05.08.02 - 9:57 a.m.

The Lady of the Gray Eyes has no apprentices. Alone in her austere tower, she is the last of her order. To the west, the blighted lands unfurl, a soiled, ragged place that wounds the eye to see. To the south, the lush decadence, to the north, austere cold, to the east, the shining lands, and in the valleys that border her own, they come together in a strange tapestry. From the highest ramparts of the delicate spire, one can see at some portion of every land � sun glinting off the distant ice, or the roil of black smoke pouring from a twisted, alien city, but she does not need to see. The tower echoes not with the shouts of apprentices, but with the memory of their laughing voices.

Years ago, years and years and years ago, their order abandoned the earth to the fate its people had forged for it. The seers had visions each morning as they stared into their smoke-silvered mirrors, and work to sweatladen sheets and nameless terror each and every night, and the elders of the order knew the time had come, their work had failed, and the cruelest fate had at last found another shining world.

Two by two they gathered, and two by two they sacrificed, and two by two they died spinning a spell from with the very stuff of their souls, the heat of their blood, until at last they finished weaving a portal bisecting time and space that would carry them to another, more innocent world.

When they were gone � the Elders and the Apprentices, the Journeymen and the Masters, the old and the young, the powerful and the weak � when they had vanished at last from this world, the tower should have crumbled to powdered dust so fine it would sift and drift in only the slightest of breezes, leaving nothing but a memory of its existence, and soon enough not even that.

But the tower did not crumble, nor did its foundations collapse. The growth of the forest � stayed sorcerously for centuries � did not renew with fervor and devour the last remnants of the tower. The gray lords disappeared, they walked through the portal and the portal closed forever, but seven remained. Seven solitary figures remained, austere in their fine robes and silent as the portal opened by the blood of their brothers for their salvation closed forever.

And one by one by one they left the tower, to seek among the people of the earth what magic remained, to renew the order and thus the possibility of peace � or, at the least, survival � in the earth. One, by one, by one, they left � pilgrims and dreamers, those who seek and those who yearn.

None have returned.

She is the last of them. She was young, once, and uncertain of her power. But now the silvered sweeps and stabs of her conscious, subtle seeking pierce deep into the heart of the surrounding kingdoms. Even now � years after all hope has past � she seeks her brothers and her sisters patiently. She will bring them home.