Red flame blazed among the thinning brush west of Trinsic gate and Adam stood transfixed, remembering.

Only a fire spirit, he told himself. Only the summoned servant of some mage. Adam had seen its like a thousand times before. Once he had even been capable of calling forth such elementals himself, so this was nothing.

And yet, he could not forget the dream.

Ever since he had wakened from the dream of fire, Adam saw the shadows more deeply, the sunlight brighter, as though the world was newly painted with depth and color. He had not told Alraune all of it.

"Not a dream?" she asked him when they sat alone in the Salon.

"No. Deeper. Like the place you go when you speak with the Hierophant."

Alraune regarded him for a long moment with eyes the color of raven feathers, and he saw her in his dreams that night.

And the next.

Now, waking, at Trinsic gate, Adam hardly heard the words of the knight Athos, asking him if Alraune would read. Reluctantly, Adam looked away from the fire spirit and escorted Athos to the Salon, but the fire burned in his memory like a beacon.

Alraune read for Athos and for others, and Adam forgot the fire when a dead man came into the salon, his flesh hardly cold, but his eyes hollow and a sibilant prayer for bloody flesh on his lips.

The undead thing howled like a chorus of banshees when Commander Soulshadow and her soldier settled his bones and Alraune returned to her reading, chasing fate while the dead ranged wild outside.

Such was life.

Captain Kaelyn said the fire spirit was something the dead had summoned, and Adam wondered as he saw Alraune's cards unveiling fate -- the dark woman who wanted a private reading; Iljian seeking new direction; old Elminster; ready for Death but relieved when it did not appear; and Tammy, sweet, wild Tammy -- was Fire the only heat the dead knew?

Had the dream of fire been an omen?

That night, after the last client had departed, Adam took the thought into dreams and Alraune was there again and all through the night they celebrated life and its gifts.

But when Adam woke in the morning, the sunrise outside was thick and red, the sky smeared with an arterial spray of clouds, and when he went up to the roof, his chest pounding with a dream deeper than the pleasure Alraune had given him, he saw the bloody dome of heaven.

And the sky was weeping ashes.