Ellian was having a nightmare, and he knew it. He knew where he was; he knew he tossed and turned on the sofa in Davria's sitting room, in Bahliefa, the Village of Mages on the border of Amasuel and Rhighelza. He knew that he wasn't a little boy, he was a man grown, nineteen years old. He knew that he wasn't back home in Arumi. He knew that his parents had been dead for twelve years. He knew...

... and yet ...

He fell to his knees, eyes huge with shock, trembling. In the center of a rapidly spreading pool of blood lay his mother, her body broken, trampled beneath the heels of a horse gone mad. His father keened with grief as the cart driver tried in vain to console him. Gawkers gathered round, an undertone of bewilderment, confusion.

He couldn't even recognize his mother's face. She had been lovely, black-haired with hazel eyes, a graceful childish nose, and rose- petal lips. This wreck -- this *wreck*, battered and bloody, brains seeping out like so much porridge from a cracked skull -- this was not his mother. Could not be.

He inched closer, his breath caught in his throat, the cloying, pungent smell of sweet iron thick in his head. In the dream, the blood was brighter than it had been in life, a vivid red unreal against the dirty cobblestones. His father wailed and could not be comforted, and he could hear it when the healers arrived, but everything was muted, the edges of his visions a blur, his father's face an impressionistic smear of flesh. It was the blood that was the strongest.

He thought she had been made of kindness, gentleness, humor, practicality, and the scent of incense, but he had been wrong. She was made of entrails and brains, blood and bone. Everything she was, exposed to the world beneath a blank sky. Blood so red. A cadaver. His mother.

He reached out. His hand was small, delicate as children's hands were, and white, so white against the red that it nearly glowed. His fingers, shaking wildly, touched the blood.

Without warning black fire leapt up from his fingers, singeing the nearest healer's knees where he knelt beside the broken corpse. With a shout of fear the crowd jumped back.

His father cried louder, despairing, clawing his hands down his face, leaving eight tracks of red as his nails scored his flesh.

The black fire rose high, twining with the formless clouds and sky, as the people watched in fearful, helpless awe, as the healers cursed, as his father clawed at himself like a madman in his grief. The fire burned only where blood had pooled, and there it burned with a vengeance. Through the haze, Ellian could see his mother's body burn, could smell the sizzling flesh.

His father's voice rose, broke, rose higher with the crackling of the fire, and Ellian, sobbing, placed his palms in his mother's blood, knelt over the burning pool as though he were a supplicant and begged the fire to go higher, to burn more fiercely, to burn that body that was not his mother away. It obeyed, whispering regret that it could not sear the memory of her from his infant mind.

His tears fell, fat drops, vaporized by black licks of fire before they could touch the blood, and his hands were never burned. When he lifted them, blood had congealed between his fingers, crusting them together. Dry flakes drifted from them when he forced them apart. He dipped his fingers in blood and painted his face frantically, echoing the eight red tracks his father had furrowed down his own face.

The fire raged on, and suddenly Ellian was in his home, and his father was slumped on the floor before him, a snapped rope tight around his neck, his face purple and slack, eyes bugged out and rolled back in his head, veins prominent and blue, tongue protruding, clothes filthy with excrement. The fire roared to life when he reached out to touch his father's distorted face, and he saw his father's swollen lips form the syllables of his mother's name...

...He awoke in a cold sweat, tears streaking his face. The moon was shining through his window.

He rose, his chest tight, and walked to the water pump behind Davria's home as though still dreaming. With trembling hands he splashed his face with water, the iciness of it making him gasp, a welcome reminder of the earth he was grounded on.

There was nothing he could do. They were dead. No way to save them. It had not been his fault. He wasn't seven years old, they were twelve years dead, and he had moved to Bahliefa where there were mages everywhere. Here there was the promise of safety.

Since when have people kept their promises to you, Ellian? murmured his mind. Mother and Father said they would never leave you. Did they keep their promise?

In response, he knelt in the muddy earth near the water pump, pressing his hands together, forming a steeple of them. He tilted his head to gaze heavenward at the round unblinking moon, Druchae's emblem.

I am your child, Lord of the Living Dead, whether you will it or no. Please do not forsake me anymore. I have been running from the bodies of my parents all my life. I'm a continent away from Arumi. Let me rest.

Daës-morn knew he dreamed, cushioned in the emerald grass of his backyard, in his village, Bahliefa. Bahliefa -- the expression used by Dy-Junindan poets when they wrote of lost love, past pain, grief and rage echoing back across centuries. Bahliefa, which would be the instrument of his revenge, meant literally "poets'-pain," and there was no word more appropriate for that tempestuous affair between him and his Saher.

Saher...

Cruel dreams, and Daës-morn wanted to turn his face away from their aching perfection, Saher standing before him in his every charming detail. Long sheer Virengrese robes of cream, trimmed in cornflower-blue, flowed loosely over an undertunic and long pants. Beneath those robes, that undertunic, was a body pale but strong, leanly muscled, sweet in surrender...

His large gray eyes were at odds with proud, aquiline features not native to Virengrai, at least partly Engladessan or Lirian, though Daës-morn had never discovered which. His Saher's pale blue hair had a tendency to fall into those eyes, escaping from the messy tail he bound his hair in, the straight wisps framing his face. Aristocratic cheekbones, long eyelashes and finely arched, inquisitive brows... silken skin, soft lips, and a smile that broke on his face like the dawn.

Like the dawn that would damn him until the day Daës-morn was dead. Like the rosy-fingered dawn that would pluck memory from Saher's cursed mind every time it rose from its golden bed.

Death had been painful. Daës-morn had been ripped in twain by the lightning his defiant student had called at the end. His soul had been torn from his body, had shot upwards --

But he had refused to die. He had stood at the door of the gods, clenched insubstantial fists and screamed, had poured all of his confusion and his love and his hatred and his fear of death into Laile, had called upon every shred of magic he had ever possessed. He, Laile's most powerful mortal child, didn't want to die.

So Laile gave him a chance. And his soul returned to the earth, fueled by the magic which clung to him still and the power death had threaded through him.

Daës-morn could never kill Saher. Even during the final battle, he had fought to protect himself. He could never look into those beloved gray eyes and knowingly strike a blow to the death.

But he could take vengeance, oh yes, in this new body formed purely of earth-magic, the most elemental magic of Laile. No blood pumped in this body; no food or drink was necessary to sustain it. A sleep beneath the star-spangled night sky, wrapped in the shawl of night, curled in the bosom of the earth which had always loved him as it had few others, was all that was needed to provide his soul-body with nourishment.

He slept. He dreamed. And as he dreamed, curled like a child in the blanket of his golden hair, Saher reached out his hand, that familiar smile playing upon his lips...

... and Saher took the hand of the golden-haired man. There was something poignant in the other man's sensuous features, something that made Saher swallow hard. He smiled to hide the sadness the other man's pain evoked in him, and with a sigh, the man stepped forward and wrapped his arms around the form of the smaller Key, nuzzling his neck.

'Who are you?' Saher wanted to whisper, but to speak would have shattered this dream, and it had been a long time since Saher had had dreams he could remember. He buried his hands in the other man's luxurious gold hair, ran his fingers through it, tucked it away from the man's face. He felt the man kiss his neck and obligingly tilted his head back. He didn't know why, but he could feel his heartbeat begin to race.

Saher felt the man's hand come up to cradle the back of his head, forcing him to look into the man's eyes. They were violet, the violet of the twilight Saher had seen fall that night, and Saher wondered how a pair of eyes could hold all the hushed mystery of the hour. With his other hand, the man, a look of desperation on his face, traced Saher's features, a touch that was gentle, even tender, and leaned forward to capture Saher's lips. He was practiced, and his kiss felt familiar somehow. Strange, that, and Saher had time to marvel before he fell back against the walls of the dream-void, the other man's hands caressing his body...

... Daës-morn could have drowned in Saher, drinking his presence, as heady as Laile's best wines. I've missed you, Saher. His lips mouthed the words as he went to his knees before Saher, tearing the robes and pants off with his hands, tracing the lines of his beloved's body with his mouth and tongue. He could hear Saher's breathing hitch, could feel the quick pulse of his blood. I've missed you, and I want you still, and I love you still even as I hate you, for even as I hate you, you are mine, mine, you have always been mine...

... Saher's hands clenched in the golden hair as the other man took him into his mouth. Who was this man? *Who was this man*? If he felt so familiar, then *why didn't Saher know him*? This man knew him. This man loved him, Saher could *tell*, could see that in those expressive eyes, could feel that as the man -- Saher's fingers spasmed -- worked wonders with his mouth upon him. I want to know... I want to *know*, I want to know, I --

-- a sweetly bitter rush of fluid and Daës-morn swallowed it unthinkingly. Ah, the taste, he could have sought it all over the world and it would never have been like this, thick and potent with the Seasons bound to every drop. Saher, you have always had power over me, even now. Even now. Perhaps especially now, you so vulnerable, so innocent, so unknowing, perhaps it was unwise of me to curse you so strongly, I didn't know it would be... like... this... He licked his lips, swallowed the last of it, and when Saher's knees buckled, Daës-morn was there and caught him...

... He felt languid, cradled in the other man's arms. The other man smoothed Saher's pale blue hair from his face, petted his head, held him close and kissed his forehead. Saher looked up at him from beneath long, sweeping eyelashes, a gaze unblinkingly curious...

... a gaze that wanted answers. Answers Daës-morn would not give, love Saher though he did. You killed me, love, thought Daës-morn with a smile, 'twas you that drove the lightning through my heart, and I am not yet through with my vengeance on you. These thoughts made him feel gentle, and idly Daës-morn continued to play with Saher's soft hair. He could stay, dawn was not yet here...

... but Saher shifted in the other man's lap and sat up, causing a look of surprise on the other man's face. Knowing that what he would say would shatter the pretty dream, he steeled himself and hoped that there would be time enough for an answer.

"Who are you?"

His voice echoed.

A fine spiderweb of cracks began to form in the walls of the void that held them safe. Daës-morn cursed and pushed Saher away, and though Saher stumbled, he straightened, stood as tall as his frame would allow, accusation in his eyes -- a pose, in other words, achingly familiar, from the days before everything fell apart. "What am I to you?" he pressed.

There was no harm in answering his question before the walls of the dream shattered entirely. Saher would only forget come the dawn. "My name is Daës-morn," answered Daës-morn roughly. "And you are mine, Saher."

There was a look of shocked surprise in the small Key's eyes. Daës- morn was able to take a moment's savage delight in it before the dream shattered completely, and he awoke with a start.

The sky was drenched in dawn.