the breath knocked out of his lungs. His vision goes black, aswarm with sparks and whirling shadows.

  He may only have moments – the barest instant.

  Coughing, sputtering, Zabayus Tarn struggles to his feet. He sways, dazed and unstable. He can make no sense of the whirling world around him. Nonetheless, he reaches out with his diadem, willing a massive, outbound shockwave – a burst of force and invisible heat so concentrated, so powerful, that it will obliterate his enemies in an instant.

  The diadem obeys. Tarn feels the backdraught of the heatwave, hears and feels the chamber shudder in protest. Enormous shards of stone tear free from the ceiling, crash down around him. He thinks he hears more of the stone giants disintegrate before the searing wall of fire he’s summoned. He hears the explosive collapse of the dais and the megalith that stood upon it.

  Then, blessed silence. There is only the sound of his own breath. The chamber cracks and groans around him, like a calving iceberg. It threatens to collapse in the next instant, to bury him in answer for the damage he’s just done.

  Zabayus Tarn blinks. Gulps breath. Come on, come on… I need to see. If I can just find the exit again, I can flee, unencumbered, before this whole place comes down.

  His vision clears, little by little. Zabayus Tarn swings his gaze about the chamber, seeking the piles of ash and smouldering remains that will assure him that his enemies have been vanquished.

  Instead, he sees two upright forms in the gloom.

  One: the young-faced wizard, lion-headed staff held out before him, bent and dazed, but otherwise uninjured. And there, directly before Tarn, in her shining golden armour and crimson robes…

  ‘Impossible,’ Tarn snarls.

  ‘The diadem gives you power,’ Thelana Evenfall says, ‘but we have power of our own. Surrender, before this whole mountain comes down upon us.’

  ‘I’ll show you power!’ Tarn roars, and lashes out with the magic of his stolen diadem.

  These are the last things Zabayus Tarn sees:

  A bright wave of plasmic fire, emanating from where he stands.

  That fire, rolling outward in a wide arc to engulf his remaining foes.

  The aelven witch and the young human sorcerer raise their staffs, almost in unison, shouting spell-words of their own.

  The wall of fire and light recoils, changing direction.

  The heat and light rush back towards Zabayus Tarn, vaporising him in an instant.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Thelana Evenfall paused in her recollection of that terrible duel, large brown eyes downcast, lips pursed. A terrible hush fell over the amphitheatre as the small contingent of students present, spread loosely on the amphitheatre’s lower tiers, waited, rapt, for their teacher to continue.

  Edinor, on the second tier from the bottom, realised that he had been leaning forward in his seat, fingers interlaced, knuckles white. Apparently, the great sage’s story had thrilled Edinor more deeply than he’d even first realised. Now, as the other students began to hiss and chitter, wondering aloud what was taking so long – why did Thelana not continue? – Edinor found himself horribly impatient, feeling almost betrayed. Why would their teacher abandon the tale now, when all that remained was her own, grim summary of what had driven Zabayus Tarn into that ruin in the first place? And likewise, what had given Thelana Evenfall the power to stop him?

  ‘What happened?’ someone demanded.

  Edinor was simultaneously embarrassed for the speaker and thankful.

  Thelana finally seemed to note the unrest in the amphitheatre. Clearly, she’d gone somewhere inward, deeper into her thoughts. Though Thelana Evenfall was, like most Lumineth, loath to show feelings and terribly enigmatic, Edinor felt that he’d learned to read what subtle hints his favourite mentor sometimes displayed.