K’rul had halted during this speech. He studied his companion, this towering, reptilian assassin, slayer of dragons, who had uprooted mountains and lifted them into the sky. ‘You speak of love,’ he said. ‘This is your beacon, your spark of defiance.’

‘The K’Chain Che’Malle look into the night sky and build for it laws and principles, as if the act of definition suffices, serving as justification prior to invasion, conquest and exploitation. Should they ever succeed, they will infect the heavens with the same wars, the same venal desires and hungers, the same witless adherence to those laws and principles by which they shackle all they see, and all they claim to know. Tell me, K’rul, when you look up into this coming night, what do you see?’

‘What I see matters less than what I feel.’

‘And what do you feel?’

‘I feel… wonder.’

Skillen Droe nodded. ‘Just so. And wonder, my friend, is the intellect’s most feared foe. Its path is love, and love is the language of humility. The rational mind would stand over it with a bloodstained sword, and in the empty bleakness of its eyes you will see its triumph.’ The assassin shook his head and fanned wide his wings. ‘This I have learned, among the K’Chain Che’Malle. This, K’rul, is why I stand at your side. The magic you offer – oh, they will seek to cage it, in laws and principles, in rules and squalid structure. But we both know that they will fail, for their minds are trapped in cages of their own making, and all that lies beyond will remain forever unknown, and unknowable, to them. And this they cannot abide.’

‘They will fail,’ K’rul agreed, ‘because I am unknowable.’

‘Yes. And your gesture, K’rul, was an act of love, yielding unending wonder. What you have done will infuriate the world.’

K’rul shrugged. ‘That will… suffice.’

They resumed their journey.

* * *

A broad, flat stone, ten paces across, squatted above the tideline, at the very edge of the caustic miasma that drifted from the Vitr. Long before the unnatural sea’s birth, in the age when the Builders were content working with raw rock, earth and trees, this massive stone had been worked into an altar, its surface roughly flattened by antler picks, with the spiralling grooves left to the elements to soften through seasons of rain, snow, heat and cold.

But none of this had prepared the altar for the acidic bite of the Vitr’s roiling breath. The patterns upon its surface were mostly gone, and the grooves that remained were brittle to the touch. Just as faith died with a people’s death, so too this obelisk and the worship it embodied.

The Thel Akai, Kanyn Thrall, crouched upon the flat surface, leaning on his short-handled, double-bladed axe. The weapon had once belonged to a Thelomen chieftain. Its forger had pronounced it cursed, unsurprisingly, after Thrall had killed the chief in single combat. Such trophies could only be claimed with a touch of irony, an acknowledgement that edges cut both ways. Kanyn Thrall had smiled when he discarded his broken spear, its famed point blunted and barely recognizable beneath a welter of gore, and collected up the cursed axe.