Much later, he rode a machine into battle. The people had regrouped and magic itself had somehow fought back, offering a final limited burst of pure power and denying the Mages’ control one last time. The tide had turned and Jossua was a warrior now, the memory of his former life smothered by weeks of battle and rage. The machine marched on giant flaming legs, graceful and deadly, and he and his squadron harried at the fleeing Mage army’s flanks. Men fell beneath his ride’s molten feet, their charred corpses sometimes carried along for several miles and providing a cushioned footfall for its rapid sprint. Jossua howled. He felt his face burning with the fury, and even people from his own side moved to let him through. He was a berserker; invincible, unbeatable. When he killed a Krote he drank his or her blood. And he fed well.

His final, abiding memory of that long time of war and death was sitting on the shores of the island in The Spine that would become known as Mages’ Bane. His machine lay dead and already rotting behind him, its purpose fulfilled. Magic had withdrawn itself earlier that day, and hundreds had instantly fallen on their swords, sighing as they died. The sense of hopelessness and catastrophe was enormous, and everything suddenly seemed very different. It felt as though any purpose in existence had suddenly gone. A flower he found growing on the beach was rotten, the sun was weak and oily on his skin, a bird drifted down into the sea and did not resurface. The sense of victory and hope he had felt at finally driving the Mages away was brief, because their defeat brought Noreela no victory. All it brought was the sudden absence of magic, and the sense that all good things had come to an end.

Around him, sprouting from the sand like sapling trees and bobbing gently in the waves, were ten thousand torn bodies. Noreelans and Krotes were equalled in death. Here and there were survivors, all of them as silent as he. They stood amongst the monuments of the dead. And in the distance, still visible as a haze on the horizon, the Mages’ burning ships showed their tails as they fled Noreela forever.

So long ago. So many moons, and here he was, still alive. Still waiting. His purpose as fresh as ever, his rage as inflammatory as it had been all those years before.

Jossua Elmantoz passed deeper into the Monastery, the former Mages’ keep, wondering what he would find when he next viewed daylight.

THINGS IN THE basements, one of the younger Monks had said. Forms shifting, shadows moving the wrong way, the smell of turned earth and scorched rock. And then something new.