Location:The Old Wood, North of Zhū'kethara
Date/Time:15 Emberrise, 9943 AZI — before first light
Realm:Upper Realm
Asha turned round to see who else had arrived, and Zharek went down on his knees in the leaf litter as though somebody had taken his legs.
Nobody moved.
Lyria had heard the accounts. Everybody has heard the accounts. It is the one story a people with no children keeps telling itself, and there are four hundred versions of it, and they are all the same version, and every single one of them had left out that it is fast — that there is no moment in which a man decides anything, no gathering, no breath taken.
He was standing. Then he was not.
And Asha, who was nineteen and filthy and had been crying and had come four miles into a wood at dusk to stand on ground that was nobody's, looked down at a demon of eight thousand years kneeling in the leaves in front of her, and did not step back.
***
