When he arrived many of the elders were already out peering to the south. They were quiet, and to Aiken they appeared strangely troubled by a mere storm. He found his mother standing before their hide and pole hut. ‘A storm!’ he announced, excited. He’d always enjoyed storms: the lighting and thunder of gods battling overhead.

‘I see, little grub,’ she answered distractedly, her gaze still to the south. ‘Get inside.’

‘But Mama!’ She clenched his arm and thrust him within. ‘Mama!’

A warband ran past the hut, led by Hroth Far-seer. They ran with their knives in their hands.

‘Who is it?’ he asked, now wondering if perhaps he should be afraid.

‘Stay within,’ his mother barked. She pulled her blades from her belt, and ran.

A rumbling and crackling reached him, as of thunder, and a dark wall burst over the hut obscuring almost all the light. Dust washed within, choking him. Of course! A dust-storm! He’d seen one of these before. But what was there to fear? Save the animals wandering lost?

Footfalls sounded all about, sifting and thumping. He heard the crack and grating of weapons clashing, gasped breaths, hisses of pain, and the grunt of mortal blows taken. He stared out of the opening, now an ochre curtain of shifting and gusting dust. Blurred shapes ran past, wrestled, duelled.

He recognized the outline of his own, and was chilled by the hoary shapes they battled: cloaked in wind-blown rags, skeleton thin, some bearing armour of animal bones.

The demons of his people’s legends. The demons of dust. Come for them at last, as their oldest myths warned.

Then he screamed as a shape darkened the doorway. His mother burst within. Her head was bloodied, her hide trousers slit at the leg, streaming blood. She scanned the hut, her eyes wild, found him, took his arm and thrust him amid piled hides and blankets.

Tears streamed down her face. ‘Quiet, love,’ she croaked, hoarse.

‘Mama –what …?’

‘Quiet now as a woodlouse, yes?’

She pressed her hand over his face, left behind a smear of warm blood, pulled the hides over his head.

Through a gap in the layered hides he watched her feet as she crossed to the doorway. From her stance he could see she was crouched, blades ready. The feet shifted, scuffing. He heard blades clash and scrape, heard his mother growl and gasp. The feet shifted anew, weakly. Blood came running down one leg. Something hissed through the air and his mother’s feet tilted and she fell.

New feet entered the hut. Inhuman. Earth-brown bone and sinew in tatters of thick leather hide. The skins were yanked aside and he stared up at a demon face of bone, dark empty sockets, and naked amber teeth. Riding atop the head of patchy hair was another skull of some sort of gigantic horned beast.

‘This one?’ the demon asked someone outside.

‘Nay – the scent is too thin. Come, they are fleeing.’