The helmet hushed into place over the mass of his hair, the lines of his profile, infinitely cold, and became him. His sense of all things exploded outward still further; he could see magic like new colours, feel ley-lines of power that lead to other worlds, feel life and death and all the strange places in-between, a familiar-unfamiliar urgency, the want to live, vicious and darkly primal and defiant against that ris—

Something black and cold clawed into his mind, trained it by force and pain to focus on the room and the remaining sense of his body. It spoke to him, in no voice he recognised, piercing, white-hot.


Beyond light and knowledge go you now to your enemy, through fire and abyss.

Not to Mair, but to some eldritch, ancient place well beneath it. The knowing lapped over him coldly. Mair was a new thing, built on the bones of a place of great lamentation and suffering. Casinos and brothels were just a shallow growth, a coat of paint, covering a place where in the ages before time men had given up their dreams, their hearts, their lives, in pursuit of gilt-edged fantasy. Where like betrayed like, and where in the far beginning the first seeds of greed and deceit had been made to grow and take form... which for ever sprout anew, and bears dark fruit even unto the last days.

It was not a mortal thing, that dealt in dreams and children.