It went south, striding across the summit of the hill and heading down its far side, to the burning forests beyond.

“Ramus!” Nomi screamed.

“Wait!” he shouted again, running after his God. “Don't leave me here, not like this. Not alone!”

Nomi screamed again, and he could see her hands stretching out as though he could jump up and hold them, pull her back to him, rescue her from the thing they had awoken.

He ran, but even walking, the God outpaced him. Nomi's voice faded into the background chaos of the falling land. The God's shadow shifted left and right, and it was briefly silhouetted against a fire reaching hundreds of steps into the sky. Ramus stopped running. He thought he saw Nomi still in one of its hands, her hair flying and arms still outstretched.

“Wait,” he said weakly. “No. Don't leave me. Don't go. Not without me.” He sank to his knees and watched his God disappear into fire.

LATER—HE DID not know how much later—he rolled from his back onto his stomach and looked to the north. Something drew his attention that way, though he was not sure what. It was certainly not one of his senses, assaulted as they were by the destruction all around. Perhaps it was the new void inside his mind—that cured, hollowed place that left him feeling so lessened.

He saw three shapes drifting from north to south. He could not fully discern their forms, because they flew very high, above the clouds of smoke and steam, floating on distant air currents as yet untouched by chaos. His eyes stung from smoke and he wiped them, but his vision was no clearer.

They drew closer, and Ramus felt a sudden sense of history gathering around him: dreadful, powerful, endless, and way beyond the understanding of a simple human. He tried to avert his eyes. But he could not.

One of the shapes flew directly over him, high up, impossibly large, unknowable, distorted in his vision by the heat and smoke of the plateau's destruction. The other two drifted past to the east.

And in that moment, Ramus felt greatness passing him by.

HE WAS CERTAIN that he would die there on that hillside. But when he did not die, he started walking north toward Noreela. He expected death at any moment, but it stayed away. Three miles down, he thought. The cliff was three miles high, so it's three miles down. On the flat, I could walk that in a short morning between dawn and noon.