“No, that won’t do at all. No one here keeps the names they were given at birth, for Nal Eston is your present, not your past. We’ll need a better name for one as light-footed as you. Hmm. I’ve got it. From now on we’ll call you The Ghost.”

With a final, futile screech, the dactyl came crashing to the ground.

Postlude 3: Cainan

Comman Dur, Finfalla

How did I get here? Cainan wondered to himself. It wasn’t self-pity or blaming the world for his own misfortune that drove such a question like a stake through his mind. It was genuine wonderment. For how could a life filled with such joy be turned on its head at seemingly a moment’s notice?

It was a question without an answer, unless one believed in things like fate and destiny, which a man like Cainan never would. He believed in his own strength, and the actions he could take to change the world around him. Luck, whether good or bad, was just a thing lazy folks used as an excuse for their own failures and successes. Luck was made, earned, not granted by the gods on a whim as a way of punishing or rewarding those pathetic mortals who magically came under their scrutiny.

Still, as Cainan was led down into Comman Dur’s shadowy bowels, shackles and chains clinking with each step, he couldn’t help but to feel a sense of loss and regret.

Mostly because he’d lost both loves of his life in a single fell swoop of his own making. His wife, Cora, to a fiery grave, and his daughter, Bryony, to that moment when he’d turned his back on her in her greatest hour of need. He would never be able to erase that look of innocent hope that crumpled to confusion as he’d twisted away.

Which, in some respects, made it better that he would never see her again, that he would live out the rest of his days rotting beneath the ground. That his final stop would be in Lostwood felt poetic somehow. Almost like destiny, if one believed in such things. Which he didn’t. Obviously.

Armies of shadows swarmed while blades of firelight fought to hold them back on the prison’s stone walls and floor. They were ordinary fires, of course. They could cook meat and consume wood and burn human flesh, yes, but they weren’t alive, not controllable by magic.

Not the way his fires were.