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By Root 1510 0

whirlwind fury. For two weeks now it had burned that brightly, and the winds in the Raksha Valley had roared west instead of east, sucked in by its insatiable hunger for oxygen. A massive thunderhead cloud had reared up from the fire, impossibly high, a vast mushroom of water and ash that towered over the Black Ridge’s walkways like God’s own vengeance made manifest. The great cloud blotted out the sun at times, at other times filtered its light so that dense, bloody shadows played across the walkways. The tourists loved it. The scientists were in seventh heaven, explaining to anyone who would listen—and many who wouldn‘t—that this was fire weather, a natural phenomenon, wholly predictable by their Earth-born art. He watched them drink themselves into joyful oblivion over the fact that they now lived in a world where such things could be measured, understood, predicted-while later that night a sorcerer cast himself from off the very place where Damien now stood, unable to adapt to a world that now declared his kind powerless.

He understood how a man could do that. He didn’t share the man’s despair, exactly—no matter what the Patriarch might have thought, he had never been that addicted to power—but in the secret recesses of his heart he nursed his own, gentler regret. He wanted to See the fae again. Just once more. He wanted to See the corrupt Forest currents surge beneath that cleansing fire, and taste their essence as they came out the other side. He wanted to See what the currents of the shadowlands looked like now that the Mother of the Iezu was active there, now that her children were meeting with journalists on the very trails he and Gerald Tarrant had forged. The loss of his Vision was like a wound that refused to heal, doubly painful because he had done it to himself ... and yes, he knew that what they had done was good, and necessary, even if they hadn’t understood all the implications at the time ... but that didn’t quell the longing inside him. He was, after all, only human.

How would you be dealing with all this, Gerald? They say that adepts can still see the fae, although they can no longer Work it; would you come to terms with that as the price of man’s salvation, or rage against the bonds that your own sacrifice forged for us? Or would you find some new way around the rules, carving out a niche for yourself in this new world as surely as you did in the old?

He wanted the man to be here now, to see all this, to witness the bad and the good and pass judgment on it all with cool sardonic indifference. He had seen him die, but he still couldn’t accept it. Maybe that was what was keeping him here. Maybe until he came to terms with the Hunter’s death—no, with GeraldTarrant’s death, which was a different thing entirely—he wouldn’t be free to start his own life moving again.

Something dark moved against the clouds, that didn’t follow the pattern of ash and wind; without thinking he drew up his springbolt to the ready and prepared to fire—

And there was a crack right by his ear, as loud as if the very mountainside had split open beside him. Startled, he missed the shot. Someone else didn’t. An unseen projectile slammed into the winged thing, hard enough that its scaled wings nearly snapped off as it was thrown back from them. A moment later it exploded into a mist of blood and fire, to the delight of those tourists who had been present to see the shot. Some of them applauded.

His left ear ringing, he turned around to see who the marksman was. A young man nodded back at him, not warmly but apologetically, as one damned well should after firing off a pistol that close without warning. For a moment he almost said something sharp, but he managed to swallow the words before they came out. Never mind that the guy looked like some spoiled brat from a rich house, out to play with explosives now that he could do so without risking his own pretty skin; there was nothing inherently wrong about using a pistol, or killing demonlings, and Erna wasn’t experienced enough in firearms etiquette to make deafening one’s neighbors