Then they were gone. Overhead the sky was a deepening blue, and with the green of the hills and the gray of the mountains and the flaming red-orange of the horizon it was a pretty striking scene. Too bad she didn’t have a camera, or an easel, or a powerfully developed aesthetic sensibility. Janet wasn’t much for rapt contemplation. She sat down on the chilly grass with her back to the hard, lumpy oak at the summit of the hill. Maybe she should be wearing sunglasses, like those people who went out to the desert to watch the early atomic tests.

Janet shivered. It seemed wrong that of them all she was the one to bear witness to this. Her—the cynical one. No shits or fucks given. Well, maybe it’s better this way, better than somebody with a lot of big weepy feelings. Quentin would be a Trevi fucking Fountain of tears by this point. Somebody or something west of her winded a great deep horn, a massive sustained brass pedal note. There were a few seconds of silence, then it was answered from off to the south by a piercing silver trumpet tone, the same note a fistful of octaves higher. Then six or seven notes followed in unison, from all points of the compass, even out to sea, shifting between major harmonies and clashing tritones.

Who the fuck is playing that shit? Janet thought. How do they even know what notes to play? Probably it was Written somewhere, probably there’s always been a big alpenhorn somewhere under glass, with a sign that says In case of Ragnarok break glass and play an E flat.

Where’s my horn? It would have been nice to at least have a horn, she thought, allowing herself some bitterness, some self-pity, because if not now then when. It would have given her something to do. As one, all around her, the clock-trees began to toll. She didn’t know they could.

She got to her feet. This would never do. She was moping, and it wouldn’t do. She needed to get involved, find out what was happening. She stood up, and on cue the grass in front of her practically exploded as a hippogriff slammed down onto it, landing at speed and skidding halfway down the slope on its talons and hooves and ripping up half the hillside with it.

It gathered itself and trotted back up the slope to her. It had come to find her.

“Your highness, Queen Janet, ruler of Fillory. This hippogriff awaits your pleasure.”

Respect. From a hippogriff. It really was the end of the world. She strode to him, set a foot on its thigh and swung her leg over its broad, tawny, close-furred back. It helped that the slope of the hill was on her side.

She realized she knew this one—it had a red crest. She’d ridden it to the Northern Marsh before.