The truth is that Elspeth von Draken is but one in a long bloodline touched by the winds of magic, a bloodline that has produced both monsters and saviours in its time. She is also one of the most powerful Amethyst wizards of the age, but one who will have little to do with the daily machinations or power-politics of the Imperial Colleges of Magic in which she was one student and still in theory holds fealty (for which many within its ranks are profoundly grateful), and with whom she now sits in an uneasy truce. Instead, she is an obsessive experimenter and mystic who goes where she will, and has collected and collated a storehouse of mystical artefacts and lore which she guards jealously and has become so saturated with Shyish, the Amethyst wind of Death, that there are some who whisper s