Dazed, Haplo watched the images shift rapidly from one to the other, was reminded of an elven toy [3] he’d seen on Pryan. The images began to repeat themselves. Odd, he thought, wondering why. They went through his mind again, in the same order, and he finally understood.
He was being given a choice: destination. Where did he want to go?
Haplo knew where he wanted to go. He just wasn’t certain how to get there anymore. Before, the decision had been locked into his magic—he sorted through the possibilities and selected a site. The rune structure necessary to effect such a determination had been complex, extremely difficult to devise. His lord had spent innumerable hours studying the Sartan books [3] until he learned the key, then spent additional time
2 Undoubtedly an elven “collide-a-scope.” One looks down a hollow wooden tube at the end of which is a glass ball containing bits of different colored glass. When the ball is rotated, the glass pieces “collide” to form a variety of shapes, visible to the viewer.
3 Xar discovered in the Nexus a small library of Sartan books written on various topics, including: a history of the Sundering, incomplete descriptions of the four worlds, and details on how to travel through Death’s Gate. The books are written in the Sartan rune language. Xar taught himself to read the language—a laborious task that took him many years.
translating the Sartan language into Patryn in order to teach it to Haplo.
Now everything had changed. Haplo was sailing closer and closer to the Gate, his ship moving faster and faster, and he had no idea how to control it.
“Simplicity,” he told himself, fighting his rising panic. “The Sartan would have made it simple, easy to travel.”
The images flashed past his vision again, whirling faster and faster. He had the horrible sensation of falling, as one does in a dream. Pryan’s jungles, Arianus’s islands, Chelestra’s water, Abarrach’s lava—all spun around him, beneath him. He was tumbling into them, he couldn’t stop himself, Nexus twilight…
Desperately, Haplo latched onto that image, grabbed hold of it, clung to it in his mind. He thought of the Nexus, remembered it, summoned images of its twilight forests and ordered streets and people. He closed his eyes, to concentrate better, and to blot out the terrifying sight of spinning into chaos.
The dog began to yelp, not with warning, but with glad excitement and recognition.
Haplo opened his eyes. The ship was flying peacefully over a twilight land, illuminated by a sun that never quite rose, never quite set.
He was home.
Haplo wasted no time. On landing his ship, he traveled directly to his lord’s dwelling place in the forest to give his report. He walked rapidly, abstracted, absorbed in his thoughts, paying very little attention to his surroundings. He was in the Nexus, a place that held no danger for him. He was considerably startled, therefore, to be roused out of his musings by the dog’s angry growl.
The Patryn glanced instinctively at the sigla on his skin, saw, to his surprise, that they gave off a faint blue glow.
Haplo writes: “We assumed that the Sartan left the books behind to taunt us, never thinking that we would have the patience or the desire to learn to read and make use of them. But now, knowing that Sartan were once in the Labyrinth, I wonder if we are wrong. Perhaps Xar was not the first one to escape the Labyrinth. Perhaps a Sartan emerged and left these books—not for us—but for those of his people he hoped would follow.”
Someone stood on the path before him.
Haplo quieted the dog with a hand on its head, a hand whose sigla were glowing brighter every moment. The runes tattooed on his skin itched and burned. Haplo waited, unmoving, on the path. No use hiding. Whatever was in the forest had already seen him and heard him. He would remain and find out what danger lurked so near his lord’s mansion, deal with it if necessary.
The dog’s growl rumbled in its chest. Its legs stiffened, the hackles rose on the back of its neck. The shadowy figure came closer, not bothering to hide, but taking care to keep out of the few patches of light that filtered through open places amid the thick leaves. The figure had the form and height of a man, moved like a man. Yet it wasn’t a Patryn. Haplo’s defensive magic would have never reacted so to any of his own kind.