Edgar landed with a heavy thud on the shore of the dragon's "target island." He lay still for several moments, wondering when he was going to be able to breathe again. He tried flexing his fingers and toes and was relieved to find that they still moved. He finally recovered from the shock enough to draw in a raw, wheezy lungful of air and turn over. He had bruises on top of his bruises, but thankfully, none of his bones seemed broken. Perhaps having a stronger skeleton was one of the advantages that non-flying fairies had over the kind with wings.

Edgar finally regained the strength needed to rise to his feet, one aching step at a time. When he was finally upright, he examined the items he was carrying and was surprised to find all of them still intact, even his skyship. However, he soon realized that one of his possessions was missing: Scrimshaw.

Edgar gazed out into the thick lavender mist, wondering what the griffin would do now that its owner had suddenly left it. As irritating as the little beast tended to be, Edgar couldn't bear the thought of leaving him behind. Would Scrimshaw stay where he was in favor of his own safety or set out in search of Edgar?

Edgar knew the answer to this question after only a few minutes. He saw a tiny, scruffy shape appear out of the mist, approaching rapidly and screeching plaintively. Edgar smiled and waved to Scrimshaw, though he doubted that the griffin would have any trouble finding him, since Edgar was in plain sight.

When Scrimshaw had reached the edge of the island, he gratefully swooped into Edgar's outspread arms, hitting Edgar in the chest so firmly that the prince staggered backwards a step or two. With a flurry of claws and wings, Scrimshaw then crawled over Edgar's shoulder and made himself comfortable in Edgar's hood once more, a place that must have somehow reminded him of the nest he had come from, the way he had attached himself to it.

Reunited with his pet, Edgar turned to examine the main island of Dark Etheria. It was quite rocky and barren, and the mist surrounding it was even thicker than it had been around the previous island. The place wasn't that dark in and of itself, but compared to the rest of Etheria, it was pretty gloomy, so the name seemed to fit.

A single path wound its way through the jagged peaks towards the north, and Edgar willingly took it. From what he had seen from the dragon's island, this current island was quite large, perhaps bigger than all the previous islands he had visited put together.

As he walked, Edgar began mentally revisiting the concept that had been running through his mind that morning, after the duel with Acilino – that paper from Shadrack's agent and those words written on it:

"The best way to stop a tree from branching out and spreading is to destroy it before the roots are firmly in place. The trick is going in at exactly the right time."

His feeling that that passage might have been alluding to somehow destroying Rosella's family hadn't waned at all since it first came to him. He was more convinced than ever that this was what Shadrack was planning. The question was how he intended to carry that plan out.

Traveling into the past and killing Rosella's parents before she and Alexander were born was one answer, but something about that possibility didn't seem quite right. That theory was like an ill-fitting shoe. There had to be a shoe that fit the message on that paper better.

Edgar tried to remember whether he had ever been told about King Graham's father or not. Perhaps if Shadrack killed him, then "the roots" would be effectively described, but somehow that didn't seem to fit either. Edgar was trying to figure out why he felt this way when he was confronted with an unpleasant revelation:

Graham had never been a prince, and his father had never been a king. He had started out as a knight in the court of the previous king – the aged king who had no heirs and therefore called upon Graham to prove himself worthy of the crown. Though Edgar couldn't remember the king's name, he remembered the story of Graham's quest to recover the three lost treasures of Daventry all too well.

Suddenly, everything fell into place. The king that ruled before Graham – if Shadrack killed him even a short time before he summoned Graham, Graham would never become king and marry Valanice, Rosella and Alexander would never be born, Edgar would never be freed from Lolotte's castle and Cassima would never be freed from Mordack's fortress.

And this was only the tip of the iceberg. Without the three treasures, Daventry would fall into ruin; without Alexander's actions, Manannan the wizard would still be ruling Llewdor; without Rosella's aid, Genesta would die and Lolotte would rule the land of Tamir in her typical cold, heartless manner; without Alexander's intervention, the tyrannical Alhazred would rule the Land of the Green Isles; and without the help of Rosella and Valanice, Malicia would most likely bury all of Etheria and Eldritch in lava, even if Edgar wasn't there to assist her.

Edgar convulsed with fear as he realized this. Destroying the tree before the roots were in place indeed. If he and Cassima didn't move quickly, Shadrack was going to effectively destroy not only Rosella and Alexander's family, but most of the known world.

But why hadn't he done this already? If the man Cassima saw in Tamir really was Shadrack's agent, that meant that his agents could slip into different times as easily as she and Edgar could, and Edgar was certain by now that every place he had set foot upon so far was in a different period of time than the one he left in his homeland. If travelling through time was that simple for Shadrack's agents to do, why hadn't Shadrack himself done the deed already?

Perhaps he hadn't accumulated enough power yet. Unless he was using a talisman like Edgar and Cassima's pendants, travelling through time was something that Edgar had thought was impossible a few hours ago, but now he began thinking that for someone very skilled in magic, it was possible, but only just.

Edgar began theorizing that travel to an era more than twenty years in the past would require a vast amount of magical energy, while traveling to eras only a few years in the past or future was much less taxing. It was possible that Shadrack had yet to build up enough power to travel to an era that was that far before his own time.

Another possible reason why Edgar and Cassima weren't respectively a foster son of Lolotte and a slave of Mordack again at the moment had to do with the very reason for Shadrack's scheme. Alexander had dealt the heaviest blow to the Black Cloak Society when he foiled Alhazred's plot to become king of the Land of the Green Isles, and thus was the main target of Shadrack's revenge. The notion of traveling to a time before Alexander was even born most likely created a slew of magical problems that Edgar didn't want to begin contemplating.

Ordinarily, solving a mystery of this size and complexity would have brought Edgar feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment, but now that he had figured this conundrum out, he was even more anxious and worried than he was before. His mission had become even more urgent now that he realized that in all probability, Shadrack was going to murder Graham's predecessor. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do now but blindly blunder forward in the hope of discovering some way to thwart this plan.

Edgar stopped. He had come to an intersection: two parallel paths headed west, each one respectively hugging the north and south sides of a large chasm, while a single one led east, sloping sharply downward. As he was glancing down the westward paths and deciding which one to take, he heard a commotion coming from the eastward path. Not only was it loud, but it seemed to be getting louder. It sounded like the shouts of many enraged men and pounding feet.

He turned in the direction of the noise, and just as he did, a brightly dressed figure appeared out of the dark haze, running up the path as if a dragon were closing in on it. It wasn't until the figure was two strides away that he realized who it was – he also realized that the figure was headed straight towards him.

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