He heard distant stirrings of brush to the northeast, probably well across the Way of the Dragon, then silence. Broken by a brief, faint hooting even farther westward.

Still and silent, Amarune’s dancer’s body poised like a statue, El waited.

Long enough for even a lazy hunter to become impatient he held still, but nothing else moved that he could hear. And the sleekly muscled body he was occupying had far better hearing than what he’d grown used to in recent centuries.

Some of his excitement washed into her sleeping mind, at rest in one dim corner of the brain he steered. Amarune rose slowly toward wakefulness, her dreams growing restless, as she tasted his eagerness.

Ye’re as giddy as a lass fleeing her first kiss, El reproached himself, as he crawled on down a ferny slope of wet dead leaves toward a dark bank of old, leaning trees. Steady, Sage of Shadowdale. Where’s that world-weary yawning that ye do so well?

Part of him smirked, but through the lacy curtain of his mirth, El fought to quell ever-wilder excitement as he reached the bottom of the slope.

Only to lose his breath under a thrilling onslaught of fresh nerves as he felt the nearness of Mystra. Right ahead of him.

A weighty taste in the air came from the silent gloom behind a rising old tree that smelled of bear.

He didn’t even have time for a hint of fear before he saw a dark wall of fur that must be that beast shambling away along the line of trees, afire with Mystra’s power just as his own mind was.

Blue fire deepened in his brain, bringing certainty. The goddess of all magic was riding the bear’s mind just as he was riding Amarune’s.

Before El knew it, the moonlit trees were behind him, and he was crawling into bear-smelling darkness, over muddy, loose stones in a musky earthen den tapestried in descending roots and floored with gnawed old bones green with mold. As he crawled on, the ground dropped down into a stony cavern tall enough to stand in, aglow with Mystra’s fire.