Athas.

The whisper of the name seethed like the sands shifting beneath the blazing sun, scorched winds matching the sibilant utterance of the name of his home world. It was not a spoken word and the images of the howling, arid winds over bleached rock and the weathered, dusty corpse of the land were but visions within his head, visions created by memories of his lost homeland. His mournful sigh at what he had lost might have been that same desert wind, now frozen with the dry, icy cold of night.

Raecci stood upon the center of the street, his feet almost touching the dry track of grime and dust where the running of rainwater had slowly gathered it then left it when the rain stopped. Here, in this place of confusion, it rained. Sometimes it rained all day. Raecci had seen it rain dozens of times in the long weeks he had been here. The rain was cold, unlike the hot rain of Athas, but it lasted much longer, hours instead of mere seconds. Here, though, the rain was acidic and could on some days sting as harshly as the wind-blown sand. In many ways, Sigil, the place of confusion around him, the cage of degradation and a miasma of swirled culture, religion, and warfare, was as deadly as the barren sands of his homeland.

Sigil was a peculiar place, as he had come to find out. The city was not a proper city in that there was no official government. No single authority governed the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants. Neither did any one entity hold itself responsible for the safety or welfare of those inhabitants or, for that matter, the city itself. Additionally, Sigil, also called the Cage, did not lie upon any stretch of land whatsoever. Raecci was uncertain just what it was exactly that the city was built on. There were streets and buildings all over but he hadn't seen any vegetation since his unfortunate departure from Athas. For all the foliage present in the Cage, it might have been situated somewhere on that dry, dusty place he had called home. The single exception was a maliciously sharp clinger called razorvine that hid beneath its leaves stems with such blade-like edges that a man could quite easily eviscerate himself merely by falling into a patch of the stuff.

The Cage stretched around the rim of an enormous ring. He wasn't certain just how large this ring was. Some had told him ten miles. Others had told him a hundred. The only thing all accounts agreed upon was that if he walked far enough in either direction around the ring, he would eventually return to the point where he had started. One could walk for well over a day in a direction perpendicular to the ring before finally reaching the outer edges, where the city ended in one long stretch of buildings. Those buildings all faced inwards, towards the rest of the city, and had no windows to look beyond. Raecci had asked what laid without. The responses from people in the city had been universal: nothing. He had been told that to climb atop one of the buildings on the outer edges and jump off the back side was to cast himself randomly into the whole of existence and that there was no certain place where he'd wind up. Raecci had no desire to try that, so he had eventually stopped asking about it.

The citizens ruled themselves, more or less, in a manner much like that of Athas; the strongest led and all others followed. Here, though, the strongest might be a fiend, or an archon, or a simple-looking man with a mighty sword. It was not anarchy, though, since there were a dozen or so popular factions amongst which the citizens of Sigil, and even all of the planes, tendered their beliefs and loyalties. Each of the factions held to a particular belief about the true nature of the cosmos and how people fit into that nature. For most of them, it meant that the followers of that particular faction were right and all others were wrong, that the truth made the believers, or the members of the faction, more powerful than the other factions. As it remained, Raecci had not yet heard the mention of one faction that made more sense than any of the others, though most claimed that they did; therefore, he remained neutral in the matter. It was this neutrality that had led to his current predicament.

Raecci stood in the center of the street, mostly ignoring the passing travelers on their way about the maze of streets in the Hive, dense slums of homeless and helpless denizens, people of less than honorable intentions and histories made colorless not by the bleakness of the desert or even by the harshness of the corrosive rain but rather by the wretched sting of betrayal and abuse by the people around them. Not for the first time, Raecci wished that he was still upon Athas. Slowly, far more slowly than was needed but not nearly slowly enough to suit him, Raecci lifted his eyes towards the man who stood opposite him. The fellow wore heavy steel armor over most of his body, steel so precious on Athas that they could not even count their wealth with it. Raecci was strong but he had no envy for the weight the man would have had to endure to bear such a defense around. Tall enough to see over Raecci's head, the man grunted out in the soft, undercut syllables of the common tongue spoken in the Cage that he would bring the charges to bear on Raecci or, by the gods and by the law, he would have Raecci's head.

Raecci disagreed. At least on the head part.

He lowered his head again, this time only a small tilt downwards, so that he glared through his brows at the warrior of steel and sweat. Compared to the size of the man, and the heft of the armor he wore, Raecci was diminutive like a rodent next to the fox. He smiled. It was good to have such an appearance. Sometimes. His glare, however, was a sign of confidence and malicious superiority. His knowledge and discipline, a lifetime's training, made him certain of himself, and more certain that he was better than anyone on the street with him that day. It was a sort of arrogance, he knew, but it was also not without merit.

Taking Raecci's glare as a sign of refusal, the other man, his face turning downwards in a scowl that nearly matched the skeletal visage embossed on the heavy steel breastplate, charged forwards, lifting his sword into the air. The demonic skull was the sign of a faction known as the Mercykillers, a bleak troupe of warriors and misfits who claimed to mete out Justice. Raecci didn't know what that Justice was, but he had seen these men behead innocents on the street in the name of it. He did know that he didn't intend to be one of those thus slaughtered.

Upon seeing the other man's forward motion, Raecci's scowl merged into an angry grin. He embraced the inner peace he had come to know as the Will. It was his inner self, the seat of his consciousness and the power that drove his thoughts. When it expressed itself in the world around him, the Will became the Way, the power of the mentalists of his homeland, the power of the mind made solid. For Raecci, unlike anyone else he had ever seen work the Way, he saw his Way step out of his body as an ethereal duplicate of himself, his mental incarnation invisible to all but him. He saw and felt things with both bodies, but the other was by father the stronger.

The ghostly statement of his Way swept an arm sideways in a deflecting manner. As it did, the arm grew longer and wider, pressing into the path of the sword. Where another psychokineticist might have merely brushed the sword away with his mind, Raecci's Way was strong enough to force the entire warrior, armor and all, to one side. This resulted in the warrior's tremendous overhand strike to swing past Raecci's shoulder, missing by over a foot. Raecci stepped sideways, turning to face the warrior as he moved. The Mercykiller had swung his weapon with so much force that the tip of the blade dug into the paving stones of the street, drawing sparks and dulling the durable steel.

Grimacing in surprise, the warrior jerked his weapon back up out of the stones and whirled towards Raecci. Screaming with his rage, the Mercykiller surged into attack again, this time with an equally powerful sideways swipe. Raecci's Way reappeared beside him, leaping forwards with speed and power Raecci could never have shown with his body. The mental arm drew back and the palm slammed forwards, catching the warrior in the chest. The big man, caught in mid-stride, lurched backwards and slowly toppled. In the resounding crash of the Mercykiller's fall, Raecci straightened into a more relaxed stance, letting his Way, and the Will that drove it, lapse away, replaced by his normal awareness.

The circle of spectators watching the brief clash caught his attention for a moment. Humans, elves, and other races stood in a large semicircle around him and the Mercykiller, some standing near each other, others farther apart and alone, but all watching with eagerness that he found so commonplace here in the Cage. It seemed that violence here was a sport, much as in the gladiatorial arenas on Athas. There, the dragon kings promoted bloody games. Here, the violence was opportunity, though for what he did not yet know.

Heads turned, including his, towards the distracting scream from a nearby alleyway. A man lurched from the darkened passage, holding one hand to the side of his head. The fellow was unkempt and bedraggled, his grey hair sparse on top and long and stringy. He hobbled in a half-run, one limping leg holding him back. Raecci kept one eye on the fallen Mercykiller as he watched the running vagrant.

"Dragon!"

Everyone around started chuckling at the shout. Raecci narrowed his eyes, more cautious now than before.

"Dragon! There be a dragon in the Cage!"

More laughter rustled through the people on the street. "Barmy berk," one man muttered, grinning.

"Somebody's bobbed 'im good," another fellow replied.

Just then, to the startled gasps and cries of fear of the people on the street, the dragon appeared. At first, Raecci tensed. Then, realizing that it was far too small a creature to truly be a dragon, he relaxed somewhat. Though it was much smaller than a dragon, the monster was larger than a horse and flew with long, languid sweeps of its wings, its one pair of legs grasping towards the fleeing people on the street.

"Bloody fool," someone near Raecci murmured. "Doesn't even know a dragon from a wyvern."

Raecci glanced at the man, a tall humanoid with dark, dusty skin, long, grey hair, and dark, glossy black eyes. The fellow wore finer clothing than anyone else around, even better than the elaborate robes worn by the old man at his side. Raecci himself only wore a simple tan robe. Even his feet were bare.

"What's a wyvern," Raecci asked.

The strange man smiled softly. "It's reputed to be distant kin of the dragon, but wyvern are smaller and much less intelligent, if somewhat more ferocious in their bestiality. Note the enlarged stinger on the tail. Definitely a wyvern." Together they calmly watched the beast hop and glide its way down the street, disappearing in the tangled warren of the Cage.

"Should we go kill it," Raecci asked.

"No need," the old man replied, stepping up besides his taller companion. "Others are already bringing it under control." The old man had white hair and heavily wrinkled skin. His lids were so sallow that only the irises and pupils gazed out, making his eyes look almost the same as the black orbs his companion bore. Those eyes gazed at him intently, measuring, and Raecci sensed a force behind them, a deep wellspring of power that was easily better than his own ample strength.

"I would like to speak with you, however," the taller one said, facing Raecci squarely. The shorter Athasian glanced over his shoulder once, quickly, to see the fallen Mercykiller rise and scramble off after the greater sport of the wyvern. "You demonstrated remarkable abilities moments ago and I am most intrigued."

Raecci looked back and forth between the two of them.

"You'll excuse my apprentice," the old man smiled. "He sometimes forgets that we are named for a reason. It is his way to speak without calling a name, as if one should automatically know to whom he speaks and what the fellow is named. Yet, he is not as arrogant as other tieflings I've known."

Raecci took a moment to remember what a tiefling was as the taller fellow glanced sideways at his elder in a disapproving glare. The Athasian wondered at such impetuosity in a pupil but he said nothing of it. Instead, he recalled that a tiefling was the ill-begotten child of a fiendish creatures of the lower planes and a mortal, such as a human or elf. Tieflings, as the word in Sigil went, were nothing but trouble, the lot of them thieves and cutthroats. Raecci had seen one or two on the streets of the Cage and they appeared to be quite standoffish and angry. Though this one seemed to bear the usual hostility towards the common man, he spoke as politely as anyone Raecci had yet met in Sigil.

"I am Crillus," the tiefling said then gestured to his companion, "and this is my honored mentor, Phenarris." The lack of any particular stress on "honored" seemed to be a form of stress in itself.

Raecci inclined his head momentarily. "I'm Raecci and I hail from the shifting sands of Athas."

"Well, then, Raecci," Crillus answered, "my teacher and I were off to a friendly shop for hot tea. Perhaps you would join us?"

Still peering from one to the other, Raecci decided to tread carefully. "Why not?"

"Then, please, walk with us."

They started up the street, heading opposite the direction the wyvern had taken, and spoke as they moved.

"Tell me of Athas," Phenarris asked, walking beside Raecci while the dour tiefling moved ahead of them, his race and grim statement urging those in their path to make room. For the most part, their passage down the street was unimpeded. Occasionally, some massive, inhuman creature, denizen of one or another lower plane, ignored the tiefling's presence and the three of them had to skirt wide.

"What can I say that would describe my world in the space of time that it will take us to find this shop? Athas is big, dry, and dusty. The winds are ferocious and the beasts are even more frightful. The sun burns a dark scarlet overhead, sucking all life from the sands."

Crillus turned to look at him over his shoulder. The tiefling was grinning rather broadly. "Sounds like a place I would enjoy."

Raecci, surprised by that response, laughed. "I can say for certain that I'd rather be there than here, no disrespect to either of you."

"None taken, certainly," the old man told him. "I have yet to visit Athas, though perhaps some day I'll find the time. These days I'm far too busy."

Before Raecci could say anything to that, Crillus and the old man turned towards a small, signless shop. They pressed past a heavy wooden door and entered a darkened lounge where a small number of patrons reclined in large, well-padded chairs. Bookshelves adorned the walls, each shelf packed with sheaves of paper, scrolls, and various bound or unbound tomes. The small group of men and women in the shop didn't even look up, each of them absorbed in some manner of study, some scribing while others merely read. Only the young woman in the back, standing behind a sort of bar, looked at them at all.

Raecci had never seen so much wood or paper in his entire existence. On Athas, wood was as rare as steel, perhaps even more rare. Here, it seemed just as it was everywhere else; Athas was unusual. Raecci rather liked it that way. However, he did admire the woodwork in the small tables and the scrolling, runic inscriptions upon the spines of the books.

At the counter in the back, Crillus ordered two drinks, both variations of hot cider tea, then glanced at Raecci. "I'm buying," the tiefling said, so Raecci looked at the menu on the wall behind the woman long enough to realize that he could not read it.

"I'll have one of those too," he told them.

The woman nodded and told them to seat themselves wherever they wished. Crillus stepped back and allowed the old man to lead, then, and he and Raecci followed to a small table in the back corner, secluded in a sort of booth formed of the massive bookcases. Crillus, Raecci noted, automatically took the chair in the corner, where he could see anyone else in the room. The Athasian took the chair to his left, while Phenarris took the one to his right.

Crillus raised a calming hand. "I asked you here out of curiosity, traveler, but I vow here that any wish for secrecy on your part shall be upheld to whatever extent you desire. That is to say, if you don't want to tell us what you did, then fine. We'll sip our tea and talk of other things and you may come or go as you wish. Then again, if you don't mind telling us, we'll keep it as confidential as you desire."

"I think," Phenarris began, "that what my apprentice is trying to say, Raecci, is that we aren't going to try to force you into revealing anything that you don't care to discuss with strangers. Please, if you will, enlighten us. What is your will?"

Raecci looked from one to the other of them. "You speak of secrecy as though the things I know might be hazardous."

Crillus glanced at his elder, confused. Phenarris shook his head. Raecci continued.

"The Will and the Way are not secrets, any more than the edge of a blade is a secret. It is the use to which it is put that may make it dangerous, but no amount of secrecy can conceal that which is."

Again the pair looked at each other. Raecci waited for one of them to speak. Finally, Crillus broke the silence. "The will and the way? We know nothing of this..."

The woman interrupted him with their drinks, setting a heavy earthenware mug before each of them. Phenarris immediately sipped at his but Crillus, watching the woman, waited until she was gone before looking at Raecci again.

Embracing his Will, Raecci's Way reached forth its hand, grasping his mug and lifting it into the air. "Is this what you mean? That I do something unnatural without the means of magic?"

Crillus nodded slowly. Raecci smiled. "Fear not, stranger. This is no secret, though almost no one here, it seems, knows of it any more than you. On Athas, magic is dangerous, both in its use and because the governing powers regulate its usage. It has been this way for centuries and the powers of the mind, I suppose, grew stronger in the absence of magic. Or, perhaps it was something else entirely. No one is certain. However, in my homeland, any man, woman, or child has the potential to do as I have just done."

"But what is it?"

"It is Will incarnate. Where a man joins mind, body, and spirit within himself is the Way, and it is given shape by the Will. These things are how we begin to teach our children. You cannot learn them from listening to me speak and neither will you find their secrets in the heavy wizard's manuals around us. They are a part of you, something you must discover within, a process that can take years."

"Psionics," Crillus muttered with a certain amount of awe. "I have heard of this. I did not realize..." He frowned. "I suppose I never really gave it much credit."

Shrugging, Raecci reached out with his physical hand and caught the mug, bringing the steaming beverage to his lips for a taste. The fluid within was thick and almost syrupy, with a very fruity taste that he decided was much better than the watery ale served in most places he had visited in the Cage.

"How did you get here," Phenarris asked after setting his mug on the table.

Raecci shrugged again. "I don't know, exactly. I was fleeing raiders who outnumbered me. My home was the desert and I sought to lead them astray in the dangers of the sands. Between one step and the next, I emerged onto a street near a building called the Mortuary. That was almost seven weeks ago. I've been wandering this place ever since."

Crillus looked at his mentor. "A random portal, do you think?"

Phenarris shrugged. "I couldn't say without seeing for myself." The old man leaned close to the table. "Raecci, my apprentice and I keep our kip in the Lower Ward, near the Towering Fiend Inn. It will be easy to recognize as it is the only solitary tower in the area with a glass dome at its top. Visit us in five days, if you wish, and in exchange for a few hours of your time, telling me more of your home world, I shall research the spells and cast for you a portal back to Athas."

Raecci leaned back in his chair. "Surely that is far to cheap a price for a costly portal spell."

The old man shrugged. "Price is measured by worth, young man, and your point of view on an alien world is worth much to an old wizard such as myself."

Leaning forwards again, Raecci extended his hand. "Very well, then. It's a deal." Phenarris smiled and shook his hand. Afterwards, Raecci looked at the pair of them. "Now I have a question for you. Just before we met, that man from the alley screamed that he saw a dragon. When he did, everyone laughed. Why is that? In my lands, a dragon is a terrible thing and none would find it at all funny."

Crillus cleared his throat, tossing long hair away from his eyes with one hand. "Dragons have come to Sigil before. It is not unheard of, but it seems that they always come in the guise of a humanoid. No one has seen a proper dragon within Sigil for decades."

Raecci rubbed at his chin with one hand, thinking of Athasian dragons and how they were like the winds and sands of his home: harsh and brutal.