Maintaining that form with a discipline that grew less effortful by the moment, he knelt and arranged the stones and feathers to make the altar. He captured two lizards and a night-crawling bruul and used them for the offering. He passed the Three Waters, spittle, urine, and tears. He gathered pebbles and laid them out in the shape of the Velalisier rampart. He uttered the Four Sorrows and the Five Griefs. He knelt and ate earth. A vision of the lost city entered his mind: the blue stone rampart, the dwelling of the king, the Place of Unchangingness, the Tables of the Gods, the six high temples, the seventh that was defiled, the Shrine of the Downfall, the Road of the Departure. Still maintaining, with an effort, the form of the Prince To Come, he told himself the tale of the downfall of Velalisier, experiencing that dark tragedy while feeling the grace and aura of the Prince upon him, so that he could comprehend the loss of the great capital not with pain but with actual love, seeing it as a necessary stage in the journey of his people, unavoidable, inevitable. When he knew he had come to accept the truth of that he allowed himself to shift form, reverting to the shapes of the Final King, the Flayed Man, the Blind Giant, the Red Woman, and then at last to that of Faraataa of Avendroyne.

It was done.

He lay sprawled face down on the soft mossy soil as the first rains of morning began to fall.

After a time he rose, gathered the stones and feathers of the little altar, and walked back toward the cottage. The peace of the Prince To Come still lay upon his soul, but he strived now to put that benign aura from him: the time had come to commence the work of the day. Such things as hatred, destruction, and vengeance might be alien to the spirit of the Prince To Come, but they were necessary tools in the task of bringing the kingdom of the Prince into being.

He waited outside the cottage until enough of the others had returned from their own obeisances to allow him to enter upon the calling of the water-kings. One by one, they took up their positions about him, Aarisiim with his hand to Faraataa's right shoulder, Benuuiab to the left, Siimii touching his forehead, Miisiim his loins, and the rest arranged in concentric circles about those four, linked arm to arm.

"Now," Faraataa said. And their minds joined and thrust outward.

— Brother in the sea!

The effort was so great that Faraataa felt his shape flowing and shifting of its own accord, like that of a child just learning how to bring the power into play. He sprouted feathers, talons, six terrible beaks; he became a bilantoon, a sigimoin, a snorting raging bidlak. Those about him gripped him all the more tightly, although the intensity of his signal held such force that some of them too fluttered as he did from form to form.