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Teldin sat in the throne. Unsure, he placed one hand on the top of one pedestal, then the other.

Instantly, he felt warm. A golden glow appeared at his hands that quickly spread throughout his body. His cloak shivered, flapped in an invisible breeze. He felt it wriggle around him, then lose its feel, its texture. It fell apart around him into thin shreds, then it disintegrated into the material of the throne. The amulet seared into Teldin's flesh, glowing below his neck, and he felt only the peaceful glow of the bonding, the warmth of his own life force.

" Yes," Teldin said, and his eyes focused far away on some dreamlike vista only he could see. The bonding had begun, and he was filled with the life, the history, the song, and being of the Spelljammer, the herald of his destiny. " Yes," he said." This is what it was all about."

His eyes were filled with visions, and his mouth hung slack as his mind struggled to absorb it all. Then he suddenly focused his gaze at his friends. "/ know. Now I know. Estriss, Djan, CassaRoc… Now I know it all. Now f-"

Stardawn screamed a foul curse in Elvish and leaped upon the dais. His sword flashed wickedly in the light of Teldin's golden aura.

The others shouted and moved to intercept him, but the elf was too fast, and with a mighty lunge, he thrust his elven sword deep into Teldin's chest.

Blood pooled around the point of the sword, embedded deep into Teldin's heart. The Cloakmaster stood slowly and stared down at the sword in his chest. He looked then into Stardawn's eyes and smiled.

" You have done nothing," Teldin announced, his eyes misty — ^; with the Spelljammer's fires. "lam still the captain."

And Teldin fell back onto the throne.

He sagged against the chair, his still hands upon the pedestals. His eyes flickered shut, and his head hung lifeless on his chest.

Na'Shee cried, "Nooooo!" but Teldin, the Cloakmaster, the new captain of the Spelljammer, was no more.

The air shimmered in a corner of the adytum. The light seemed to dim, as though it were being muted, absorbed, and the adytum sparkled as the energies of a spell were dispersed. Then the Fool was revealed, standing where his powerful spells of invisibility and concealment had protected him from all notice, even from the guardian shivak and the Spelljammer itself. At his feet, shackled at the neck, huddled Cwelanas.

The Fool lifted a skeletal hand and pointed a bony finger at Stardawn. He took a step. Stardawn gurgled, feeling the power behind the Fool's glaring eyes close around his neck like a vise.

"The Cloakmaster was mine, insect!" the Fool shouted. "The Spelljammer was to be mine! Mine alone!"

The Fool released Cwelanas's chains and stepped toward Stardawn. "Now, elf lord," he said, "you shall pay."

Chapter Thirty

"… Death is but a gateway. We all hold the key. "Shall I open the door for you?…"

Surturrus, Lord of the Tenth Pit; reign of Noj the Heavy

Teldin floated. The universe was a sea of twilight, ofgray-ness broken only by lightning veins of white and yellow that crackled in the distance.

His body was gone, invisible, yet he felt. He was cool and warm, hot and cold, real and unreal at the same time. He felt separate from himself, stolen from his body, yet he was more comfortable and more complete, more ivhole, than he had ever felt before. He stretched out one finger and felt the universe shift around him instinctively. He opened his eyes, and suns were born. He breathed, and the flow shifted its currents around a score of spheres.

He was planets. He was stars. He was spheres, suns, systems, memories, races long dead.

He was all.

His sight, his senses, were filled with a panoramic vista of the flow, of the oneness of each sphere with its obsidian counterparts scattered like pebbles across the universe.

He thought of himself. He felt his being pull back, into the reality of the Spelljammer, and his mind saw and felt the Unhuman fleets converging on the Spelljammer. Elves, neogi, humans, giff-their ships promised bloodshed and war, and the stench of death followed in their wake.

— Who? he thought. -Where?

The answer rang through him with a force unimaginable, a force that had seen stars being born, seen planets die, seen whole spheres bubble into existence and slowly solidify, a thousand years witnessed within a second. It was a word, yet not a word, more a feeling that was sound and sight and touch and smell and taste, all at once.

— Here, was the answer.

— Live.

— See.

— Feel.

— Hear.

— Die.

— Experience.

— Know.

— All.

Then:

— We are not the first.

And the universe was a sphere, a single, wondrous black jewel floating in the empty, endless wastes of the chaotic phlogiston. Alone, perhaps; at least unknown by the beings from any other sphere.

— Ouiyan.

Eighteen worlds swung in slow, graceful arcs around Aeyenna, the eternal sun. Eighteen worlds-blue, green, vibrant with a variety of life unknown today. There, among the worlds, life had evolved, reaching out from mother oceans to stare transfixed into the skies. Empires flourished and were destroyed, then were rebuilt upon ancient foundations. Myth gave way to science, then magic, and humanity learned to coexist peacefully with the animals that shared the worlds. Children swam with the great beasts of the sea; mages and scholars shared philosophies with wolves and whales. Most unique among the worlds of Ouiyan were the spaakiil.

Alone among all the beasts of the One Sphere, the spaakiil sailed through wildspace and atmospheres alike, great mantas that sang and frolicked among the stars, swam along the boundaries of magic and reality. To each world they brought wonder. To each world they brought the joys of life and diver sity. To each world they brought peace. To each world they brought their songs of greeting from other worlds, and the knowledge that granted humanity the skills to break the cage of gravity and sail the first spelljammers into space.

To each world, the spaakiil were considered holy: gods to one world; messengers to another; brothers to a third.

To each world-except one-they were considered friends.

The outermost planet was unknown to the others, circling Aeyenna in an orbit so far distant that the sunlight never shone brighter than dark twilight. The eighteenth world was a cold rock, where vegetable life was limited to black scrubs and thick, dark flowers that cried plaintively as the pinpoint that was the sun teased the sky.

It was from here that evil came and spread across the sphere.

They called themselves the Sh'tarrgh, and for years, the Sh 'tarrgh waged war against humanity, the Stealers of the Sun. The grotesque gray humanoids fed on the blood and fear of their chosen enemies. They attacked first the seventeenth world and spread from there to claim the sphere as their own. For years cities were leveled by their weapons of destruction, their mages of darkness. The oceans of Resanel boiled under the heat weapons of the Sh'tarrgh. The Citadel of Kiril, housing four thousand men and women, was reduced to rubble in a day. Worlds died as armies were enveloped in clouds of magic, and nothing but bones and armor were left when the clouds dispersed.

The worlds burned at the Sh 'tarrgh's departure, and the One Sphere echoed with the screams of the innocent and the dying.

The Sh 'tarrgh wanted nothing but the worlds that orbited peacefully in the glow of the sun. They cared not at all for life; they simply wanted, and wanted. They wanted what before they could not have… the sacred, blessed sunlight, and their lust for power fueled their evil.

The leaders of the sphere met only days before Ouiyan was to become but a memory, a legend. The war had gone on too long, for almost a century of mindless death. Already BedevanSov and Ladria had been taken by the Sh 'tarrgh, and Ondora was about to fall. Politicians and kings, wizards and priests, knew that the sphere would not hold much longer. It was decided, then, to devise apian that could save those who were left.