Early Events

The Heist of Thade

A month before Warcry, the God Ryiak stood in front of a Skein Gate and told all of Arthos what he wanted. Four stolen days. A labyrinth. The greatest heist the realm had ever seen. He got his days. What came out of Styphon’s vault along with them changed more than anyone expected.

Warcry 2026

Friday Night, July 31st, 2268

Ryiak went to the River of Spirits and asked Vesmir for four days. Not four made. Four stolen. Vesmir is the god who owns every second that has ever passed or will, and Ryiak walked up and asked to steal from him directly, then smiled when the answer was no. Vesmir told him he wouldn’t help. Then, in the same breath, said he wouldn’t count either. Somewhere a clock stopped mid-tick. A candle stopped mid-flicker. Four days vanished from history before anyone noticed they were gone.

Into that stolen time, Akah’teal, a Dragon who’d refused oblivion and a queen with no throne left to sit on, offered her hand to anyone willing to take it. Those who did got carried across a place with no road and no horizon, until they landed where the four days had been hidden.

The adventurers came out on the edge of a small village in Duvain. They had to cross the rest of the way in the dark, fighting off whatever hunts at night and dodging man-eating plants along the way. Dewacre’s lights, when they finally showed up, meant safety and a drink at the tavern.

Suvant does not exist anymore… not really. The floating capital of the High Elves crashed to Amaranthian earth in 2261, during the war against Ga’more, and it never came back up. What’s left are the noble houses that used to sit on its council, still carrying their titles around with no kingdom left underneath them. Some descend upon Dewacre at this time. House Shalonost and House Sumendar have hated each other for decades, endlessly fighting over who actually leads what remains. House Tanna backs whoever is currently winning that fight. House Tel’Montain never had a council seat to begin with. They are a private army for hire, which is why the first thing they do in Dewacre is recruit spies instead of politicians.

That first night, a representative from House Tel’Montain pulled aside anyone who could keep a secret. He wanted help swinging Lower House Durand’s support toward Shalonost via names, gold, and the other usual methods of political machinations. Later that night, Ursa-Therians marked with Dietremen’s brand tore through town hunting for something. They didn’t find it, so they went looking for the local Blood Red Rose encampment instead.

Saturday, August 1st, 2268

The sky over Dewacre changed colour before anyone saw her land. Akah’teal, Firstborn of the Crescent Isles, showed up at first light in spiritual form, and handed over Prine, the Orb of Anti Magic, like it was nothing. Only with Prine’s help could Thade be held down, even briefly, and someone still needed to petition Magnora’s followers for something to contain both orbs. What she didn’t mention was the price she had already agreed to pay for her own restoration, or who she owed it to. A Firstborn does not fly into a mortal village to hand out favours for free. Nobody thought to ask what this one cost until it was too late to renegotiate.

The Blood Red Rose camp did not make it through the night against the Therianthropes. A Tel’Montain delegate, lost and looking for the Suvantian encampment, ran into a Sumendar delegate stumbling into town half dead. Whatever tore through the aforementioned camp had done real damage. The healers on hand leaned too hard on magic and not enough on basic medicine, so a few of his bones ended up set wrong. Not long after, a Shattered Elf walked out of the woods laughing and cutting at his own arms. To some watching, it looked like he was trying to say something. An adventurer named Reia didn’t wait to find out. She put him down quickly.

Suvantian politics kept moving too. A low-ranking Shalonost representative showed up, controlled Undead horde in tow, to talk up Suvantian tradition against Corbin Durand’s “bleeding heart” politics. Minutes later, House Tanna sprang a trap meant for the Shalonost delegate, sending their own Undead against the town in revenge for the hospitality shown to Sumendar and Tel’Montain. The delegate escaped, wounded, and swore he’d take the matter straight to Victor Shalonost, the right-hand of the Shalonost household’s head.

Other business occurred in the town of Dewacre across the day.

Thalric came looking for the state of the Dark faithful on Malagant’s behalf. He found scattered remnants and no real leadership, then headed east for “a long overdue conversation.” Corvain, a Conclave White Tower defector, brought word of a Conclave research party studying Gargylen effectiveness. It ended in a fight. The mage Srasta and an Inquisitor refused to leave peacefully, and the Gargylen guarding them died buying time for their escape, along with a defector’s name.

Late afternoon, the air in Dewacre went thick and cold, and every hammer in the blacksmith’s shop froze mid-swing. Leaves hung in the air like they had been pinned there. Vesmir had walked into town, and for one long moment he simply owned the place, down to the last falling leaf, before he let the world move again. He had barely started warning the adventurers about what was coming when the Dragon Essyllt arrived uninvited, molten-eyed and grinning, to remind the God of Time that his deadline was already growing late.

“Choose your next words with extreme care, Vesmir. Your life depends entirely on them.”

Whatever peace Vesmir made with her that night, he made it knowing exactly how little time he had left, from the one being in creation who could actually take it from him.

That night, Ryiak led the adventurers into Styphon’s lair of Atol-Gyryn to do what he’d promised all of Arthos he would do.

The following chronicle details this most daring of heists.

Within the stronghold was a maze built to swallow anyone careless, treasure everywhere, and at the center of it, the Baleanith—the Word of Styphon—standing guard over Thade like she had been carved into the very stone there. Two of the party broke off from the rest to try something bolder than theft. Avas Ibsen and Tidus, an Azure Monk of Doranth, went straight for the Orb of Necromancy itself, swords raised, meaning to end it right there in the vault. Neither blade landed. Thade took them first, swallowed whole before either strike could fall.

The rest managed to take the orb and run. The Baleanith did not let them leave quietly. They ran the maze backward with her on their heels and made it out through the same celestial portal Ryiak had opened to get them in, Thade in hand… yet still with two of their own left behind inside the orb’s confines. As the others broke for the portal, Ryiak held the exit, buying them the distance they needed. The Baleanith’s blade caught him across the face on her last swing before he made it through. He felt it. He did not feel how much until later. By the time anyone checked, one of his ears was gone, left behind in that cursed place. Not a small thing to leave behind for a being of his power.

Of everyone who went into that fortress, only eight walked back out on their own feet. The rest did not make it. The Undead horde took their lives in that maze, and their spirits found their way back to the resurrection circles not long after.

Back in Dewacre, the job was theoretically simple: Get the Thade into the box with Prine, then seal it. Ryiak fought the urge the whole way there. He lost. A locked box with something ancient and screaming inside is not a thing the Cat Lord can walk past. He cracked the seal just enough to open a window into Thade’s spherical surface and look in.

What looked back wasn’t a shape; it was everything at once. The fog inside Thade didn’t sit still, it boiled, folding over itself like smoke with a mind, and packed into that smoke were centuries of the dead. Not dozens. Not hundreds. An uncountable weight of spirits, every one of them twisted into something Undead over however many lifetimes it took to fill an orb that size. This was what Thade actually was. Not a trophy. Not a container. A prison holding back enough necromantic ruin that if it ever broke open for good, there might not be a livable world left standing on the other side of it.

Ryiak understood that in about half a second, and slammed the window shut. But half a second was enough. Skeletal hands, ghoulish claws—hundreds of them—had already found the gap and were dragging themselves toward it, climbing over each other to reach the light. Most got shoved back into the dark when the seal closed. One did not. It tore through the pile ahead of it, ripping the others down and out of its way, and clawed free before the crack sealed shut behind it.

Three small motes of spiritual essence slipped out in the same instant, riding the same crack in the seal, and scattered into the dark before anyone thought to look for them.

The thing that made it out stood up, and in each hand it held a body. Avas Ibsen and Tidus, the Azure Monk of Doranth. Both bloodless, both husks, both already gone. It dropped them to the ground without ceremony, wiped its mouth, and introduced itself as Reann Tanna of High House Tanna.

Reann Tanna was once Lord Protector of the House of Tanna. Though he was deposed and banished over a decade ago, and presumed dead ever since, it seems his fate was far stranger. He has been sealed inside Thade the whole time, and Avas Ibsen and Tidus had, I believe, just given him the strength to force his way out.

Sunday, August 2nd, 2268

The Suvantian High House Nobles arrived at midday, and for once all the old rivalries showed up in the same room. The High Elven attendees were as follows: Victor Shalonost, Jjik’da’s right-hand and the closest thing Shalonost had to a war leader. Ulya Sumendar, the one the common people actually loved, leading a house that has spent seven years governing in exile with no capital to govern from. Malim Valisilwen, the neutral cleric everyone trusted to referee. Lower House Head Corbin Durand, representing a house that never sat at Suvant’s real council table and clearly wanted to.

Before the summit even opened, Victor addressed House Tanna’s attack head on. The perpetrators, already caught and questioned, were handed over for judgment on the spot and stripped of their titles. Asked why they had betrayed Suvant, they gave a simple answer: “Gold, from House Durand’s own coffers.” Corbin called this display “Shalonost’s last desperate swing.” It was Ulya, the war hero, who cut through the noise and got the summit back on track. Despite decades of hating one another, House Sumendar still proved to House Shalonost that their reputation was respected, on some level, by all sides of the argument.

While the summit debated over titles and gold, something else walked out of the woods and into Dewacre’s town square. A High Elf, flanked by Shattered Elves who scattered the second he crossed into the square, like they had already done their job merely getting him there. Golden runes marked his face. Silver hair fell past his shoulders. A wreath of gold sat on his head, and in his hands he carried a dozen white roses. Word moved through the crowd faster than anyone could explain it. This was Ichabod, the Fallen Archangel of Ll’yandra, Goddess of the Elves.

He walked straight into the tent where the Suvantian leaders were gathered, most of the Elven adventurers in town packed in around them. He did not ask permission. With the Mortigeist dead, he told them, his Principality in the Hellstack known as Mizzer’baugh needed a new master, and he had taken the throne. The Shattered Elves answered to him now, and he was looking for something he had grasped once before: The Song of Death. Death’s Dirge. The same ancient song he and his brother Icarus taught the Mortigeist—then Whitethorn—so long ago. The one that drove their brother mad and turned him into the thing that spent countless years hunting Elves for sport. Ichabod claimed he had learned from his brother’s mistake. He could control it, and was going to use it to kill Ll’yandra, his mother.

He needed help finding it. The song had scattered, he said, many of its notes buried in the hearts of mortals across Arthos, and he would need those hearts opened to get them back.

Ichabod did not get to finish the pitch. Golden light broke outside, bright enough to bleed through the tent walls. A piece of Celestial Heaven touched down over Dewacre, and Ll’yandra herself walked out of it. Whatever anyone in that square had pictured a Goddess to look like, this was more. She stood tall in a white dress that seemed to trail on forever, never quite touching the ground. Her eyes were gold, and they held none of the fury her son was carrying. Barefoot, she crossed toward him, and where her feet touched the earth, white rose plants broke through the soil and bloomed behind her, one step at a time, gone as fast as they had grown.

She was not angry. That was the first thing anyone noticed, and it seemed to bother Ichabod more than rage would have. She was sad. She asked him not to do this. He did not take such a request well.

While he did not have his brother’s morbid gift for killing Elves with a thought, he did have something arguably more frightening; the ability to dominate them outright. He turned on her, furious, accusing her of abandoning them. He and his brothers cleansed her Heaven of every Demon in it, for her. And when it finally came time for her to sit and teach them what she had promised—art, beauty, love—she had gone and made new children instead and given all of it to them. It was not hard to see what this actually was. Ichabod was not fighting for his mother. He was jealous of all mortal Elves for stealing the attention an Angel felt he was owed.

Ll’yandra tried to answer him gently. She told him she was grateful, that she loved him exactly as much as she loved every Elf she had ever made. But their hearts, his and his brothers’, had gone cold doing the work she had asked of them, and that was not something she could undo now, however much she wished she could. It only made him angrier. He turned his dominations loose on the Elves around him and threw them at her one after another, demanding to know ‘why,’ over and over.

She did not fight back. She dispelled every domination he threw, and every hit that landed on her while she did it, she simply took. She never raised a hand against him. She just kept asking him the same question back: “Why are you doing this?”

In the end he screamed the answer at her himself: “Because you loved them more than you loved us!”

Something in her turned final after that. “I can’t have you doing this,” she told him. “This isn’t what I want. But you’re tying my hands. You’re leaving me no choice.” She began to cast Celestial Magic aimed at unmaking her own son, the same as she had done to Icarus in untold ages past.

Above them, the sky had already gone wrong. Every Elf carries a shard, a living piece of Ll’yandra given at birth, and when an Elf dies clean of corruption, that shard returns to her Garden to be reborn. A corrupted shard does not get that mercy. It stays twisted, trapped, and for centuries the Mortigeist had lined the walls of his prison with exactly that; the murdered and the ruined, filling his sky like stars that should never have existed. Now that Ichabod held that throne, he had apparently brought some of that harvest with him. Clouds of dark shards had gathered over the town the moment he arrived, and as Ll’yandra’s spells came down, those shards answered, shooting out of the clouds to catch every blow meant for him, shattering on impact, buying him time he had not asked for and could not explain.

He knew when he was beaten. Screaming, he turned and fled, tearing open a celestial portal that ripped the roof off the inn on his way through. It closed somewhere in the sky above Dewacre, and he was gone.

Ll’yandra did not leave right away. She stayed a while longer among the Elves gathered in the square, quiet now that the altercation had ended. She moved through the crowd and touched the ones closest to her, a hand to the face, a hand to the shoulder, and where she did, something settled in them that had not been settled in a long time. She said nothing about what had just happened, or what her son intended to do next. She simply gave what comfort she had to give, and when there was nothing left to grant, she returned the way she had come, back into the light, and it closed behind her.

The rest of the day ran normal for Dewacre. Urzahk the Banished of the reformed and self-proclaimed Clan Sprawn, went looking for allies and found a few worth keeping conversation with in, Ratbag, Krishanks, BeFe, and Gubgub, before leaving satisfied. Jareth of the Rolling Bones Gambling Covenant got plenty of interest in his high-stakes game, and while no one was willing to see it through, a good time was had regardless.

Shortly after, Trayel Thornside, a known criminal of the area with a large bounty on his head, showed up begging for amnesty in exchange for the location of a “strange laboratory.” He was not lying. The adventurers found a Pax Mordibish testing site, with high ranking officers running experiments on captured Gargylen. These experiments were cruel and imprecise, with some Gargylen being freed and others just killed outright. As the group of adventurers made off with intel, samples, and the newly freed Gargylen, Brandee Kattajack of Ryiak stayed behind to cover the retreat. She was captured, tortured, and killed for it by the Pax Mordibish.

Nobody asked her to stay; she just did.

Monday, August 3rd, 2268

Vesmir entered town with Essyllt and Akah’teal walking beside him, a God and two Dragons in the same place at the same time, and the air itself seemed to know it. No one in Dewacre had ever seen anything like it. People felt it in their teeth before they saw them coming, a pressure like weather, like something enormous deciding not to crush you. Ryiak trailed behind, off to the side, no monologue on his lips this time. His part in this was done, and for once he seemed content to let it be someone else’s turn at center stage. Together Vesmir, Essyllt, and Akah’teal led the way to the last Pillar of Suulazultsur, a place sacred and revered enough that most in Dewacre had never laid eyes on it. There, Thade came out of the box that had held it. Akah’teal drew Prine into the folds of her bandages first, not willing to let it out of her sight for even a moment. Vesmir set Thade down on the Pillar itself, and the three of them channeled into it together, pulling the Undead spirit of the Dracolich Suulazultsur bodily out of her prison. She came up already swinging, a Dragon who had been dead and imprisoned for years remembering in one breath how to be furious. Thade was lodged where one eye should have been, as if the orb had never just held her but had grown into her, socket and all. Her Breath Weapon was a putrid green flame that stripped the life out of anything it touched and fed her own wounds shut, leaving the ground behind her dead and barren.

The fight was brutal. Healers worked frantically just to keep pace, hauling people back onto their feet as fast as her flame put them down. Everyone else split into groups and went at her piece by piece, one crew working her wings, another her limbs, and a third fighting for an opening at her head where Thade sat fused into her skull. It took everything the adventurers had to put her down.

When Suulazultsur finally fell, her skeletal body did not stay a body long. It collapsed to dust where it lay, and sitting in the middle of that dust was her phylactery, a massive green gem, the only piece of her still holding a shape. Her spirit did what a Lich’s spirit does; it started pulling itself back toward that gem, already reaching to knit itself whole again and rise a second time. Essyllt did not let it finish the crossing. Her Breath Weapon, the one that severs connections outright, tore into the phylactery before the spirit could reach it and shattered it completely. Whatever Suulazultsur had been about to become, it ended right there, in the dust that used to be her. This time, for good. Thade, freed from her ruined socket and lying in the wreckage, did not stay on the ground long. Ryiak scooped it up before anyone else thought to.

What was left of her did not just vanish. Her spirit spread out low across the field, sinking into the dirt and the roots and the standing timber around the Pillar. Grass came up green where it touched. Trees that had gone half-dead in the fighting straightened and filled out again. It felt not like a death. It felt like a Dragon of Nature finally getting to lie down, and the ground itself opened up to hold her.

Akah’teal moved fast. She pulled out the egg the Pax Mordibish had given her, the one she had been promised would bring her back, and set it on the ground, ready. She expected it to happen right then and there.

What transpired was not what she predicted. The egg began to cook. Wisps of smoke curled off its shell, then more of it, until a fog rolled out low across the field and swallowed everyone standing near it. Whatever was in that vapour did not cause harm, but instead reversed it. The assembled people felt alive, in a way most of them had not felt in days. When the fog finally cleared, the egg was gone, and someone was standing in its place.

She wore turquoise silk under a robe of deeper teal, both worked through with silver brocade, beasts and blossoms woven into the fabric like it had grown that way rather than been sewn. A headdress sat close over her brow, gold beads and fine chains falling in rows past her face, half veil and half crown. Gold caught the light at her throat. Her eyes were dark and steady, and when she moved, the hem of her robe shifted just enough to show something that didn’t belong on a Human woman standing in a field: a curve of blue scale where an ankle should have been. Whatever she was wearing as a body, it was not the whole truth of her.

Nobody standing there knew who she was. Not yet.

“Thank you, mortals,” she said. “I am Laio, Firstborn of Life, the Phoenix of Rebirth.”

It did not happen slowly. Silk and gold gave way as she rose past humanoid height, past the treeline, her turquoise scales catching the light and throwing it back warmer than they should have, shot through with a pink colouration akin to new flesh healing over an old wound. Four wings unfolded from her back, a great pair above a smaller pair beneath, and her tail, short for a Dragon her size, ended not in a point but in something closer to a halberd, flat and edged and built to cut. Everyone close enough to reach for a weapon found themselves shoved backward instead, as flame broke out across her entire body at once and drove them off her like a wave.

She rose burning. Wings beating once, twice, she climbed straight up into the sky until she hung directly in front of the sun, wings spread wide enough to eclipse it, fire trailing off her in long streamers. For one full breath, every person in that field saw exactly what a true phoenix looks like when it decides to be seen.

Then something took hold of her from behind. It did not look like a wound and neither did it look like magic. It appeared as if she was being drawn backward through the sky itself, her form stretching thin from tail to mouth like she had been caught on a line and reeled in from somewhere very far away. She did not fight it. Whatever held her, it wasn’t hostile, just absolute. Her territory wanted her back, and by the most ancient of Draconic laws it seemed she was not able to leave it for long… however she had managed it this once.

As she stretched, thinned, and was pulled away toward wherever home was for her now, her voice carried back across the field, one last time.

“Thank you. Come find me.”

Then she was gone.

In the wake of this rebirth, the Dragon Akah’teal was not restored. It became known she had made her own deal with the Pax Mordibish earlier: Prine, in exchange for something powerful enough to bring a being of her stature back to life, since if not for her own draconic will she should already be long dead. What they gave her was Laio’s egg, the same Dragon of Rebirth they had killed once before, ages ago. It never mattered to them either way. The Pax are immune to magic. The Orb of Anti Magic, and what they could wrought with its nullifying energies, was well worth the price of a resurrected Firstborn, and one they were willing to pay in this calculated exchange.

Just as it looked like it was over, blue light flared across the field, the telltale sign of Pax gate technology cutting a hole into the day. A dozen or so Pax Mordibish stepped through, trained Magic Eater hounds at their heels, and demanded Akah’teal make good on her end of the bargain to hand over Prine.

Everyone froze. Then Akah’teal did something nobody expected from a Firstborn of such pride; she entirely lost her temper.

“You didn’t keep your bargain,” she told them, fury cracking through every word. “You said you would heal me.”

The gathered Pax did not even blink.

“We said the egg would give rebirth,” they told her. “We didn’t say it would give yours.” Laio’s rebirth meant nothing in the grand scheme of their worldview. They had killed her once; they would do so again just as easily if warranted.

When it was clear she was not handing Prine over, Akah’teal turned to walk away, but the Pax were not done. They turned to the adventurers instead, offering a trade of their own: a way to break the Conclave’s control over the Gargylen, theirs to keep, if the adventurers helped retrieve the Orb of Anti Magic from Akah’teal themselves. The weight of the offer landed. Hands drifted toward sword hilts. People hesitated, actually hesitated, weighing a Firstborn’s fury, especially one only projected outside her domain, against a secret that valuable.

Nobody moved on her. In the end, the squad of Pax soldiers attacked on their own, and after a short, one-sided fight, they were put down.

Ryiak told the adventurers what he meant to do with Thade next; give it back. Trade it to Styphon’s Baleanith in exchange for his ear, and let the Black Wyrm keep his vault and its contents. Not everyone agreed. Some wanted Thade destroyed outright. Others wanted to keep it. While the arguments began to fly, those with the eyes for it noticed something starting to spread from the wound where his ear had been; a vile corruption creeping slow down the side of his neck. It did not take long to work out what it meant. Styphon, or his Baleanith, had already started turning Ryiak into his final Wealdath via the severed body part. Styphon may only ever have two of these perfected forms of undeath at any one time, and word was he had been sitting on the candidate for the second one for longer than anyone could remember, waiting for something worth using it on. Every hour they spent arguing was an hour that transmogrifying corruption had to finish the job on the Cat Lord. Ryiak had to talk the adventurers down from both positions of keeping the orb and shattering it, doing so in the only way that actually worked; telling them exactly what he had seen when he looked inside Thade. An uncountable weight of the dead, packed in tight enough to end the Arthos if it ever got loose all at once. Whatever Styphon was doing with that orb, keeping it locked in his vault was safer than any alternative on the table. Break it open trying to be rid of it for good, and there would not be a mortal land left standing to worry about who owned its power. Eventually, reluctantly, and with a God visibly running out of time, each adventurer came around.

That same day, Ryiak got escorted back to Atol-Gyryn to answer for the theft. In exchange for Thade, the Baleanith gave him his ear back. She did not notice what else left her hands in the trade. Ryiak, ever the God of Renown, and with a cat’s grace, stumbled into her right as it happened, with the apologetic nature of a being all too practiced. No one present believed a God to merely be clumsy, yet the Baleanith remained oblivious.

Reann Tanna’s fate beyond the courts of Suvant is still unrecorded. So too is what the Fallen Archangel Ichabod intends to do next, now that he rules Mizzer’baugh and still means to find the rest of the Song of Death.

However, this is where the account ends. What comes next… is still being written.

Aftermath - It's About Time

August 12th, 2268 – Afternoon

The following psychic imprint displayed across the Skein Gates during a Solar Eclipse.

Psychic Imprint Post: All Skein Gates — Arthos
Origin: Superior Mind Meld
Sender: High Chronologer Esxen’Tenadall II of the Thalan

I am told to speak as I saw it, so I will.

I did not mean to come back to the Black Tide. I want that said plainly, and said first, because the last time I recorded something I was informed, at some length, that documentation is not the same as involvement, and that a Thalan who cannot tell the difference is not much use to anyone, least of all himself. I have not forgotten this. I have written it on the inside of my own wrist, in a script even I struggle to read upside down, so that I am reminded of it every morning before I am reminded of my own name.

So when the pull came, and it does not ask permission, it simply arrives, the way the need to sneeze arrives, I told it no. I told it no twice. By the third time I was already untying the rowboat.

I did not interfere, and I want that noted for the record, whatever the record turns out to be. I rowed, and I watched, and that is all I intended to do tonight, and if anyone asks, that is all I did.

The sky above the Tide had gone the colour of a healing bruise, the sun bitten down to a sliver by something with no edge I could name, and I have seen eclipses before, from solid ground, among people who at least had the decency to be frightened of them, but I had never seen one from inside a God’s own Heaven, where the water does not so much reflect the sky as mimic it.

The Reaper sat at anchor ahead of me, black hulled and patient, not resting so much as waiting to be needed, and there on the deck, alone, was Vesmir.

There was an egg on the deck beside him, close enough to his boot that he might have been standing guard over it without meaning to, and I want to describe it honestly rather than dress it up for you. It was pearlescent black, shot through with flecks of a deep azure that seemed to shift and catch the light differently depending on where I stood, and it sat in a small nest of black cloth someone had folded for it with more care than skill. The kind of nest a person makes when they do not entirely know how a thing like this is meant to be kept. Beside it sat a few coals, still faintly hot, which I took to be an attempt at warmth, though I suspect it came from desperation rather than any real understanding of what the egg needed. Still, it did not move. It did not glow, or hum, or do anything at all that a mortal eye would call remarkable, but I am not a mortal eye, and when I looked at it the way my kind look at things, I found it entirely unlike Tryst. There was something inside it, full and still, and it was nothing at all like the hollow I had found in the wounded Orb of Healing not a few feet away. I have catalogued a great many things in my long service, and I have never once been able to say I have felt something and had no name at all to give it, not even a wrong one, until that egg. I did not yet understand that I was looking at the reason for everything that follows.

He did not look up when I came alongside, and ordinarily I would tell you that this meant he had not noticed me, since I have spent a very long life learning how to be the sort of thing that Gods and Dragons and mortal Queens do not notice, and I am good at it, better than good at it, but I will not lie to you here of all places. Vesmir is not other Gods. Other Gods live in the moment the way the rest of us do, one after the other, and can be surprised by what walks up behind them. Vesmir does not have that mercy, or that luxury, however you wish to think of it. If I was here, it was already written that I would be here, long before I untied the rowboat, long before I was born, and he had likely known the shape of my arrival for longer than I have been alive to arrive. Whether he knew or not, I cannot say for certain, since he never once turned his head, and he never once spoke to me, and if a God has decided a Thalan is beneath acknowledging he will show you exactly that and no more, so I will only tell you that I do not think it was possible for him not to know. I will let you make of that what you will.

He had the Oblivion Dial out in his hand, and I have read of it in three languages and never once seen it before tonight. I will say only that it is smaller than the stories make it sound, and somehow worse for it. He turned it over and over between long fingers, sand hissing one way and then, impossibly, the other, as though it could not decide which direction time wished to run.

“Nothing.” He said, not to me mind you, to himself or perhaps the cosmos itself. “Nothing? Nothing again?!” He shook the Dial in frustration. The sand a turmoil within the glass as he did. After a moment he composed himself with a deep breath. He stared deeply into the sands and turned the Dial over once more but once more the sand refused him. “Why nothing?”

It was this moment I realized whom he spoke to, the orb, Tryst.

It sat on a shelf bolted near the wheel, small and cracked and dim as a coal going out, and Vesmir spoke to it the way a man speaks to someone across a supper table, easily and without performance, the words falling into the gaps of a conversation that only one of them seemed to be having.

“You’d tell me if you could see something I couldn’t,” he said to it. “Wouldn’t you, Tryst.”

It was not phrased as a question so much as it was shaped like one out of old habit.

I confess I did something here that I will not call interference, only professional diligence, and looked at the orb the way my kind look at a thing when we wish to know what it’s made of. I have looked at trees this way, and stones, and once, memorably, a very old and very offended turtle, and I found in Tryst nothing at all. No pulse of the kind even a dying thing carries. No warmth behind the cracks, waiting for its turn to answer him. I have, in my long service, been near enough to other Orbs of Power to know their particular flavour, if flavour is even the word for it, and it is not a thing I have ever been able to describe cleanly to another living soul, since it is not mortal magic, and it is not draconic magic, and it is certainly not the borrowed light or darkness of the Celestial Planes. It is only itself, some old cosmic thing with no family I can name it kin to. Whatever that flavour is, Tryst did not have so much as a trace of it left in him. Whatever he had once been, he was not that now, and he was not anything else either, as far as I could tell.

I have watched grief before, more of it than I would care to count, since it is most of what my order is paid in, but I had never watched a God carry on a conversation with something I could find no life in whatsoever, and come away from it wearing the quiet satisfaction of a man who believes himself heard. I did not know what to do with that, and I am not certain I do now, so I will only tell you what I saw and let you decide what to do with it yourselves.

He set the Dial down on the rail and rubbed at his eyes with the heel of one hand, the way I have seen exhausted soldiers do it, and exhausted kings, and now, apparently, exhausted Time Gods.

“I can read the fall of an empire from the way a farmer plants his crop wrong three seasons running,” he told Tryst, conversationally, as though he were only continuing something he had already been saying for a while. “I watched Kael’s temper crack four hundred years before it actually did. I knew which mortal would break Cassandra’s heart, and when, and I was right down to the hour.” He paused, “Wait no, that hasn’t happened yet.” He picked the Dial back up and turned it, the sand hissing the wrong way again. “This is not that. It is not dim, and it is not clouded, it is simply gone, as if something reached up and tore the page out of the book before I could read it.”

He looked, for a moment, toward what was left of the sun, and something in the set of him changed, as if he just realized the problem was larger than anticipated.

“The eclipse is not the thing, Tryst,” he said, slower now, as though he were working it out for himself as he spoke it aloud, which I suspect he was. “I have seen the moon steal the sun before. I could tell you the hour of the next one and the one after that and the one a hundred years past that no living mortal will see. That is not what has gone dark on me.” He turned the Dial over once more, and let it fall still in his palm. “There is more coming tonight than this. The sky is not finished.”

He was quiet for a while after that, long enough that I began to wonder if he had forgotten I was there at all, though I have already told you what I think about that.

“I will need to see the stars when they come,” he said at last, and there was something in his voice I had not heard in it before, something that did not sit easily on a God, though I will not pretend to know the correct word for it. “The planets, when they align. Whatever the sky means to finish tonight, I mean to be looking at it directly when it does, and not through a Dial that has decided to stop speaking to me.” He looked around him then, at the water, at the dark shape of the Deadlands crouched along the far shore, as though seeing where he was for the first time in some while. “This is not the place for it.”

He did not say anything further, and he did not need to.

The Reaper woke beneath him like something old and eldritch, not all at once but gathering itself in pieces, a groan through the hull first, then the creak of old rigging drawing tight. Her black sails rose without a single hand touching them, filling with a wind I could not feel from where I sat, and had no business existing at all on waters as still as these had been all night. Her anchor came up dripping something that was not quite water. Vesmir did not move from where he stood at the rail, did not so much as glance at the sails or the wheel that turned itself slowly beside him, and I understood, watching it, that the ship had never needed him to sail her so much as she had simply been waiting for him to decide where they were going. He did glance for a moment at the egg, almost concerned, like the sudden movement might knock it from its resting nest. It was almost a fatherly concern and my heart ached for but a moment. Once he was sure the egg was still secure he turned his attention back to the Dial.

The Reaper began to move.

I want it on the record that I did not think, not for one moment, that I would be able to keep pace with a God’s own ship under full sail, and I want it on the record equally that I tried anyway, because that pull I told you about at the start of all this does not particularly care what is or is not possible; it only cares that I am where it wants me. So I put my back into the oars and rowed after her, small and foolish and soaked to the elbows, while ahead of me the Reaper cut through the black water beneath a sun that was still only half itself, carrying a God who did not know what he was sailing toward, but meant to look it in the eye regardless.

As the ship cut through the spiritual waters, twin glows alighted in the near endless gloom of the Deadlands. The Ghostlight of the Wayward Lamp illuminated the Goddess Haldora in its pale flickering flame as she watched from her City of the Echoes the event above. In almost opposition, the grim yellow spotlights that were the eyes of the Dragon Oblivion narrowed skyward, his gigantic shadow framing the Isle of No Thing in his temple of the Detritus. What they could not glean from the God of Time’s ministrations, they would strain to perceive in reality’s now heaving form.

August 12th, 2268 – Dusk

The following psychic imprint displayed across the Skein Gates shortly after the Sunset.

Psychic Imprint Post: All Skein Gates — Arthos
Origin: Superior Mind Meld
Sender: High Chronologer Esxen’Tenadall II of the Thalan

I did not catch her easily. I want that understood before anything else, because a Thalan does not often admit to struggling, and I am admitting it now.

The current beneath me had changed somewhere in the rowing, though I could not tell you the moment it happened, only that it had, the water going from merely swift to something that pulled at the little boat with intense speed. Ahead of me the Reaper’s black sails still cut the dark, closer now than they had been, and it was only as I closed the distance that I understood why she had slowed, what I was actually rowing toward, and what she was resting upon. The Black Tide did not narrow there, or thin itself down the way a river is meant to when it nears its end. It simply stopped, all at once, as though something had reached up out of whatever holds the Deadlands together and torn a hole clean through the bottom of it. The whole black weight of the river was pouring itself through that hole and away, endlessly, into a fall with no floor I could see or imagine. I want to tell you plainly that I have never in my long service been so afraid of a body of water, and I want to tell you, just as plainly, that fear was not the only thing I felt looking at it.

Beyond the falling, where by every sense I possess there ought to have been nothing at all, there was instead the Astral Void, and I confess that for one unforgivable moment I forgot entirely to be afraid, because I had never seen anything so beautiful in all my centuries of observation. It was not dark the way the night sky is dark. It was a deep and endless violet, folded through with threads of colour that had no source I could find, and drifting through all of it, unhurried, were shapes I could not name, vast and slow and utterly indifferent to the water pouring past them into whatever waited below. That domain, I understood, belongs to more than the Firstborn Isana alone, and I will tell you honestly that even my own kind, who are said to know a great many things no one else was ever meant to know, cannot say with any certainty what else calls that violet distance home. Only that something does, several somethings perhaps, older and stranger than a single Dragon’s claim upon it. I understood, distantly, that I was looking at the true measure of a place my own people have only ever glimpsed the edges of, that this was laid bare in front of me by a wound that should never have opened. I also understood too that I had absolutely no business seeing it, and that I would remember it regardless, for as long as I live, however long that turns out to be; which given my current situation, shouldn’t be that long. The ship I was rowing toward sat balanced upon the very last thread of water still holding, tilted forward into that impossible violet distance like something leaning to admire a view.

I threw the rope before I had entirely decided to throw it. My hands, I think, made the decision without consulting me, which I am told is common in moments such as these, though I had never had one before to compare it to. It caught on something along the Reaper’s stern, some cleat or spar I could not properly see in the dark, and I want it on the record that it caught by no particular skill of mine, only luck. The kind of luck a Thalan is not meant to rely upon and yet here I was, relying on it entirely.

I held on. The boat did not.

It went out from under me somewhere in the pulling, and I will not dwell on it, since it was only a boat, and I had other, more pressing matters to attend to, chiefly the matter of not following it.

The Reaper herself hung over that edge in a manner no honest ship has any business hanging. I have sailed on real vessels, the kind built by real hands out of real timber, and I can tell you that a ship four fifths past her own edge, keel and half her hull suspended over open falling nothing, ought to have gone over already. Ought to have gone over the moment the water beneath her stern stopped being water. She had not. She sat there, black and patient, tilted forward into the dark as if she had already decided the fall held nothing worth her concern. Her stern still touched the last thread of the Tide that remained, and that, apparently, was enough. I do not pretend to understand the physics of a God’s own ship. I do not believe physics was consulted in her making.

Vesmir stood near the helm, and he had not moved from the spot I last saw him in, though the world around him had rearranged itself considerably. He was looking down, not at the falling behind his ship, but at the egg still nested in its little bed of black cloth at his feet.

“It should not be doing this,” he said, and I did not know at first whether he meant the Tide, or the egg, or something else I had not yet been told to worry about.

He crouched, and touched two fingers lightly to the shell, like a physician touching a patient he already suspects he cannot help, and then he straightened again and looked out at the ruin where his own river used to be.

“The alignment,” he said, to Tryst, since it was always to Tryst, “is doing this. It will pass. Whatever holds the planes apart is being pulled thin tonight, thinner than I have felt it pulled in a very long while, and when it lets go again, the Tide will remember what it is and put itself back together the way water always does.” He watched the black edge a moment longer. “I only wonder about the ones already in it.”

He did not explain what he meant by that, not directly, but I had been doing this long enough to follow the shape of a thought even when a God declines to finish it aloud. The spirits the Tide carries do not choose their own current. They are only carried, and most of them are carried somewhere unpleasant. Tonight, for reasons none of them will ever be told, a great many of those unpleasant destinations are simply gone, the road washed out from beneath them, and where they end up instead is a question even the Celestial who tends that river could not answer with any confidence.

“Fortunate, perhaps,” he said, “for the ones bound for the Hellstack. Unfortunate for everyone left to make sense of them wherever they end up instead.” He paused. “I genuinely do not know which.”

He left the rail then, and returned to where Tryst sat on its little shelf, and picked the orb up gently, as a man picks up something he has picked up ten thousand times before and will pick up ten thousand times again.

“The egg is not doing anything, Tryst,” he said, and there was a frustration in it now that had not been in his voice before, quiet, but present. “It has been a week. When I carried Essyllt’s egg back to Melinda, I could feel it. It pulsed under my hands like something with somewhere it very much intended to go, whatever the Lords of the Fae Courts had worked into it still moving through the shell long after their hands were done with it, and I did not understand the working, not truly, but I could feel that something was happening inside it, and that felt like tending something. Like keeping something warm that wanted to be kept warm. I could also see it. The future of it. The rebirth of the Purple. Just like I saw that I would bend the knee and liberate the spirit of the Green. But I cannot see the future of this egg.” He looked down at the shell in its bed of cold cloth and dying coals, its black surface catching the last of the dial light in threads of azure that did nothing, tonight, but sit there and shine. “This does nothing. It has done nothing since the moment it was placed in my hands, and I do not know if that is because it is simply slower than hers was, or because it is not the same thing at all, and I confess, Tryst, that I would very much like it to be the first of those two answers and not the second.”

He was quiet after that, and I did not interrupt him, because I have learned, across a great many centuries, that silence is often the only respectful thing a witness has to offer.

“She was different,” he said, more softly, and I understood without being told that he had moved from the topic of the egg to the Purple Firstborn. “Essyllt. Difficult, and vain, and entirely without mercy toward anyone she has decided does not deserve it, which is nearly everyone of such category. I have earned perhaps an inch of her patience over ten years of very careful behaviour, and I would not call it more than that, not honestly. But there is something in her I find myself glad exists in the world, and I do not examine that feeling too closely, because I suspect if I did I would not care for what I found underneath it, and she would like that even less than I would.” He set Tryst back on its shelf. “I gave my word to her. I intend to keep it, whatever this egg turns out to be.”

Above us, the sky was finishing whatever it had been building toward all evening, one light after another sliding into a line I could not have drawn myself but could feel, somehow, resolving into rightness, like a held breath resolves when it is finally released.

“Nobody agrees on what those lights are, Tryst,” Vesmir said, tipping his head back to watch them settle. “Some believe them other realms entirely, whole worlds hung up there like lanterns. Some believe them something closer to spirit than to place. The Cindus’Thalan, as the Fire Elves style themselves in the old tongue, believe they are their own dead, the worthiest of them, those who gathered enough water in life to be carried up past their Black Desert and through what they call the Celestial Canopy, to shine forever afterward as guides for the living below.” He was quiet a moment. “It is a lovely thing to believe. I will tell you honestly, since you are the only one I tell such things to honestly, that once a spirit leaves the Material Plane, there is only the Inner Realm, and the Outer beyond it, and past that…” He shook his head slowly. “… I do not know. I have never needed to know before tonight.”

That was the moment the last of the six lights found its place, and the sky above the Black Tide went, for the space of one long breath, entirely still.

Then, the Astral Echo came. The Firstborn Isana.

I did not see her arrive so much as I became aware that the darkness at the ragged edge of the Tide, the same darkness the Reaper hung over, had grown a shape, vast and patient and entirely too calm. Amethyst and starlight caught somewhere in scales I could see only in outline, the rest of her lost to whatever the Astral Void does to light that tries to describe things within it. She did not cross onto our side of the edge. I do not believe she could have, any more than Vesmir could have crossed onto hers without falling into the abyss, and I want that understood plainly, because it matters for what came after.

“I felt a tearing begin in mine own realm,” she said, and her voice carried the particular evenness of something ancient enough to no longer need to raise itself for effect, “at the very hour the Inner and Outer Realms drew close enough to touch. I doth not believe that a coincidence, Gatekeeper. Gods meddling with powers they doth nary understand tend to leave this sort of mess in their wake.”

Vesmir turned to face her, and inclined his head, not deeply, but not carelessly either, the particular small bow of a man who has decided courtesy costs him nothing and might buy him something.

“I have no hand in this, Isana of the Firstborn,” he said. “I felt the tear as you did, from my own side of it, and I do not know its cause any better than you do.” He paused, and something in his voice shifted, dropping its guard for just a moment, in a way I do not think he intended for either of us to notice. “If I am honest with you, the tear troubles me less than what waits behind it. I cannot read past tonight. Time is not written here, or it is being kept from me, by something closer and larger than anything I have had cause to fear in a very long while. I would tell you if I knew more.”

“Would’st thou.” It was not a question.

Her gaze moved past him then, to the small black shape resting at his feet, its azure flecks catching what little light remained. Something in the stillness of her changed, sharpened, the way a predator’s stillness sharpens the moment it has found the thing it was looking for. Her eye narrowed as the orb Phell, from whence her opposite eye once rested, focused its luminance upon the egg. Her form grew slightly.

“The egg of the Green,” Vesmir said, before she could ask, since I do not think he saw any use in delay. “I am caring for it, until I know better what it needs.”

“It is not an egg.”

She said it as one corrects a child who has used the wrong word for something sacred, patient, and entirely without warmth.

“It is an Icon,” she said. “That is the word for what a Firstborn leaves behind when they die, Gatekeeper, and I would’st think a God who hath spent a decade bound to one of us might bear knowledge of that by now. In fairness, Essyllt is not the brightest of us, so perhaps not. There is not a scale’s worth of the draconic left inside it. No breath, no fire, no thought. Only a memory of what she was, folded down into something small enough to hold.” She let that sit a moment. “I have seen this before twice. Ta-Ba-Ret left hers in the chest of a mortal Orc. When it had burst forth, animated by Ta-Ba-Ret evolutionary impetus, they took it for another parasite, and crushed it underfoot without a second thought. It was gone before a single mortal understood they hath just destroyed the last remnant of a Firstborn’s own dying.” She paused. “Daedalon’s Icon, I could not tell you where it lies. Perhaps Pandora destroyed it outright, the same as she destroyed him, wishing no trace of the Silver Firstborn left behind to be recovered. Perhaps it sits even now in some corner of her own hall, kept as a trophy of what she did that day. Or perhaps, and I think this the likeliest of the three, it was simply overlooked in the horror of losing him, left where he fell near Galaheim’Vox, and lies still under some hundreds of years of ice and snow, forgotten by everyone but perhaps Zsiera.” Her eyes did not leave the little shell. “I doth not know why these Icons exist when we die, or what purpose, if any, was meant for them. I hath never once had the opportunity to see if they become anything other than what thou possess now. My sight is unlimited in this Astral Plane, yet not for this concept. But the moment a Firstborn dies, a small, hollow thing is left behind where once something vast used to be. A headstone, perhaps, is the kindest way to think of it. A trophy would be the truer word, for anyone base enough to keep one, and I hath known several who would commit exactly that sacrilege against a Firstborn’s memory without a moment’s hesitation, godling, so do not imagine thyself above suspicion simply because thy intentions tonight are kinder than most.”

Vesmir did not answer that at once. I watched something move through him, quick and quiet, gone before it had fully arrived, and he did not give her the satisfaction of naming it.

“Grant it unto me,” Isana said, and there was no request in it at all. “That is not thy cenotaph to keep. Whatever use thy kind means to make of a dead Firstborn’s memory, I promise thee it will end in a use she would’st nary hath chosen for herself. She was the best of us, I will not have thee sully her memory.”

“No.”

He said it simply, without heat, like a man declines something he has already decided upon long before being asked.

“She entrusted it to me,” he said. “I will not make myself unworthy of that.”

Isana did not move to cross the boundary between them, and I understood, watching her, that this was not restraint so much as simple fact, a line she was no more capable of stepping over than Vesmir was capable of stepping onto her side of it without falling into the void, whatever either of them might have wished otherwise. That she could not reach him herself did not mean she was without reach. I have no doubt she keeps servants enough in her own domain to trouble a God from a distance, and older, stranger things than servants besides, half-glimpsed shapes drifting through that violet dark I would not care to have named for me, let alone owe a favour to. Her power here was not diminished in the slightest. Only her ability to stand in the same place as the thing she wished to use it on. Her Astral Self, more than a match for any Celestial within the Astral Void, was waiting just beneath the surface of scale and sinew to manifest if needed.

“Come into my realm, then,” she said, and there was an invitation in it dressed very thinly over something else entirely. “Where I am not so restrained as I am here at this border. I can allow thy ship to pass through the astral barrier via the Ethereal Winds. We could’st speak further. At length.”

“I must respectfully decline.” Vesmir said, tipping his tricorn hat in the way a nobleman would, which I found, and still do, a strange thing to have witnessed.

Isana’s mouth curved, not quite a smile.

“A pity,” she said. “I would have enjoyed…”

She did not finish it.

The tear opened behind her without warning or ceremony, a wound tearing wide across the dark fabric of her own domain, vast and sudden, and through it, for the length of a single breath before she turned to face it, I saw them. Small, distant, uncountable, a swarm of falling lights already gathering on the other side of whatever thin membrane had, until this moment, kept them out of the Astral Void.

Isana did not look back at us again. She was already moving, already vast and terrible and entirely occupied with the wound in her own territory, and whatever she had meant to say to Vesmir was left unsaid, which I suspect troubled him a great deal less than it might have troubled someone with less practice in being threatened in such measured fashion.

Above the wound in her domain, I could see plainly now what the sky itself had been arranging all evening. The Plane of Life sat closest to us, a soft and constant glow low along the dark. Beside it, small and furious, burned what I took to be the Plane of Fire. Further along hung a light so impossibly black it was visible only by the stars it swallowed, and I did not need Vesmir to tell me that was Death, keeping its place beside its opposite the way it always eventually does. Further still, pale and never quite settling into one shape, sat the Far Realm, or some reflection of it. Beside that, a light the colour of an old bruise, which I took, with some discomfort, for the Shadow Plane. Last of the six, furthest and coldest and utterly unmoving, sat a single white point I was told afterward was the Celestial Realm itself, where the other Gods keep their own Heavens, and even from that distance it looked to me like something watching, rather than something merely present.

Vesmir did not look at any of them for very long. He reached into his coat instead and drew out a spyglass, small and brass and plainly very old, etched along its length with markings I did not recognize and did not think it wise to ask after. I understood, without being told, that whatever the Oblivion Dial had refused to show him tonight, he intended to go looking for it now with his own eyes, through a piece of ordinary craft that had never, in all my long study of such things, been ordinary at all.

He raised it toward the tear, and toward whatever still burned beyond it, and began speaking softly to himself, like a man speaks when he no longer trusts his own memory to hold what he is about to witness.

I did not catch all of what he said. I do not think I was meant to.

We waited there. That is all I can tell you of what came next, because it is all that transpired. We waited there to see what was going to happen.

August 12th, 2268 – Midnight

The following psychic imprint displayed across the Skein Gates shortly after midnight.

Psychic Imprint Post: All Skein Gates — Arthos
Origin: Superior Mind Meld
Sender: High Chronologer Esxen’Tenadall II of the Thalan

I do not know how long we sat there. I want to be honest about that rather than invent some tidy number for the sake of the record, since time behaves strangely enough on the Black Tide when nothing at all is wrong with it, and considerably worse when a hole has been torn through the bottom of it and left open for hours at a stretch. It was some good long while. That is the truest thing I can tell you.

It was Isana who broke the waiting, and I confess I had half forgotten she meant to come back at all, occupied as she had been with the wound in her own realm.

“Move thy ship, Gatekeeper.”

Her voice reached us across the tear as thunder reaches you after the lightning has already gone, present but somehow behind itself, and there was none of the earlier mockery left in it, only something flatter and more urgent.

“I hath seen this before,” she said. “Not often. I doth not know why the realms tear themselves the way they hath done tonight, and I will not pretend that I do. But it hath happened before, within this last decade, and in ages thou were not yet made to witness. What comes through such a tear, while such hath never once seemed to me a malevolent thing, is dangerous regardless of its intentions. Malevolence is nary required to destroy something standing in the wrong place.”

Vesmir did not ask her why she troubled herself to say it.

“You needn’t concern yourself on my account,” he said, and there was a dryness in it that I do not think was lost on either of them.

“I do not,” Isana said, and the honesty in it was almost its own kind of insult. “I concern myself with the Icon. If we are being blunt, I am quite fine with thy obliteration. Thy story would be remembered, as would any other. But I would’st rather it did not become anything at all while that Icon is still in thy keeping.”

He did not answer that directly, only inclined his head once more, and turned from the rail, and I watched him speak a few low words to his own ship. The Reaper came about beneath him without complaint, the black sails swinging heavy against a wind I still could not feel, and we drew back from that ragged edge and the violet dark beyond it, out into the wider dark of the Tide proper, until the tear was a smaller thing behind us. Although never so small that either of us stopped watching it.

Vesmir stood at the bow and raised the spyglass again, and I watched him work it slowly across the sky, from the six settled planar lights down to whatever now moved in the black beyond the tear.

“There,” he said, to Tryst, since I do not believe he had ever once, across the whole of this night, spoken a single sentence that was not addressed to that orb first and to the rest of the world only as an afterthought. “I can see them properly now. A shoal of something, Tryst. That is the only word that comes close. Small, dark, wreathed in a dim fire that does not seem to be burning them, and moving the way fish move, or birds, in one long unbroken turn, all of them at once, as if a single mind decided the direction and every one of them simply agreed to it.” He was quiet a moment, tracking them. “Beautiful, actually. I had not expected that. A swarm, perhaps, is closer to it.”

I watched his shoulders change. It was the kind of change that marks the exact moment a beautiful thing becomes, instead, a problem.

“They’ve turned,” he said. “All at once, the same as before, but toward the tear now, and through it.” A pause. “Toward us, in point of fact.”

He lowered the spyglass a fraction, and raised it again, and I heard something in his voice shift that I had not once heard from him across two long memories of watching him be entirely unbothered by things that would have unmade lesser beings.

“They’re moving toward us. Quite quickly, actually.” Another pause, shorter than the last. “Rather too quickly.”

He dropped the spyglass. It struck the deck and rolled, and I did not see where it stopped, because I was watching him instead, watching him reach for Tryst and gather the small cracked orb into the folds of his coat in the same motion, quick and unthinking.

“Fuck me,” he said, with the calm resigned clarity of a man who knew there was no fighting this particular fate.

Then the sky came down on top of us.

I will not pretend to have seen the strike itself in full, only pieces of it, but one piece I saw clearly, and I do not believe my eyes deceived me, however much I might have wished them to. In the last instant before the light took everything, I saw a thin ribbon of green come up out of the wreck of the wheelhouse, out of the little nest where the Icon had been resting all this while, swirling once around itself like smoke caught in a draft, and I watched that green vanish into the falling dark thing an instant before it struck, drawn into it the way water is drawn down a hole, gone before I could properly call it anything at all. Then the light took everything, white and total and gone in the same instant. A great tearing crack followed it that I felt in my teeth before I properly heard it in my ears.

The Reaper bucked beneath everything like a living thing struck across the flank, and I was thrown, the rope I had lashed to her stern hours before pulling taut against my chest so hard I believe it will leave its shape there for days afterward. I want it on the record that I did not let go, though I would not swear to you that this was through any courage of mine rather than simple animal refusal.

Vesmir went over the rail entirely.

I saw him go, a dark shape thrown clear of the deck and out into the black water below, and I confess that for one very long moment I believed I had just watched a God die in front of me, which would have been, I imagine, a fairly significant thing to have to relay.

He did not die. I wish that said plainly and immediately, so as not to draw the moment out longer than it deserves.

The debris was still settling, dust and splinters and small burning fragments hissing where they touched the Tide and went out, when he rose. Not swam. Rose, unhurried, entirely without the indignity that ought to accompany being blasted off one’s own ship into a river. I watched him set one foot and then the other onto the surface of the Black Tide as though it were paving stone laid there for his convenience, which I suppose, in the truest sense, it always had been.

His hand went first to the folds of his coat, and I saw him pause there, feeling for something small and cracked and, evidently, still whole, and only once he seemed satisfied of that did something else occur to him, some second and more urgent thought arriving a beat behind the first, and I watched him go from walking to something considerably faster than walking in the space of that single realization.

The Reaper was not destroyed. The precision of this fact is paramount, since the sight of her might have suggested otherwise to anyone watching who did not know her nature. Where the wheelhouse had stood there was instead a wide black crater, timber curled back on itself and still smoking at the edges, and the helm itself was simply gone, along with the shelf that had held Tryst not an hour before. But she still floated, still sat upright on what remained of the Tide beneath her, patient even now.

Vesmir climbed aboard through the gap where a rail had been, and stood a moment surveying the damage, and let out what I can only describe as a deific sigh.

He raised one hand, and made a small, unhurried gesture, and the timber began, slowly and without any great fanfare, to knit itself back together, splinters rising and rejoining, the black scorch along the edges fading.

He did not wait for it to finish before he stepped through the closing gap, into the wreck of the wheelhouse, searching.

The little nest of black cloth was still there, burnt at one corner, the coals inside it long since scattered and cold.

The Icon was not.

In its place sat something smaller, and rounder, and entirely still, deep viridian in colour, the kind of green that has cooled and hardened past the point of anything still growing, and Vesmir went very still above it. An Orb of Power.

He reached for it.

His hand stopped short of the surface, hovering there, and I watched him hold that position a long moment. The way a man holds his hand over a stove he is no longer certain is safe to touch, though he cannot say precisely why he suspects it. Then he drew the hand back entirely, and simply looked at the thing instead. He did not touch it, and did not speak, and I do not believe, in that particular silence, he wanted either.

I looked at it myself, the way my kind look at things and I will tell you honestly that I did not enjoy what I found. There was a nature to it, faint but unmistakable, something of green things and growing things and the quiet insistence of a seed toward the light, though bent now toward some narrower purpose I could not immediately name. Fertility, I want to say, though I offer that word to you with real hesitation, since I am not certain it is the correct one, only the nearest one available to me. Whatever this thing now was, it wanted things to grow. That was the whole of what I could tell.

I did not say any of this aloud. That must be conveyed with all certainty. I only stood there turning it over, piece by piece, like a puzzle box looking for the seam that will finally open it, and I do not doubt Vesmir could see me doing it, the same as I could see, in his own stillness, something turning over just as slowly behind his eyes.

He reached for it a second time.

This time he did not stop.

He lifted it, carefully, in both hands, and he held it a long while without a single word.

Then he looked up.

The tear still hung open in the distance, smaller now than it had been, and there, at the ragged border of it, was Isana, vast and still in her full Astral Self, her attention fixed not on Vesmir but on the thing cradled in his hands. I could not read a Dragon’s face across that distance, and I will not pretend otherwise, but I did not need to. There was a particular quality to her stillness that needed no translation. Whatever she had expected to see recovered from that wreckage, I do not believe it was this.

She moved before I had finished the thought.

I have called her vast, and patient, and I stand by both, but I want it understood that neither word prepared me for how quickly a thing of her size could close a distance when it chose to. She came at the boundary with unnatural speed, six floating astral arms already outstretched well before she had any hope of reaching it, some old and instinctive want written plainly across the whole shape of her; the same want, I imagine, that draws any God or Firstborn toward any Orb of Power the instant they lay eyes on one. Or perhaps the ‘want’ was Phell’s own, seeking to fervently make contact with this new orb before its fate was decided elsewhere.

Whatever the truth may have been, neither Phell nor Isana reached it.

The tear closed before she had covered half the distance, shutting itself calm and complete, like a closed hand. Where the violet dark, and the drifting shapes, and the Dragon of Enlightenment reaching for something she had not yet understood had all been only a moment before, there was now only the ordinary dark of the Black Tide, whole again.

Vesmir stood there a long while, looking at the place where she had been.

Then he set the viridian orb down upon the deck. Not gently, exactly, and not carelessly either, but with the particular deliberateness of a God setting down something he has not yet decided what to do with, and turned back to where Tryst sat in its worn cradle of cloth, and for a long moment he only looked at him.

“I believe I could restore you with this,” he said. He did not reach for it. “I find I am suspicious of my own suggestion, Tryst, which is a new feeling for me, and not a welcome one.”

He crouched down beside the cracked orb, low, the way a man kneels beside something small.

“I think I understand… and I feel like a child. I think I have broken my own tenet,” he said. “Not tonight. Long before tonight. If I am right about what I watched happen to that Icon, then before you were ever Tryst, before you were ever an orb of anything, you were something far greater than either. You had a life the same as any Firstborn or God has a life, and a proper ending waiting at the end of it. I took that ending from you the day I chose to hold you together instead of letting you go where you were meant to go, if anywhere.” He was quiet a moment. “I have spent ten years hunting for the orb of a Firstborn who corrupted the natural order of one Dragon’s death, Tryst, and the entire while I did it, I was standing on the deck of my own ship, keeping you from yours.”

He did not go on immediately. I did not fill the silence either. Some things, once said, deserve to sit a while before anything else is asked of them.

“I know you cannot hear me,” he said, and there was something almost gentle in the way he said it; the particular gentleness of a man being honest with himself for what may have been the first time in a very long while. “I have always known that, I think, even when I told myself otherwise. But I am going to say this regardless, because you deserve to have it said, whether or not it ever reaches you.”

He picked the orb up, familiar, unthinking, one last time.

“I am sorry,” he said. “For however many years I have kept you like this, cracked and hollow and held together by nothing but my own unwillingness to be the one who let go of you. I told myself it was kindness. I am no longer certain that is true.”

He turned it slowly in his hands.

“You should know why I did it, at least. I do not think I have ever said it aloud to anyone, and I find, tonight of all nights, that I would like to have said it at least once before I stop.” He looked out at the dark water, not at the orb. “I am the God of Time and of Natural Death, Tryst. I see the whole of everyone’s road the moment I look at them, not just where they are going, but where they end, every one of them, always, whether I wish to see it or not. There is no meeting a spirit for me the way other beings meet each other. There is only ever meeting them and knowing, in the same instant, exactly how and when I will lose them. I have found, across a very long existence, that this makes it extraordinarily difficult to keep anyone close. Grief is easier to bear when it arrives as a surprise. My grief starts the moment I meet them, because I have already lost them. I have never once had that mercy, save with you.” He paused. “You were the only one who never gave me that grief. Not because you could not have. Because I made certain of it, myself, before it ever had the chance to come.”

He held the orb a moment longer.

“Thank you,” he said, “for being my friend. When you were alive, before I ever laid a hand on you to keep you from where you belonged, and after, in whatever unnatural half-state I made of you since. I do not know if either version of you would forgive me for the second part. I would understand if neither did.”

He was quiet, and then he said, very softly, in a voice I do not think was meant entirely for me to hear, though I heard it regardless, and I record it now only because I believe it was meant to be recorded, even if it was not meant to be overheard:

“It’s about time, if I am being honest. I hope you understand.” He paused. “Goodbye, my friend.”

He let his power go.

I did not see it leave him, exactly, only its absence, and the orb in his hands came apart like an old dried thing; without violence, without sound. As small pale shards fell from between his fingers and down into the black water below, they did not float, and did not linger; only sank, and were gone.

I confess I felt something come to my own eyes then, which I did not expect of myself, and which I chronicle only because I promised at the outset of all this to give you the truth of what I witnessed rather than a tidier version of it. It was, I think, a very sad thing to watch, however small the thing being mourned. I do not know that I have ever seen a friendship end so gently and so completely at once.

Vesmir watched the water close over the last of the shards.

Then he turned to the viridian orb.

He lifted it, and held it much as he had held Tryst, though I noticed, and I do not think I imagined it, that he held this one more carefully. The particular care of a man who has just finished learning, at some cost, exactly what carelessness can do.

“Do you have a name?” he asked. “Do you know what you were?”

I did not hear an answer. I desire that stated plainly, because I do not believe there was a sound to hear, and yet something in Vesmir’s posture shifted, as if he was listening rather than merely waiting for his turn to speak again.

“Interesting,” he said, after a while. “No. Of course not. You are brand new. In every sense that matters. You are not draconic and not celestial. Born only moments ago, out of something that ended so that you could begin.” He turned the orb slightly, considering it. “I am Vesmir, God of Time, and of Natural Death, among other titles I find considerably less use for. Would you like me to give you a name?”

Another pause, longer than the first.

“Excellent,” he said.

He was silent a moment, and something crossed his face that I had not seen there once across this entire long night, something almost fond, almost light.

“I will name you after an acquaintance,” he said, and there was a slyness in it, the particular slyness of a man enjoying an irony he suspects will never once be understood by the thing he is sharing it with. “One of the very few beings I have ever had cause to properly respect. I will call you Suul.”

The orb did not answer in any way I could witness, and yet Vesmir tilted his head slightly, as though it had.

“Good,” he said. “I am glad.” Then, more gently, “However, Suul. You are not for me. There is a great deal of good you might do in the worlds beyond this ship, and I do not think I am the one meant to shape what you become, having so recently learned what becomes of things I try to keep. I may come to regret this. I already see the future in which my brothers and sisters in the Light Pantheon chastise me for it. I find that I do not care. I am going to let you go and find your own way, and find others better suited to whatever it is you now are.

He held it up slightly, as if presenting it to the shadowy water below.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” he said. “I can see your future now, Suul, clearer than I have been able to see anything all this long night, and though I could not tell it to you even if you asked, and I do not think you would want me to, I will say only that I am pleased by it. Genuinely.” He paused. “Goodbye, my new friend. I am glad I could help you continue on toward whatever you were always meant to become. I am only sorry I did not understand sooner what that meant, or what it cost the last friend I tried to keep from it.”

He lowered the orb to the water’s edge, and let it go.

It drifted, unhurried, out onto the black current, and the Tide carried it from us, smaller and smaller. Despite the buffeting waters, its surface seemed protected from abrasion and force; perhaps a final parting gift for its journey by the Gatekeeper. The Black Tide, I should tell you, reaches every corner of every realm there is, given time enough, and I do not know where Suul is bound, or what shore it will finally wash up against, or whose hands it will end up in, only that the river does not stop, and does not lose things, and that somewhere, someday, it will arrive.

Vesmir stood alone at the rail for a long while after that, and did not speak.

I broke my oath that night, and I will not pretend otherwise, nor will I pretend I regret it, whatever consequence follows. Maybe I am not very good at this, but some things ask too much of a watcher who is also, whatever my order likes to forget, a being with a spirit and feelings enough to be moved by them. Perhaps I follow in the perceived folly of my father’s footsteps, but I care not at this moment. We Thalan are not quite mortal, not in the way the younger races mean the word, and we do not die the way they die, but we are not so old or so far removed from the realm’s own making that we feel nothing of what passes through it, whatever the rest of Arthos assumes of us. I crossed the deck, and I put my hand on his shoulder, and I said the only thing I had.

“I am truly sorry,” I told him. “I understand your loss.”

He did not startle. I do not think he had ever once, across the whole of this night, not known exactly where I stood.

“Thank you, Watcher,” he said. “Unfortunately, Tryst is not the only being I have kept from a natural death. So you most certainly do not.” He was quiet for a moment, and then something in him seemed to settle. Whatever feeling he had just discovered he had decided to swallow and deal with it later. “No, I do thank you. Let us get you home.”

The Reaper came about beneath us both, her sails filled, and we sailed out from the Black Tide together, toward a sky where the moon had at last finished its slow theft of the sun, and the light was beginning, thin and grey and then gold, to come back into the world exactly the way it always had, exactly the way it always would, whether anyone watching understood yet what it had cost to get there or not.