She did her best work in wartime, didn’t she? Imagine what she could do with the whole Ashen Sea at war. The clay of humanity in her fists, wet with blood.…

An increasingly apparent pattern of epidemic disease in the unconquered west. The maps called the west the Camou Interval, a vast historical lacuna left by the collapse of the old Tu Maia. On her voyage up to Aurdwynn, Baru had visited a Camou fishing town called Chansee, where pale people died of cancer.

And, of course, the disturbing findings of our expeditions across the Mother of Storms.

And oh, those findings did disturb her, they filled Baru with terror and with joy.

Falcrest sent its ships across the great eastern ocean from which no visitors ever arrived. Across the Mother of Storms. The fourth expedition went under the command of Lindon Satamine, a brave young captain in the Storm Corps. Not two weeks out of Grendlake he stumbled on a fleet of primitive Stakhieczi longships. He seized their young leader, Svirakir, as a hostage: the fact that he was a prince was not recorded. (Hello, Apparitor, so that’s your real name? Svirakir?)

Then, with Stakhieczi ships as sacrificial vanguard, the Storm Corps went on east through maelstrom and burning sea. Through the eel-swarming dead water that had killed the first expedition by thirst. Through volcanic peaks and jagged fjords, into lush lake-lands where the second expedition had recorded boiling ponds and died together in the night. Through beautiful naked stone land afire with burning pits, and long tidal flats where the third wave of expeditions had all gone mad.

Baru tasted each word like pufferfish-meat, sweet and poisonous and delightful.

Lindon and his hostage led the fourth expedition to the unexplored mountains. Star-tall mountains that rumbled so low you could only feel the sound. On the peaks there was fire, volcanism or burning forest, perhaps even the mysterious energies of the Oriati sacred stone called uranium.

And above the fire raged the storm, the endless thunder, the clouds that never broke. Forks and graphs of lightning hammered the mountain slopes again and again as if some celestial clock counted out the universe moment by moment.

In his reports, Apparitor said, As we approached the site of the lightning strikes, we perceived moving lights, like the shapes made by a thumb pressed into the eyeball. And the lights gathered into symbols. And wherever we looked, the symbols moved with us. There was a sharp smell, and a sound we cannot agree on.…

They passed through rings of stone monoliths. “Reminiscent of the pyramids and greatwells built in ancient Falcrest and the Normarch,” Lindon Satamine reported, “perhaps by an ancient transoceanic civilization.”

Burnt trees, carbonized into black pillars. Shattered ruins marked by fire.