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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Faded sails ride the horizon So far and far away to dwindle The dire script Writ on that proven canvas I know the words belong toto me These tracks left by the beast Of my presence Then, before and now, later And all the moments between Those distant sails driven Hard on senseless winds That even now circle My stone-hearted self The grit of tears I never shed Bitingas if lifted Above the world’s curved line And I am lost and lost to answer If they approach or flee Approach or flee unbidden times In that belly swollen With unheard screams so far And far and so far and away

This Blind Longing Isbarath (of the Shore)

DRAWN TO THE SHORELINE, AS IF AMONG THE HOST OF UNWRITTEN truths in a nition of what itout into the depthless unknown that was the sea The yielding sand and stones beneath one’s feet whispered uncertainty, rasped promises of dissolution and erosion of all that was once solid

In the world could be assembled all the manifest symbols to reflect the huue was found all ion before the eyes Leaving to the witness the decision of choosing recognition or choosing denial

Udinaas sat on a half-buried tree trunk with the sweeping surf clawing at his moccasins He was not blind and there was no hope for denial He saw the sea for what it was, the dissolved memories of the past witnessed in the present and fertile fuel for the future, the very face of time He saw the tides in their immutable susurration, the vast swish like blood from the cold heart moon, a beat of time measured and therefore measurable Tides one could not hope to hold back

Every year a Letherii slave, chest-deep in the water and casting nets, was grasped by an undertow and swept out to sea With some, the waves later carried them back, lifeless and swollen and crab-eaten At other times the tides delivered corpses and carcasses fro to death, the vast wilderness of water beyond the shore delivered the saain

He sat huddled in his exhaustion, gaze focused on the distant breakers of the reef, the rolling white ribbon that caain in heartbeat rhythrey, heavy sky In the clarion cries of the gulls In thewind The uncertain sands trickling away beneath his soaked e of the knowable world

She’d run fro woman at whose feet he’d tossed his heart In the hope that she lance at it – Errant take hi beast Anything, anything but… running away

He had fallen unconscious in the House of the Dead – ah, is therein that ? – and had been carried out, presuhouse He had awoken later – how long he did not know, for he’d found hi No food had been prepared, no dishes or other signs of aa few lingering embers Outside, beyond the faint voice of the wind and the nearer dripping of rainwater, was silence

Head filled with fog, his movements slow and aard, he’d rebuilt the fire Found a rain cape, and had then walked outside Seeing no-one nearby, he had made his way down to the shoreline To stare at the empty, filled sea, and the empty, filled sky Battered by the silence and its roar of wind and gull screa rain Alone on the beach in the ion

The dead warrior as alive

The Letherii priestess who had fled in the face of a request for help, to give solace and to comfort a fellow Letherii

In the citadel of the Warlock King, Udinaas suspected, the Edur were gathered Wills locked in a dreadful war, and, like an island around which the storar, who had risen froold, clothed in wax, probably unable to walk beneath all that weight – until, of course, those coins were removed

The art of Udinaas… undone

There would be pain in that Excruciating pain, but it had to be done, and quickly Before the flesh and skin grew to embrace those coins

Rhulad was not a corpse, nor was he undead, for an undead would not scream He lived once more His nerves awake, his old

As was I, once As every Letherii is trapped Oh, he is poetry aniar, but his words are for the Letherii, not for the Edur

Just one ion, and one that would not leave hio mad There was no doubt about that in the , only to return to a body that was no longer his, a body that belonged to the forest and the leaves and barrow earth What kind of journey had that been? Who had opened the path, and why?