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clung to her which she felt she would never be free of, as if she would drown in it. She was so exhausted. Exhausted and wrung out with despair in the never ending gray, gray world.
    Then color shimmered like a newly created thing. A path opened up on the side of the road painted with rusty red pine needles and vibrant green hemlock, pine, and spruce trees. Tiny white bunchberry flowers grew in patches along the path. The sun broke through the clouds, and though it appeared just a lighter shade of gray elsewhere in the woods, along the path it showered through the trees in brilliant beams of gold.
    Karigan reined The Horse along the path and slumped on his neck. She could see right through his chestnut hide to the forest floor. He halted, and she slid off his back onto a moist patch of sphagnum moss. She was too exhausted to even remove the sodden greatcoat.
    As she drifted into sleep, she wished to be whole again—not transparent like some living ghost.
    GRAY ONE

    The rising sun was hidden behind the height of the great wall. One could look up and up, and even higher, but never really see the top. It was magic, of course. Where the real granite stopped, a magical shield continued in a seamless illusion of a towering wall. The D'Yers had designed the wall to seemingly surpass the sky and reach for the very heavens. There were flying things the Sacoridians and the League had wanted to keep on the other side.
    The Gray One's original crack had spread its spidery fracture lines into the surrounding seams of mortar, weakening a section of wall about the size of a doorway. This went far beyond his expectations—that the cracks would grow more than a few inches. He was closer to breaking through than he could have hoped for.
    Time. Time had made the spells brittle and the mortar vulnerable. Without the touch of a mage to maintain the wall, it had weakened. Even now silvery runes shimmered on the granite blocks around the fractures. The runes were ancient Sacoridian and Kmaernian characters. They were runes of alarm; they warned of the fissures, of the weakening of the wall. They revealed unraveling spell songs, and rhythms that had been corrupted.
    No one would know about the wall until it was too late. It was already too late. The D'Yers hadn't bothered with patrols for centuries, and even if they became aware of the cracks, they wouldn't know what to do. They would have to seek a scholar to decipher the runes, and a very learned master he would have to be. The language of Kmaern was lost with its people, extinct from the tongues of the living for centuries.
    Even if the D'Yers could translate the runes, they would have no understanding of how to rebuild the wall. Like many other things, they had lost the craft. There was no threat to the Gray One's plans.
    He splayed his fingers against the cold wall. It prickled, but without the intensity of before. He willed his thoughts down through his shoulders, down his arms, and through his fingertips. His consciousness spread across the wall like cracks, and he felt the resonance of his song still working in the rock and mortar.
    The old voices had grown uncertain, and the beat weaker. With any luck, his song would spread along the entire length of the wall of its own volition and decay the spells that bound it together. In time, the wall would crumble to the earth and the power of Kanmorhan Vane would spread unhindered across the lands. Not only would the Gray One win access to those great powers, but the lands would surrender to him under the threat of darkness that lurked in the forest.
    He sang the unweaving, steadily corrupting the old spells, chipping away at mortar with his thoughts, convincing the granite it had been subject to thousands of years of freezing and thawing, to wind, rain, and snow.
    Finally, he weakened it enough.

    The Gray One moved each limb experimentally where he lay on the dewy grass. His body proved a hindrance at times, but it managed to absorb the shock