They wheeled him into a great hall, brilliantly lit although he couldn't see the light source. Wizards leaned over him, their faces concealed by hoods. A half dozen of them picked him up, like a sack of roots.
His head lolled backward, and from the skewed and upside-down perspective, he saw what surrounded him.
The entire hall was filled with wizards, each holding a red, lit candle. Another wizard was pouring a circle with white powder, perhaps salt, around Alaire and the group holding him. A strange monotonous chant began among the wizards, and grew in pitch and vol- ume until the entire hall was chanting the st Suinomen verse.
The box they laid him into was of oak, shallow and tapered, lined and padded with black silk. Altogether too much like a coffin for his sanity. He watched help- lessly as they picked up what had to be the lid to the thing, unable to scream.
They dropped the lid over him, leaving him in total darkness. He couldn't feel anything, and the lid cut off sound as well as light. He was lost in a formless, shape- less darkness.
He couldn't even cry out in terror.
His fear was beyond anything he'd ever felt before; there was nothing left to him but fear.
They were going to rob him of his soul and store his body somewhere. They might already have done so!
He had no way of telling. How long would he be in here? A year? Two? Forever? They had no reason to let him go; he was not a Suinomen citizen. Only Nai- tachal knew where he was, and they might kil Dark Elf before he could get word home. He could be condemned to an eternity of this darknes Blackness became light. His body melted away completely, as if he were made of wax, and held over a flame. He had thought he could not feel anything -- but now he realized there had been a feeling of weight, of solidity, and of connection. Now tha gone! There was no "Alaire" anymore, only a spark floating in the light.
And light became cold, deep, chilling cold. It was the cold of a thousand winters, of being frozen in ice, of freezing blood, of skin turning blue. It was a cold beyond numbness, but he could not shiver, for his body was elsewhere.
Now he was the ice itself, his new body an ice crystal, among several other ice crystals. He could see, after a fashion; a revelation that gave him no relief. Instead, to his horror, he realized that he was one of a row of crystals, lining a shelf, with other shelves before him and to either side. His "vision" through the crystal was fogged, unclear, blurred with tiny cracks and fissures.
On his surface these were minute imperfections, and he was aware of every little flaw and blemish.
The terror ebbed, and as it faded, he tried to recall why he had been frightened. There was no reason to be frightened, was there? Not in Suinomen ...
Why am I in Suinomen? he wondered, then. I'm from. . . the south. Al. . . Althe. .. somewhere south.
Somewhere else. It didn't matter. Here mattered, and now. Right?
Distant recollections of a Dark Elf, a Bard, were somehow important to him in ways he could no longer remember.
If he could not remember them, then they weren't important. The elf faded in his memory to a dark blur, and van Father...
But the thoughts slipped away, like swiftly swim- ming fish, leaving behind only the biting cold and the vague awareness of being in a prison.
Prison of... what? Of where?
His identity continued to slip away in pieces, like falling shards of glass, until he could no longer recall his name.
Who am I? How did I come to be here?
What is here?
What is...
It was a moment later, and an eternity; it was both, and neither.
Fog shifting within ice, freezing over his soul. Drift- ing amid vague fears, vaguer longings, he no longer knew who he was, or what he was; captured in crystal, the soul sought memories, found nothing but ice and fog. Ice and fog, and a fear that hounded him and kept him restlessly searching for someone, something, while the ice urged him to sleep, to let it numb him to everything, to make him forget completely.