It was the day of Aumry's Feast, when the folk of Shadowdale gathered to toast their lord in the name of a much-beloved predecessor. In his leaning stone tower, well away from all the festivities, the Old Mage sat in the creaking chair by the hearth, his long pipe alight, sighing and muttering his way through a thoroughly hopeless grimoire of some long-ago necromancer of lost Netheril.

The writer had been a perfect crazed-wits, Elminster decided early on, and paranoid to boot. What little magic the Netherese mage had set down was twisted by the periodic ravings of a tenuous sanity and by the suspicion-driven cloaking of facts in a torturous maze of codes, obtuse jargon, deliberate misinformation, and mystical gibberish. The obvious intent was to conceal magical truths from unauthorized readers-all relatively sane wizards, for instance.

"A good one?" His scribe, Lhaeo, was rising from the hearth-cauldron with a long ladle in his hand and an amused look on his face. He'd seen Elminster's disgusted looks a time or two before.

"About five good breaths of blaze, on a hot fire," Elminster replied, hefting the old tome in his hands and looking meaningfully down at the flames under the cauldron. He glanced at the book again and shook his head.

"Sixty pages," he said with a sigh, "and only three real spells so far, one of them hopelessly skeltered at that. Yet he may have hidden a gem or two somewhere in all this nonsense. As ye know, I live in eternal hope."

Elminster snorted, rolled his eyes comically at Lhaeo, and turned another page. His pipe also snorted, puffing out a little burst of sparks.

Lhaeo chuckled and turned back to the herbs on his cutting board. Elminster watched him with a fond smile. When Lhaeo wasn't cooking, cleaning, or actually acting as a scribe, he was gathering herbs, gardening, gathering or shopping for food, or talking about recipes and culinary lore with every caravan cook who passed through the dale.