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By Root 498 0

if from a darkened corner of the great main chamber, observed the shimmering door of black crystal open and a newcomer enter. He started and again attempted to wake himself, without success. The man was his father, Sadric the Eighty-Sixth, a tall man with heavy-lidded eyes and a misery in him. He passed through the throng as if it did not exist. He walked directly towards Elric and stopped two paces from him. He stood looking at him, the eyes peering upwards from beneath the heavy lids and prominent brow. He was a gaunt-faced man who had been disappointed in his albino son. He had a sharp, long nose, sweeping cheekbones and a slight stoop because of his unusual height. He fingered the thin, red velvet of his robe with his delicate, beringed hands. Then he spoke in a clear whisper which, Elric remembered, it had always been his habit to employ.

“My son, are you, too, dead? I thought I’d been here but a fleeting moment and yet I see you changed in years and with a burden on you that time and fate have placed there. How did you die? In reckless combat on some upstart’s foreign blade? Or in this very tower in your ivory bed? And what of Imrryr now? Does she fare well or ill, dreaming in her decline of past splendour? The line continues, as it must—I will not ask you if that part of your trust was kept. A son, of course, born of Cymoril whom you loved, for which your cousin Yyrkoon hated you.”

“Father—”

The old man raised a hand that was almost transparent with age. “There is another question I must ask of you. One that has troubled all who spend their immortality in the Forest of Souls, which surrounds this shade of a city. Some of us have noticed that the city itself fades at times and its colours dim, quivering as if about to vanish. Companions of ours have passed even beyond death and, perhaps, I shudder to contemplate it, into non-existence. Even here, in the timeless region of death, unprecedented changes manifest themselves and, those of us who’ve dared ask the question and also give its answer, fear that some tumultuous event has taken place in the world of the living. Some event, so great is it, that even here we feel our souls’ extinction threatened. A legend says that until the Dreaming City dies, we ghosts may inhabit its earlier glory. Is that the news you bear to us? Is this your message? For I note on clearer observation that your body lives still and this is merely your astral body, released for a while to wander the realms of the dead.”

“Father—” but already the vision was fading; already he was withdrawing back down the bellowing corridors of the cosmos, through planes of existence unknown to living men, away, away…

“Father!” he called, and his own voice echoed, but there was none there to make reply. And in some sense at least he was glad, for how could he answer the poor spirit and reveal to him the truth of his guesses, admit the crimes he himself was guilty of against his ancestral city, against the very blood of his forefathers? All was mist and groaning sorrow as his echoes boomed into his ears, seeming to take on their own independence and warp the word into weirder words: “F-a-a-a-ath-e-er-r-r…A-a-a-a-a-v-a-a-a…A-a-a-a-h-a-a-a-a-a…R-a-a-a…D-a-ra-va-ar-a-a…!”

Still, though he strove with all his being, he could not rouse himself from slumber, but felt his spirit drawn through other regions of smoky indeterminacy, through patterns of colour beyond his earthly spectrum, beyond his mind’s conception.

A huge face began to take form in the mist.

“Sepiriz!” Elric recognized the face of his mentor. But the black Nihrainian, disembodied, did not appear to hear him. “Sepiriz—are you dead?”

The face faded, then reappeared almost at once upon the rest of the man’s tall frame.

“Elric, I have discovered you at last, robed in your astral body, I see. Thank Fate, for I thought I had failed to summon you. Now we must make haste. A breach has been made in the defenses of Chaos and we go to confer with the Lords of Law!”

“Where are we?”

“Nowhere as yet. We travel to the Higher Worlds. Come, hurry, I’ll be your