Location: The Shattered Rise Before Aethelburg, The Wild Lands of the North | Year: 8003 A.A.
Have you ever stood in the wake of a great thunderstorm, when the last peal has rolled away across the hills and the world seems to be holding its breath—waiting, listening, wondering if the fury is truly spent?—then you will know something of the silence that fell upon the shattered rise before Aethelburg. It was the deep, ringing silence that follows a cataclysm, the sort of silence that is not empty but full to bursting with the memory of sound. Snow that had been blasted high into the air by Trevor's lightning was now drifting down in fine, glittering flakes, settling with a gentleness that seemed almost apologetic upon a landscape that had been fundamentally and terribly altered. What had once been a frozen rise of ice and stone was now a bowl of glassed earth and smoking craters, and the flakes that landed upon it hissed softly and vanished, as if the ground itself was still too hot to bear them.
Then, a slight shuffling. It was the sort of sound that is very small in a very large silence, but it was enough. A mound of snow near the center of the devastation shifted and trembled, the way a blanket trembles when the sleeper beneath it stirs. Then it burst outward in a spray of white powder, and Zuberi the Great Dragon broke through, his massive crimson form flexing against the pale drifts. He shook himself, the way a dog shakes off water—only this was a dragon the size of a mountain, and the motion sent chunks of ice and stone skittering across the frozen waste. His great wings unfolded slowly, stiffly, and as they spread wide they revealed what they had been sheltering. Tucked beneath them, crouched low against the dragon's warm scales, was the Shadow. Zuberi had wrapped himself around his master in the instant before the lightning struck, and his ancient body—scarred and scored and eternal—had taken the brunt of the fury.
The Shadow straightened. He brushed snow from his shoulders with movements that were almost calm, almost controlled, the way a man brushes lint from his coat before entering a dinner party. But if you had been watching closely—and I must tell you that everyone present was watching very closely indeed—you would have noticed that his breathing was faster than before. His chest rose and fell beneath his torn cape with a rhythm that spoke of exertion rather than ease. And his eyes swept the devastation with a new expression. It was wariness. The sort of wariness that a predator feels when it hears a sound in the undergrowth that it cannot quite identify—a sound that might be prey, or might be another predator, or might be something stranger than either.
"Dust and ashes," a voice cut through the settling quiet, and it was a voice that would have been cheerful under any other circumstances. Jarik appeared at the edge of the crater, rushing forward on feet that were decidedly unsteady. His immaculate charcoal-grey suit—that suit which had survived the destruction of the inner sanctum without so much as a wrinkle—was now torn in a dozen places, the silver threading along the lapels hanging loose like the strings of a broken instrument. His hat was gone entirely, lost somewhere in the chaos of the lightning strike or the collapse of the chamber or the mad scramble to survive what had come after. His pink fur was singed and blackened in patches, giving him the appearance of a stuffed toy that had been left too close to a fire. And he moved with a stiffness that spoke of muscles pushed far beyond their limits, of a body that was still trying to process what it had just survived.
But he was alive. That, in itself, was a testament to something—perhaps to his own resilience, perhaps to the strange and terrible power that the Shadow had given him, perhaps simply to luck. In any case, he was alive, and he skidded to a halt before the Shadow and dropped to one knee with a grace that his disheveled appearance should not have allowed.
"Master!" Jarik called, and his voice was rough and raw. "You are alright."
The Shadow shrugged off the last of the snow from his shoulders. His cape—that long grey garment that drank light rather than reflecting it—was torn at the edges now, ragged and frayed like the wing of a moth that had flown too close to a flame. But it settled around him with a familiar, comfortable weight, and when he spoke his voice carried a note that none of his servants had heard in centuries.
"What," he said slowly, and the word was measured and careful, "was that?"
Now, if you have ever heard a voice that is usually full of certainty suddenly stripped of it—the way a confident man's voice wavers when he has just seen something he cannot explain—then you will understand what the Shadow sounded like in that moment. It was not fear, exactly. It was uncertainty, the sort of uncertainty that is more unsettling than fear because it means the rules have changed and no one has told you what the new rules are.
Jarik rose from his knee, and his mismatched gaze—one violet, one the ordinary pink of his natural form, for the Filtisi transformation had long since receded—followed the Shadow's toward the horizon. That far, frozen horizon where Trevor had vanished in a blaze of amber lightning, where the ape who had outsmarted him and beaten him and then, for reasons Jarik still did not fully understand, spared him had gone roaring into the storm.
"I cannot say, Master," Jarik said, and his voice carried no evasion and no excuse. "I am just as lost as you are."
The Shadow's eyes narrowed. He looked into the distance—not the immediate horizon where the shattered remains of his fortress still smoked, but something further. Something deeper. It was the look of someone who is reading a page that no one else can see, or listening to a song that no one else can hear. As if he could perceive, across miles of frozen waste and through the howling winds of the eternal storm, the figure of the ape who had dared to unleash such power against him. The ape who had walked into his fortress with a clone and a smirk and had walked out with a victory that the Shadow had never seen coming.
"That ape," the Shadow said softly, and there was no mockery in his voice now and no academic detachment and no cold, calculating amusement. There was only the quiet, grudging respect of one predator acknowledging another. "Might be a greater threat than I thought."
***
Location: A Ridge in Ettinsmoor, Miles from the Northern Fortress | The Same Hour
The snow here was softer and less cruel—it fell in gentle flakes rather than biting shards, the sort of flakes that drift down lazily and catch on your eyelashes and melt without you noticing. It blanketed the rocky ridge in a silence that felt almost peaceful, a silence that asked nothing of you and expected nothing from you and simply was.
Adam sat on a flat-topped boulder that jutted from the snow like a grey island in a white sea. His ocean-blue coat was dusted with white, the flakes settling on his shoulders and in the golden streak of his hair, and his blindfolded face was turned toward the grey sky as if he were listening to something very far away. Beside him, Trevor stood with his back against a twisted pine—one of those stubborn trees that manage to grow in places where no tree should grow, their roots clutching at the rock like the fingers of a drowning man. His arms were crossed over his chest, and his amber eyes were fixed on nothing in particular, the way eyes are fixed when they are looking inward rather than outward.
The journey here had been swift. Trevor's speed, even diminished after the expenditure of the Thunder Staff—that terrible, sky-splitting technique that had nearly brought the fortress down on all their heads—had carried them a thousand miles in seconds. Adam had not questioned the direction. He had simply followed, trusting his friend as he had always trusted him, the way you trust someone who has fought beside you and bled beside you and never once given you reason to doubt.
Now, in the quiet, the questions came.
"What was that about?" Adam asked, and his voice was gentle, the sort of gentle that comes from genuine concern rather than mere politeness. Concern laced every word, warm and unguarded in a way he rarely allowed himself to be. "What happened back there?"
Trevor looked away. His gaze slid to the distant mountains rather than meeting Adam's blindfolded eyes—those mountains that rose grey and solemn against the grey sky, their peaks lost in clouds. When he spoke, his voice was flat. Not the sharp and witty tone Adam knew so well, not the irreverent drawl that could make even the direst situation seem manageable. It was something drained and hollow, the voice of a man who has just had something taken from him and is not yet sure what it was.
"It was a trap."
The words hung in the cold air like smoke, and they did not dissipate quickly. "The rune wasn't there. We factored in the Shadow knowing we were coming. We factored in resistance, defenses, even the possibility of a false location. But we didn't properly factor..." He trailed off, shaking his head, and the motion was heavy with something that looked very much like self-reproach. "He broke the Aktil rune into four different parts. Split them. Scattered them. Gaia knows where."
Adam was silent for a long moment, processing. The snow continued to fall around them, soft and indifferent, and somewhere in the distance a bird called out—a single, plaintive note that seemed to ask a question the world was not prepared to answer.
"So it was simply a trap, then? To lure us over there?"
Trevor didn't respond to the question. His jaw tightened, the muscles working beneath the fur of his cheeks, and his fingers curled into fists at his sides so tightly that the knuckles went pale.
Adam studied him—or studied him as much as a blindfolded wolf can study anyone, which is to say he turned his head slightly and seemed to listen with more than his ears. The tension in Trevor's shoulders was wrong. The way he held himself too still and too controlled was wrong. Something had happened in that fortress, something beyond the failure of the mission, something that Trevor was holding inside himself the way you hold a hot coal, burning and silent.
"Trev," Adam said, rising from the boulder and taking a step toward his friend. His feet crunched softly in the fresh snow. "Are you al—"
"We have to be getting back to Kurdiala."
Trevor cut him off, and the words were sharp and final, a door being slammed in a face. He pushed off from the twisted pine, turning away from Adam's approach with a movement that was almost violent in its suddenness. His back was a wall, and his shoulders were set in a line that said, very clearly, do not ask again.
"The sooner we plan our next course of action, the better."
Adam stopped. He knew that tone. He had heard it before, in other voices and other faces and other moments when someone was hurting and refused to show it—the tone of a soldier who has just lost a battle and cannot bear to talk about it, the tone of a friend who has just discovered something about himself that he does not like and cannot bear to share. And Adam, who was wise in the way that only those who have suffered greatly can be wise, did not press further. Not yet.
"By the way," Trevor said, and his voice was almost normal now, almost the old Trevor, "I almost forgot."
Poof!
A plume of amber smoke erupted beside where he stood, swirling and coalescing into a shape that was not quite solid and not quite real—a fire clone, one of those elemental constructs that Trevor could summon with a thought. It flickered and wavered, its edges blurring like a reflection in disturbed water.
Poof!
Another plume. Another shape.
But this time, when the smoke cleared, the figure standing beside Trevor was not a clone. It was a young white fox tracient, and he stood with the stiffness of someone who has been transported without warning and is not at all sure he likes it. His blue eyes were wide—that deep and startling blue that Trevor had first seen in a dim corridor a lifetime ago—and his body was tensed for a fight, every muscle coiled and ready. His hand went to the sword at his hip, the same curved blade he had drawn against Trevor in the fortress, but he did not draw it. He simply stood, frozen in the space between confusion and action, the way a deer freezes when it hears a twig snap in the forest.
Adam's attention shifted to the newcomer. And the moment his gaze fell upon Iltaz—that hidden gaze behind the yellow silk—the world shifted.
A flood of visions came rushing at him. Not as images, but as knowing—sudden and overwhelming and impossible to contain, the way a dam breaks when the water behind it has grown too heavy. A loud ZING rang through his skull, a resonance that set his teeth on edge and made the Crescent Moon at his throat pulse with a soft, startled light. It was the Arya of Creation stirring, responding to something it recognized, something it had been waiting for.
"Urrghh!"
Adam grabbed his head, his knees buckling, his body collapsing toward the snow-covered ground with a suddenness that was almost graceful.
"Adam!" Trevor was there in an instant. His earlier distance was forgotten, his emotional walls abandoned, and his hands caught his friend before he could fall. He held Adam steady, supporting his weight with the ease of long practice, and his amber eyes were sharp with a concern that he had been trying very hard to hide. "Are you alright?"
Adam's breath came in short, uneven gasps. The vision faded slowly and reluctantly, the way a dream fades when you wake from it, leaving behind only fragments and echoes and a strange sense that something important has just happened. He smiled slightly, and the expression was weak but genuine—the smile of someone who has just seen something wonderful and terrible and is not yet sure which it was.
"Now you feel like talking?"
Trevor's expression flickered. It was something between guilt and exasperation, the look of a man who has been caught avoiding a conversation he knew he needed to have. "Is your sight too much to bear, even with the blindfold on?"
Adam shook his head, and the movement was slow and careful, the way you move when your head is still ringing. "Not usually. Not unless it's triggered by something." His focus shifted—slowly, deliberately, with the weight of someone who has just found something he did not know he was looking for—to the young fox who stood frozen a few feet away.
"I found him on my way in," Trevor said, following Adam's gaze. His voice was carefully neutral, the voice of someone delivering a report rather than telling a story. "He's not like the others."
"I can tell."
Iltaz stared at them both. His body was still tense, his hand still on his sword, and he looked like a cornered animal—ready to fight, ready to flee, not yet certain which would serve him better. He had been taught, in the cold halls of Aethelburg, that the enemies of the Shadow were monsters and deceivers and servants of a weak and dying light. But the blindfolded wolf before him did not look like a monster. He looked like someone who had carried a very heavy weight for a very long time and had not yet set it down.
"How..." Iltaz's voice cracked, and he swallowed hard, trying again. "Where are my—"
"Relax." Trevor's tone was dismissive but not unkind—the tone of someone who has no patience for panic but understands it nonetheless. "I marked you with my mana when we last met. That's all. All I had to do was swap a clone with you. You're not in any danger. Not from us, anyway."
Iltaz's eyes moved between them—the ape with the sharp gaze and the guarded posture, the blindfolded wolf with the quiet presence and the strange, gentle smile. He did not relax, not completely. But his hand fell away from his sword, and that was something.
Adam rose from Trevor's support and walked toward the young fox. His steps were slow and deliberate and utterly non-threatening, the steps of someone approaching a frightened animal. When he stopped, there was barely a yard between them—close enough to speak softly, far enough to give the boy room to breathe.
"What's your name, young one?"
Iltaz stared at him.
Something about the man before him was awe-inspiring. Not in the way of power—though Adam radiated power, that much was obvious even to Iltaz's untrained senses, a steady hum of mana that seemed to vibrate in the air around him like the note of a great bell. It was something deeper and stranger and harder to name. There seemed to be some sort of glow around him, as if he were brighter in that moment than everything else around them. More real. As if the snow and the trees and the very ground beneath their feet were mere shadows, and Adam was the substance that cast them.
It reminded Iltaz of something. A memory, half-forgotten and long buried, stirring in the depths of his mind like a fish stirring in dark water. The Stone Table. The rainbow butterfly that had landed on his paw when he was very small. The voice that had spoken to him without words, the presence that had told him he was not alone, the version of himself that went by the name Asalan. He had not thought of it in years, had locked it away in a corner of his heart where the Shadow's teachings could not reach it. But here, in the presence of this blindfolded wolf, the lock was beginning to turn.
"Iltaz," he heard himself say, and the word escaped before he could stop it, the way a secret escapes when you have kept it too long. "My name is Iltaz Aktil."
Adam was silent for a moment, turning the name over in his mind the way you turn a stone in your hand, feeling its weight and its shape. "Iltaz," he said finally, and his voice was soft, the sort of soft that carries more meaning than any shout. "'The right one.'" He stressed the meaning, and Iltaz felt something shift in his chest—a recognition and a resonance, as if the name had been waiting all his life to be spoken with that understanding. "You can sense it, can you not?"
Iltaz blinked, and the snow caught on his lashes. "Sense what?"
"The same things I can see." Adam gestured vaguely to his blindfolded eyes—the yellow silk that hid whatever lay beneath, the shield and the promise and the burden. "For you, it comes as a feeling. A knowing, without knowing how you know. You sense it there—the truth, the shape of things—but you cannot quite reach out to grasp it."
Iltaz was speechless. Because the man was correct. Completely and utterly correct, in a way that no one had ever been correct about him before. There had always been something—a whisper at the edge of his perception, a flicker in the corner of his eye. He had not known what it was, but he had always been sure of the presence of others, had always been able to tell the kind of person they were from the feel of their mana. The Shadow's servants felt cold and sharp like broken glass. The soldiers felt grey and dull like old stone. But this man—this blindfolded wolf with the golden streak in his hair—felt warm. He felt like sunlight on a winter morning, like the first thaw after a long freeze.
Here, in his presence, the whisper was louder. The flicker was brighter.
Iltaz nodded, and the movement was small and almost involuntary—the nod of someone who has just been given an answer to a question he did not know he had been asking.
Adam smiled. It was a warm and genuine smile, the sort of smile that seems to light up the whole world around it, and it made the grey afternoon feel a little less grey. "You will fit right in, son."
"Ehm." Trevor's voice cut through the moment like a knife through silk. He had been standing apart, watching the exchange with an expression that was difficult to read—something between impatience and a softer emotion that he would never have admitted to. "If you two are done bonding, we have to be heading back. Like I said, our skirmish here was futile. We have to focus on gathering the fragments instead."
Adam turned to look at his friend, but Trevor was already scanning the horizon, his expression closed and unreadable, a door that had been locked and barred. Whatever had happened in that fortress, whatever weight he was carrying, he was not ready to share it. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.
Iltaz hesitated. This was not his place. He had been brought here against his will, by an enemy who had defeated him and then—inexplicably and for reasons that still baffled him—spared him. He owed these strangers nothing. He could have stayed silent, could have kept his knowledge to himself, could have waited for a chance to slip away and return to the only life he had ever known.
But something made him speak.
"It might not be my place," he said slowly, and his voice was steadier now, finding its footing, "but I am relatively high among the Shadow's men. Ranking-wise, at least. We commanders are directly below the Golgev. We hear things."
Trevor's gaze snapped to him, sharp and assessing, the way a hawk's gaze snaps to a movement in the grass. "Be straightforward."
Iltaz met his eyes and refused to flinch. It was not easy—those amber eyes were very sharp indeed—but he had faced this monkey in combat and survived, and that gave him a courage he had not possessed before. "Well, we heard rumors. Something is being heavily hidden a few leagues from here. Some of the Golgev spoke about it—how precious it was to the Shadow. How he visited it personally, which he never does for anything."
Adam's head tilted, and the blindfold shifted slightly. "Could it be a fragment?"
"It's possible."
Trevor frowned, and his arms crossed over his chest with a finality that was almost aggressive. "But why would the Shadow go through the stress of splitting the rune only to have it hidden somewhere this close to his own fortress? It defies logic. If he wanted to protect something valuable, he would send it far away. Across the sea. To the ends of the earth."
"Perhaps," Iltaz offered, and he was surprised by his own boldness, "he could not afford to have the fragments far from himself. Perhaps the rune, even broken, needs to be near him for some reason." He paused, and then added, with a hint of the cleverness that had served him so well in the Shadow's service, "I mean, if I were the Shadow, my first thought would be that people would suspect that I would hide the rune somewhere far. So I would do the opposite of that instead."
Adam nodded slowly, considering. The snow continued to fall, soft and patient, and the twisted pine creaked gently in the wind.
"It wouldn't hurt to check the location," Iltaz volunteered, and he was surprising himself now—surprising himself with his own eagerness, his own willingness to help these strangers who had been his enemies only hours before. "Even if it's not a fragment, it might be something else of value. Something to make this journey less of a waste."
Adam turned to Trevor. The question was unspoken, but it hung in the air between them as clearly as if it had been shouted.
Trevor was silent for a long moment. His amber eyes moved between Adam and the young fox, and something flickered in their depths—calculation, perhaps, or suspicion, or the slow dawning of a grudging respect. Then he shrugged, and the gesture was more resignation than agreement, the shrug of someone who has decided to go along with a plan he does not entirely trust.
"Fine. We'll check it out. But if this is a trap, I'm leaving you both to dig yourselves out."
Adam smiled, and there was warmth in it. "Fair enough." He turned back to Iltaz, and the blindfolded face somehow managed to convey a question. "I suppose you know where this location is?"
Iltaz nodded, and something like purpose settled into his chest—a feeling he had not felt in a very long time, a feeling that was both strange and familiar. It was the feeling of belonging. Of being useful. Of having a place, however small, in a story that was bigger than himself.
"Yes," he said, and his voice was firm and clear. "I can lead you there."
***
Location: A Rocky Valley, Overlooking the Frozen Wastes, Ettinsmoor | The Same Hour
If you have ever climbed to a high place and looked down upon a valley where something important was about to happen—the kind of looking that makes your skin prickle and your breath come short, even though you cannot say exactly why—then you will understand the vigil that Thagros Fil and Verliss Tarkan kept upon that rocky ridge. The valley below them had been carved by glaciers in an age so distant that even the oldest trees did not remember it, and its walls were scarred and smooth, the way a great bowl is smooth after the potter's wheel has finished with it. The wind that howled through that valley was a hungry wind, a wind that had tasted the warmth of living things before and had never forgotten the flavour.
But the wind did not touch the two figures on the ridge. It veered away from them as if it had been politely but firmly asked to go elsewhere, and the cold that bit so fiercely at the rest of the world did not bite at them. They existed in a bubble of their own making, separate from the landscape they watched, patient as predators waiting for prey—the sort of patience that is not passive but active, the patience of a cat at a mousehole, every muscle still but every sense awake.
Thagros Fil sat upon his throne of bone. It was a terrible thing to behold, that throne, and if you had seen it in a dream you would have woken with your heart hammering and your sheets twisted. It was the curved, colossal skull of a leviathan from the old world—the world that had been wet and warm and full of creatures so vast that their footsteps had shaken the continents. Its bone had been bleached white by eons and polished by reverence until it gleamed like a monument to everything that had ever been lost. Carved glyphs wound along its sweeping tusks, telling stories that no living being could now decipher, though Thagros sometimes traced them with his thick, grey fingers and seemed to be listening for an answer that never came.
The elephant tracient himself was no less imposing than his seat. His massive frame seemed to merge with the throne, the grey of his hide blending into the white of the ancient bone, so that he became not merely a creature sitting upon a chair but a monument to extinction itself. Around his thick, wrinkled neck hung nine smaller skulls, each one taken from a sacred clan that had been wiped from the scroll of existence—clans whose names were no longer spoken, whose songs were no longer sung, whose children had been the last of their kind and had died without anyone to mourn them. The Hazël number ten glowed upon his granite skin like a sullen, permanent brand, a mark of power and loss intertwined, and leaning against his throne was his weapon: the great skull-shaped scythe. It was less a tool for reaping grain than the very symbol of his grim office, and the blade of it caught the pale light and held it. He was the Reaper of Lost Lines, the Last Witness of Vanished Peoples, and the weight of that title was visible in every line of his ancient face.
Beside him, Verliss Tarkan drifted with an effortless, serpentine grace that made the snow itself seem clumsy. Her scaled form was draped in silks and gold that gleamed dully in the ambient gloom of the overcast sky, refusing to shine too brightly or call too much attention—a subtlety that was, in its own way, more unnerving than any open display of power. Her ornaments should have chimed with every movement, for she wore bracelets and anklets and chains of delicate metal that looked as though they would sing at the slightest breeze. But they were nearly silent, only the faintest shimmer of her golden armlets betraying her presence. It was a deliberate manipulation of sound and presence, the sort of thing that takes centuries to perfect, and she had indeed had centuries. Around her slender neck, the Hazël number thirteen curved like a serpent swallowing its own tail—a perfect, vicious circle that seemed to tighten whenever she moved, as if it were a living thing that fed upon her stillness.
"They're on their way," Verliss said, and her voice was a sibilant whisper that should have been lost in the wind but somehow carried as clearly as a bell in a silent room. "The plan is in motion."
Thagros nodded, but the gesture was solemn rather than eager—the nod of someone who has agreed to something he does not entirely like and is reminding himself, with every passing moment, of the reasons he agreed. His ancient eyes, deep-set and shadowed, watched the distant figures moving across the snow far below. They were small at this distance, no more than specks against the white, but he knew who they were. He had known who they would be before they arrived.
"Are you certain this is going to work, Verliss?"
She glanced at him, and her reptilian eyes were unreadable. They were the sort of eyes that have seen many things and judged most of them and found nearly all of them wanting. "It is the only other chance you will get to gain the Master's favor," she said, and her voice was not cruel and not kind—merely factual, the voice of someone stating a truth that did not need to be softened. "You know what is at stake, Thagros. I do not need to remind you."
Thagros closed his eyes. The lids were heavy and wrinkled, the lids of someone who had seen too much and slept too little. He sighed, and the sound was soft, almost lost in the wind that howled past their bubble of stillness. But Verliss heard it. She heard everything, that serpentine Hazël, and she said nothing. There was nothing to say. They both knew what was at stake. They both knew what failure would mean. And they both knew, though neither of them spoke it aloud, that the figures moving across the snow below were not merely enemies. They were the children of legends, the heirs of powers that had defied the Shadow at the dawn of time. To face them was not a battle. It was a wager with fate itself.
Below, in the valley, three figures moved across the snow. From this height they were small and fragile, the way all living things are small and fragile when seen from a great distance. A wolf in a coat of ocean-blue, his golden streak of hair a thin line of defiance against the endless white. An ape with a staff upon his shoulder, his posture still carrying the tension of a battle he had not yet finished fighting. And a young fox, white-furred and blue-eyed, who walked with the hesitant purpose of someone who has just made the most important decision of his life and is not yet sure whether it was the right one.
They did not know they were being watched. They did not know that the valley ahead, with its rocky walls and its ancient ice and its promise of something precious hidden at its heart, was not a discovery but a destination—a place that had been prepared for them, a snare that had been set long before they ever decided to walk into it. They only knew that the quest was not over. They only knew that somewhere, scattered across the frozen world, pieces of the Aktil Rune waited to be found, and that the fate of nations depended upon finding them. They only knew that one of those pieces, if the young fox's information was correct, lay somewhere in the valley just ahead.
Was Iltaz right? Or was he wrong? The world is full of such questions—questions that hang in the air like snowflakes, drifting and spinning and refusing to land. But I can tell you this: the fox had spoken in good faith. He had offered what he knew, freely and without guile, to the blindfolded wolf and the amber-eyed ape who had spared his life when they had every reason to end it. Whether that knowledge was true or false, whether it would lead them to a fragment of the shattered rune or into the waiting jaws of a trap, was a question that only the next few hours could answer. And those hours were approaching quickly, the way all important hours approach—silently, steadily, and without any regard for the hopes or fears of those who must live through them.