After their victory over the shadowy kidnapers, the four fugitives traveled swiftly. Their stolen enchanted cloaks allowed them to move nearly unseen through the forest at night, and as long as Kazé stayed out of the direct moonlight his fur remained ink black. They camped during the day in areas with good visibility. This took away any advantage that the cloaks gave their assailants. Kazé had caught the scent of their pursuers on the wind several times, but they were too few in number to make a frontal assault so they held well back and waited for an opportunity.

They traveled solidly for little more than two days before reaching a clearing on the river's edge. Just before they crossed the tree line, Cariolta caught the scent of burgundy silk on the air and stopped. It was magic. The rustling of leaves in the wind muffled their movements as they circled through the underbrush to get a look. What they found was an aged wizard and, presumably, his apprentice silently facing off against Prag, who was staring back blankly with his jaw hanging loosely and a bit of drool starting to drip from the corner of his mouth.

The decision was made with nothing more than a quick glance between the compatriots. Kazé charged through the last of the underbrush at lightning speed, his paws barely touching the ground as he flew towards the distracted wizard. Kish and Cariolta sped after him as quickly as their human feet could carry them, aiming for the apprentice. The boy bounded out after them, curious as to what all the excitement was about.

The old wizard returned to his sense just in time to see Kazé bearing down on him and he and began to conjure a spell that would tear the wolf in two. The words tangled in his mouth, however, as he saw Kish break through the bushes. His mind swirled with the images from Prag's mind and his focus drained out his ears. An instant later he found himself flat on the ground with a pounding headache and an uncomfortably heavy wolf on his chest.

The apprentice found himself at the sharp end of two swords and a spear as well, though he took no particular notice of the danger. He paid as much mind to the ambush as a grazing cow might pay to a passing moth.

"So much as a twitch from either of you and you'll be practicing your magics in several pieces." Cariolta snapped in an uncharacteristically vicious tone. "What business do you have with this man?"

"Now let's all just calm down. Nobody's been hurt." The ageing mage, having been floored so easily, decided to carry the pretense of a bumbling old man. "We're just looking for a friend of ours that went missing in these parts. This fellow here surprised us and I just stunned him a bit. He'll be fine in a few minutes. Just a misunderstanding I'm sure."

Given Prag's charming character and his soothing way with people, Cariolta was unsurprised that someone's first reaction to him would be to stun him, if not out of fear, then perhaps just to shut him up.

However, Prag was not stunned, he was well and truly ensorcelled; It takes a wizard of some skill to lock up a man's mind like that.

Kish didn't buy into it either. She knew nothing of magic, but there was something familiar about the old wizard—the way he looked at her, perhaps. She didn't trust him, though she couldn't say why.

Kazé didn't suffer the pangs of doubt that the humans might have. He could smell the deceit dripping off the man beneath him. If a single finger moved on the old man, he'd tear out his throat.

"That's him there!" The wizard said so suddenly that Kazé almost killed him. "The boy I'm looking for, that's him."

The strange youth, who had finally wandered into the middle of the clearing stared back at him blankly.

"Don't you recognize me boy? It's me, your master." The wizard obviously expected the young man to know him, but the boy continued to look around with the same vacant curiosity that he always did.

"That boy's a simpleton and a mute," stated Kish. "How do you know him?"

"A mute simpleton you say? Interesting," the wizard's voice started to change. It lost the soft tone of a confused old man and started to become thoughtful and full of malice "How do I know him? I made him. He's mine, and I would like him back. Defend me!"

The last words seemed to wake his apprentice from his disinterested state. His eyes were instantly afire and before anyone could react he had thrown a wave of force outward from himself, sending Kish, Kazé and Cariolta flying through the air. Well before any of them could regain their feet, he had pinned all three of them invisibly to the ground and created a crackling dome of lightning around him and his master.

"Well now, isn't this fortuitous. I've everything I'm looking for all wrapped up neatly for me." The wizard was gloating, obviously overflowing with satisfaction. "Both missing princesses, my wayward weapon, and a valuable puppy laying at my feet. Now let's see what I can do about making you lot a bit more co-operative." He closed his eyes and began to mumble slowly to himself. He reached out towards Kish and made a grasping motion. Cariolta recognized the spell. He was trapping her within her mind, just as he must have done to Prag. Once trapped, they would be helpless. He could read their minds, or even enslave them as his thralls. She watched in anguish at how quickly Kish fell to his power.

The wizard then turned his attention to Kazé. "I've half a mind to have my boy here reduce you to ash, Alpha, but I want your fur. So go to sleep." The wizard was so confident that he was taunting his helpless victims before placing his psychic shackles.

Kazé managed to fight off the mental cage longer than Kish, but without the moon to bolster him, he soon fell as well. Then the old and very self satisfied wizard turned to Cariolta. "Ah Princess, your escape was most vexing. I'm glad we have you now. Prepare yourself for the worst, my dear."

Cariolta was ready. She knew this spell well. Her uncle Ash, the man who had taught her magic, had cast it upon her as a game when she was young. The wizard would try to lock her in her own mind. He would throw her consciousness into a room in her psyche and then lock the door. If the subject was prepared and practised, they could escape back through the door before it was locked. Then it became a race. The wizard would try to find new doors and lock them, while the subject fled through the twisted corridors of the maze that is the mind. The maze is endless and it has many pitfalls and dead ends, but if one knows their own mind well, they can navigate it fast enough that the wizard cannot lock enough doors to capture them. Should the wizard become exhausted before the victim is trapped, the spell will fail.

Cariolta loved the 'game' as a child and had been very good at it. It became quickly apparent, though, that the mage was an old hand at it, as well. Cariolta dashed through the alleyways and twisting corridors of her mind, doors slamming shut all around her, but she was fast enough that she could push through them just before they were locked. This battle could go on for hours.

The boy took a long time to decide how he felt about the situation. There was some quick action, then some talking, then some flying and a big crackling blue thing popped up and all his friends started looking either very uncomfortable, or very slow.

He decided that the two other people were not his friends and that they were doing something bad. He walked up to them, but the noisy blue wall hurt a lot when he touched it. So he threw a tree at them.

It wasn't a very large tree, but then again it wasn't a very small tree either. It was certainly large enough to kill a man, especially at the speed at which it was sailing through the air. Fortunately for its targets, it exploded as it passed through the dome of lightning and instead of being hit by several hundred pounds of lumber all at once, they were hit by it in several smaller, albeit now flaming, chunks.

Cariolta stumbled out of her mind and back into the clearing. She found herself unrestrained and she sat up to see a burnt, battered, and bruised wizard pulling himself off the ground, coughing and wheezing. Her young friend had now drawn his sword and was bounding towards him on all fours, shredding the ground as he passed.

The wizard, unable to defend himself, tore a talisman from a leather strap from his neck and hurtled skyward as though he was pulled by a great rope tied about his waist. Moments later, his disinterested apprentice followed, though not by any apparent will of his own.

The two mages flew southward at a terrifying speed and were soon out of sight. Once confident that they would not be returning anytime soon, princess Cariolta set about unlocking the minds of her comrades. Normally it would have been a slow and arduous task to enter their psyches, but the clearing in which they stood was awash with residual magical energies which gave Cariolta enough power to operate. She started with Kish. Her mind was familiar and welcoming. It was a simple task to unlatch her cage and return her to her senses. Next was Kazé. Cariolta had never entered the mind of a wolf before and the psychic landscape was totally unlike that of a human. Instead of neat corridors there were dark caverns and crevices. It felt like hours before she finally found Kazé's imprisoned consciousness trapped in a deep pit.

Finally, she moved on to Prag. The dark alleys of his mind were well ordered and easy enough to navigate, though most of the doors were firmly locked. This made it difficult to discern which had been the one sealed by the wizard and which were secrets held very closely by Prag himself. She eventually found the room in which he had been locked, primarily from the sound coming from it, and flung open the door. There is only an instant between the moment a mind is released and when it ejects the rescuer from itself. In that moment, however, Cariolta gleaned a flash of the inner workings of Prag's mind for which she was not at all prepared.

Back in the physical world, Prag and Cariolta found themselves looking into each other's eyes with great discomfort. Cariolta blushed visibly, even through the heavy layers of cosmetics she somehow managed to maintain and Prag's stolen trousers did little to conceal his recent train of thought.

"What's wrong?" queried Kish.

They both looked at Kish. They both blushed further. "Nothing!" they stated in unison.

Cariolta was never so glad for their young companion's antics as she was at that moment. He suddenly started waving his arms madly trying to get their attention and broke the awkward silence that had filled the glade and was threatening to drown its occupants.

Once he had the attention of his friends he set about re-enacting his first remembered moments of life, for this was the very glade in which he had woken. Sadly his attempts at communicating his first strange and terrifying first moments were misread as the boy was jumping into a muddy crater and rolling around in it. He seemed to be taking it quite seriously, but nobody had any idea what was happening. The display was interrupted by a yelp of pain and a crash from the woods.

Looking up, everyone watched as Prag reloaded his crossbow and started making his way through the brush.

"You son of a three-legged-goat!" came a pained voice from the forest.

"... Warlis?" Prag stopped short.

"You toad munching ass! You shot me!" Came the voice again, obviously enraged.

"Warlis, it is you! What in the hells are you doing here?" Prag jogged into the brush and dragged out one of the cloaked men that had been pursuing the others. He was a fairly young man with unkempt brown hair, shifty brown eyes, and a crossbow bolt in his leg.

"Argh! Could you be a little less rough with me? In case you haven't noticed, there's an arrow in my leg!"

"Oh stop complaining. You should be glad this thing doesn't shoot straight. It didn't even catch any muscle." Prag was chiding the rogue playfully.

"Oh, well then you wouldn't mind if I shot you then? It feels great. Trust me, you should try it."

The others stared dumbfounded at the exchange. Finally Kish formed enough of a complete thought to speak. "You know this man?"

"Yeah, this is Warlis. He's one of the Shadow Thieves of Antiq. We used to go drinking together back home in Caneria. What are you doing way up here?" Prag seemed overjoyed at having found one of his buddies by chance in the wilderness and seemed to make very little of the fact that he had just shot the man out of a tree.

"I could ask you the same thing." "Working."

"Same here."

"What's the job?"

"Can't say."

"Naturally."

The tenor of the conversation had switched to a strangely professional tone. Kish once again decided to step in and interrupt this fond reunion. "They're trying to Kidnap Cari," she said flatly.

"Seriously?" Prag looked for confirmation from his friend who shifted his gaze in a non-committal fashion. "But you guys don't do kidnapping. You're thieves. Who the hell managed to get you to travel across two countries to do a job you're neither qualified nor licensed for?" Prag interrupted himself and turned back to Kish and the Princess "How did you three get shadow cloaks?"

Warlis answered for them with a mix of anger and horror "The wolf and the kid killed four of us. They actually ate Dan and Warwick. They ate them!"

"I got some bad news for you Warlis." Prag spoke as he began bandaging the thief 's wound. "You boys won't be getting your revenge for that anytime soon, nor will you be finishing your job. These nice folks just saved my ass and I owe them some protection for that. Besides, your best scout just got shot in the leg and lost his shadow cloak."

"But I didn't lose my... You really are wart suckling eel Prag." Warlis took off his cape and threw it at Prag with furious resignation. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to replace these?"

"Don't care Warlis. Now go home and forget you ever left Antiq."

"We can't Prag." Warlis was suddenly crestfallen. "This job wasn't for cash. We're in it pretty deep. If we don't come through... Fair warning, Prag. We can't pull out."

Prag double checked the dressing and turned away from his old friend with resignation. "Come on you lot, we should be able to ford the river a little upstream." The others followed his orders, more out of confusion than obedience.

Princess Cariolta felt a strange sense of guilt for having defeated the Shadow Thieves' two nights prior. Their victory over the dark and vile assassins had been tainted by the unpleasant reminder than those same assassins were just a group of regular people who had gotten themselves in a jam. Her mind again wandered to the courtyard strewn with the corpses of men who had died in agony in their escape from Irsank. She considered what the further death toll might be should she continue to run and wept softly to herself.

Kazé and Kish had seen battle before. They knew what it meant to fight to survive and they were outwardly unfazed by the deaths of their enemies. Inwardly, though, they both had their own personal demons with which they were wrestling.

Kazé was a proud Moon Wolf and held himself at least on par with his human compatriots. Yet in a time of pain and hunger, he had been reduced to a feral beast. Although, his friends had hailed him as their saviour at the time, they did not know that he could not remember choosing foe over friend to attack. Had there been no other source of meat, would he have devoured one of his companions—one of those he had sworn to defend? He did not know, and the uncertainty devoured him.

Kish was far too preoccupied to be worrying about the ethics of self preservation. She was hunting. Her prey was an elusive memory, a moment of recognition that teased her and fled into the recesses of her mind. The old wizard had seemed familiar, but it was not his face or his dress or his voice that had stirred her recognition. There was something deeper that she couldn't lay her hands on. The man's gaze filled her with unease. Almost as if he'd been listening to her thoughts, Prag broke the silence. Or, as the group suddenly realized, broke the pattern of inane banter that he had been spewing, and they ignoring, with a pointed question.

"Hey! Who was that old wizard anyway?" He asked bluntly. Kish was obviously discomforted by Prag's apparent insight. "I

don't know. At least I don't think I do. Why are you asking me anyway, why should I know him?"

"Because he knows you." Came the flat reply "He knows our lost little princess here too but he knows you really well, and I think he has less than pure ideas about you." His voice quickly shifted and dripped

for a moment with all the venom of Lord Cailo before he let out a most lecherous and disquieting chuckle.

"You shall refer to me as 'Princess Cariolta', or 'Her Highness' you miserable peasant!" The princess managed to inject enough regal authority into her voice to cut off Prag's tasteless comments and even cow him for a very brief moment of shock.

"Oh! You're that princess. Then I apologize, your highness, but I'm doing this work in-kind for you folks saving my butt. I only engage in pleasantries when I'm getting paid. You're welcome to dismiss me if you don't like it." He grinned playfully and hopped up on a log. "We're here!"

He had brought them to a narrowing in the river over which a large tree had fallen. It was starting to rot from age, but it looked solid enough to cross. Prag scuttled across the log and baited the others to do the same. Kish followed with ease and Cariolta chose to sacrifice speed for grace and walked, very much like a princess should, with nose held high and with sureness of step as though she were on marble floor. Kazé ignored the games of the awkward humans and trotted across casually, barely taking note of the rushing river below him.

The boy was last, and he approached the log with all the caution of a hurricane. He made it little more than two bounds, however, before the log cracked beneath his weight and dropped him into the fast moving waters.

There were several moments of panic as the four on the far side of the river tried and failed to form rescue plans. Kazé chased the water downstream hoping to catch sight of the boy as he bobbed to the surface and hopefully drag him to shore once the river calmed. Prag dug for the rope in his satchel. The two women searched for a branch that they might use to reach out to the boy if he resurfaced.

Almost a minute passed without any sign of the boy. Hope drained from the party and despair set in. Each one began to blame themselves for his untimely demise and Cariolta was on the verge of shedding tears of grief when the boy emerged on the bank of the river. He pulled himself out, confused, but apparently unharmed. Kish ran to his side in an uncharacteristic affectionate joy and was rewarded for her compassion with a rather unreasonable amount of water being vomited onto her trousers.

Prag's perceptive gaze shifted from the boy to the unusually deep tracks he was leaving in the soil and he slapped his forehead in realization of his oversight. "It's that sword!"