Together, the three emerged from the trees and out across the moonlit meadow beyond. The giant tower of the Clyst measured their progress, its many bridges cutting across the darkness like the skeletal limbs of a colossal spider. Here and there festival fires still burned, illuminating figures huddled in quiet council. The music and laughter of the festival had long since died upon the air, replaced now by a pensive silence.

The remains of James’ robes fluttered pitifully in the breeze, his unsteady feet somehow propelling him on. Despite everything that had happened tonight, it wasn’t fatigue or the lingering pain in his hand that sought to ground him, but the crushing sense of unreality; the intolerable weight of a dream that would never end.

Torrinth limped at his side, diligently observing his progress, ready at any moment to catch him if he fell. The blademaster of Galendar was in obvious pain yet he clasped the Custodian’s Blade firmly to his chest, cradling its fragile weight like that of a newborn child.

If it were not for the presence of that sword, James might have been able to believe those other things had never happened; that he had not destroyed the sacred tree in a blaze of blue flames; that he had not witnessed the monk drop from the sky, toppling Balen’s warriors as though they were nothing but stumbling children…

On impulse, he glanced to his side to see if the monk was still with them. The enigmatic old man had just saved his life for the second time, but it did not prevent James from hoping he had once more returned to his lofty perch upon the summit of the Clyst. His heart quickened when he caught sight of him walking nearby, his dark silhouette cutting a path through the silvered grass like a shadow cut from the night. Quickly, James looked away, unnerved that his continued scrutiny might draw his attention.

Just who was this man who could halt a plunging blade with his bare hands? Whom had dropped more than two thousand feet from the summit of the Clyst, shattering the stone beneath his bare feet like the brittle boards of a rotten floor?

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I think you know who I am, or at least who I was.

James stifled a gasp, suddenly unbalanced by the queer feeling of the monk’s voice echoing inside his mind.

It was I who brought you here.

‘It was you?’ James exclaimed. ‘You brought me to this world?’

The monk grinned in the darkness, the moonlight glinting off the white orbs of his eyes like polished stones.

Not quite. You were summoned to our world by another, but it was I who caught you before you fell.

‘I don’t understand…’ James cried, shaking his head in anguish. ‘You can’t be Perrin! When I saw him in my dream… he was just a boy!’

What you witnessed was of a time many, many turns ago.

The old monk stopped walking. A deep sadness tightened his leathered face as his sightless eyes gazed up at the two moons that with each passing moment drifted further and further apart.

‘James…’ the monk said, his words at last taking form between his thin lips. ‘It is essential that I gain your trust. If you are not overly tired and willing to listen, I will tell you the story of the boy who was taken into the mountains, the boy who became the man you see before you today.’

James looked to Torrinth as though for permission, but his former guardian merely nodded before turning and walking on into the night.

‘This is as good a place as any,’ Kloven-Perrin said, sitting upon the meadow grass where he had halted.

Paralysed for a moment by indecision, James watched his friend limp off into the darkness. As much as he feared and distrusted the strange man sitting at his feet, he realised that at last he might find some explanation for the torments he had suffered these past weeks. Gingerly, he lowered himself beside the blackened husk of the old man and waited.

For the longest time the monk remained silent, only the quiet whisper of the breeze through the grass marking the passage of time. But when at last he did speak, he used the words that once more crept inside James’ mind like warm treacle dripped from a spoon.

I thought that I could escape them… but I was wrong…