I will tell her of my fears, and if I must fall in esteem in her eyes, then still I shall not hesitate.

Wife. You buried my axe.

But I buried it long ago.

You think me now dead. But I died in that line. I, Ravast, widower to them all.

We will laugh then, in our breaking of souls, and set our vision back upon the trail, to our distant, peaceful farm, which lies upon the heel of the Lower Rise, just above the veil of morning smoke from the village below.

The dogs are barking, I hear, but not in alarm. They are just keeping their throats ready.

Because the Thelomen will come again, in their ships, and I will take my place in that first line. Where I will stand in silence. And in blessed anticipation.

He thought back to the dragon’s carcass, and the frantic swing of his axe, that only by chance struck the beast’s taloned paw. The walls had held on that day, if only because the battle proved so brief in duration. The walls had held, but barely.

‘Another slope and another mountain and another high pass!’ Garelko groaned as they climbed up from the lake’s edge. ‘Ravast, I beg you, carry this old man!’

No, I already carry too many.

Tathenal said, ‘The saddle pass is high enough, I should think. That will see us safe from the flood. When next we camp, I have in mind a new idea. Ravast, consider this when you build our hut for the night. Hull-shaped, and sound of flank…’

Tathenal’s dreams of flood the night just past were not the first. For years, he had been haunted by visions of disaster, against which his will proved, time and again, utterly helpless. Behind the veil of sleep, the mind had a way of wandering into strange places, as if the soul knew that it was, in truth, lost. Landscapes arrived twisted, known and yet unknown, and he would see faces that he recognized, yet did not, and in walking through his dreams, in turning to him and speaking in garbled tongues, they proved little more than harbingers of confusion.

For all that, the sense of dread persisted, like the scent of a storm upon the air. The roots of a mountain grown corrupted and rotten – he alone could feel its tremors, its promise of imminent collapse. A tendril of smoke upon the breeze – none other noticed the glow of the raging flames deep in the forest, the growing roar of conflagration. Diseases among the livestock, birds falling from the sky, the village cats poisoned and dying beneath wagons. Each time, Tathenal was alone in seeing the signs, unheeded in his cries of warning, and the last to fall to whatever calamity – fleeing exhausted, whimpering, and yet burning with validation.