With skin as pale and eyes as black as death, a blood-red ruby depending from one nostril, he ser Noris, the most villainous wizard of all time. He had done it all--slain all adepts worth his scorn, attained immortality, become the dire tyrant of the Sorcerer"s Isles and a shadow of doom on the lands beyond. But it wasn"t enough... There was yet one opponent he had not humbled--She whom men called Maiden; She who was implicit in the alternation of death and birth, the cycling of the seasons, the complex circling of the moons. She who was the phoenix--the spirit of the earth itself!