The Crystal of Light glowed like a sun, radiating rays of bright yellow light out in all directions. It had the size and appearance of a huge diamond that had been cut by an expert jeweler so that its surface contained hundreds of facets; each facet shined the light inside of it out in a different direction, so that it sent light out in every direction from itself. Its light was almost blinding. The force of its glare made the party members’ eyes want to look away from it, as their eyes began to water and hurt when they looked directly at it.

  When Rose looked at this thing she was about to steal, she felt as though she could hear a choir of angels singing, even though no such noise was there. The Crystal’s light felt warm when it hit her skin, but in a distinctly magical way, as if it made her flesh tingle with energy and melted away her tension and stress at the same time. Some part of her just wanted to close her eyes, smile, lay down, and embrace the warm, peaceful bliss waiting for her, like taking a restful nap with a loyal pet dog cuddled in her lap. Ignore it! Rose thought. Snap out of it! The team is counting on you to guide them to the finish line! Just focus on completing the heist!

  The Crystal floated in midair at the center of a vast circular chamber, the Crystal Chamber. The room was wide enough to fit several elephants in next to each other, and it was high enough that a typical three-story house could have been built entirely within it. Its ceiling was a high, flat white stone surface held aloft by many tall, thick white stone pillars that rose from the floor up to the ceiling; the pillars were set in rows that went out from the center of the room like spokes on a wheel. The walls, floors, and ceiling were made of the same white stone as the rest of the Temple of Light, but in this room, much like the outside exterior of the tower but unlike the rest of its interior, no seams between blocks of stone could be seen: it was as though the entire room had been made from white stone cast to molten heat in a furnace and then poured into a giant-sized mold, cooled, and extracted as one single object.

  The Crystal floated as the exact mid-points of the room for both width and height, so it was high enough that a person could jump up and still not reach it. The room had no windows, but it needed none: the Crystal of Light was so bright that the white surfaces of the walls and floors and ceiling gleamed and almost glowed, as if white light was shining from torches that someone was holding mere inches away from every inch of surface.

  The room had one feature other than the Crystal of Light: the room was full of a spider’s-web-like array of crisscrossed rays of yellow light, which converged on the Crystal of Light as though it was at the center of this spider’s web of light. The rays of light were long and slender, like strands of spider’s web, and they seemed to radiate out from invisible points along the walls and ceiling of the chamber. However, some of the rays of light seemed to be damaged or missing: the glowing yellow beams were arranged in what looked like a perfectly symmetrical pattern, yet the design had become an asymmetry due to some lines missing or appearing faint and weak where the web-like pattern would lead one to expect them to be there.

  The room had only two doors: the iron one they had come from, and another door, this one made of white stone with an iron handle, set into the far wall at the location precisely opposite from this door, at a place directly across from it and farthest away from it. Nathan closed and locked the iron door behind them as they walked in. “In case those priests ever wake up,” he said.

  “They won’t wake from my spell for hours, but okay,” Rose said. She stared at the shimmering crystal and licked her lips. “I can sense the magical power in that diamond: that is the Crystal of Light, for sure. This room is the Crystal Chamber. And I believe that the rays of light forming a web around it is the spell the Dark Wizard told us about, which protects the Crystal and holds it in place to prevent its theft. The Dark Wizard gave us that magical box of his and said that when we open it, it will deactivate the lines somehow, so that we can remove the Crystal.” My God, I can sense such tremendous power in that Crystal, Rose thought. Can we really get away with stealing this thing?

  “That’s the Crystal of Light? Given that it is a crystal and it’s shining so much light I can barely see, I would never have guessed,” Sylis said sarcastically.

  “Weak joke, Sylis,” Nathan said. “I think you can do better. Take this one: the Crystal of Light? More like the crystal of light up my coin-purse with gold coins!”

  “Ugh,” Sylis said. “I liked mine better.”

  “Enough with the bad jokes!” Rose said. There will be some good things about this heist coming to an end and me not being around Nathan and Sylis’s jokes any longer. “Glorissa, heal the elf, then let’s open the box, grab the Crystal and get out of here!”

  Kylus and Glorissa dragged Yarid towards the Crystal of Light, but they stopped well short of the area below the Crystal, at a place where the rays of light condensed into a thicker array near the center of the web.

  “It’s like those rays of light are some sort of physical barrier,” Kylus said. “I can’t get any closer. I’m walking forward but my body doesn’t move anywhere.”

  “This is close enough,” Glorissa said. “Let him go.” Kylus and Glorissa eased the slumped-over, half-passed-out Yarid to the floor. Then Glorissa knelt at Yarid’s body, clasped her hands together, and closed her eyes.

  “God, hear me,” Glorissa said. “I ask you to heal Yarid King of the elves. He is a good man, and a faithful and devoted worshipper of yours. Please heal him. And, if you do not choose to do this thing because Yarid is a good elf, and a faithful man, then please: do it for me. I… I do not want him to die!” A tear slipped from Glorissa’s eye and rolled down her cheek, and she suddenly looked like she was about to burst into tears. If I had known her true regard for the elf, perhaps I never should have told her he was lying to her, Rose thought. Yet, for some reason, I do not regret it.

  Rose gasped, and the others also stared with looks of shock in their eyes. The Crystal of Light began to glow with an even more intense light, and the room suddenly became very hot, as though the sun-like light within the Crystal was having a solar flare. Then waves of hot white light poured forth from the Crystal of Light and hit the elf prone on the floor, bathing his body in glowing yellow-orange waves of radiance. Rose felt herself about to go blind from the glare and closed her eyes; the light was so bright that she saw splotchy shadows against her eyelids even with her eyes closed. Then the splotches went dark. Rose opened her eyes.

  Yarid was standing up, his posture straight and strong, his skin alabaster white, all bruises gone, and a beaming smile on his face. Glorissa rose up off the floor from where she had been kneeling next to Yarid.

  “Thank you Glorissa,” Yarid said. “You literally saved my life.” He smiled at her. She smiled back and batted her eyelids at him and giggled but made no verbal reply.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, for your main attraction,” Rose said. She sat down on the floor, while the others looked at her with looks of curiosity in their eyes. Rose reached into the pocket of her red wizard robe and pulled out a small red cloth bag. She placed it on the floor next to her and slid both of her hands into it. She felt around inside the bag, while her eyes had a distant yet intense look in them. “Aha!” she said. She pulled something out of the bag and placed it on the floor next to her.

  It was the Dark Wizard’s box that he had given them during their meeting at the Dark Wizard’s castle. The box was a small wooden box coated in a black lacquer finish. The box was locked, but Rose was holding the key.

  “Here we go, boys and girls,” Rose said. “It’s fun time! The Dark Wizard promised that when we open this box, a spell will come out of it that will liberate the Crystal of Light from the magic spell that protects it. That overcomes the final obstacle in our way. Then we grab the Crystal and go!”

  “Glorissa… did you feel it?” Yarid asked. What is Yarid talking about? Rose thought. I felt heat and light, but he means something more. She put the magical bag back into her pocket and got up off the floor.

  “Yes. I did feel it. I was wondering if you would. I guess you did.”

  “Okay, let’s hear it,” Rose said. “I already suspect I’m not going to like the answer, but: what feeling did the two of you have?”

  Yarid and Glorissa exchanged a look with each other, and then turned and gazed at Rose and the others.

  “It’s the Crystal of Light,” Glorissa said. “It told us something. It’s difficult to explain, it’s like it sent us an emotion without concrete words, but… it’s like it doesn’t want us to open the box that the Dark Wizard gave us. Or, at least, it wants us to think about whether we should choose to open it.”

  Nathan laughed. “I would well expect that the Crystal of Light does not want us to open the Dark Wizard’s box, because no object desires for itself to be stolen by rogues and resold on the market for stolen goods! I was unaware that the Crystal of Light is sentient: the Crystal is ten thousand years old, yet no myths and legends ever speak of it having a mind of its own. But I am not surprised. This is our final triumph! We stand before the Crystal of Light, finally! Let us open the box to break the spell that protects the Crystal, steal it, and be on our way!”

  Glorissa cleared her throat. “Wait. There’s more. I learned some stuff from some visions that God gave me, after I walked through the door where the words were written in fire on the wall. It has to do with a conspiracy among the Star Knights and the return of a dragon who had been banished. I sensed that the Crystal… wants me to tell you what I saw.”

  Rose’s eyes narrowed, and her brow furrowed. “Ugh,” Rose said. “I had been hoping to avoid this, but it looks as though no one less than God has ordained that I cannot avoid it. Sylis and I also learned some interesting information that is relevant to this heist: information about the Dark Wizard himself. The man who hired us might not be the person we thought he was. If you are to share your knowledge with the team, it is only fair that we share ours. Then we can make whatever decision it is that we face with full information.”

  Glorissa, Rose and Sylis told the party what they knew, with Glorissa recounting her visions in the void, and Rose and Sylis explaining the information they had been given by the rogue crime boss Humbler.

  Nathan huffed and pouted as soon as the presentation was over. “Nice of you to share your knowledge with the rest of the group,” Nathan said, “oh wait, except you didn’t! How rude of you! I would have secrets of my own and not share them with you to get revenge, except unlike you, I have no secrets!”

  “Please don’t resent it, Nathan,” Rose said. “I paid for that knowledge, and it belonged to me. I intended to share it if there was a need for it to be shared, and, when there was, I did.”

  “Well, you did have a secret, which is you were sleeping with Yarid while I was dating him in a supposed-to-be-monogamous relationship,” Glorissa said. “In any event, what do you make of what we told you?”

  “I didn’t know that you and Yarid were dating, to be honest,” Nathan said. “You know Mr. Dark would never betray his best accomplice Glow!”

  “I’m the team’s resident Blue, so let me help out by thinking through the facts and framing the analysis,” Sylis said. “These are the possibilities: first, it really was the Dark Wizard who hired us, and the heist is exactly as it seems. I consider this least likely.

  “Second, if you combine Glorissa’s knowledge about the dragon’s conspiracy in the Star Knights, and Rose’s facts that the Dark Wizard is probably dead and whoever hired us and paid for the letter of credit was probably a puppet of the Star Knights, it becomes plausible that this dragon king who came back to the world secretly was pulling the Dark Wizard’s strings, and he is using us to steal the Crystal of Light for him so that we give it to him and then he can destroy it. I consider that scenario most likely, although that is horrific if it’s true.

  “Third, somewhere between likely and unlikely, is the possibility that the Star Knights themselves, who knew that the Dark Wizard was dead, wanted someone to steal the Crystal of Light and give it to them so that they can secretly move it to secure location where the dragon won’t be able to get at it. Because the King is a puppet of the dragon, the Star Knights can’t try to steal it and risk getting caught and having the King go to war against them, so the Star Knights are trying to use us to steal the Crystal.”

  “Just for the sake of argument, I must mention a fourth possibility,” Nathan said. “That the person who hired us really wasn’t the Dark Wizard but also is not the dragon or the Star Knights, and we were hired by an unknown person for reasons we do not and cannot comprehend.”

  “When you’re a Blue, they teach you to stick to the facts that will prove useful for you to inform your decisions or improve your actions,” Sylis said. “While that might be true, there’s nothing we can do with that scenario. That’s not actionable intelligence, so it factors out of the analysis.”

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  “This is great, Blue and Black, but what do we actually do about it?” Rose asked. “Is the question whether we complete the heist?”

  “I guess the question is whether we choose to open the box, like Glorissa and Yarid said,” Sylis said. “We have an escape plan as part of the Dark Wizard’s plan, and, as I remember it, our escape plan does not rely on us having the Crystal in any way. We are free to leave without opening the box or stealing the Crystal—although whoever hired us might come after us and try to kill us for revenge, depending on who that person really was.”

  “The only way we find out what’s in the box is if we open the box to see what is in the box,” Rose said. “How can we not open the box? We’ll never know unless we open it.”

  “Actually, contemporary Blue philosophy says that’s also a logical fallacy,” Sylis said. “All human actions and choices are made under a condition of total or partial ignorance, so you’re supposed to find techniques to make decisions given incomplete knowledge, not try to know everything before you choose. Ignorance is a universal condition, so it factors out of any specific decision—and ignorance itself can never be the basis of a decision because ignorance points equally in every direction. Like, for example, what’s in the box might mean anything, it could require that we do anything, we don’t know.”

  “Which is why we should open the box!” Rose said. Sylis frowned; Rose grabbed her red hood in both her hands and tugged it in frustration.

  “The Dark Wizard was evil—and he is the one who handed us that box,” Glorissa said. “I don’t know if that wizard of Black was really the Dark Wizard, but I know he was evil. He was so creepy that the sound of that oily voice or the sight of those black-gloved hands folding together sent shivers up my spine and put ice cubes in my blood. The Crystal of Light is good. When it healed Yarid, I felt it: it’s warm, and sunny, and cheerful, and nice, it’s like taking your family to a picnic in a warm grassy meadow and having a good time and eating sandwiches and chocolate-chip cookies and it’s nice weather out and the ants and insects don’t even bother you while you’re sitting on the grass, it’s that nice. We cannot open a magic spell that the Dark Wizard gave us and use it on the Crystal of Light. We cannot take evil magic and use it on something good. It’s just not right.”

  “But the spell in that box is our only hope to break through that web of light and steal the Crystal,” Rose said. “If we don’t open the box, this heist is done.”

  “Maybe there never was a heist,” Glorissa said. “Maybe we never had the target. We just thought we did.”

  “Faith means never having to give a reason,” Yarid said. “My faith tells me not to open the box, although my reason tells me that my tribe of elves requires me to do so to honor my fae bargain that the kings of the elves have between us and those who are part of the faerie realm. Yet somehow, I say we do not open it. Once, I chose to allow the Crystal of the Elements to be destroyed, ending the covenant between elves and God. Fae-spirits sometimes drift through the air and sing to me of what has become of the fae after that happened, and the elves in exile know nothing but hardship, with no place to call home, no safety, and no blessings of God from our priests, no miracles small or grand to save us from our faults. It would break my heart to allow the Crystal of Light to also be destroyed and let the covenant between humans and God die as well. I am an elf of faith and an honorable fae. I cannot stand by and watch while we put at risk the sacred bond between God and the humanoid species. I am honor-bound to the elves, but I am also honor-bound to God, even now, after the Crystal of the Elements was shattered by the goblin horde. We do not know where the Crystal of Light will end up after we open the box. Glorissa speaks truth: this isn’t right, but more… it feels, if this is the correct word, dishonorable.”

  While the others talked, Kylus watched, his gaze tracking who was speaking, going from person to person, and all the while a frown on his lips grew deeper, and deeper, until finally he couldn’t take it. He jumped up and down and began to wave his fists in the air.

  “Are you okay, Kylus?” Sylis asked.

  “Are you serious?” Kylus said, his voice high and shrill. “I want to steal the Crystal! Why is this even a discussion? I need the Dark Wizard’s money to transition to become a man! I’m poor! I can never afford that magic spell without his money! Do you mean to tell me we came all this way and went through all that crap and now we chicken out at the last minute? Really? Yarid: you have to save your elves from the goblins! The elves are counting on you! Sylis: you need money to stop those assassins from coming after you! Don’t you want to be able to return to your farm? Rose and Nathan, you both need money or you’re going to die: Rose to a hit man, Nathan to some evil necromancer. Unless you can pay off the contract on your life, Rose, and unless you can pay off your debt, Nathan, you’re dead! Glorissa, you never would have learned what happened to your sister if you hadn’t come along on this heist—and we were counting on you to be a member of the team! I was counting on each of you to be a member of our team! What is wrong with you all? I thought you wanted this! I thought you wanted this as much as I did! Why is this even a question?”

  Sylis stared at Kylus in shock. “I had no idea you wanted this that badly,” Sylis said.

  “Becoming a man is my dream,” Kylus said. “I am a man, but to be a complete man would be a dream come true! Of course I want this! You know that, Sylis! I never would have joined this heist for any reason other than wanting it that badly!”

  “I guess I maybe sort of understood? Or maybe not,” Sylis said. “I’m not sure any man is ever truly a complete man, regardless of any magic spell. I don’t feel like I am a complete man, and I have never met any man whom I regard as one. If you’re complete, that means you’re finished, which would kind of imply that your life was over, right? Things becoming finished and completed kind of signals that there’s nothing more for them to do.”

  “More talking!” Kylus said. “I’ve had enough talking! Time for less talking! More stealing!”

  “I don’t want us to come to combat and bloodshed over this,” Rose said. “I was educated, in my youth, and one of my teachers taught us that, in history, the only way for a group of angry people to make decisions without killing each other is by taking a vote. So let’s put it to a vote. The majority wins, and the minority accepts, unless that minority seeks to resist by force, in which case the majority can usually overpower them by force and enforce the vote. So, I will ask you, one by one, this question: should we open the Dark Wizard’s box and try to steal the Crystal, or just walk away and leave, and switch directly to our getaway plans? I would go down in history as the worst rogue crime boss ever if I had a chance to steal the Crystal of Light and walked away, but, nonetheless, I am prepared to honor the vote of the team, whatever that turns out to be. Do you all agree to a vote?”

  No one spoke. Sylis, Nathan, and Yarid nodded yes to Rose, while Kylus stared at his feet and stewed in silent rage, and Glorissa had a wistful, sad look in her eyes, almost a look of fear, but said and did nothing else.

  “I take that as the agreement of this group,” Rose said. I truly will abide by this vote, Rose thought. The others will probably kill me if I don’t.

  “Wait. What if there’s a tie?” Sylis asked. “We have six people. It could split three to three.”

  “The purpose is a vote is to change things, so, if the vote fails, nothing changes,” Rose said.

  “The status quo is that the Crystal of Light is here, and we have not stolen it,” Sylis said. “If nothing changes, then we just walk away, escape, go our separate ways and never see each other ever again. If we steal a big treasure like the Crystal of Light, then the police will hunt each one of us as rogues until the day we die. Going through with the heist is a big decision: I don’t think we can make it unless the team has voted to go through with it.”

  “Okay. That’s fair,” Rose said. “I shall start with myself and my own vote first, and then ask each of you. I have been a rogue for a long time. I know a scam con game when I see one. That Dark Wizard, or whoever he was, is obviously not to be trusted. He is some sort of con artist, and he is just using us. However, from my years as a crime boss, I can tell you that, among rogues, that’s nothing unusual. It happens all the time. If someone lying to me was a reason not to steal, I would never get any money at all! So I say: let’s open the box.”

  “You know my vote,” Kylus said. “Do it! Do it, do it, do it! Let’s steal the Crystal of Light!”

  “I quite frankly do not know whom to trust or what to do, as shocking as that is,” Nathan said. “Our friend Sylis has spelled out various potential scenarios for who the Dark Wizard is and what might result if we open the box. I have no way to know which is true. And, not knowing, I cannot make a rational decision about which option to select. I do not desire for the dragons to return, but neither do I desire to die by getting killed if I fail to repay my loans that I owe. The scales seem evenly balanced to me, so I shall choose to maintain my purpose in being here, and, further, I can only assume that, after we open the box and I see what happens, I can adjust my behaviors accordingly to deal with the result. Open the box.”

  “That is three votes to open,” Rose said. “Now I suspect we have some other votes at hand.”

  Yarid shook his head. “I betrayed God once, when I let the Temple of the Elements fall to the goblins. Never again. I heard the voice of the Crystal when it healed me: it does not desire for that box to open. I say no.”

  Glorissa was fiddling with her hair to distract herself from her nerves. “You know my vote, right? I’m with Yarid. The Dark Wizard is just too creepy, and I don’t think my Star Knights would ever use a puppet that horrible, so it must be the dragon behind the Dark Wizard. Absolutely do not open the box. I pray that we don’t, but I will abide by this vote, if only because I think the yes votes would force me to.”

  All eyes turned to Sylis. He looked at Kylus, and his boyfriend returned his gaze: he could see the eager, expectant joy in Kylus’s water-blue eyes, waiting for Sylis to agree with him.

  Sylis said nothing.

  “Well?” Rose asked.

  “I’m trying to figure out what to do,” Sylis said. “I’m puzzling through whether I can solve the outcome from the available set of clues.”

  “We can’t wait all day,” Rose said.

  “If you’re looking for a reason for your actions, then just open the damn box,” Glorissa said. “You’re choosing between good and God, or evil and greed. If you have faith in God, then you don’t need a reason. If you don’t have faith, just steal the Crystal of Light and be done with it.”

  “That isn’t true,” Sylis said. “A Blue’s intelligence is his most powerful weapon, and he never relinquishes it, for any reason.” Sylis’s eyes opened wide, and he gasped in shock, as if he had an idea—or a revelation. “Wait a minute! It isn’t just that the Dark Wizard is reportedly dead according to the secret Star Knights history only they know. It’s that the money from the letter of credit came from a Star Knights bank account! The Dark Wizard would never have access to the Star Knights’ bank accounts, even if he had come back from the dead and was trying to raise a new army: that would be between the Star Knights and the gnomes.

  “Also, remember the Dark Wizard’s castle? Every room of that castle was coated in a thick layer of dust, and there were no footsteps anywhere in that dust. No one had walked through that place in ages. If the Dark Wizard was trying to raise an army to conquer the Kingdom, why hadn’t he recruited any soldiers for his army yet? And if he had an army of soldiers getting ready for war, where would they have been other than in his castle! It was not the Dark Wizard who hired us.

  “That leaves either the dragon or the Star Knights as the person who really hired us: those are the only two people who could have paid us through a Star Knights-funded letter of credit, because the Star Knights themselves could have, or the dragon could have through the conspiracy within the Star Knights that the dragon controls. But the Star Knights have their own teams of assassins and spies and special operatives, whom they would send to do this job, even if they wanted to keep it secret from the dragon! And the idea of the Star Knights wanting to move the Crystal of Light to a safer location doesn’t make sense, because the White Wizard is the realm’s most powerful wizard, so no location is safer than right under his nose and under his protection.

  “That means it must be the dragon who hired us! The dragon would want to act in secret, to not alert the world that it had returned, lest all the humanoid species go to war against it. And we would be the best thieves it could get whom it could keep secret and sever all its ties to us if we were captured, exposed or killed! But then—if we steal the Crystal of Light, the dragon will shatter it, and then the dragons return, and it’s the end of the world! If we open that box, it’s probably a teleportation spell that will open and let the dragon come right into this room and take the Crystal of Light! Regardless of which spell will come out if we open the box, we must not open it! I vote no!”

  “NOOOOO!” Kylus said. He fell to his knees, held his face in his hands and cried.

  Sylis went to him and tried to place a hand on Kylus’s shoulder, but Kylus batted it off.

  “We can get the money for your magic spell some other way, Kylus,” Sylis said. “The Dark Wizard’s heist is not the only job in the realm. If the transformation spell is a Green spell, which I suspect it is, I swear, if I have to, for you I will switch from Blue to Green, learn Green magic, become a Green wizard, learn the spell, cast it on you, and then change back to Blue. I would do that just for you, Kylus. I love you. Together you and I will find a way, or find the money, somehow. I promise.”

  Kylus looked up at Sylis, his face red, his eyes wet with tears. Kylus just shook his head, and then went back to crying. Sylis sighed, and stayed standing next to Kylus but did not touch him again.

  “That’s it, then,” Rose said. “So I guess we came all this way and we’re not going to go through with it. But do you know what? I don’t regret this. I’ve made great friends, had a good time, and learned a lot. I’m a master Red. My true goal is not money. My goal is to have fun! And I did. I will find other ways to get the coins to save my life. There are other jobs. This isn’t the end of the world, but if the dragons returned, it would be.”

  “All right. Let’s get going then,” Nathan said. “I had another appointment somewhere else tonight, which I skipped out on in order to be here, but if we escape from this place quickly enough, I may still be able to make it to another location where I was expected.”

  “I see, against that far wall, a door,” Yarid said. “Based on our position and my sense of direction, I believe that it must lead from the East Tower to the North Tower. I assume that is the path we must take for our escape.”

  Suddenly there was a loud banging at the door from which they had come, which Nathan had closed and locked earlier.

  “Open this door! Open it this instant!” a voice said in a loud scream. It was the voice of the wizard of White whom Yarid had teleported away before the team had reached the Crystal.

  Rose’s eyes widened in shock. “That’s the White Wizard! Yarid, how far did you teleport him away?”

  “A hundred miles at least!” Yarid said. “It’s the reason I almost died! I used all my magical energy to do it! He can’t have gotten back here this fast!”

  “Well, it looks like he did, even though it’s impossible,” Rose said. “Everyone: run!”

  But before they could take more than a few steps, the iron door was blasted off its hinges. The door flew through the air and clattered to the floor, its iron burnt and melted. Lucy leapt up into Nathan’s chest at the sound of the explosion and wrapped its tentacles around Nathan, clinging to him and quivering in fear.

  The party stared at the twisted, burning door on the floor, parts of which still glowed red. The White Wizard walked in through the now-empty doorframe. Their eyes moved from the smoldering iron door on the floor to the slender, elderly wizard standing before them.

  “Thank you for joining me for dinner,” the White Wizard said.

  “Dinner?” Rose asked.

  Suddenly, Glorissa shuddered. Her small, lithe body shook and trembled, as if a giant’s hand had grabbed her and was shaking her vigorously.

  “What is it, Glorissa?” Yarid asked. “Are you hurt? Is he doing something to you?”

  Glorissa hugged herself with both arms, folding her arms across her chest and clutching her shoulders with her hands. She held herself and stopped shaking. But tears began to trickle down her cheeks, and her large brown eyes were wide, hurt, and afraid.

  “I know that voice,” Glorissa said. “I have heard that voice twice before. I heard it speak to King Zebyx and King Gargarez, ten thousand years ago. My sister heard that voice, after he tricked her. He ate my sister.

  “That is not the White Wizard. That is the dragon king.”