Will the magic of Earth fade, no longer fertilized by that rich vitality? Aether is an element like the other four, woven through the very fabric of the cosmos. Surely some breath of aether remains on Earth.

Yet knowledge of the future is closed to her, because she is grounded here. It isn’t even shadows seen beyond a translucent shroud; it is an impenetrable curtain. Only the elementals who breathe and respire in the pure aether can see forward and backward in time. Only God can know past, present, and future as if it is all one.

Did her mother know what fate awaited her? Did she go willingly into that darkness, or did she fight it?

Did she love my father anyway?

I’ll never know.

The landscape skims past below, a blighted roll of dusty hills and tumbled forests. Now and again a village passes beneath her sight, roofs torn off, fences down, dead animals floating in briny pools. With each league as they move southeast the land’s scars grow more noticeable. Trees are burned on one side, those that still stand. The ground is parched and bare. They have turned south and she smells the sea. Waves lap lazily against a battered shoreline. They pass over a ruined town whose stone walls have fallen into heaps. A cockroach scuttles along the stones. No. It is a person, small and fragile but somehow still alive. Then the town falls behind.

So close to the sea nothing moves except the wind through what remains of vegetation. Out in the water she sees the smooth back of a mer-creature split the surface and slide beneath.

Is it Gnat, or Mosquito?

The griffin shrieks, and banks to the right in a wide circle. Below, marching along parallel to the shoreline, walk human figures. So many! Two thousand at least, or four or ten, impossible to count so many. It is a refugee host strung out in double or triple file and marching into the worst of the devastation. There are many children and old people among them. It seems there are more groups coming up from behind, all moving in the same direction.

She wants to cry out. She wants to warn them: “Turn back! This way lies ruin!” But she has no voice.

And then she truly sees them.

By face and feature they are Ashioi. Where have they come from? There were not so many children among the exiles as she sees in this company. The larger help the smaller. The warriors march in the van and at the rear to guard the helpless, who are also the most precious. They are well dressed in tunics and knee-length cloaks, their warriors in fine armor and brightly painted masks.

The Ashioi she lived among, however briefly, were so poor that none had more than a rag or worn skin to cover themselves with, not even the warriors. That’s why she sleeps beneath a covering woven of reeds. Eldest Uncle doesn’t even have a spare tunic to gift her so that she might not sleep, or wake, naked. All the animals died in exile, and toward the end even the fields of flax withered.