See the Lords of Water— Beyond the waves they leapSee the Lords of Land— Beneath the ground they sleepSee the Lords of Air— Above the clouds they creepSee the Lords of Fire— Around the ﬂames they reapWater. Land. Air. Fire.Together, the balance of Farworld they keep.

UNDLEDSAFEINHER

underground burrow, with eight fuzzy babies snuggled against her warm body, the ishkabiddle woke to a curious rumbling. Her milky white eyes—interested, butnot yet frightened—slid open as she tilted her head, listening. For amoment the rumbling seemed to be fading away. Then, all at once, itgrew much louder, and bits of dirt crumbled onto the ishkabiddle’sdappled gray fur. Alarmed, she clawed her way up through the dark,dusty tunnel she had dug out years earlier, and stopped at the edge of the opening.Perched half-in half-out of the burrow entrance, she paused. A pair of bald pink feelers rose quivering from her fur-covered body.Cautiously, she slipped out of her hole, and blinked. Somewhere faroff a bird screeched, but that wasn’t what was making the groundtremble so the tops of the grass shivered to and fro.From the tips of her feelers the ishkabiddle sent out a cloud of gray specks—each no bigger than a grain of sand. One by one the

Chapter 1

ONESPLINTER

ATER

EEP

specs floated out into the cold night air, buzzing and spinning as they bounced from one blade of grass to another. Had she found any signof a predator, the ishkabiddle would have scurried back into her holequick as two winks. But nothing she discovered was threatening.For a moment everything was perfectly still and the insects thathad gone silent resumed making their nighttime music. Without any warning, the ground exploded into the air less than ten feet away,and the ishkabiddle found herself staring into a pair of deadly yel-low eyes. The glistening diamond-shaped head of a huge black snakeswiveled, and its eyes—each bigger than the entire ishkabiddle— fixed on the poor shivering creature. The snake rose out of theground, its scaled body,thick as the trunk of a mature tree,gliding skyward.The ishkabiddle could not move. Her body paralyzed by fear, thepoor creature could only watch as death slithered to her very doorstep. The nightmare snake opened its mouth, revealing wickedly shining fangs. Its tongue flicked out and touched the tip of the ishk-abiddle’s wilting pink feelers.“Boo!” the snake said, and the ishkabiddle’s muscles turned to water. She dropped into her tunnel and rolled all the way to the bot-tom of her burrow where she hid, trembling, for the rest of the night.The iskabiddle didn’t see how the snake’s armor-like scales beganto slide and change. She didn’t see how its long body twisted andshortened, or how its head filled out as its mouth and nose shrunk. Above the burrow, the snake disappeared and was replaced by a manin a flowing black cape and hood. The man raised his forked staff and slammed it on the ground with a wicked laugh.“Lucky for you I’ve already had dinner,” he whispered with dark mirth. “Perhaps I’ll come back for you later.”But the man had no time for such trivial things now. The three