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Elmara nodded.

Ilhundyl waved his hands, and darkness enshrouded the chamber, save for two globes of radiance that hung above the Mad Mage and the young intruder. They looked at each other, and when Ilhundyl spoke again, his voice echoed with tones of doom.

"Know then, O Elmara, that you must apprentice yourself to a mage, and once you learn to hurl fire and lightning, slip away without a word to anyone, travel far, and join an adventuring band. Then see the Realms, face danger, and use your spells in earnest."

The ruler of the Calishar leaned forward, voice thinning in urgent precision. "When you can battle a lich spell for spell and prevail, seek out Ondil's Book of Spells and take it to the altar of Mystra on the island called Mystra's Dance. Surrender it to the goddess there."

His voice changed again, thundering once more. "Once you know you hold Ondil's tome in your hands, look no longer on its pages, nor seek to learn the spells therein, for that is the sacrifice Mystra demands! Go, now, and do this."

The light above the Mad Mage's high seat faded, leaving Elmara facing darkness. "My thanks," she said, and turned away. As she walked back down the great chamber, the globe of light moved with her. The light faded beyond the great bronze doors, which ground shut with their usual boom. When the echoes had died away Ilhundyl added quietly, "And once you've got me that book, go and get yourself killed, mageling."

Garadic's handsome features melted soundlessly into the fanged and scaled horror of his true face. The scaled minion stepped forward and asked curiously, "Why, master?"

The Mad Mage frowned. "I've never met anyone with so much latent power before. If she lives, she could grow in magic to master the Realms." He shrugged. "But she'll die."

Garadic took another step, his tail scraping along the floor. "And if she does not, master?"

Ilhundyl smiled and said, "You will see to it that she does."

Ten

IN THE FLOATING TOWER

Great adventure? Hah! Frantic fear and scrabbling about in tombs or worse, spilling blood or trying to strike down things that can no longer bleed. If ye're a mage, it lasts only until some other wizard hurls a spell faster than thee. Speak to me not of "great adventure."

Theldaun "Firehurler" Ieirson

Teachings of an Angry Old Mage

Year of the Griffon

It was a cold, clear day in early Marpenoth, in the Year of Much Ale. The leaves on the trees all around were touched with gold and flame-orange as the Brave Blades reined in beneath the place they'd sought for so long.

Their destination hung dark and silent above them: the Floating Tower, the lifeless hold of the long-dead mage Ondil, hidden away in this bramble-choked ravine in the wilderlands somewhere well west of the Horn Hills.

Upright it stood, a lone, crumbling stone tower reaching into the bright sky… but as the tales had said, its base was a ruin of tumbled stones, and there was a stretch of empty air twelve men or so high between the ground and the dark, empty room of the tower's sixth level. Ondil's tower hung patiently in the air as it had for centuries, held up by an awesome sorcery.

The Blades looked up at it, and then looked away-except for the only woman among them, who stood with a wand raised warily, peering past her hawk nose at the silent, waiting keep hanging above her.

The Blades had come here by a long and perilous road. In a spider-haunted sorcerer's tomb of lost Thaeravel, said by some to be the land of mages from which Netheril sprang, they'd found writings that spoke of the mighty archwizard Ondil and his withdrawal in his later days into a spell-guarded tower to craft many new and powerful sorceries.

Then old Lhangaern of the Blades crafted a potion to make his limbs young again, drank it-and fell screaming into crumbling dust before their eyes… and they were without a mage.

The Brave Blades dared not take the road again without so much as a light-bringing incantation to aid them. So when a young