Favaronas himself was unharmed, though his head reeled from proximity to so great a discharge of energy. The ground sloped steeply there. Getting to his feet required caution lest dizziness send him cartwheeling down the mountain. Still, he made all the haste he could. His chance to escape had come.
Whispering voices brought him whirling back toward Faeterus’s unconscious form. Four spirits had appeared higher up the slope. Apparitions did not manifest in Faeterus’s presence while he was awake (and he never slept). With him laid out cold, that protection was gone.
The specters regarded Favaronas with unblinking eyes. Their faces were unnervingly devoid of expression. At first they floated in midair, their bodies fading away a foot above the ground but as the apparitions solidified, their lower legs appeared. It was impossible to tell whether they were male or female. All had hollow, emaciated faces framed by long, tangled hair.
Favaronas stared in fear, falling back and sending pebbles skittering down the mountainside.
‘Don’t hurt me!” he rasped, holding out both hands to ward off the ghosts. “I mean no harm. He forced me to come!”
One of the four spirits took a step forward and spoke—at least, the words seemed to come from it.
“Is he one of you?” The spirit answered in the affirmative. “Who is he?”
More whispers filled the air. Other spirits, less solid-seeming than the first four, had materialized above and below Favaronas. His escape blocked, the scholar gave in to curiosity and crept toward his immobile captor. The knotted rag that held the hood tight around Faeterus’s throat finally yielded to his trembling fingers. He pushed the hood back and beheld the sorcerer’s face for the first time.
Faeterus had implied that be was thousands of years old. Favaronas might have disbelieved his claim to such an improbably great age, but the sorcerer’s hands were those of a very old elf, with prominent knuckles, so he expected to see a wrinkled, withered visage. Not so—the sorcerer’s face was smooth and unlined. His forehead was high, his chin sharp, and his ears rose to the expected points. His white-gold hair was short and curly. He looked like an elf in the very prime of life.
Or did he? When Favaronas looked more closely, certain oddities became apparent. The ears were not quite right; their peaked tips were too long and pointed not up, but back. The nose, though long and narrow as was common among Silvanesti, was dark around the nostrils. What Favaronas had taken for pale skin was in fact a coat of downy hair, No true elf grew such hair on his face. It wasn’t even a beard such as humans or half-elves wore. Fine, white hair covered Faeterus’s entire face from forehead to chin. To confirm the evidence of his eyes, Favaronas put out a tentative finger and touched the sorcerer’s cheek. The hair was soft as velvet.
Stranger still, a shadow under Faeterus’s nose proved to be a faint scar, as though his upper lip had been split in two and sewn back together.
Favaronas backed away, still staring. The more he looked, the weirder the face appeared. The sorcerer’s tongue, just visible between his parted lips, was dark as sandal leather. His eyebrows seemed to meet over his nose, or was that a trick of the light? Taken as a whole, the face seemed somehow animal-like, as though a beast had tried to transform into an elf and failed.
“Why do you walk the mortal plane? What do you want?”
With a sinking heart, Favaronas glanced up the slope beyond the four specters. Distance and the steep angle reduced the Stair of Distant Vision to nothing more than a horizontal band of dark rock. “Why? What’s up there?”
The crowd of apparitions vanished, leaving only the first four. They wavered like an image seen through desert heat. Desperate, Favaronas repeated his questions.
The four blinked out of existence.
“Wait! What does that mean?” he cried, the scholar in him already puzzling over the words.
“It means,” said a voice behind him, “time is short.”
Icy defeat lanced through Favaronas as he turned on leaden feet. Faeterus was himself again, sitting up. The sorcerer put a hand to his head, realized his concealing hood was askew, and cast a venomous glance at his captive.
“Well, elf spawn what have you learned?” His voice was weak, but hatred dripped from every syllable.
“Nothing, master. The more I hear, the less I know!” the archivist gabbled.
