s of an outright stare, a
stare which held no friendship. For by her skin patterns he knew her for
the one who had led that triumvir who had sent him into the cavern of
the mist. And with her was the younger witch he had trapped on the night
that all this baffling action had begun.

"We meet again," he said slowly. "To what purpose?"

"To our purpose ... and yours----"

"I do not doubt that it is to yours." The Terran's thoughts fell easily
now into a formal pattern he would not have used with one of his own
kind. "But I do not expect any good to me...."

There was no readable expression on her face; he did not expect to see
any. But in their uneven mind touch he caught a fleeting suggestion of
bewilderment on her part, as if she found his mental processes as hard
to understand as a puzzle with few leading clues.

"We mean you no ill, star voyager. You are far more than we first
thought you, for you have dreamed false and have known. Now dream true,
and know it also."

"Yet," he challenged, "you would set me a task without my consent."

"We have a task for you, but already it was set in the pattern of your
true dreaming. And we do not set such patterns, star man; that is done
by the Greatest Power of all. Each lives within her appointed pattern
from the First Awakening to the Final Dream. So we do not ask of you any
more than that which is already laid for your doing."

She arose with that languid grace which was a part of their delicate
jeweled bodies and came to stand beside him, a child in size, making his
Terran flesh and bones awkward, clodlike in contrast. She stretched out
her four-digit hand, her slender arm ringed with gemmed circles and
bands, measuring it beside his own, bearing that livid scar.

"We are different, star man, yet still are we both dreamers. And dreams
hold power. Your dreams brought you across the dark which lies between
sun and distant sun. Our dreams carry us on even stranger roads. And
yonder"--one of her fingers stiffened to a point, indicating the
skull--"there is another who dreams with power, a power which will
destroy us all unless the pattern is broken speedily."

"And I must go to seek this dreamer?" His vision of climbing through
that nose hole was to be realized then.

"You go."

Thorvald stirred and the Wyvern turned her head to him. "Alone," she
added. "For this is your dream only, as it has been from the beginning.
There is for each his own dream, and another canno