The women told stories until they drifted to sleep one by one. And in the morning it was not darkness that fell from the sky, but brightness.

  The suns were high but the endless canopy of the forest kept the light out. The thick humid air stank of mule and sweat. The crying of babies and children and the brutalized never ceased. Even so, the cicadas attempted to make it a song. A song of sorrow and pain, but one worth dancing to. Guo took a seat in a mule pulled wagon, unclasped her weathered greygreen cloak, and played her boneflute with her only hand through the weeks that followed. Her white hair and ancient face like a beacon to the refugees who circled her wagon every night to hear her stories. The cicadas sang high and piercing while the human cries were discordant and tumultuous, but her boneflute stitched the two together beneath the stifling heat.

  Beleaguered and pained. Most walked but every wagon was full of either people or possessions or goods. Men with spears or rusted swords were scattered throughout. Some hardly more than children while others tiptoed towards Death.

  When they broke through the forest, the undulating river valley opened before them for miles and miles, and in the distance was the Dragonroad, shining black in the light of the suns. The mighty westward flowing Raulver met the southern flowing Raulumina and the shining black Dragonbridge crossed the mile of raging currents.

  As the train of refugees spilled into the open grasslands, they came to a halt. There were gasps of relief, for many feared the forest and the mysteries it contained. Guo stood in the wagon and squinted through the daylight to the people approaching the refugees on horseback kicking up dust.

  She hefted her pack and hurried to the front of the caravan, pushing through the refugees who carried all that they possessed with them. Her pack, a rectangular wooden crate with two leather straps, bounced painfully against her back. At the head of the caravan, she found Flok, Flod, and Brod leaning on their spears, the blades notched, the wood weathered to the color of mud. They wore no armor and stank of the road, their clothes worn and torn and all they had. Tall and skeletal thin, they stood straighter than Guo had ever seen them.

  “What is it?” Guo spoke in heavily accented Bauruk, the language of the refugees, of the Dragon Empire. It was coarse against her tongue and stuck in her throat.

  Flok raised an eyebrow to her, “Chose to stay with us, auntie? Looks like our Wolf’s coming to meet us.” His voice was thick and husky.

  The two on saddleless horses slowed to a stop before the caravan. A bald Bauruken woman with thick grey scars on her dark face running from above her left ear to beneath her right ear. The scars tore through her lips and nose. The skin of her scalp was discolored and rippled as if it had been removed and poorly replaced. She held her head high scanning the mass of refugees still snaking their way through the forest. Beside her was a woman with copper skin and blondish green hair carrying a long halberd and a lute made of bones strapped to her back.

  A cloud of dust raced across the valley in the distance. A thousand horses and riders heading south along the Dragonroad.

  Guo smiled wide revealing small sharp teeth. She spoke in an ancient language, “It’s her.”

  Flok said, “What?”

  The two women on horseback smiled wide and the bald woman waved her hands to them. Brown leather straps crisscrossed her torso over bare flesh.

  The refugees touched their fingertips to lips and stretched their palms up and forward, bowing deeply before her.

  The bald woman spoke to her companion who laughed, then raised her voice for all to hear. Her accent was musical but her voice was harsh, “Welcome, friends. I take it you know who we are, so I’ll not bother to introduce ourselves. Before I take you in, point out any Arcanes among you.”

  Muttering broke through the caravan and shouting and pushing followed.

  Flok cleared his throat and stepped forward, “Auntie—”

  The scarred woman said, “Not your aunt, old man.”

  Flok bowed with his hands covering both of his ears. “We have no Arcanes with us, Mother.”

  “Not your mother either.” She leaned back on her horse and turned to the other woman, “When’s the last time someone came without offering me an Arcane to flay?” Her smile was wide, bisected and gnarled by the thick scars.

  The blonde woman laughed.

  The scarred woman turned back to the refugees, “All of you! Call me Luna or call me nothing. You’re free now. We’ll have no titles or honorifics. Now, if you have no Arcanes—if you do, I’ll find them and rip even the vision of Angels from their eyes—come with me.”

  Guo nearly danced after Luna. Downhill and overhill, she hurried to keep pace with the front of the caravan, but the suns wore her down. She slowed, wiped the sweat from her eyes, and marched on, falling into the midst of the refugees.

  The day wore on hot and thick. Children cried and women breathed heavily as they carried them along. The mothers draped tattered shawls over their babes to keep them cool and safe from the blistering suns while others kept them at their breasts nursing. Anything to keep them from screaming. The countless callused feet of the refugees kicked up dust. Flies swarmed and buzzed round the mule and human droppings.

  Guo panted, spinning her boneflute in her only hand. A young woman came beside her and put a hand under her elbow for support.

  “Thank ye, child.” Guo’s voice was breathy as she leaned into the support.

  The woman’s hand was firm, and her eyes focused ahead. She touched her fingertips to her lips and nodded to Guo.

  “We found her,” Guo smiled and wiped sweat from her brow.

  “Quiet, auntie.” The woman said.

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  Guo listened and welcomed the aid until she caught her breath.

  “I am all right now, child.”

  The woman kept her hand where it was, “She’s real. She’s really real.” Her voice held a hushed desperation, as if all of this were a dream, as if needing confirmation.

  “Yes. I have searched long for her.”

  “Thought you were looking for a Forester among the refugees.”

  Guo blinked, then laughed. “Word spreads fast, yes? I thought I was.”

  The woman smiled, “The stories you tell at night pass through the caravan during the day. It’s like—have you seen the sea?”

  “Many of them.”

  The woman raised an eyebrow and waited for Guo to add to that comment. When the words did not come, she said, “It reminds me of waves. You tell a group of us a story and it creates a wave that spreads through the rest. By the time it passes, you have another story moving through us. We all know you now, auntie. Likely no one will say it, but you helped keep us sane through those weeks in the forest.”

  Guo patted the woman’s hand, “It was nothing, child.”

  “No, it was a great deal. We were afraid. You’ve no idea how afraid we were, running for our lives from the Empire, trying to avoid the Dragonroads in case marauders or—worse—soldiers came upon us. We thought the forest was cursed. An evil place full of demons and monsters.”

  “Hearing it is full of gods is better?”

  The woman laughed, a fragile tenuous noise, “The only gods we’ve ever heard of don’t seem so different from monsters, but you made them beautiful. I hope to see one worth seeing.”

  Guo scratched at her nose with her boneflute, “It is a terrible and beautiful thing to see a god.”

  The woman swallowed, “Auntie, all my life the Dragon Emperor’s been more than a leader. He’s been like a father to us all. Almost like a god. He was emperor before my own parents were born. He spoke and the world turned. He snapped his fingers and the suns danced. He was who we were. The heart and soul of Bauruk made flesh. The last of the true Dragonlords. You know his son never rode? Word was that he was afraid, so all our hopes fell to the grandson, the only surviving heir. The dragons won’t even speak to him, so he threw himself into this new god come out the forest. God of creation, though she brings as much Death as any other god I heard of. The Dragon Emperor was gonta build a Dragonroad to her temple in the middle of the forest. The first in a thousand years or more. My own brother was signed on to help with the construction. The birthplace and mausoleum for the Dragon Emperor’s god, the Black Dragon.” She sighed, “I watched the new emperor bleed his own grandfather in the streets. Saw the last Dragonlord reaching to the dragonstone statues of his ancestor while his life bled out. Watched the greatest authority in the world butchered like a pig by his own son. If gods are as bad as all that, you can keep them. But, if not,” she moved her lips, searching for words, but found none.

  “I am sorry, child.”

  She swallowed, “That’s why most don’t talk about where we come from or who we were before we joined this Deathmarch into the forest. We were damn afraid. Afraid we’d die in the forest. Get raped or murdered or robbed on the way. Or worse, that we’d come all this way and find nothing. Just more dragons. The dead emperor’s Black or the new emperor’s Green, sister of the Black.”

  “How do ye reckon time here?”

  “What?”

  “The years. Do ye count them?”

  She shrugged, “Depends on who you ask. Bauruk numbers them by the Twilight. Lots of the Foresters just count seasons if they bother to count time at all. Eight seasons to a year. That’s the easiest way to tell where people are from. Besides the accent.”

  Guo nodded, “Ye follow the Sorean calendar.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Lapsa reckons time as ye do as well, but Yuli count two years to one of yours. The Twilight comes every other year for them. Tell me, child, how old are ye?”

  “My name’s Piatra, auntie. I’ve seen ten Twilights.”

  “So young to see so much.”

  “That’s life, yah.”

  Guo sighed, “That it could be kinder.”

  Piatra snorted. “Maybe it will be now that we’ve found her. They say she takes all kinds and it looks like she’ll take us. Young, old, sick, poor—don’t matter. She’s gonta take us all. I hear the city she’s built is made of light and music. A safe place. Free from chaos.”

  “If only such a place could exist.”

  “Look at what just the dream of her has done.” Piatra gestured to the crowds before and behind them. “Bauruk’s been an empire for a long, long time but we’ve always been a people divided. Likely you know that better than most. But she’s united us all together. We got followers of the Green and Black Dragons here but all of that don’t matter no more. It’s the dream she’s promised. A Wolf to save us from the fire of dragons. To give us a sense of peace for the first time in years.”

  The suns beat down on them as they trudged through the thigh-high grass. Guo told Piatra stories of the distant past during the hours it took to reach and cross the Dragonbridge and enter the vast encampment filled with yurts and the stalls of a developing trading town nestled against the two rivers. Piatra hurried ahead to meet their savior.

  Luna waited at the far end of the Dragonbridge and welcomed the refugees individually, hearing their names. The woman beside her plucked at the sixteen strings of her bonelute lazily.

  “Welcome, ancient one.” Luna smiled horrifically wide and the bonelute player laughed. Luna’s lips and nose mutilated by the scars puckering her flesh.

  Guo laughed with them while touching her lips and bowing. Straightening up, she played a quick melody on her boneflute against the lazy plucking of the bonelute. The bonelutist sat up straight and said, “Where’d you get that?” Her accent turned the harsh Bauruken sounds into music.

  Guo smiled at Luna, her lips parted to show her pointed teeth, “We have much to talk about, Dragoneater.”

  Luna took a step forward, squaring her shoulders, scowling, “Who are you?”

  Guo threw her head back and laughed. Her mouth opened inhumanly wide, her teeth growing longer and sharper in her head before shrinking once more to fit behind her closed lips. “An ancient one who has journeyed exceptionally long to meet you. Call me Guo.”

  Luna cocked her head to the side, “A Yuli demon?” She turned to the bonelutist who laughed. “What?” Luna said.

  Guo raised an eyebrow at the bonelutist, “Do ye know me?”

  The bonelutist strummed chords and sang in an ancient language, her voice low and sonorous.

  From higher than high

  brought lower than low,

  the Ren Shen showed where old gods go.

  Beneath the sea!

  Beneath the sea!

  Oh! what a dream to go

  to the bright body brought low!

  Guo’s jaw hung open while the bonelutist played on, smiling wide and encouraging Guo to take over. Her eyebrows danced at Guo, “Come on, ancient one!”

  Finally, Guo sang, her voice delicate and high.

  Lian Tiantang sang a broken tune,

  Gods all gone!

  Gods all gone!

  Feng Fengshen, what did you know?

  Let the ocean rise!

  Hear the sky’s cries!

  Ren Shen dies!

  Ren Shen dies!

  The bonelutist finished with a flourish and clapped her hands.

  “What the shit,” Luna said. “You know her, Ogma?”

  Ogma strummed playfully, “Seems like legends flock to you, Luna. She’s an extinct immortal.”

  Guo laughed, “As I said, we have much to discuss.”

  Luna’s eyebrows came low and her jaw set. “Meet me at the tavern on the hill at twilight. It’s called Reuban’s though there’s not been a Reuban in many years. I need to welcome these weary ones to their new home.”

  Ogma watched her go and sang another ancient song of the city of Gu and the folly of Lian Tiantang.

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