Sai gasped and started so violently that he knocked himself out of bed and fell to the floor. His heart pounded in his ears, racing from a nightmare he could not remember. He pushed himself to his knees and looked around in panic. The unfamiliar stones of the windowless walls pressed in around him, and a lone torch that cast no shadows sputtered in a crooked brazier on the wall. He could feel the chill of the bare floor through the thin, blue blanket that had fallen with him. Goosebumps prickled the green skin of his good arm. "What…" he said. "Where am I?"

  A dark laughter rolled through the room. "Your disorientation never ceases to amuse me."

  "Syn!" Sai shouted. "Where have you taken me?" He pushed himself to his feet and glared, naked, into each corner of the room, searching for the shadow from which the voice spoke. Behind him sat his bare cot, and across the room, a spiral staircase descended to the floor below. But he could see no shadows. "Syn?"

  The familiar voice came again, speaking from everywhere and nowhere. "In thanks for all the service you did me, I have brought you to my realm, this Shadowed Vale, where you will remain for eternity among my children."

  Sai gazed into the orange flames of the torch on the wall. It did not seem to be casting light, but it bathed the entire room in a dim, almost purplish glow that made the uneven stones look bruised. "Your children are monsters and nightmares," he said.

  "And you will fit right in," Syn replied. "They're so looking forward to eating you."

  "I'm sure they are," said Sai. With a last frown at the torch, he turned his attention to the stairwell. The unhealthy light extended below to where the staircase turned out of his sight. "Do you expect me to just stay up here forever?"

  "No," Syn said. "I expect you to try to escape. Your fellow monsters would be distraught if they were not given the chance to tear you limb from limb a time or two."

  Sai took a step back from the stairs. He ran a hand over the golden scales of his left arm. They still gleamed in the not-light. "And what if I do just stay up here?"

  "Then I shall enjoy watching your sanity bleed away over the course of centuries," said Syn. The Eternal Nightmare's mirthless laugh rolled again through the room. "Should you decide to try your luck outside your cell, I've left you a means to defend yourself in the footlocker there."

  "You what?" Sai asked. He looked around the room again and spotted a rotting chest at the foot of the cot that he was nearly certain had not been there before. "Why would you help me?"

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  "To coax you out to where you can be crushed," Syn answered. "Why else?"

  Sai sighed. "I don't know what other answer I was expecting," he said, mostly to himself. He took a moment to look around the room again, closer this time. The walls, floor, and ceiling all seemed to be made of the same rough stone. His cot sat against the wall opposite the stairs, its threadbare blue blanket half draped onto the floor. The torch cast its light from a crude iron brazier on the wall. Beneath the torch lay the shattered wreckage of what seemed to once have been a dresser. In another corner was a single, stained pot. And there, still at the foot of the cot, was the footlocker.

  Sai rubbed his eyes and shook his head. "This is a trap," he said to himself. He paused, waiting for a response from Syn, but there was only silence. He lowered his hand to his mouth and stared at the footlocker. Then he stared at the stairwell and then down at his naked body. Finally, he stared into the draconic talons that had once been his left hand. He flexed them, open and shut, several times. "There might be wyrmkin down there," he muttered. He opened his talon. "They're children of Syn." The talon closed. "I'm just as likely to run into a werewolf or bogling, though." It opened. "But I have to survive." And closed. "Survival's always been enough before."

  With a sigh and a shrug, Sai crossed the small room and gave the footlocker a cautious kick. The rotten side boards disintegrated. Sai grunted in surprise and knelt to look inside. He pushed aside the broken boards and fished out a simple backpack of the style given to all grunts in the Trotzen Horde. He held it at arm's length and stared at it, frowning. He recognized every scuff and every scratch in the brown leather of the pack. But it couldn't actually be his. Right?

  Still frowning, Sai set down the pack and opened it up. Inside were his journal, his charcoals, his tunic, and a rough chunk of flint. He ran one of his fingers over the spine of his journal before pulling out his tunic. It was stained and gray from overuse, its lower hem frayed so far up that he would almost still be naked from the waist down. "This is the same tunic I wore in the desert," he said. "After Drang and I fled the fall of Fort Vrarag." He shook his head to clear away the memories and pulled the tunic over his head. Its belt was missing.

  Next he pulled out the flint. "I don't recognize this," he said. Then he blinked. "Wait. Is this what you expect me to fight with?" he asked the air. "A rock? Really? A rock?"

  "I am the Eternal Nightmare," the air replied. "Did you expect a pleasant imprisonment?"

  "Fine," Sai said. "When I die, it's on your hands."

  Syn chuckled. "I look forward to it."

  Sai set down the rock and pulled out his journal. He sighed. Just touching the well-worn leather of its binding made him feel better. He opened to the first page and smiled at his own handwriting. "The Research Notes of Gert 'Sai' Wulfgar," he read. He traced the fading lines of the stylized sun he'd drawn as his personal symbol. "I've brought the sun into Syn's shadows," he said. "I'm going to get out of here." Then he dug one of his charcoals out of the pack, flipped to the next open page, and began to write.