The Fading Lands ~ Eastern Desert

As the Great Sun began its descent towards the western horizon, Ellysetta caught sight of a city rising from the flatness of the distant desert.

"What's that?" she asked, pointing.

"That is Lissilin, light of the east," Rain said. "Our destination for tonight."

Lissilin, which they reached before twilight cast the Rhakis into shadow, was another abandoned city of the Fey. Like Elverial, there was a haunting beauty to the place, the otherworldly grace of the immortal Fey evident in every curving archway and artistically carved stone wall. Unlike Elverial, however, there was no sense of a sleeping city waiting for its inhabitants to return. Life had left Lissilin. Its gardens were parched plots of sand, its buildings and fountains the dry, sunbaked bones of a dead city.

Ellsyetta felt a deep sense of sadness as she walked through the empty, sand-blown streets. "How many Fey once lived here?" It must have been many. Lissilin was no mere village.

"Twenty thousand," Dax supplied the number.

She winced. "Where are those people now?"

They had reached the center of the city. Five thoroughfares converged on a pentagon-shaped center dominated by a large, dry fountain filled with a half a dozen stone tairen. Once, no doubt, this had been a beautiful, lush park as lovely as the cherry-tree orchard at the base of Teleon.

Rain met her gaze, his own bleak. "Gone."

"Dead?"

"Most. The rest moved to Dharsa when they realized Lissilin was fading."

Ellysetta glanced around at the dry, abandoned buildings. So much beauty lost. What a terrible, sad waste. "Of all the cities in the Fading Lands, how many are still inhabited?"

He drew a deep breath and let it back out as a heavy sigh. "A few Fey still live in Tehlas and Blade's Point, and a few live alone, but only Dharsa still thrives."

Only Dharsa. In all the vast kingdom of the Fey, only Dharsa was still populous.

Rain gestured to a beautiful rose-stone building on the left where graceful, columned arches led to a brightly tiled inner courtyard. "Shei'tani, you and Marissya can wait there while Dax and I hunt. That building holds a few rooms still kept up for travelers. I'll fill the fountain so you will have water to wash and drink." He turned to the tairen fountain and spun a cool, blue weave of Water magic. Moments later, clear water spouted from the mouths of the stone tairen and rapidly began to fill the fountain's large pool.

Ellysetta frowned in bewilderment. His weave had not been powerful enough to create that much water from nothing. He'd merely summoned it from beneath the sands. "I don't understand. If there's still water here, why did the city die?"

Rain didn't answer immediately. Instead, he gathered a handful of sand, spun it into a small cup, and filled it from one of the streams pouring out of the tairen mouth. He handed the cup to Ellysetta. "Taste it."

She took a tentative sip. Cool, sweet water touched her tongue. "It's just water."

"Precisely." Rain spun another cup for Marissya as Ellysetta quenched her thirst. "It's just water. But this fountain is—or was—Lissilin's Source."

Her eyes widened. She looked at the tairen fountain with dawning dismay. There was no crisp tingle of faerilas magic in the water pouring from those stone mouths. There was nothing but…water.

"It isn't lack of water that made the city die, Ellysetta. The magic of Lissilin died too."

For the first time she began to truly understand just how desperate the plight of the Fey really was. They were living in the shadow of extinction in every possible way. The death of the tairen, the decline of their numbers, even the slow eradication of their magic.

"Do you think everything could somehow be related?"

Rain took a drink of the magicless water, then poured the rest out onto the sand. "The tairen are sickening in the egg, the Fey are childless, and the magic of the Fading Lands is slowly dying. Do I think they're all related? Aiyah. I am certain of it. But what's causing it all is the question we have yet to answer."

Eld ~ Boura Fell

Accompanied by half a dozen servants, Vadim Maur walked down the corridor that housed the luxurious cells reserved for his most magically gifted female captives.

For many years, Elfeya v'En Celay had resided here, garbed in delicate silks and left to await his pleasure as he sought to mate his great mastery of Elden magic with her countless Fey gifts. That attempt had come to naught, except that he'd discovered truemated Fey did not breed with any but their bound mates.

That limitation was not true for unmated Fey. Though the unmated Fey females he'd captured during the Wars had been too fragile to survive more than a few decades in captivity, the males were both hardy and fertile. Over the centuries, his captive Fey and dahl'reisen males had successfully impregnated thousands of Celierian and Elden females, and in an effort to bring additional magic into the bloodlines, he'd even released a number of their offspring back into the Celierian populations in the magic-infused lands near the borders.

All along the borders, the unwitting descendants of Vadim Maur's centuries-old breeding program lived their lives, Celierian and Eld mortals crossbred with a mix of Fey, Elvish, and Mage bloodlines, propagating amongst themselves with the genetic drives he had manipulated into their flesh, building the pool of increasingly gifted prospective breeders, females for his dahl'reisen studs, males for those rare females whose genetic makeup had left them too gifted to tolerate the touch of dahl'reisen flesh. In his office, entire volumes of books documented the specifics of the bloodlines he had bred and crossbred over the centuries.