Rings were believed to form perhaps once a generation, in extremes of spin weather. Dura had never seen one before, and as far as she knew neither had her father, in a long lifetime in the upflux.

She felt a prickle of deep unease. A vortex ring. Something extraordinary is happening to the Star.

She remembered the odd, distant movement she had seen at the start of the storm, the needles of blue light on the concave horizon. Perhaps that blue light was the cause of all this. Making sure she wasn't in any immediate danger, she glanced around the sky, seeking out the strange vision...

A scream. Rauc.

Dura spun in the Air, her legs thrashing at the Magfield. Rauc had gone from her side, unnoticed. She felt a surge of anger at herself, her own carelessness, her dreamy fascination with the vortex ring.

The scream had come from the path of the vortex ring, as it rose toward the Crust. There was Rauc, high up in the thinning, rushing forest of vortex lines. She must have seen the damage being wrought at the farm, and had taken it into her head to return. To help. And now she was right in the path of the climbing vortex ring. Rauc's eyes and her round, gaping mouth were like three splashes of dark paint on her round face. The older woman was hanging in the Air, mesmerized by the ring's oscillations, making no effort to flee.

Dura wrenched her legs and arms through the Air, surging toward the remote tableau. "Get out of the way! Rauc, oh, get out of the way! It will kill you..."

But she could not overtake the ring. Rauc seemed to be waiting, almost patiently, for the ring to come to her. The Air scraped in Dura's mouth and throat. She clawed through the Air, her concern for patient, harmless Rauc merging with layers of savage memory: her desolation at the loss of Esk and her father, her continual, helpless ache at the thought of Farr, so remote from her.

A ring was a mechanism for a vortex line to shed instability, to lose excess energy in a bid to regain lost equilibrium. But the ring itself was unstable. It quivered in the Air as it climbed, seeming almost fragile, and it was visibly shrinking: already it had lost perhaps half its original diameter and was reduced to no more than a mansheight in width. And its path curved in the Air, as its spin wrenched at the gas it passed through. For a moment Dura wondered wildly if the combined effects of the shrinkage and the deviation of its trajectory might take the ring away from Rauc. Perhaps if Rauc would just Wave a little way, away from the curve of the path...

No. It was too late. Rauc was still alive, fully breathing, aware; but it was as if she was already dead.