Extinction

Ryld cast his mind back to his training at Melee-Magthere. One of the tests initiates had been required to pass involved maintaining concentration in times of physical duress. The initiates had been instructed to strip off their clothing, sit cross-legged on the floor of the practice hall with their eyes closed, and focus on their breathing. At the time, Ryld thought the test was designed to teach them to ignore the cold of the stone floor?but he was wrong. One of the masters strolled between the rows of meditating pupils, dropping centipedes onto their skin. The insects were each as long as a finger and bit immediately when they landed, injecting a venom that raced like fire through the students' veins. Those initiates who cried out or gasped were given a sharp rap on the head. If they cried out a second time they were hit harder. A third, and they were told to leave Melee-Magthere and never return.

Ryld had been dimly aware of the student behind him gasping a third time and listened with only a portion of his mind as he was ordered to leave. He heard the choked sob he made as he obeyed. Ryld forced his mind deeper into meditation, at the same time bracing himself for what he knew was coming next. When the centipede fell onto his thigh, he didn't flinch. As the centipede bit into his flesh like the stab of a fire-heated skewer, he told himself to remain calm, to breathe in through his left nostril, out through his right, in through his left nostril, out through his right. .

Then the centipede scurried across his groin, its hundreds of legs tickling, its head moving from side to side as if it was looking for a second spot to bite. In the space between two heartbeats, Ryld nearly forgot how to breathe. He felt his heart begin to race, while instinct screamed at him to leap to his feet, to brush the foul insect away.

Then he remembered his life before Melee-Magthere?his life in the Stenchstreets, and the time, years before, when the nobles had come on their hunt. He was only six years old then, but he remembered lying there, blistered from the fireball that had left corpses strewn all around him. In order to survive, he'd been forced to lie utterly still, to play dead while the hunters claimed their trophies: teeth, ears, and occasionally an entire head. Ryld had learned then to control his breathing, to make it shallow and slow, inaudible above the sawing of blades through flesh. Thankfully, they did not deem any parts of a small, scrawny boy worth taking.

Remembering that trial, he found the strength to ignore the tickle of the centipede and its second painful bite.

When the ordeal was over, the masters nodded, silently acknowledging the fortitude of Ryld and the other five students who had passed the test. Ryld had been almost unable to walk for an entire tenday afterward.

Lying in the forest, riding the waves of the war between the belladonna and the disease, Ryld used what he'd learned that day. Focusing on his breathing, on the drawing in of air, the slow filling of his lungs, and the slow exhalation that followed, he slowed his racing pulse. He drove the heat from his skin, imagining it flowing from him with each breath. Slowly, his body returned to normal, and he shivered.

His eyes, however, continued to see the fantastic images the belladonna had limned on the world. The trees remained grayish-white against a sky studded with impossibly bright stars. The moon, trailing brighter stars in its wake, hurt to even glance at. Wavering shadows danced in the forest. One of those shadows stepped out from the others and coalesced into the form of a woman.

"Halisstra. ." Ryld breathed, then he saw that he was mistaken.

The woman was a drow but was not Halisstra Melarn. She was naked, her white hair hanging well past her hips. As she moved closer to Ryld, his fevered eyes saw that her skin was covered in evening dew. Drops of it covered her body, sparkling in the moonlight like stars against the sky-black of her skin.

She stood before him a moment, staring down with eyes that reflected the light like twin crescent moons. Then she touched the hilt of the sword he'd accidentally speared into the earth. Slender fingers traced a lazy circle around the leather-wrapped hilt. To Ryld's eyes the fingers looked as if they were dancing. Her lips parted, but instead of speech Ryld heard the notes of a flute. Its tune was somehow both welcoming and harsh at the same time, as if the flautist was of two minds about what tune to play and was able to play both at once. All the while, the woman stared deeply into Ryld's eyes, as if she was trying to see into his soul. Her hand closed around the hilt of the sword.