The evidence of scattered, scared communities lay spread out below: small villages, a few larger towns, all of them lighting fires against the darkness that should not be. Ten thousand faces would be searching for the sun but seeing only this unnatural dusk, and Lenora wondered what they would think were they to see the hawk. Would they know? Would they have any inkling of who or what they were looking at?

Probably not. But soon that would change.

For most of the night Lenora had been trying to hide from the two Mages. She sat motionless and silent, as far back on the hawk’s tail as she could go without falling off, two short swords buried deep in the creature’s hide to provide precious handholds, and watched her masters with a sense of fear the likes of which she had never felt before. The Mages had changed so much, and they were strangers to her now.

For the past three hundred years Angel and S’Hivez had been bitter, angry and mad, given to lengthy musings on revenge and what it would mean to them. Lenora had served them and listened—their trusted lieutenant—but over time they had become shadows of themselves, bitter old things who showed only occasional flashes of their former brilliance and brutality. Ensconced in their mountain retreat on Dana’Man, they had been fading away, though they had still retained a certain power; things that had once ruled a land could never lose that. And Lenora had still feared them—the mad, sometimes beautiful Angel most of all. But their glories had been fading into the past, and the more time passed, the more her memories of them had been dictated by what they said rather than what she remembered. She had let the Mages’ power become a self-serving myth in her own mind, rather than preserving it as a rich memory. Time staled everything.

But now the Mages had made Time their own once more, and they were making fresh memories that Lenora would keep forever.

Angel still clasped the body of the farm boy to her chest, like a mother mourning her dead child. She had sawn off the top of his skull and eaten his brain, sharing it with her old lover S’Hivez, and then together they had opened the boy and sought something more nebulous within his flesh. From that moment, Lenora had felt the raw power surging from them, and they were true Mages for the first time in three hundred years. They had searched, moving bones and organs aside, and somewhere in there they had found what they were looking for.