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when the spirits of my love and Regis rode from Mithral Hall on a ghostly unicorn, rode through the stone walls and were lost to me, that morning of the deepest pain I have ever known, remains to me an open, bleeding, and burning wound.
    But no more.
    That memory I now place on the flowing waters, and look not behind me as it recedes.
    I go forward, on the open road with friends old and new. Too long have my blades been still, too clean are my boots and cape. Too restless is Guenhwyvar. Too restless is the heart of Drizzt Do’Urden.
    We are off to Gauntlgrym, Bruenor insists, though I think that unlikely. But it matters not, for in truth, he is off to close his life and I am away to seek new shores—clean shores, free of the bonds of the past, a new segment of my life.
    It is what it is to be an elf.
    It is what it is to be alive, for though this exercise is most poignant and necessary in those races living long, even the short-lived humans divide their lives into segments, though they rarely recognize the transient truth as they move through one or another stage of their existence. Every person I have known tricks himself into thinking that this current way of things will continue on, year after year. It is so easy to speak of expectations, of what will be in a decade, perhaps, and to be convinced that the important aspects of one’s life will remain as they are, or will improve as desired.
    “This will be my life in a year!”
    “This will be my life in five years!”
    “This will be my life in ten years!”
    We all tell ourselves these hopes and dreams and expectations, and with conviction, for the goal is needed to facilitate the journey. But in the end of that span, be it one or five or ten or fifty years hence, it is the journey and not the goal, achieved or lost, that defines who we are. The journey is the story of our life, not the achievement or failure at its end, and so the more important declaration by far, I have come to know, is, “This is my life now.”
    I am Drizzt Do’Urden, once of Mithral Hall, once the battered son of a drow matron mother, once the protégé of a wondrous weapons master, once loved in marriage, once friend to a king and to other companions no less wonderful and important. Those are the rivers of my memory, flowing now to distant shores, for I reclaim my course and my heart.
    But not my purpose, I am surprised to learn, for the world has moved beyond that which I once knew to be true, for this realm has found a new sense of darkness and dread that mocks he who would deign to set things aright.
    Once I would have brought with me light to pierce that darkness. Now I bring my blades, too long unused, and I welcome that darkness.
    No more! I am rid of the open wound of profound loss!
    I lie.
    —Drizzt Do’Urden

THE DAMNED
The Year of Knowledge Unearthed (1451 DR)
    I T WAS A CLEVER DEVICE SHE HAD FASHIONED, A THIMBLELIKE, CONICAL PIECE of smooth cedar with a point like a spear and an opening that allowed her to fit it onto her finger. She slipped it on and gently rotated a knot in the wood, and the mundane became magical as the finger spear diminished and took the form of a beautiful sapphire ring.
    The glittering adornment fit the majestic image of Dahlia Sin’felle. Her tall, lithe elf form was topped by a head shaved clean but for a single thin clutch of raven black and cardinal red locks, woven to run down the right side of her shapely head and nestle in the hollow of her deceptively delicate neck. Her long fingers, wrapped with more than that one jeweled ring, were tipped with perfect nails, painted white and set with tiny diamonds. Her icy blue eyes could freeze a man’s heart or melt it with a simple look. Dahlia appeared the artist’s epitome of Thayan aristocracy, a lady great even among the greatest, a young woman who could enter a room and turn all heads in lust, in awe, or in murderous jealousy.
    She wore seven diamonds in her left ear, one for each of the lovers she