Zyrdicia unbuckled the dragon's saddle silently, lost in thought. She did not notice the great, green eyes regarding her. The beast's deep voice finally brought her back to the task at hand.

"Why did you choose not to kill them?" it asked delicately.

"I should have killed them," she mused. "I'm not sure why I didn't. I've killed greater men for less. Something about the tall one reminded me of Azriok," she said, remembering her former mentor. "That's rare in a mortal. It surprised me."

"He looks like him?"

She shook her head. "Not at all. Not even close in fact. He is handsome enough, but no mortal could ever look like Azriok. It is something else. I've been trying to put my finger on it and can't," she frowned.

After a moment, she blurted out suddently, "The voice. It is the damned voice! It sounds like a physical manifestation once Azriok took on earth. Ugh. After 115 years, some human somewhere managed to breed a prince with a similar haughty arrogance and lush tenor." She wrinkled her nose in distaste.

"You know the story of the thousand monkeys breeding infinitely . . . …" the dragon began.

She laughed, throwing her arms around the reptile's neck.

"Do you think the tall one is a messenger from Azriok then?" Roshor asked, his tone much more serious.

The mirth drained from her face. She thought a moment then shook her head. "I don't think so. I just destroyed his latest manifestation last month on the astral plane. It is much too soon for him to start sending things after me. He is stuck in Tenaebra licking his wounds and regrouping. He will send something after me eventually, just to show he still cares. For now, I still have a few months to sleep peacefully. Besides, Azriok loathes mankind--he would never work through a human being."

"How can you be sure the man was really human?" the dragon inquired. "He smelled human, but that can be faked."

"This prince's mind was hopelessly human. His psyche was genuine. The man is a heartless, sadistic, power-hungry killer. In a way, I suppose that makes him family. There's something else . . ." she said, thinking out loud. "My instincts tell me that he has something to do with the reason father's messenger brought me there. It doesn't make any sense, but I don't think I should kill him until I'm sure."

"Do you have a plan for their world yet?"

"Plan? Plans ruin the spontaneity of the game. Father's messenger led me through the opening to find the world, but there was no word as to what I was supposed to do with it once I got there. My only guess is that he wants it destroyed. So, then the plan would be to annihilate it. Enslaving it might be entertaining, but then what? Finding something to do with an enslaved world is more trouble than just killing them all off. It doesn't look like there is much worth plundering, so I think that just leaves 'death and destruction' as our choice. I'm open to other ideas, if you have any."

The dragon was silent.

"There are only three competent practitioners of magic in that world. It's the sort of backwater place where I could be a deity relative to the native powers that be," she laughed. "The fact that those three old sorcerers manage to keep a monopoly on magical fire power is evidence of the population's stupidity. Really, we have a moral imperative to rid their world of the human ballast.

"As for the sorcerers, we already met one of the three tonight. He's incredibly careless; I can take him. That leaves two others, whom I might never even encounter. For all I know, they may be even more pathetic than the wizard we just met.

"From what we've seen, the place seems to be fairly sparsely inhabited. I'm guessing we've killed about 200 people there so far. Once we finish our work on the rest of the continent's farmlands, the crops will fail from the salted fields. Without food, the death toll will grow quickly. They lack a complex distribution network for food, which makes this almost too easy. There is no reason to hurry. Time is on my side. Even going slowly, I think I could empty the place entirely in half a decade, give or take a few years. A few earthquakes, a bit of famine here, some pestilence there. Hell, they already are at war. They'll help me do it and never realize it."

"You could simply wait for word from your father," the dragon pointed out gently.

"Oh, spare me the lesson in patience! There were no further instructions!" she snapped. "Besides, I'm bored."

"You mean you're lonely. Killing takes your mind off it. You still miss Azriok," Roshor corrected.

She glared hard at him. The dragon was, of course, as correct as he was tactless. Roshor was her oldest friend. In fact, he was one of only a handful of creatures she knew that was older than she was. At 115, worms long ago had eaten most of her childhood acquaintances. The dragon endured. In some ways, he probably knew her better than anyone else in the universe, with the sole exception of Azriok himself. Since she had parted ways with her former mentor, she had been filled with a bitter sense of emptiness that never seemed to go away. Nearly a century had passed since their quarrel, but time did little to heal the bitterness. Killing Azriok's physical form in various planes of existence was one of the few activities that truly took the sting out of it. That, and she was always delighted to see how much it pissed off the Sephiroth lord.

Thinking of Azriok, she was somber as she left the dragon's den and walked back to her residence. Outside, dawn had already broken. The sunrise was stunning, as it always was in this dimension. She watched the mist at her feet turn gray and then coral as it reflected the morning's color play.

She walked to the edge of her property and looked off at the endless abyss of azure sky beyond it. A trace of cirrus on the horizon was the only evidence of her nearest neighbor. She had not lived here long enough to take the beauty and sense of desolation completely for granted yet.

The residence had taken twenty-five years for the dimension's proprietor to complete. He considered it a rush order. At the time, it had cost her almost her entire fortune. This place was to be her sanctuary, her retreat from the madness of the cosmos beyond. It was an uncharted place, a bubble trapped within a crack in the fabric of the elemental plane of air. The half-dozen other residents spread throughout its expanse were fanatical about privacy, as was the place's creator. The privacy justified the price he charged. Not that the home he had created for her was not breathtaking and in itself worth every coin it had cost.

The palace was a house of dreams, a place born of her imagination and countless telepathic conversations with its architect. The sinister elegance of the dwelling mirrored the essence of her aesthetic values. The walls were an iridescent black, which shimmered and reflected the light around it. There was no seam or sense of texture to the walls. They were smooth, curving and flawless. The substance of which they were made was unnaturally cold to the touch and felt like solidified fog.

She pushed opened the spiked, gem-encrusted silver gate on the path leading from the dragon's den to the residence. The gate's purpose was purely ornamental. There were no enemies to keep at bay in this desolate world of clouds.

She saw her assistant, Portia, waiting for her at the home's entrance, arms crossed. Zyrdicia pulled off her soft leather gloves and handed them to the smaller woman without a word.

"What's the body count?" the smaller, red-haired woman asked, noting her mistress' distant expression. She knew these moods. Talking about the death toll might life lift her boss' spirits.

"Two hundred or so, I think. Trivial. It won't be like last time. There are not enough people inhabiting the place to approach those numbers," Zyrdicia answered, disinterested. The last interplanar crack she had explored had led her to a world on the brink of a massive technological war. Through her magic, she could directly lay claim to adding tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands of bodies there; indirectly, she probably affected the deaths of millions more. Technically she had nothing to do with the greater number, for it was really only an aftereffect of the mad, forgotten gods she had convinced men there to summon in the name of the Twilight prophecy. The gods had exploded out of control, as was to be expected.

Eventually their leader blamed her for the rampant destruction, and their own inability to control the power they themselves unleashed. They turned on her. That decision brought their country to ruin. She remembered laughing as their enemies hung them from the gallows at the war's end.