The Drifter never offered him any help; not advice, not cryptic hints, not even witty banter or insults.

He just stood there against the backdrop of the screaming mutes, a pale, towering presence in a vast tan cloak and a strange red uniform. Savas watched him out of the corner of his eye as he worked. That was how he noticed the small scar on the Drifter's forehead, dead center above and between the eyebrows. It was circular. Faint enough that Savas didn't notice it at all for a long while. It struck him as the kind of scar a man might get if he could survive getting shot in the head at close range by something better than what the Alerians and Kebirans had access to.

When he was done, Savas had converted an entire fountain-courtyard to his purposes. It took him a while. He wasn't a geomancer, most of his equipment had been broken over the course of this merry adventure, and there's only so much blood in your average faceless idiot. He was still getting the hang of fire again too. Shadow and darkness; easy to get back in touch with that when you're a necromancer by trade. Fire produces light and warmth and hope. It was only because enough of Aeraul had stayed behind to reawaken his knack that Savas could do anything with it at all.

He set the blood on fire, then twisted shadows into solid letters burnt into the ground, the walls, everything. He completely painted and burned and shadow-wrote several thousand square feet without ever stopping to do more than kill someone and bleed them for paint's sake. The end result looked like a vast rambling narrative writ large on walls and floors, physically patterned into a spiral from word one to the interlocking circles and polyhedrons at the center.

Savas stood there at the center, carrying what was left and brandishing a knife as he waited. Eyes closed.

He was evolving now. The journey had changed him. The people had changed him.

Not as they would have wanted, but Savas never did care too much about what others wanted of him.

He reached out with nascent senses, hybrid senses, probing into the empty darkness of space, feeling things without words to describe them to the uninitiated. In a way, the whole thing made him regret not taking a bite out of Blueraven's corpse and tearing into his soul. Caden's ability to sense Time would have been profoundly useful right about now. There were a lot of things he had to keep track of without it. His agents on the other side, the few who remained. He had to keep up with the voice pestering him from the jawbone around his neck. He had to keep track of planetary alignments and the literal tides of nothing and darkness. He had to keep track of his own shadow.

The hole in the sky swirled shut during one of the earlier battles. The Stairway to Earth was closed.

Wormaxe was going to cheat by crashing through a window.

He opened his eyes to see the Drifter's grin.

He slit his left hand along the lifeline.

And then he slammed it into the circle and shouted a blandishment to somebody else's god.