### 164

You walk beside the Beholder along a corridor which leads to a vast, circular gallery. At its centre stands a towering, bell-shaped vessel made out of transparent, glass-like material and filled with a huge, seething ball of fire. Its brilliant light illuminates some strange equipment standing against the walls and cluttering the tables, but little of its heat radiates into the room. You pass on until you come to another gallery which is floored with shining steel like a gigantic mirror. The domed roof is lost in the dim shadows, but at its centre you notice a tiny, disc-shaped portal. The Beholder glances at a row of crystals embedded in the wall and they glow in response to his psychic commands.

‘I am called the Beholder,’ he says, his thin voice echoing loudly in the emptiness of the dome. ‘I observe all that transpires in the Daziarn. I saw your arrival upon the Zhamin Plateau and I know from whence you came. So few of your kind survive transference that I abandoned all hope of meeting you. Indeed had you not met with one of my hunting parties your bones would now lie bleaching upon the sands of that arid plain. It seems that you are by nature a survivor.’

Suddenly a swirling column of light appears, projected from the disc in the centre of the dome. It casts a pool of brilliance in the middle of the gallery and gradually widens until it encompasses the whole floor.

‘Come, observe, and perhaps you will learn the nature of your new world. For you will need to adapt if you are to survive here … for the rest of your life.’

Turn to 268.