Although she’d brought a canvas shelter with her, most nights she left it tied in a bundle. She lay out in the grass near her tethered horse and mule and watched the wheel of stars while the sea murmured and sang nearby. On nights when the fog came in thickly over land and sea, she gathered driftwood for a fire. She watched the flames, burning blue from the salt crusted on the wood, for half the night. At times she saw strange images among them, of tall towers of stone amid the streets of ancient cities.

On the twelth day she reached the ruins of the old guard tower. A half circle of broken walls stood on the edge of a cliff. On the beach below, the corners of huge stones emerged from nearly two hundred years’ worth of sand and driftwood as if they were swimmers just coming up from a dive. Jav had found the box with the the obsidian crystal somewhere among them when they lay clean and exposed to the open air. If any dweomer objects lay in the sand now, they were too well-buried for her to sense. The remains of the tower wall, however, still stood on the cliff edge.

Some hundred yards west, Valandario found a rivulet of fresh water digging itself a channel through the grass. It slithered rather than cascaded down the cliff face, then lost itself in the sand, but up on top it ran deep and clean enough for drinking. She unloaded her stock, watered them, and set them out to graze, then walked over to the tower. The half circle of wall, gray stone mottled here and there with green moss, stood to a height of about ten feet.

Ancient, broken, gutted by Time and sea storms—still the remaining stones gave out a peculiar energy. Val felt it as a tingling in the air and smelled it as the clean sharp aftermath of lightning. Someone had worked dweomer in this tower, someone powerful enough that the traces had lingered for over a thousand years. She ran her fingers along one flat stone, about five feet above the ground and set next to what seemed to have been a doorway. Under the moss she felt deep-carved runes, still readable by touch.

“Lords of Aethyr!” she called out. “Grant me your protection in your temple!”

She felt their answer as a cold ripple down her back. The lightning-scent intensified around her. She stepped through the doorway and looked down. The grassy ground fell away some ten feet from the threshold. How far it would be safe to go was debatable.

“Lords of Aethyr! My thanks to you!”

Valandario turned and walked back out to ordinary ground. That evening she took one of the long sticks from her canvas lean-to and consecrated it as a ritual staff. She wanted to test the footing before she trusted her weight to the cliff edge.