30

You steel your nerves and step through the rift. The good news is you're not immediately incinerated. The bad news…

For a moment everything seems stable. You're in a short, wide tunnel, the village behind you, Dr. Sabbatine's workshop ahead. But when you step forward, the workshop slides away, like in a nightmare. A second step, and the workshop skews sideways. The doctor looks at you in alarm; you hear her shouting, but it's only static. Crooked runes crawl across the walls of this un-place, and you feel yourself tumbling!

You're falling through empty sky, below the gray mountain, above the Ziggurat! You see it below, surrounded by palm trees and swamps half converted to paddies, but it's getting bigger quickly! You see Stralchus atop it, surrounded by strange apparatuses and shifting patterns. Are those Icons? The patterns move suddenly toward you, as if to warn you or to plead for help, and then–

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This isn't

It is summer, but everything is gray: the wooden ship, the slate-colored sea wreathed in fog, and on the far horiz

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at an end.

You have already said farewell to your companions, and now find yourself among unf

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in your ungloved hand. A young man—a merchant, you guess—notices what you're holding. Smiling, he holds up his own version before tucking the paper back into his waistcoat.

"A soldier, hmm?" he says. He sizes you up and tries to peer under your broad hat. "And not a local, it appears. Where are you from?" He regards you for another second, then says, "You speak English, right?"