Darkvision by Bruce R. Cordell Page A

connection passed up from the ground and into the dwarf, jolting him as if it were an electrical charge.
    The dwarf stumbled and managed a controlled fall into the circle’s center. He closed his eyes, not to see darkness, but a vision bequeathed him by the soil.
    The world was composed of the four primary elements: air, earth, fire, and water. But earth held Thormud’s attraction, and earth responded to his fervent attention. And more often than not, earth gave up its secrets to the dwarf.
    Earth accepted all and tolerated all; earth observed all that occurred on or within its embrace. To those who knew the language of stone, earth poured out its knowledge in a slow, steady stream. Because so few had the patience to bother learning the deliberate arts of geomancy, Thormud often found his solicitations were answered energetically, almost eagerly, as if stone relished its rare opportunity to communicate.
    The geomancer saw lines of connection running below the ground, lines of attraction and correlation, currents that passed telluric energy to all points of the world-sphere. He followed the lines south and east, and was slightly surprised when his trace pushed far beyond his past attempts. The disturbances which had turned to gibberish all his previous attempts to understand the earth’s vision remained, but this time, he managed to slide between the disruptive waves and push forward.
    An image flashed behind Thormud’s eyes—a body of water shining like molten gold. The golden water ran up to a rocky coast. Inland from the coast, the ramparts of mountains unfamiliar to the dwarf darkened the sky, but these were not the focus of the insight. The vision concentrated onto a single, lonely feature close to the shore, like a lone tooth of a predator, a vicious animal’s incisor cast in stone. The slender peak towered several miles above the surrounding lands. Thormud’s expertise identified the peak as natural, but as the vision narrowed further, bringing him closer and closer, he spied signs of occupation: a narrow road winding up the peak, tailing beds in haphazard order, and pools of murky, tainted water.
    The peak housed a mine—one that had been in use for years, by the size of the tailing beds …
    Thormud’s vision plunged into the side of the peak. A moment of jagged dislocation suffused him, as if he pierced a void far greater than the mountain could contain. He was overcome by white lights, threads of connection between vast spaces, and an empty feeling in his stomach as he nailed madly for purchase and understanding.
    Then another jerk of true dislocation—he could not tell in which direction his sight was wrenched. When his vision steadied, the geomancer glimpsed a plain that shimmered under harsh sunlight. Vast dunes of sand rolled in paralyzed majesty to every horizon. All was silent and unmoving, bright and glaring, and empty. Then Thormud saw something lurking on the horizon. Something slender as a tower, something dark—something unnatural. Was it the spire of some great fortress unglimpsed by history? Or was it a shard of some alien reality standing unnaturally tall and narrow, a splinter in the world’s flesh?
    His vision closed on the spire. Its edges shimmered and flashed every color in the sunlight, but at the center, there was no color—it was black, a pure darkness whose paucity of light was a presence unto itself. The earth whispered a name into Thormud’s mind: Pandorym.
    With the name, Thormud understood that the splinter sapped the earth and pained it. The splinter was the source of the geomancer’s discomfiture.
    But where was it? His knowledge of place and location had scrambled during the last dislocation. If he wanted … Something in the dark splinter looked back at Thormud.
     

     
    Kiril idly flipped stones down the side of the bluff. Most of the stones bounced and slid into a gully. The elf pondered the stars above, those that weren’t drowned out by the vast light of the moon. They