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featureless blur. Time spun onward, sweeping Elienne’s awareness with it like thread cast haplessly from a spool. Aware its nether end passed straight through the Eye of Eternity, beyond which lay the heart of Ma’Diere’s mystery where no mortal may enter, Elienne tried to brake, to slow the rush of thought. But the effort only served to reunite her sluggish flesh with her mind.
    Flung beyond control, Elienne glanced back, frantically searching for sanctuary. But instead of a haven, she found a wide, light sky peppered black with shapes. Hell’s Demons were extended in full pursuit. Beneath the straining pinions of their wings, claws and fangs gleamed like steel polished in anticipation of blood and killing.
    Elienne yelled in stark fear and stumbled. Faisix and his snake-scaled horse led the Hell‘s Horde, and the creature’s forked red tongue tasted her presence. It quickened pace.
    Elienne screamed again. Terror froze her thoughts. She forced herself to run. Time unreeled futureward under her, but its course was no longer straight.
    Cut, spliced, and rewoven repeatedly, the Timepath’s clean line had been altered to the point where the eye could scarcely follow its spiraling tangle of convolutions.
    Elienne had no chance to wonder whose hand had meddled with the thread of natural progression. Her pursuers drove her forward without mercy. She fled over the first splice in the Time-track, her only thoughts of escape.
    The universe splashed into fragments. Darkness reigned between one step and the next. Reality re-formed as Elienne’s foot came down, but its shape was unrecognizable, utterly changed. Hardly had her senses encountered an impression when a second junction came upon her. Another void opened underfoot, replaced by yet another sequence of existence. But the alien reality of that Time-borne place held no comfort to human perception, and it was shortly spliced away in favor of still another.
    Elienne glanced behind, saw Faisix and the Horde had fallen back. More junctions passed beneath her step. Time-track interwove with Time-track in blinding progression, until each successive reality fell into the next like a toppling row of dominoes whose faces defied counting. Then, without warning, Time’s line straightened out.
    Elienne knew a world, a land with customs separate from any she had ever known, and in that place a woman. Almost it could have been herself, so fresh in the stranger’s mind was grief for a lost husband and ruined home. Elienne felt herself sift through the woman’s existence, body, mind, and emotions, striving to match character and circumstance with a pattern she found embedded like a signpost along the path she traveled. The woman failed to fit, and Time bucked underfoot, spliced into change with unarguable purpose.
    A second woman waited on the other side, and beyond her, women by the thousands in tireless succession. Each had suffered the recent loss of home and lover, and each carried a newly conceived child. Elienne entered the lives of all of them, mercilessly driven by the meddler who had carved Time to fit his purpose and left his pattern at every turn.
    “Release me!” she wanted to scream, yet she knew such outcry would be futile. Faisix and the Hell’s Horde were still behind, and she could stop only when a woman was found whose character and circumstance meshed with her predecessor’s requirements.
    She traversed mind after mind. Her nerves became frayed by others’ pain until humanity itself wearied her, and the lives she experienced became numerous and petty as the movements of insects. Yet pursuit denied her a second’s rest.
    Elienne felt her feet become heavy; every mortal instinct balked at the distance she had wandered from her proper Time. She glanced often over her shoulder, each time horrified to discover that Faisix and his Hell’s Horde had gained.
    Dulled like water-polished stone by fatigue, she dragged herself over another seam in the Time-track.