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Crivreen.
    “Please let the lady speak,” said Ragnar.
    “I need to go back a little farther. When I first met him, Narcion was a minor wizard who did his best to stay out of the wars. He was never a gentle person, but his dark side was well under control at that time. He often took people in randomly and helped them get started in life. That was the way he was,” said Raquel.
    I smiled at her comment, as that was just how this team had been formed. Narcion might have been the most ruthless and merciless warrior I had ever heard of, but he poured himself into this team and made us what we were today.
    “The wars found him; they found everyone eventually. It was a very dark time. The wars forced him to fight, and all the death and destruction he had to take part in changed him into the cold and calculating man you knew. He turned to necromancy in order to gain the power he needed, but the evil art twisted his soul and turned him darker.”
    Raquel had to pause there, choked up with emotion. I started to say something but Ragnar stopped me. She had previously confided that he had turned to necromancy to obtain vengeance for someone close to him, but this remark about the war was new. I wondered if that person close to him had been Raquel herself.
    After a moment she continued. “The master sorcerers devised a plan to use Narcion’s tables to come back after all the wizards were gone and the weave had been healed.”
    “By the gods! That would have put them in control before anyone could stop them,” said Ragnar.
    The incident she was referring to had happened ten thousand years previously. At that time, the wizards thought they could stop the sorcerers by rending reality itself. They had hoped it would remove from the sorcerers the ability to do magic by denying them access to the weave, but it did much more: it prevented everyone from working magic until recently.
    “Yes, a new age of evil would have risen,” she said. “Narcion knew that once the wizards tore the weave, we would all die. I tried to warn them, but they didn’t believe me and said I had been duped by my husband. I have often wondered what they might have thought, what excuses they might have come up with, if they hadn’t been consumed in the casting. They never had time to realize that their mistake would wipe out the magi, good and bad alike, for eons.
    “So, before the wizards could tear the weave, Narcion and I fled to another realm where we pretended to be mundanes. He brooded about creating the tools that would turn this realm into a living, waking nightmare, and over time the guilt drove him mad. The only saving grace he could come up with was that we had survived and might be able to find a way to return to this realm before the sorcerers could, to destroy the tables. In order to do that, Narcion devised a timeless state for us to sleep in, tied to this realm’s weave. The plan was that we would wake once the weave had healed enough for us to operate in this realm again.”
    Ragnar brought a drink over for her and she paused to take a long swig before continuing. “It worked. He woke first and started his hunt without me. I eventually awoke and followed him out here. He was working hard to complete his mission, throwing all caution to the wind and embracing the very powers that had twisted him.”
    She paused for another swig and Ragnar asked, “Then the doom you warned us of was the expected result of Narcion’s use of necromancy?”
    “Yes. It was what I believed inevitable, but somehow he managed to stay focused on the mission until the end. Had he not – ” she paused for a moment, took a deep breath and continued. “Had he not, it would have ushered in an era ruled by the undead.”
    It had not been very long since Narcion had died in that final battle and she obviously mourned him deeply. Even Felix was quiet for a moment.
    “He redeemed himself,” said Ragnar. “Whatever he had once been, he gave his life to save the realm