"How do you know how late it is," Quenthel asked, "or how cold it'll get?"
Valas struck a spark and quickly crouched to shelter it from the wind. In a few moments, the brush crackled and burned brightly. The scout fed it carefully with more brush.
"You see the pattern of stars to the south?" he said. "Six of themthat look a little like a crown? I hose are winter stars. They rise early and set late this time of year. You'll note that they're near the zenith."
"You've traveled on the surface before," Quenthel observed.
"Yes, Mistress," Valas said, but did not elaborate.
"If it's the middle of the night, what is that glow in the sky?" she asked. "Surely that must be the dawn."
"A late moonrise."
"It's not the sun coming up? It's so bright!"
Valas looked up, smiled coldly, and said, "If that was the sun, Mistress, the stars would be fading from half the sky. Trust me, it's the moon. If we stay here, you'll come to know the sun soon enough."
Quenthel fell silent, perhaps chagrined by her mistake. Halisstra didn't hold it against her - she had made the same mistake herself.
"That raises an excellent question," said Pharaun. "Presumably, we do not wish to stay here for very long. So, then, what shall we do?"
He looked deliberately at Quenthel Baenre, challenging her with his question.
Quenthel didn't rise to the bait. She gazed off at the silver glow in the east, as if she hadn't heard the question. Moon shadows faint as ghosts began to grow from weathered walls and crumbling columns, so dim that only the eyes of drow accustomed to the gloom of the Underdark could perceive them. Quenthel reached down to the sand beside her and let a handful run between her fingers, watching the way the wind swept away the silver stream. For the first time, it occurred to Halisstra that Quenthel and the other Menzoberranyr might feel something of the same weariness, the same desolation, that lay over her own heart, not because they felt her loss, but because they understood that they had witnesseda loss, a great and terrible one.
The silence stretched out for a long time, until Pharaun shifted and opened his mouth as if to speak again. Quenthel spoke before he could, her voice cold and scornful.
"What shall we do, Pharaun? We shall do whatever Idecide we should do. We are exhausted and wounded, and I have no magic to restore our strength and heal our wounds." She grimaced, and let the rest of the sand slip through her fingers. "For now, rest. I will determine our course of action tomorrow."
Hundreds of miles from the desert ruins, another dark elf stood in another ruined city.
This was a drow city, a jutting bulwark of black stone that thrust out from the wall of a vast, lightless chasm. In arrangement it had once been something like a mighty fortress built upon a great rocky hilltop, only turned on its side to glower out over an empty space where foul winds from the unplumbed abyss below howled up into unseen caverns above. Though its turrets and spires leaned boldly out over a horrifying precipice, the place did not seem frail or precarious in any sense. Its massive pier of rock was one of the bones of the world, a thick spar rooted so securely in the chasm wall that nothing short of the unmaking of Toril would tear it loose.
Those few scholars who remembered the place knew it as Chaulssin, the City of Wyrmshadows, and even most of them forgot why the city was called that. In the lightless fortress on the edge of an abyss, the shad-ows themselves lived. Inky pools of midnight blacker than a drow's heart curled and flowed from tower to tower. Whispering darkness slithered like a gigantic, hungering dragon in and about the needle-like spires and the open-sided galleries of the dead city. From time to time the living shadows swallowed portions of the city for centuries, drawing a palace or a temple deep into a cold place beyond the circles of the world.
Nimor Imphraezl climbed deliberately through Chaulssin's deserted galleries, seemingly oblivious to the living black curtains that danced and writhed in the city's dark places. The maddening howl of the end-less hurricane rising up past the city walls ripped at his cloak and sent his long silver hair streaming from his head, but he paid it no mind. This was his place, his refuge, and its perils and madness simply