Flint’s mind drifted in a space between contemplation and dream, occupied with a fantastically vivid memory while simultaneously aware of his blustery surroundings.

Today he stood implacable and still on the upper deck of his airship, alone in meditation amidst the sweltering wind and the oppressive sun. Two days ago he sat in the company of a small child on the rooftop of a building in Ettermire, at chilliest sunset. Both moments existed for him at once, playing out in parallel, neither any more or less vivid than the other. The only thing that separated the present from recollection was the foreknowledge afforded to one experience and not to the other. He knew how the conversation would play out with the child. He didn’t know what awaited him in the desert.

The dusk air played over his exposed shoulders, teasing the hairs there to stand on end. He ignored it, but the child could not. She scooted closer to him, so that her shoulder pressed against his side. “We can go inside,” he told the little elf.

She shook her head stubbornly, staring out over the limitless expanse of city skyline arrayed before them. Steam and smoke mingled, billowing from the factories and the stacks in unending white-and-grey exhalations. The pair was high up enough that they could see over the clouds and the fumes, see the city lights rendered into a golden, hazy glow below, and at the same time see the brightest stars sparkling above. The sun, low on the horizon now, was behind them. He understood this about her: she did not want to see the city from the streets ever again. She wanted to be above it all - free from the oppressive smog and the cruelty it concealed from the eyes of gods.

Dark elves were not kind to their high elf cousins, and less so to their children...and doubly cruel to those children that display some aptitude for magic even here, hundreds of miles from Raiaera.

The pair sat in silence for a long moment. Flint’s forearms were rested across his knees. He dwarfed the child beside him, but thought that her potential power and value far outweighed his. His destructive capacity was as nothing to her unique abilities: foreknowledge, sight into the future. Her tiny fingertips could trace the myriad skeins of fate, and deftly.

He was her protector now, her guardian, but only because she had chosen it as the best eventuality for herself. For now. He, in turn, made himself good company and an eager audience for her, in case she deigned to guide him on his way as she sometimes did. He felt like he was on a tightrope: to be a parent but not a jailer, to value her as a person and not merely for her magical insights; to make use of her predictions without becoming dependent on her, to be present for those moments of clarity without pressuring her for them. He had many orphans and outcasts in his care, and many special ones, but none so integral to his success as Aetena.

“It’s not so ugly up here,” she told him. “It’s like when I see everything, instead of just what’s going on in the right-now.”


He nodded. She’d told him this before. “I know,” he said. And, not for the first time: “But the present matters. What you say and do, and when you say and do it.”

She didn’t say anything for another long moment. Then, she gave a big sigh.

“You have to go fight again,” she said at last. “He’s a scary human, but he’s not really human anymore. He’s full of fire.”

He looked down at her. She was making every effort not to look at him. He knew this meant that she was afraid he would ask questions, and that there were answers she could not give him, lest she change the outcome of what she had foreseen. He mulled this over.

“Is he far away?”

She nodded, and pointed. “That way, in the airship, for days. You have to leave tomorrow.”

Flint opened his eyes, and glared against the sudden flare of midday sun and heat. A desert stretched out below, broken only by a white marble structure rising ageless from the sand. Despite the unimaginable eons through which it had endured, the heat and wind and sand had not diminished the edifice, except perhaps to strip any colors that might have originally softened the glare off those unyielding pillars.

The airship was steadily descending toward the thing. Flint peeled his shirt off over his head and tossed it to the deck. He undid the laces on his boots and then kicked them away. He lifted a water skin and dumped a generous portion over his head, washing the sweat off of his naked scalp, and then he drank down whatever remained.

And then, with a running start, he leapt from the deck of the airship and fell with his limbs spread wide.

His head, chest, and back were dry by the time the battering wind relinquished him, and he landed heavily in the sand amidst a tremendous cloud tossed skyward by his impact. His body, enhanced beyond its apparent humanity, found his terminal velocity a simple thing to survive. The sand he trudged through wanted to scald the bottoms of his bare feet, but the pain was minimal. The marble steps, too, were not friendly to the touch. It was a relief from mild discomfort when he entered the building and stepped down into a thin layer of cool water. His toes were barely submerged in it.

The brute rolled his prodigiously muscled shoulders and strode into the arena. Fate awaited him within: hell all bottled up in a human shape, as foretold by a little girl who could - he knew - be sending him to an ignoble death.