“What did you say?” Drakis asked, his eyes going wide.
Twenty feet. Eight more steps.
Drakis lunged forward, pushing his shoulder into Braun’s stomach. The Proxi doubled over the warrior’s shoulder in surprise.
Axes and sword blades alike were raised. Two steps more to strike.
Drakis wheeled with the Proxi over his shoulder and leaped headlong into the fold.
Drakis fell shoulder first against the stone floor. The impact shook the Proxi from his grip. Drakis felt Braun tumble away from him just as the thunderclap of the closing fold shook the air next to him and plunged him into absolute darkness.
Something fell with a dull thud and a resounding clang next to him. Drakis started, rolling quickly away from the sound. Instinctively, he reached to his side, drawing his sword from its leather scabbard, but though his eyes shifted back and forth in anxious anticipation, sight was useless in the total absence of light.
Black is the sightless light smothering. .
Dead to the waking world sighs. .
Dead is the hero. . Dead to all lament. .
Buried past memory here below. .
He was alone with the song.
Drakis’ hand began to shake uncontrollably in the darkness.
“Octian!” Drakis called out, his words swallowed into the black void around him, echoing small and hollow. His fellow warriors had passed through this same fold just a few moments before him. They should have been arrayed all about him with their globe-torches shining.
Yet he crouched in the darkness, and there was no reply to his call.
The wheeling melody surged forward in his mind once more. Drakis quickly muttered a prayer to Rhon-god of war-and drew enough courage to shout again.
“Octian!”
The gentle, answering voice coming from so near in the darkness unnerved him with its quiet calm.
“I am here, Drakis.”
The warrior spun around in the dark. “Braun? Is that you?”
Dim blue light grew stronger as he watched, pushing back the smothering black as it brightened. Drakis fixed his eyes and his sanity on the glowing, expanding circle. Drakis’ world settled with each revelation of the brightening sphere. The headpiece, then the shaft of the Timuran Proxi staff that he had followed to victory in every battle of his life emerged from the darkness. Then the bald head now obscured with three days’ growth of gray-flecked hair, the hooked nose and the piercing eyes. .
. . The figures of Impress Warrior dead.