“Not in your lifetime,” Alera said. “Or in the lifetimes of your children, or their children. Perhaps not in the lifetime of your entire people. Almost certainly, beyond the length of time your written memory will survive you. A thousand years, or two thousands, or three or twenty. But it will come.”

“If I do not act,” Tavi said, “the vord will destroy my people before the snow flies this year.” He shook his head. “The Alerans of thousands of years in the future will never have the chance to exist—and you’ll never get to tell anyone that you told them so. The theoretical Alerans of tomorrow will have to look out for themselves.”

He half expected her to smile at his commentary. It was the sort of quiet, cerebral humor that the fury seemed to appreciate. She did not respond.

“You’ll help us?” he asked.

She inclined her head slowly. “Of course.”

Tavi stepped closer to her abruptly, reached down to her folded hands, and lifted them. His heart went up into his throat as he did. The fury before him was a being of almost unthinkable power. If she took exception to his actions...

But she only stood there regarding him with a calm expression. He moved his eyes from hers to her fingertips.

They looked ragged, the material of them frayed, somehow, chewed. Tavi had once seen the bodies of soldiers who had fallen into a river during a battle. The men had drowned, and their remains had not been recovered for more than a day. The fish and other creatures of the river had been at them, biting and snipping off tiny bits of flesh. The wounds had not bled. They had remained cold, inert, grey, as if the bodies had somehow become sculptures of soft clay.

Alera’s fingers looked like that—like a wax sculpture an industrious mouse had been nibbling upon.

“What is this?” he asked her quietly.

“Inevitability,” the fury replied. “Dissolution.”

He frowned for a moment, both at her hands and at her reply. The meaning sunk in a few seconds later. He looked up at her, and whispered, “You’re dying.”

Alera gave him a very calm, very warm smile. “A simplistic way to view what is happening,” she replied. “But I suppose that from your perspective it does share certain superficial similarities.”

“I don’t understand,” Tavi said.

Alera considered her hands in his for a moment. Then she gestured down the length of her body, and said, “Know you how this form came to be? Why it is that I speak to your family’s bloodline?”

Tavi shook his head. “No.”

She gave him a chiding glance. “But you have conjectured.”

Tavi inclined his head to her. “I hypothesized that it had something to do with the mural in the First Lord’s meditation chamber.”