Edgewalker turned and limped from the House. Out upon the open plain he struck a direction towards the featureless horizon. Dust-devils dogged his heels. How many times, he wondered, had he heard that very same conceit from a claimant to the Throne? Would they never learn? How long, he wondered, would this one last? Why was it none of the long chain of hopefuls ever bothered to ask why the Throne should be empty in the first place? After all, perhaps there was a reason.

Still, this one’s residence should bode new and interesting times for Shadow. He should be thankful to these men, for in the end the one thing their presence might bring to the enduring eternity of the Realm was the potential for change and thus, the continuing possibility of . . . progression.

The strange thing looked like nothing the boy or his sister had ever seen or heard of before. Out crabbing during the evening low tide they came across it wedged between limpet-encrusted rocks, half buried in sand. Against his sister’s silent urgings to move away, the boy used a stick to prod the pale shape.

‘It’s a man drowned,’ whispered the girl, hushed.

‘No,’ the boy answered, scornful of his sister’s knowledge of fishing, or anything else for that matter. ‘It’s scaled. It’s a fish.’

The girl peered down to where her brother knelt, and the pale shadowed length at his feet. Its glimmer in the fading light reminded her of the glow she sometimes saw at night along the edge of waves. To tease her brother, she asked, ‘Oh? What kind of a fish is it then?’

The boy’s face puckered with vexation at the silliness of girls’ questions. ‘I don’t know. A big one. It sure stinks like a fish.’

The smell was undeniable. Yet the girl remained uneasy. She thought she saw the glint of an eye, watching them from behind a tangle of seaweed at one end of the body. Hoping to scare her younger brother away from the thing, she whispered, ‘It’s a corpse. A drowned man. Come away or his ghost will haunt you.’

The boy glared back. ‘I’m not afraid.’

The girl did not answer, for behind her brother the pale shape moved. An arm, lustrous in the dark, slipped from under it. The seaweed fell back from a face of angular, knife-like lines holding molten golden eyes.

The girl screamed. The boy shrieked as a cold hand clasped his ankle. Both screamed into the empty twilight while the thing’s mouth moved, its message obliterated beneath their combined cries. Then the thing released the boy’s ankle.

Sobbing, the boy scrambled away on all fours, his sister tugging upon his tunic, urging him on, as if he were yet held back. Behind them the shape collapsed among the shadows of the rocks.

After sunset a single torch approached the rocks. The incoming tide slapped and splashed among their black, glistening teeth. Torch held high, an old man eased his way through the pools and gaps. His long hair and beard shone white, whipped in the contrary winds. At the shore, a glowing lantern revealed brother and sister, hands clasped together.