Rod found himself staring at Taeauna's front, bared almost down to her crotch. He'd seen her intestines spilling sickeningly out of a great gash, but that wound was now gone. Under a darkening smear of drying blood, her stomach was flat and whole.

"How did you…?" he blurted, gesturing almost helplessly at her.

Her eyes grew larger, and fear came back into her face.

"Have you forgotten everything, lord?" she whispered. "Your blood healed me, just as it healed you. You have that power. The wizards have lusted after it for as long as Falconaar can remember."

Rod frowned. "Falconaar? And my blood heals- why? Because I’m 'Lord Archwizard?' Or the 'Dark Lord?'"

Taeauna closed her eyes, sighed so hard she started to tremble again, and then opened them and said patiently, like a teacher instructing a child, "Your writings change Falconfar, and every sage and wizard knows it. We Aumrarr, whom you created, know it. There have been other writers, many others, before you, but their creations are now but dim shadows before the fire of your pen. Thousands upon thousands of people in this, your world, visit Falconfar in their dreams, and their dreaming gives us strength, too, but it is the scribes of this world that anchor and shape us, and you are the strongest of them all. So strong that we Falconaar, the people of Falconfar, call you the Lord Archwizard, where none have been so named before you."

Rod stared at her, and then looked across the room at the bookshelves he couldn't quite see in the gloom, picturing the row of seven books there, with their familiar, vivid covers, and… and he looked back at Taeauna, at this slender, blood-covered and very real woman kneeling in his bedroom, and forced himself to say, "You called me Dark Lord, too. What's this 'evil' I've done?"