Location: The Shadow's Fortress, The Wild Lands of the North | A Few Months Earlier | Year: 8003: A.A
If you have ever stumbled upon a room in a great house that the rest of the household seems to have forgotten—a room where the dust lies thick on the windowsill and the fire has not been lit in a very long time and the silence has a texture all its own—then you will know something of the chamber where Verliss Tarkan sat coiled upon the sill. It was a small room by the standards of the Shadow's fortress, which is to say it was only about the size of a modest cottage, and its walls were bare stone that had never known the warmth of a tapestry. A single window looked out upon the snow that fell perpetually upon the Wild Lands of the North—not the cheerful snow of a Christmas card, you understand, but a relentless and smothering white, as if the sky itself were trying to bury the world in cold silence and was not particularly sorry about it.
Verliss sat with her legs tucked beneath her, and her silks lay as still as moonlight on a pond. All the little golden chains and bracelets she wore—which could chime and jangle in ways that made you want to agree with whatever she said, the way a snake's swaying makes a mouse want to stay very still—were, for once, perfectly quiet. She had willed them to be so. She was watching the snow, and her face was the unreadable face of all her people: smooth and scaled and giving away nothing at all. If you had passed by that door and glanced inside, you might have thought she was a statue that someone had dressed in silks and forgotten.
Then came a sound behind her. The door opened with a groan that spoke of hinges that had not been oiled in a very long time, and a shape filled the doorway.
She did not turn around. "Took you a while to get here," she said, and her voice was as soft and thin as a thread of smoke rising from a candle that had just been snuffed.
Thagros Fil filled the doorway. I use the word "filled" quite deliberately, for he was a truly enormous elephant, one of the old Tracients, and the doorframe seemed to strain a little at the edges, as if he had to push the very air out of the way to get in. Nine skulls hung around his thick, wrinkled neck—the skulls of sacred clans now wiped from the scroll of the world—and they clinked together as he moved, a tiny bony music that was the only answer he made for a long moment. The Hazël number ten glowed upon his granite skin like a sullen, permanent brand.
"Reasons," he rumbled at last, and his voice was so deep that you felt it in your chest rather than heard it with your ears. "I was attending to matters."
Verliss uncoiled from the sill and stood. She moved the way a stream moves over stones—no noise, no waste, no hesitation. Her scaled feet made no sound on the cold stone floor. "Attending to matters," she repeated, tasting the words as if they were unfamiliar food. "Or avoiding me?"
The elephant did not blink. His ancient eyes, deep-set and shadowed, regarded her with an expression that was impossible to read—the way a mountain's expression is impossible to read, because a mountain has seen so much that it has stopped bothering with expressions. "Why have you summoned me here, Verliss?"
She came close to him now, close enough to touch, though she did not. The top of her head barely reached his chest, but she looked up at him without any sign of fear. "I want to help you, Thagros."
A look that is hard to describe passed over his great grey face. It was not surprise, exactly, and it was not suspicion, though there was a little of both in it. It was the look of a man who has been offered something he had long ago stopped hoping for and is not quite sure he believes in it. "Help?"
"I have noticed," said Verliss, and she began to move again, circling him slowly, the way a cat circles a great and patient mountain, "that you are not like the rest of us Golgev. The rest of us are broken vessels, you know. Cracked pots mended with mud and bad intentions. We hang on the Shadow's favor because it is all we have—because without it, we would fall to pieces and blow away. But you Elephant-folk..." She paused in her circling, and her reptilian eyes caught the dim light and held it. "You were always different."
Thagros said nothing. The skulls around his neck clinked softly as he breathed.
"Your people left Narn not because you were thrown out," Verliss continued, and her voice was thoughtful now, the voice of someone turning over an old story in her mind. "You left because you chose your own road. There was no war and no betrayal. Only a chosen distance. A parting of friends who had grown in different directions and decided, with mutual respect, to walk separate paths."
She stopped directly before him and looked up into his ancient face. "And then the Shadow brought his message to your people."
The air in the little room grew heavier. It was the sort of heaviness that comes before a storm, when the pressure drops and your ears pop and you know, without being told, that something is about to break.
"You refused him," Verliss said softly.
Still nothing from Thagros, but the shadows in the corners of the room seemed to thicken, the way mist thickens over a marsh at twilight. The single window rattled faintly in its frame, though there was no wind.
"And your people paid the price."
For a long time, there was only the sound of the relentless snow against the window—a soft, persistent hissing, like the world itself was trying to shush them. The incense burner on the little table sat cold and dark. The silks of Verliss's dress did not stir. And Thagros stood as still as a mountain that had been carved by glaciers and would be carved by glaciers still, long after everything else had crumbled to dust.
At last he spoke, and his voice was so quiet and so deep that you felt it in the marrow of your bones. "Did you call me here, Verliss, to tell me my own story?"
She met his gaze and did not flinch. It was a brave thing to do, for his gaze was the sort of gaze that had seen civilizations rise and fall and was not particularly impressed by either. "You were willing to fight," she went on, as if he had not spoken at all. "You truly believed you could withstand the Master. You gathered your strength and made your plans and prepared to defy him, and you believed—with all your ancient, stubborn heart—that you could win."
She took a step closer, and her voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "That was until..."
And now the temperature in the room dropped. I do not mean that it got a little chilly. I mean that the cold became a physical presence, a third person in the room, pressing against the walls and the floor and the very air. The shadows in the corners thickened until they were almost solid. A thick and palpable Yakit—the spark before the outburst of a mana ability, the sort of pressure that makes your ears ring and your heart race—came rolling off Thagros in waves, and the skulls around his neck rattled like dice in a cup.
"Choose your next words carefully, snake." His voice was no longer quiet. It was the voice of an avalanche, of a tectonic plate shifting, of a force that could crack the world in half if it chose to.
But Verliss did not flinch. I must tell you that this was either very brave or very foolish, and I am still not sure which. "I mean no disrespect. I speak only what I know." She turned away from him—turned her back on that terrible presence, which is something that most creatures would not have dared to do—and walked to the little table where the incense burner sat. It was a small and homely thing, quite out of place in that dark fortress, carved from pale wood and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She took up a match from a box beside it and struck it against the stone wall. The scratch of it was shockingly loud in the silence, the way a cough is shockingly loud in a cathedral. A tiny flame leaped up, and she touched it to the incense. A wisp of sweet and sad-smelling smoke rose into the air, curling like a question mark.
"All you have done," she said, and she did not turn around to look at him, "the battles and the compromises and the moments that made you hate yourself when you woke in the dark hours of the night—you have done for your daughter. To keep her alive. To give her one more day of breath and sunlight, even if the sunlight in this place is thin and pale and hardly worth having."
She turned now, and her eyes met his across the little room. The incense smoke drifted between them. "I understand that. I once had a sister I would have done anything to protect. I had to stay away from her—had to hand her over to the Carlonans, of all people, just to keep her out of all this. To keep her safe from the monster I was becoming." Her voice was steady, but there was something beneath it, something old and raw that she had never quite managed to heal. "We are the same, Thagros. We do what we must for the ones we love. Once the stakes become personal, we do not really have choices, do we?"
Thagros looked into her eyes, searching for the lie and the hidden fang and the venom that he was sure must be there. He had been a Hazël for a very long time, and he had learned that kindness from his colleagues was usually a prelude to betrayal. But what he saw in Verliss's eyes was not kindness and not cruelty. It was weariness. A weariness that matched his own, a weariness that had been earned through centuries of impossible choices and sleepless nights and the slow, grinding knowledge that the path you had chosen was leading you further and further from the person you had once hoped to be.
"But in order to protect them," Verliss continued, and her voice was gentler now, "we need the Master's favor. His good graces. With his power—with the full weight of his authority behind us—he could grant you what you need. He could ensure that your daughter is safe, not just for one more day, but for all the days that remain." She paused, letting the words settle. "If you can impress him. Truly impress him."
The great elephant was silent for a long moment. The incense smoke coiled around him like a grey cat, and the snow continued to fall outside the window, and somewhere far away a door slammed and was answered by silence. Then, slowly, something shifted in his expression. It was a crumbling of a wall he had built long ago, a wall that had kept everyone out and everything in, and the sight of it was almost painful.
"What do you suggest?"
Verliss's smile was small and sad—the smile of someone who has just won an argument and discovered that winning does not feel as good as she had hoped. "The greatest threats to the Master are the Grand Lords. We have watched them for years, feared them for years. They will come for the Aktil rune. The Master knows this, and he has made his preparations. But what if we could kill two birds with one stone?"
She took up another match and lit a second incense stick. The tiny dancing flame made her scaled face look like something out of an old and dark poem, the sort of poem that you read once and never quite forget. "We spread a rumor. A whisper of a fragment of the rune, hidden in a place that is isolated and vulnerable. A place we control. A trap." She blew out the match, and a thin line of smoke rose from the blackened tip. "They will come, and when they do..." She let the words hang in the air, unfinished and full of possibility.
An image flashed into Thagros's mind then—the way these pictures can flash into our minds when we are alone and afraid, vivid and sharp and impossible to ignore. It was the image of a small elephant, soft-skinned and bright-eyed, laughing at something he had said. It was an image from before the world had grown so cold, before the Shadow had come with his offers and his threats, before the choices had narrowed to a single terrible point.
"What exactly," he said slowly, and his voice was heavy with a resignation that had been building for centuries, "do you have in mind?"
Verliss gestured to the floor, for there were no chairs in the little room big enough for an elephant of his stature. It was a simple gesture, almost homely, the sort of gesture a host makes when inviting a guest to stay for tea. "Sit down, Thagros. This may take a while."
***
Location: A Hidden Valley in Ettinsmoor, Miles from the Northern Fortress | Present Day
If you have ever walked into a place and felt, before anything had happened, that something was about to—the way the air feels heavy and still before a thunderstorm, the way your skin prickles for no reason you can name—then you will know what that valley in Ettinsmoor felt like. It was a day when the sky had forgotten what blue looked like. Iron-grey and heavy as a cold pot-lid, it pressed down upon the hidden valley, and the three figures who moved across its floor seemed very small indeed, the way all living things seem small when the sky is low and the world is white and the only sound is the crunch of your own feet in the snow.
One of these figures was a monkey called Trevor. His brown fur was still singed in patches from a recent battle—the battle in the Shadow's fortress, where he had faced a rabbit who could bend time and had walked away with a victory that felt, in some ways, very much like a defeat. His amber eyes swept the snow with the restless caution of someone who trusts no silence, however peaceful it seems, and his prehensile tail hung behind him, still as a snake that has not yet decided to strike.
The second figure, walking ahead of the others, was a young white fox named Iltaz. He moved with the confidence of someone who knows his way—perhaps, as it would turn out, a little too confidently. His deep blue eyes swept the ridges that ringed the valley, and if you had asked him, he would have said he was simply following a hunch. But hunches, as every wise creature knows, can be planted.
The third figure walked in the middle, and he was the strangest of them all. He was a great Wolf, blue of coat as deep-sea water, moving upright and wrapped in an ocean-blue garment that fluttered faintly in the wind. A yellow blindfold covered his eyes, yet he walked without hesitation, his feet finding the surest path through the snow as if he could see it—or as if he were listening to something that told him where to step. At his throat, a crescent moon of light pulsed steadily, like a second heart, and the gentle glow of it painted the snow around him in shades of soft silver. His name was Adam, though some already called him the Blue Wolf, and others called him the son of Abel and Amaia Kurt, and a few—a very few—called him the one who might finally end the long and terrible war that had been tearing Narn apart since before most living creatures were born.
"You would think," said Trevor, breaking the long quiet with a voice that was not quite a chatter but certainly sharp, the way a knife is sharp when it has been honed too many times, "that a place with a thing like the Aktil rune hidden in it would have a few guards. Visible guards, I mean. The sort you can see before they see you."
"It has guards," Adam replied calmly, and his muzzle barely moved when he spoke. His voice was the voice of someone who has been observing things that others miss, and who has grown used to explaining them. "The whole valley is humming with them. Can you not feel it? They are stitched into the stones under the snow, woven through the roots of those dead trees." He gestured with one blue-furred hand toward a stand of twisted pines that clung to the valley wall. "Whoever hid the rune did not skimp on spells."
Trevor scratched the fur behind one ear and made a noise of disgust—a short, sharp exhalation that turned to steam in the cold air. "That's not what I mean, and you know it."
Iltaz hesitated. He was still learning the rhythm of these conversations, the way the monkey and the wolf spoke to each other in a shorthand that only old friends can use. "The Master," he began, then caught himself—a habit he was trying very hard to break. "The Shadow, I mean—he rarely stations living soldiers near such places. A single sentry spotted where no sentry should be might undo centuries of secrecy. But there will be defenses. Only, not the sort you can see."
Trevor said nothing, but his tail gave a short, sceptical twitch. He had met the invisible sort of defense before, in the corridors of Aethelburg and in the dark places beneath the world, and he did not like it. No sensible creature does.
The valley opened before them like a great stone bowl, ringed by rocky ridges that leaned inward like onlookers waiting for a fight to begin. The snow in the bowl was untouched—a perfect, unbroken sheet of white that stretched from one side of the valley to the other. No tracks marred its surface. Not even a scavenging bird had left its print, and that was stranger than any visible guard could have been. It was a place that had been holding its breath for a very long time, and the three figures who walked into it were the first thing it had seen in centuries.
Adam stopped. It was a sudden stop, the sort of stop that makes the people behind you bump into your back. He stood very still in the center of the snowy bowl, and his blindfolded head was tilted to one side, the way a dog's head tilts when it hears a sound that human ears cannot catch.
Iltaz walked on several paces before he noticed that the others had stopped behind him. He turned back, and his white-furred face was puzzled—the puzzled look of someone who has been leading a procession and suddenly discovers that the procession is no longer following. "What's wrong?"
Adam's voice, when it came, was slow and careful, each word measured the way a jeweler measures gold. "Iltaz, you told us you heard a rumor that led to this place, did you not?"
"Yes?" The word came out as a question, though Iltaz had meant it as an answer.
"Then how," said Trevor, stepping forward and fixing his sharp amber eyes upon the fox like two pointed nails being driven into soft wood, "did you lead us here without one wrong turn? Without even slowing down?"
Iltaz opened his mouth to answer. And I must tell you that he meant to answer—meant to explain that he had simply followed his instincts, that the way had seemed clear to him, that he had not thought to question it. But nothing came out. His mouth moved, and his throat worked, and no sound emerged. And then his own face changed. It was not a change to guilt, and it was not a change to fear—not yet. It was a sudden, dreadful confusion, the look of someone who has just discovered a locked door inside his own mind and has no key, someone who has just realized that a room he thought he knew by heart has a corner he has never seen before. He blinked hard, trying to shake off a fog, but the fog would not lift.
Trevor was in front of him before the fox could register the movement. The headband across the monkey's brow—the Arya of Derision, that strange and unsettling talisman with its three spirals bound together—began to glow with a soft amber light. The spirals revolved slowly, the way galaxies revolve in the deeps of space, and from Trevor's finger shot a beam no thicker than a needle. It passed clean through Iltaz's forehead with a surgeon's precision, and it did not hurt. It did not burn or cut or leave a mark. It simply unpicked the sticky, clinging threads of a spell that had been coiled in the young fox's thoughts for a very long time—a spell that had been woven into his mind so carefully that he had never known it was there, a compulsion that had guided his steps and shaped his decisions and led him, as surely as a leash leads a dog, to this valley at this hour.
Iltaz collapsed into the snow, his white fur blending with the white ground. He was asleep and free, and his face, in sleep, looked younger than it had when he was awake.
"He was fighting it," Trevor said, lowering him gently to the snow and brushing a few flakes from the boy's forehead. "But the compulsion was too strong. A deep-layered working, planted long ago. Probably when he was very young—too young to resist, too young to remember."
He straightened up, and his small, nimble form was tense as a drawn bow. His amber eyes swept the valley with the look of a hunter who knows the trap has already sprung and is now trying to find the teeth. "We have to get out of—"
ZIIIIIIINNNNNNNGGGGGGGG!!!!
A sound ran through the snow and through the stone and through the bone of the world, the way a great tuning fork sounds when it is struck by an unseen hand. It was a sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, a sound that made your teeth ache and your ears ring and your heart skip a beat.
THOOOOOM!!!!
The valley floor woke. A vast sigil blazed into being beneath the snow, so huge that it filled the entire bowl from ridge to ridge, its lines burning with a cold and pale blue light—the sort of light you might see in a surgeon's diagram, or in the depths of a glacier where the ice has been compressed for a thousand years. The snow that covered it did not melt; it simply became transparent, the way a curtain becomes transparent when a light is turned on behind it, and the sigil shone through with a terrible clarity. And at the very center of that sigil, where all the glowing lines met in a knot of intricate patterns that hurt the eyes to follow, a strange symbol pulsed: a clock face, its hands frozen at some unknown hour, its numbers written in a script that no living creature could read.
It was called the Mühür Yıldızı—the Seal Star—and it was one of the oldest and most terrible traps ever devised by the Shadow's servants.
And Adam the Blue Wolf could not move.
He did not panic. The Blue Wolf was not the panicking sort, and he had been in enough tight places to know that panic is a luxury you cannot afford when your life depends on clear thinking. But he realized, with a curious and far-away clarity—the sort of clarity that comes when you are observing your own predicament from a great distance—that his muscles no longer obeyed him. His powerful frame was locked in place, his arms frozen at his sides, his legs rooted to the ground as if they had grown there. His mana, which he usually felt like a warm sea at his core, surging and ebbing with the rhythm of his breath, had gone still as a winter pond. Even his thoughts seemed wrapped in yards of thick wool, moving slowly and heavily, the way a fly moves when it has been caught in honey.
"Adam!" Trevor's voice reached him as if through deep water, muffled and distant and full of a fear that Trevor rarely allowed himself to show. "ADAM!"
The monkey rushed forward, his staff Gözkıran blazing with furious amber light—and was hurled backward by an invisible wall that sprang up at the seal's edge. It was not a wall of stone or force, but a wall of sheer denial, a barrier that said you shall not pass in a language older than words. He tumbled through the snow, turned a somersault that would have been comical under any other circumstances, and came up snarling. His fur was bristling along his arms and the back of his neck, and his amber eyes were wild with a fury that he had been keeping banked for a very long time.
"Don't bother trying, Lord Maymum."
The voice came from the edge of the valley, and it was a voice that seemed to have been carved from an older and grimmer age than the one they were living in. Thagros Fil stood upon the ridge, a giant of an elephant, and in his massive grey hand was a scythe whose blade gleamed with a hungry, patient light. Nine skulls hung about his thick, wrinkled neck and clinked softly together, though no wind blew to stir them. One of the skulls—the smallest and oldest, a fragile thing of yellowed bone—was glowing with the same mournful light as the clock face in the seal, and the sight of it made something cold settle in Trevor's stomach.
"You!" Trevor spat, and the word was a bullet. "Let him go! Now!"
"I cannot," said Thagros, and his ancient eyes held no cruelty as he said it. They held only a terrible sadness, the sadness of someone who has done things he cannot undo and made choices he cannot unmake. "Even if you struck me down this very moment, that seal would not break. The final stage of the Seal Star, once begun, runs its own course. And when it ends..." He did not need to finish. The silence that followed his words was more terrible than any threat could have been.
"Nothing is unbreakable!" shouted the monkey, and his amber aura blazed brighter than before, pushing back the grey cold and the pale blue light of the seal. The snow around his feet melted in a widening circle, and the steam rose around him like a cloak.
Thagros was silent for a moment. The great scythe gleamed in his grip, and the nine skulls clinked softly, and his ancient eyes were full of something that looked, from a distance, very much like regret. "I used to believe that myself," he said at last. And if you had been listening closely—and Trevor, for all his fury, was listening very closely indeed—you could hear, far back in his voice, the echo of a much younger elephant who had once believed in his own strength, and in causes he thought just, and in a world that could be changed by the force of a good heart.
Trevor sprang. A monkey well and truly angered is quicker than you can blink, and with the Arya of Derision blazing on his brow, Trevor was quicker still. He vanished from where he stood, his small body becoming a blur of amber and brown, and he stretched out his furry hands toward the seal and toward his frozen friend with a desperation that was almost tangible.
And Thagros intercepted him. A creature that enormous should not move so swiftly—should not be able to flow like an avalanche given purpose, his scythe sweeping a terrible arc that sang through the air with a sound like a choir of the damned. Trevor twisted in mid-air, his monkey agility serving him well, and landed hard in the snow, gasping, losing seconds he could not afford to lose.
'How?' Trevor's mind raced, even as his body scrambled to recover. 'The gap in our ranks should make this impossible. How is he this fast?'
Then he saw her.
On the far ridge, still as a statue carved from serpentine, stood Verliss Tarkan. Her scaled hands wove patterns in the air—intricate and fluid patterns that looked almost like a dance, if a dance could be performed with nothing but fingers and intent. Around her floated a constellation of tiny, pale sigils, each one glowing with a faint, sickly light, and from those sigils ran fine threads of mana. They stretched across the valley to Thagros, threads so thin they were almost invisible yet terribly strong—the sort of threads that could hold a mountain in place if they were woven tightly enough.
"I see," said Trevor, rising slowly from the snow, his voice cold now and controlled. The wild fury had not left him, but it had been forged into something sharper, something more dangerous. "So you Golgev can fight as a team. Your friend over there has a support Arcem. She's lending you the speed to keep up with me."
Thagros did not deny it. He only shifted his grip on the great scythe, and the blade of it caught the pale blue light of the seal and threw it back in fractured patterns. "We all have things at stake, Lord Maymum. Things that make compromises bearable." He glanced at the Blue Wolf, pinned in the seal's icy glow, and his ancient eyes were sorrowful. "Removing Lord Kurt from the board is nothing personal. It is simply... necessary."
Trevor's aura erupted. I have used that word before, but I must ask you to imagine it this time—to truly imagine it. Amber coated his small, wiry form like a second skin, blazing like a sudden sun in that grey and frozen valley, and the heat of it melted the snow for fifty yards in every direction. His staff, Gözkıran, blazed with a light that seemed to answer the seal's pale glow with a defiance that was almost musical, its runes throwing back the shadows as if daring them to return.
"Like hell," the monkey snarled, and the words were not a curse but a promise, "I'm going to let that happen."
Thagros raised his scythe into a defensive stance, the great curved blade held before him like a shield. "I am sorry," he said, and he meant it—truly meant it, in the way that only someone who has been sorry for a very long time can mean anything. "Lord Adam cannot act. You will have to face us both alone."
BOOOOOOM!!!!
It was not an explosion of fire. It was not a blast of light or a shockwave of force, though it had something of all these things in it. It was a weight—a pressure, a silent thunder that pressed down on the valley as if the sky had grown a giant, invisible hand and was leaning on the world with all its strength. The snow for a hundred yards around the seal flashed into steam without pausing to melt, the way water flashes into steam when it touches a hot skillet. Rocks cracked with sounds like gunshots. Skeletal trees shattered into splinters that flew through the air and landed in the snow and lay there, smoking.
Thagros staggered. His great feet slipped on the suddenly bare stone, and the scythe wavered in his grip. On the far ridge, Verliss's hands faltered—the intricate patterns she had been weaving broke apart like spiderwebs in a wind—and several of her little sigils winked out before she could steady them. She gasped, and the sound was sharp and startled, the sound of someone who has just had something snatched from her grasp.
All eyes turned toward the source.
Adam.
The Blue Wolf was still pinned and still trapped in the seal's cold net. The glowing lines of the Mühür Yıldızı still blazed around him, and the clock face at the center still pulsed with its frozen, patient light. But something was happening. His blue fur shimmered at the edges, as if the lines of his body were no longer quite sure of themselves—as if he were a drawing that someone was trying to erase and redraw at the same time. The seal's glowing lines flickered and stuttered, fighting to contain what pressed against them, the way a dam fights to contain a flood. And from Adam's locked and untouchable form rolled a pressure—a Yakit—that made ancient and terrible beings remember why they were afraid of the dark.
'Impossible!' The thought flashed through Verliss's mind with the speed of a lightning strike, and it carried with it a cold and creeping dread that she had not felt in centuries. 'That seal should have stolen every drop of his power. He should be nothing but a statue—a breathing corpse, a living zero. How is he...'
But the pressure only grew. It was a slow and dreadful tide, a tide that did not rush but simply rose, inch by inexorable inch, and the seal's lines flickered more violently with every passing second.
And Trevor, crouched in the melting snow with his staff blazing and his heart hammering, felt a fierce, sharp-toothed grin spread across his monkey face. It was not a pleasant grin, but it was a hopeful one. 'Atta boy, Blue!!!' he thought, and the thought was a prayer and a battle-cry and a promise all at once. 'Don't you stop fighting. Not for one second. Not for one heartbeat. You keep pushing, and I'll keep the elephant busy.'
Thagros stared at the struggling Blue Wolf, and even he—ancient and sorrowful as he was, a creature who had seen empires fall and gods die—felt a chill that had nothing to do with the winter wind. 'The Shadow was right to be paranoid of you,' he thought, and the thought was grim and quiet and full of a respect that he had not expected to feel. 'Alone of all the threats arrayed against him, you may be the storm that cannot be outrun.'
The clock face in the center of the seal began to tick. It was a soft sound, barely audible, but it seemed to fill the valley the way a whisper fills a silent room. The hands moved in jerks and stutters, as if fighting some invisible resistance—a force that refused to be measured or contained or bound to any hour but its own. Tick. The minute hand shuddered forward. Tick. The hour hand trembled. Tick. The second hand raced in a circle and came back to where it had started, as if it could not decide whether to move or to stay.