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Sanglant and a ragged army toil through a blasted countryside. He pauses beside a half dozen men in stained and ragged clothing who are digging a grave. They wear the badge of Fesse, its proud red eagle sigil visible despite the dirt.
“One of Liutgard’s men?” he asks as they bend knees and kneel on the parched ground.
“Our sergeant, Your Majesty,” says one. “His wound went rotten, all black and with a nasty smell.”
His aspect is so grave, as if the cataclysm blasted him as well, right down to his soul.
“Will we see our homes again, Your Majesty?”
“This poor man will not. But the army will reach Wendar, although I fear our dead men and horses mark our trail for any who seek to follow us.”
“It will be good to shake Aosta’s dust from our feet! We came south over the high passes west of here, Your Majesty. How will we go home?”
“See!” He points toward a place she cannot see, not even in her dreams. “There are the mountains. We’re close enough that you can see them even through the haze. That notch, there, marks the valley that will lead us up to the Brinne Pass. Once we have crossed, we will be in the marchlands.”
“Your Majesty!” A man’s urgent cry causes every soldier to stand nervously, awaiting a call to action against some as yet unseen foe. “See there!” A young man appears on a restive mare, a bow slung over his back and his hand extended as he indicates the cloudy heavens to the northeast. “The griffins!”
Shouts break out everywhere, some frightened and some triumphant, welcoming their return. A yelping call rings down from the sky as if in reply. Horses scream, and Sanglant reins in his gelding with a press of his knees. His lips part as he stares upward at a sight she cannot see, and yet she can feel the gleam of their presence, woven through with magic down to the bone. They fly overhead and on, continuing southeast.
“Where are they going, Your Majesty?” asks the young archer as all heads turn, following the course of that flight.
Sanglant shakes his head, eyes narrowed, and for an instant his shoulders slump, as though he has been defeated. “I don’t know.”
“Will they return?”
“I do not possess foreknowledge, Lewenhardt.” Hearing his own words, thinking them, he smiles sharply and urges his mount forward on the path. “Best be grateful they survived the blast. Best to wonder why they fly toward the heart of the cataclysm.”
She spins upward on the wind and finds herself aloft, flying with griffin wings. Her sight is as sharp as an eagle’s.
Was she not an Eagle once? She learned the gift of sight and it inhabits her even in her dreams as she floats between dreaming and waking on the last fading swell of the aether as the aftershocks of the cataclysm rumble away into nothing. The breath of the heavens long spilled its respiration into the lower world through the thread that bound the exiled land to its root. Soon that road will be pinched closed.
Will the magic of Earth fade, no longer fertilized by that rich vitality? Aether is an element like the other four, woven through the very fabric of the cosmos. Surely some breath of aether remains on Earth.
Yet knowledge of the future is closed to her, because she is grounded here. It isn’t even shadows seen beyond a translucent shroud; it is an impenetrable curtain. Only the elementals who breathe and respire in the pure aether can see forward and backward in time. Only God can know past, present, and future as if it is all one.
Did her mother know what fate awaited her? Did she go willingly into that darkness, or did she fight it?
Did she love my father anyway?
I’ll never know.
The landscape skims past below, a blighted roll of dusty hills and tumbled forests. Now and again a village passes beneath her sight, roofs torn off, fences down, dead animals floating in briny pools. With each league as they move southeast the land’s scars grow more noticeable. Trees are burned on one side, those that still stand. The ground is parched and bare. They have turned south and she smells the sea. Waves lap lazily against a battered shoreline. They pass over a ruined town whose stone walls have fallen into heaps. A cockroach scuttles along the stones. No. It is a person, small and fragile but somehow still alive. Then the town falls behind.
So close to the sea nothing moves except the wind through what remains of vegetation. Out in the water she sees the smooth back of a mer-creature split the surface and slide beneath.
Is it Gnat, or Mosquito?
The griffin shrieks, and banks to the right in a wide circle. Below, marching along parallel to the shoreline, walk human figures. So many! Two thousand at least, or four or ten, impossible to count so many. It is a refugee host strung out in double or triple file and marching into the worst of the devastation. There are many children and old people among them. It seems there are more groups coming up from behind, all moving in the same direction.
She wants to cry out. She wants to warn them: “Turn back! This way lies ruin!” But she has no voice.
And then she truly sees them.
By face and feature they are Ashioi. Where have they come from? There were not so many children among the exiles as she sees in this company. The larger help the smaller. The warriors march in the van and at the rear to guard the helpless, who are also the most precious. They are well dressed in tunics and knee-length cloaks, their warriors in fine armor and brightly painted masks.
The Ashioi she lived among, however briefly, were so poor that none had more than a rag or worn skin to cover themselves with, not even the warriors. That’s why she sleeps beneath a covering woven of reeds. Eldest Uncle doesn’t even have a spare tunic to gift her so that she might not sleep, or wake, naked. All the animals died in exile, and toward the end even the fields of flax withered.
These are not the same people. Yet who else can they be?
