Their Valeer had been recognized and captured by Legionnaires in the chaos and carnage of their flight from Azure. If Semon hadn't held onto a handful of 'nails as a precautionary measure, things would have been bad at best after that. So many horrible dooms to choose from, too, if they hadn't managed to get through that Thorn at the heart of burning Port Villach: death to an arbitrary Legionnaire's spear, hard, hunted life as refugees somewhere in a remote Azure fishing village, or enslavement with the rest of Villach's population as the Ancients seized the beautiful blue beaches and bountiful fisheries of Azure for themselves.

Or, most likely, capture, recognition, and a slow, public torture. A chance to become the martyr of martyrs for the Mother's Faith. Better an anonymous death from a stray javelin and rebirth as a rotter. Hiding on the countryside as fugitives while the Legions pillaged and razed would have been a blessing compared to either.

A miracle indeed they'd managed to get through to the Vale at all. He muttered a prayer to the Mother, thanking her for sparing him from such miserable fates. She clearly had some great, mysterious plan for him yet.

After fleeing the desolate carnage around Libriam's Thorn and as he and Hue poled their stolen boat towards the thick black cloud of smoke rising from where the Annalis compound was supposed to be, Semon realized they may have escaped from one doom only by leaping headlong into another. Sweat soaked his once-yellow, torn, and soot-stained robes as he swatted at a cloud of stinging insects swarming up from a clump of swamp grass they poled past.

"I'm in a miserable, reeking swamp, thank you very much," Sadar mumbled to himself. The strange boy looked as hungry, hot, and bite-welted as the rest of them; confirmed by him complaining about it for the last two hours to his Twine.

Only the dusa seemed unfazed by the heat and bugs. The strange, silver-haired man lay on his back at the prow of the boat watching his hair dart and flick to murder the bugs by the dozen.

"Want to take a turn poling yet?" Semon asked Strygen for the fifth time. He'd learned the hard way that the dusa hadn't accompanied himout of a sense of obedience to the First Disciple of the Mother, but his own inscrutable reasons. Reasons that generally precluded him from taking orders or pitching in, it seemed. His bizarre form of combat prowess had saved their lives on any number of occasions, so Semon figured he should be grateful, but as his stomach rumbled, his arms and back ached, and they drew ever closer to what looked like just more devastation instead of the civilization they hoped for, Semon wasn't in any mood to be grateful.

At least the four-legged stork-like god wading through the marsh a halfway to the horizon's' setting sun provided something to distract him. Watching the towering beast wade the shallow waters, then darting down to catch a writhing crocodile in a beak twice their boat's length gave him a strange sense of peace. At least something in the Book was still continuing on as if everything wasn't coming apart at the seams.

"I see a tiny dark figure racing across the top of the water," Sadar said. His voice grew loud enough that, if they hadn't traveled with the lad for all these months, Semon might have thought the kid was talking to them. It proved to be just excitement at seeing something different after a long, hot day poling through Libriam's endless marsh.

Semon looked the direction the boy stared off to, wondering if the kid had wandered off into one of the flights of fancy and philosophizing he was periodically prone to. If Ocyl had planted him as a spy to keep tabs on Semon, he'd chosen a source who spent ten times more time daydreaming out loud or debating himself over topics that would have confounded most academics five times his age as he did actually talking about whatever was going on around him.

This time, however, the lad wasn't making anything up.

"Why did you stop?" Hue grumbled from his place poling at the front of the boat. Even the Vibrant's seemingly-boundless optimism crushed down under the weight of their travels. "I'm not doing this on my own again."

Semon simply pointed, for he couldn't find words to describe what he was witnessing.

A human-sized figure comprised of darkness so empty and devouring it hurt Semon's eyes to look at bounded across the surface of the water fast enough to outrun the fastest ConMach courier. Each step sent a spraying plume of water launching into the air as high as a Jadeye tenement's roof.

"The Aj," Semon murmured in horrified awe. "Nothing else it could be. So the rumors of its awakening are true."

Hue stopped poling, Strygen sat up, and they all drifted slowly towards the Annalis' docks. None of them noticed.

The bird-god saw the Aj coming and tilted its head as if trying to determine what manner of food rushed towards it. Its piercing cry hurt Semon's ears even from the distance; some sort of territorial call to warn the Aj perhaps. The Aj took no heed and instead increased the speed and length of its already-impossible stride.

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As the distance between the two immortals rapidly vanished, Semon found himself clenching his robes.

"True then," Strygen said, a hint of sadness in his voice. "Aj real. Aj awake. Aj slay gods. Aj kill verses."

Hue looked away from the spectacle, dropping to a squat and hugging his knees. His coloration changed faster than usual as he sobbed, the colors flowing down his body in somber shades.

Not content to wait for its strange challenger, the bird-god unleashed another piercing cry and charged towards the Aj. Each step of its somehow-majestic gait hurled up walls of water that partially obscured it from view as it advanced and thrashed a riotous swell in its wake.

When they came within javelin-throwing range, Aj hurtled from the water with enough force to geyser an enormous plume of water behind it. Moving faster than Semon would have thought its immense size would allow, the god exploded out of the water in reply, wide-spanning wings unfurling and crashing down against the water as its legs compressed and launched it at its tiny intruder.

For a moment that felt embedded in eternity, three figures on a slender boat watched the distance between god and god-slayer shrink to nothing.

"By the Mother," Semon muttered, wanting to look away from the terrible spectacle but unable to force himself.

"Ascen save us," the dusa muttered.

For once, Semon didn't correct him.

The two ancient beings collided in an explosion of force, feathers, blood, and viscera. The god's long neck snapped sideways like a whip. A hunk of beak the size of their boat arced off with a wild spin. Then everything vanished in a veil of feathers, water, and blood as the god crashed down into the marsh then slid in a sluicing tsunami the length of several Jadeye city blocks.

It took several seconds for the sound of the impact to reach them. A shock wave rippled across the water to rock their boat and erupt a thousand fen birds into the air in a cacophony of startled squawks and cries. The sound distorted with distance, but comprised mostly of a sickening crunch, a sharp cry, and a crack-whoosh of compressed air and water.

Despite missing half its beak, one eye, and most of the feathers on its neck and upper breast, the god clawed itself from the muck and unleashed another hateful cry. A ways away, periodically vanishing from view as drifting clouds of feather, mist, and a churning confusion of waves, the Aj stood waist-deep in the churning waters, unharmed and facing it serenely. As the god thundered towards it to exact revenge, the Aj remained motionless until the god was almost upon it.

In a blur of motion another explosion of water, the Aj darted aside as the god's broken beak speared down. The force of the Aj's motion carried it on a horizontal leap to connect a kick with one of the god's legs. Semon winced in spite of himself as the leg shattered and sent the god crashing down again into the muck. Several seconds later, the booming crack of the impact reached the boat.

Sadar ceased muttering to himself, looking away and covering his ears while Semon and even the implacable dusa flinched at the intensity of the sound. Hue's sobs briefly entered Semon's sphere of attention before he focused again on the awful combat resolving in the golden light of the setting sun.

This time the god tried lashing out with a kick as Aj approached. Again the Aj proved too fast. It spun away from the path of the jabbing talons to land in a squat momentarily before hurtling itself at the god again. Another limb sundered under the force of the Aj's blows and for a third time the god crashed into the mire.

With a soul-wrenching cry part pain, part confusion, and part anger, the god unfurled its wings again began to beat against the water's surface with enough force to churn huge waves large enough to tilt and spin the boat when they finally crossed the vast distanced between them. The Aj had disappeared entirely from sight. For a moment Semon thought the god might escape.

Then the Aj arced up from beneath the immense stork, striking the god's wing at the joint where it married to the god's torso. The final flap of the god's wings combined with the shearing power of the Aj's strike nearly tore the gods wing off completely. The god crashed back down with a thundering slap against the waters, the waves produced this time nearly capsizing the boat even from their remove.

By the time Semon and Strygan managed to stabilize the craft, the god lay out in the muck, it's once pristine, white feathers now stained with mud and blood. It struggled a few times to rise, but its mangled limbs could not support its immense mass. The Aj strode towards it again relentlessly. Mercilessly.

The god cried out a final time, an ancient cry of sorrow and pain that broke Semon's heart and left everyone in the boat weeping and shaking. Then it seemed to accept its doom, laying its head in the water and watching the Aj approach with one eye. When it reached the god, the Aj rested a hand on the god's neck for a moment, a gesture that seemed to convey sadness or perhaps comfort to the maimed beast.

Then the Aj vanished in a cloud of vaporized water as the raw speed of its final attack cracked into the side of the god's skull. When the mist cleared, the Aj stood a respectful distance back from the mangled ruin of what had been the god's head.

A solemn pause. The Aj bowed to the slain god. Then it turned away.

Through it all, the Aj remained unblemished, untouched, un-dirtied by any hint of gore or muck.

At first it walked, then jogged, then gathered increasing speed until it vanished beyond the horizon trailing a spray of water glinting like gold dust in the sunlight.

Semon was grateful for the darkness removing the god from their sight. Of all the horrors he'd witnessed in his long life, and especially since leaving Jadeye, the sacrilege he'd just witnessed seared not just in his mind's eye, but into his soul. He thought he felt a piece of himself die with the god. Perhaps it was only his imagination, but the sun's light seemed dimmer, the air colder, the birds quieter. As if the verse itself mourned in preparation for its own death.

When they finally reached the smoldering remains of the Annalis and Semon pried his stiff old bones out of the boat and onto the docks, he just wanted to sleep. Between the days without food, hour after hour poling through a fetid swamp, layers of welted bug bites, and the reality-shaking desecration of what they'd just witnessed, Semon felt weary and tired to his core.

While the dusa held the boat, Hue shimmered and disappeared to go scout ahead. As was their established routine. Semon turned wearily back to where Sadar still stood near the craft's rear, staring off into the darkness towards where the god lay dead.