‘How fare your scouts, Bonecaster?’ she asked, unable to keep a savage grin from her face.

‘They are gone,’ he announced. His gaze fell to her. ‘Others are there.’ He now shook his nearly fleshless head in admiration, and, it seemed to her, even horror. ‘My apologies, Jaghut. I would never have believed any entity would dare …’ He drew his flint blade. ‘You are a desperate fool. You have doomed us all – and more.’

‘I am merely returning the favour.’

All about, the remaining Imass warriors flinched as if stung, drawing their blades of razor-thin flint. ‘Purchase us what moments you can,’ he told them flatly. His brown tannin-stained visage remained fixed upon her.

The warriors dipped their heads. ‘Farewell,’ one answered, and they disappeared into snatches of dust.

Above, figures now came pouring from the cave mouths: stone-grey shapes that ran on oddly jointed legs, or all four limbs at a time.

‘I am tempted to leave you to them,’ Ut’el said. ‘But we Imass are not a cruel people.’

‘So you would absolve yourselves over the centuries, yes?’ She took hold of the spear haft. ‘That is fortunate. Because we Jaghut are not a judgemental people.’ And she heaved herself backwards in one motion, yanking the spearhead from the ground to tumble off the ledge, spear in hand.

He swung, but the blade cut just short of her as she fell off the narrow ridge. Her buckskins snapped in the wind. ‘I leave you to …’ she yelled as she plummeted from sight down the sheer thousand-foot drop.

… your doom, Ut’el Anag, Bonecaster to the Kerluhm T’lan Imass, finished for her. He turned to face the high slope. The grey tide of creatures had finished his band and now closed upon him.

In what he considered his last moments, he raised his flint blade to his face. He watched how the knapped facets reflected the clouds overhead, how the reflections rippled like waves on clear lake water.

No. This is not yet done. I so swear.

He stepped into the realm of Tellann as the first of the clawed hands snapped closed upon the space he once occupied.

* * *

Hel’eth Jal Im (Pogrom of the White Stag)

51st Jaghut War

6,031 years before Burn’s Sleep

Here evergreen forest descended mountain slopes to a rocky shore. Shorebirds hunted for crabs and beetles among tide-pools and stretches of black sand beaches. From their perches on tree limbs and among the taller rocks larger birds of prey watched the shorebirds and the glimmer of fingerlings in the shallows.