He saw Erisha then, standing less than ten feet away, her clothing torn and bloodied, her slender white throat sliced open to the bone. She stood solitary and ethereal in death, cast out into the Void by the loss of her life. She looked at him and tried to speak, but no words came. Erisha, he said. I’m sorry.

She tried again to speak, and again she failed.

Who told you that?

The voice again. Not her voice, but another’s. He searched for the speaker and found him standing close to the girl. Old Culph, his grizzled face and gnarled body unchanged from life. Yet

he was a ghost, too. The boy could see it in the translucence that radiated from him, in the way the starlight shone through him.

He could see it in the silhouette of his bones through his skin. The old man was grinning, his lips curled in disdain, his sharp old eyes fixed and staring. Who told you that?

Kirisin did not understand. Told him what? What was the old man talking about? The demon, he corrected. What was the demon saying?

He looked again at Erisha, who did not seem to see the demon. She was speaking once more, but still no words would come. Her mouth opened and closed, and there were tears in her eyes. Then a third figure appeared, cloaked and hooded, dark and forbidding, hovering back in the deep shadows at the edge of his vision. A wraith, perhaps. But no, not this one. This one was alive, was of flesh and blood. It stared at him from out of the folds of the hood, and while he could not make out its features, he could feel its gaze.

Kirisin started toward it, and the ground seemed to give way beneath his feet. Suddenly he was falling, pitching forward into blackness, leaving Erisha and Culph and the Ashenell behind. Only the dark figure stayed with him, one hand reaching. Its voice hissed in warning. Who told you that?

KIRISIN’S EYES SNAPPED OPEN, and his slumped body jerked upright. He had been dreaming. Daydreaming perhaps, but maybe something more, something deeper. A vision? He couldn’t be sure. He wet his lips and stared out into the sun-drenched day. How much time had passed? Only moments, it seemed. But then he looked at the sky and saw that the sun had moved far to the west. He had been sleeping or daydreaming or whatever it was for hours.

And what had the dream been about?

Who told you that?

The words echoed faintly in his memory, vaguely recognizable, and for a moment he almost had a grip on their origin. But then the link faltered, and his grip was gone. He tried to regain it and failed. For the moment, it was lost to him.

But not forgotten. At some point, he would remember.