Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol II - By Richard A. Knaak Page 0,330

she was helpless despite being free to move about, and she would note that even a might as great as he was little challenge to the Tezerenee.

It was the next step in breaking their will.

Removing his hand from the box, Darkhorse’s ungodly prison, Barakas scratched at his throat. He still wondered about the image. Was it a trick of his eyes, eyes that had, of late, not seen as well as they should have? Was it just his imagination? If so, why pick that one image to conjure to life?

Why would he imagine the startled vision of his traitorous son, Gerrod?

SOMETHING HAD GONE wrong terribly wrong and he didn’t know what to do and he didn’t know where he was and how he had ended up here but the last thing he remembered was almost reaching his goal but his father had been there, hadn’t he?

“Stop it!” Gerrod screamed at himself, not caring a whit at the moment how mad he must look. He put his hands to his ears as if by doing so he could silence his own inner voice. Yet, the insane thoughts rambled on for several breaths before the warlock was finally able to bring himself under control.

In perverse fashion, it was his father’s words that provided the willpower.

We are the Tezerenee. The name Tezerenee is power. Nothing is greater than our will.

Until this moment, those words had always struck him as contradictory and simplistic. For all his father’s speeches, only one will really mattered among the clan of the dragon—the patriarch’s, of course. Now the words reminded Gerrod that his father would not allow madness to rule him so easily. The Lord Tezerenee would fight it with as much strength as he would a physical foe. It all depended on how you focused that strength.

Gerrod would not allow himself to fail where he knew his father would succeed.

Through silent contemplation, he brought order to his thoughts and quelled, if not cast out, the fear. It occurred to him then that he had closed his eyes upon losing his hold on his destination and had not opened them again.

From the darkness of his inner self, Gerrod found himself thrust in the light of… nothing?

For lack of a better term, he was willing to call his surroundings white, though white implied something, if only light and color, and this was neither. It was simply a vast nothingness.

“Dragon’s blood!” he hissed, momentarily slipping to a favorite Tezerenee oath.

He was floating helplessly in what could only be the emptiness that Dru Zeree had tried so desperately to describe, but always in so very inadequate terms. Gerrod could see why. Nothing, no words, could match the truth. There was no description that could do justice to the Void.

Calm. He had to remain calm. Master Zeree had escaped this place, and so would he.

What had happened? Gerrod recalled his brief intrusion into the real world and the sudden vagueness of his destination, as if the teleport spell no longer had a certain path to fix upon. His father had been there, a risk the warlock had been willing to face, but not the dweller from the Void. Why? The spell should have brought Gerrod to Darkhorse, unless there was some unforeseen barrier.…

A box. He recalled a box. There was something about it that had drawn him, something—

“You are not other I.”

“What?” Gerrod looked around, trying to find the source of the voice.

“Other I was becoming boring. Maybe you will be entertaining.”

“Who is that? Where are you?” the warlock shouted. He tried to turn around, but in the Void it was impossible to say whether he had achieved any result or not. Certainly, nothing but emptiness spanned his field of vision. It might have been a different nothing than the moment before, but how would he know?

“I am here.”

A vast hole opened up before the floating Vraad. Gerrod’s stomach began to turn. This was sounding too familiar to him. The hole quivered. Gerrod wondered how one could have a hole in the middle of emptiness. This was a part of the Void’s tendencies that he had never come to terms with even after mulling over the story for years. The natural laws that he was accustomed to had no meaning here. If the Void felt a hole could exist in the midst of what was basically a bigger hole, then so be it.

“You’re real!” Gerrod’s blurted remark was superfluous at best, but staring at this creature, even after having faced Darkhorse, he