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shall you know the child, that it shall read the very thoughts upon the wind,
travel upon the wings of demons, and master all the magics of the masters ere
it can stand alone! The child shall resemble a human, yet its eyes will be
those of the demons; of the very green of the elf-stones. The child shall be
hunted before its birth, yet shall escape the hunt. The child shall be sold,
and yet never bought. The child shall win all, yet lose all."
Standard prophetic double-talk, she thought to herself. If the slaves
had any belongings of their own, she could make a fortune in preaching. You
could tell them anything as long as it sounded impressive and mysterious, and
they'd believe it.
"And in the end," she concluded, her voice rising, "the child shall
rise up against the masters and cast them into the lowest hell, there to make
ofthem slaves to the demons of hell!"
The girl stepped an involuntary pace forward, fascinated in spite of
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herself. Her-eyes were bright with mingled fear and excitement, and her curly
hair damp with nervous sweat. Alara looked straight into her eyes, and thrust
a bony finger at her.
"Hear the words of the Prophecy!" she shrieked, as the girl jumped
back. "Hear them and heed them!"
"Jena! What's going on down there?" a deep female voice scolded from
the top of the staircase.
Young Jena jumped again, and went pale and frightened. "N-nothing!"
she called back.
"Then who the hell are you talking to?"
"I uh " The girl looked at Alara in confusion; Alara remained silent
and statue-still.
"Get your rump up herenow , girl!"
Jena looked helplessly at Alara, and scampered up the stairs as fast
as her legs could carry her.
But when she came back down, trembling with fear, the kitchen
overseer behind her, there was no sign of a mysterious old woman. In fact,
there was no sign of anyone at all.
But therewax one extra wine cask, if anyone had bothered to count&
And shortly thereafter, twenty or thirty witnesses, including two
elven overseers, saw a Great Kite launch itself from the roof of the manor. It
rose into a bloody sunset, wings blotting out the sun itself, screaming doom
down upon the Clan of V'Larn.
That was fun, Alara decided,even if the rest of the Lair would have
had a fit about the shaman risking herself like that .
The elven lords suppressed the Prophecy and those who spread it
whenever they could but the best way to spread something is to try to outlaw
it, as they found to their frustration. It was hard to do anything about it
when it was being spread by old men and women who vanished into thin air and
the more they punished those who had listened to the forbidden words, the more
others wanted to hear what was so dangerous.
It was just one more way to make the lives of elvenkind a little more
uncomfortable. The elves hated and feared the Prophecy, not the least of which
because there was a germ of truth in it.
It was not commonly known, but elves and humans were cross-fertile.
The offspring were relatively rare, even when contraceptive measures were not
being taken, but there had been halfblood children in the past. And those
children, like many hybrids, had gifts that surpassed those of their parents.
That was why the elves controlled the fertility of their slaves
through contraceptive measures in the very food they ate. Breeding was
permitted only under the eyes of the overseers.
Humans had magic of the mind; speaking mind-to-mind across vast
distances, reading the thoughts of others, seeing things at a far distance, or
in the past or future, or manipulating and moving things without the use of
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their hands. Elves had magic as the dragons understood the concept, for
dragons had the magic of shape-shifting and a few other, minor abilities.
Those who became shamans tended to have the ability to read thoughts, but not
to the extent that talented humans or halfbloods could.
But the children of mixed blood had both human and elven magics, and
the human mental gifts tended to amplify their abilities as magicians.
"Wizards," the elves called the halfbloods, and attempted to use them
in their own never-ending feuds with each other. But the wizards were not
helpless creatures like the human slaves, and used their own magic to win free
of their masters.
Right then the elven lords should have welcomed the wizards into
their own ranks, Alara thought cynically.That's what I'd have done. There's
nothing like a life of luxury to make thoughts of revolution melt away like
snow in the sun.
But the elves didn't; instead, they panicked, and tried to destroy
their halfblooded offspring.
So the Wizard War began, with the wizards ranged on one side, and the
elven lords and their slave armies on the other.
The dragons entered the world before the Wizard War and the defeat
and destruction of the wizards, but for the most part were too busy with their
own establishment to pay much attention to the goings-on across the desert.
Later, they became aware of at least some of what had happened through faulty,
faltering, human word-of-mouth and through elven history, and through the
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