Prophets thrived on being ignored. They delighted in being proved right, and delighted yet more in seeing misery and suffering afflict every fool who dared to mock. Tathenal had long since learned to keep his fears to himself, barring the occasional confession to his closest companions – his fellow husbands. Their chiding and amusement comforted him, when he chose to not think about it too much. Familiar voices took the sting from dismissive words. Habits and patterns could be worn like old clothes.

There was little challenge in assembling each scene of destruction, plucking free the specific details, and then recognizing the singular fear hidden behind them all. Worse, he was hardly unique in his terror of death. Warriors marched into its face at every battle, and their courage was but the visible side of the mask, when the unseen side, flush against the skin of their faces, was cold and clammy with fear. Wives who commanded the hearth, as mistresses of the farm and its myriad denizens, wove blankets, or pushed the dust from the rooms; they dragged husbands or lovers to their furs and blazed like fires against the darkness. Herders counted their flocks and sought signs of wolves on the mountain paths. Wood-carvers gathered dead trees and fought their own kind of war, seeking resurrection in what they made. Poets and hearth-singers pulled threads from tattered souls, eliciting emotions which, in the end, were proofs against death.

The enemy forced every act, every deed. The enemy pursued, or stalked, or waited in ambush. It could not be defeated, and it never lost.

Tathenal understood the Jaghut, Hood. He understood this summoning, and the outrage that gave it such appeal. He understood, as well, the futility of it.

Middle among the husbands, he found himself upon an ever-moving bridge, with the youth, Ravast, carrying one end, and the elder, Garelko, the other. Their positions were fixed, but the march through time could not pause, not for an instant. Until death came to take one of them. Then, the journey would stagger, stumble and slide. In a predictable world, Garelko would fall first, and Tathenal would find himself taking the old man’s place, as the new eldest, and if Lasa Rook was as unchanging as she seemed, then Ravast would find himself upon that bridge, trapped in the middle, with a new youth upon the other end.

It was an awkward construct in Tathenal’s mind, and yet it held, stubborn and persistent. He did not particularly like it, sensing its lack of artistry, and, indeed, its lack of purpose. It is simply how we are. A stupid thing to consider. A bridge? Why a bridge? What unknown torrent does it span? And why am I alone in finding my feet not upon solid ground, but upon an uncertain purchase? When I at last find myself the eldest, will I step with relief upon some future shore, some river’s verge or chasm’s blessed ledge? And, should I arrive there, what will I see ahead of me?