Book One – Chapter 1

It did not help that he smelt the fire. It was old fire, as you sometimes found it lingering in ancient dwarven temples. There was no smoke, not in any ordinary sense, but the air carried a scorched mineral bitterness that gathered at the back of his throat and then got stuck there. Breathing became harder with every step. Heat pressed against his face in blunt waves; not the persistent oppression of the sunburnt desert, but something striking from behind the dune, striking and recoiling and striking ever again. It reached this far; the violence that thrashed against whatever held it beyond the ridge.

He heard it too. A deep, reverberating roar rolled across the dark rise, repeatedly broken by sharp, concussive blasts. The sound did not merely travel through the air. It entered the stone, the glass, and the soles of his boots. The broken structures trembled with it. They were dead conduits, voicing the violence that had broken them, or perhaps made them.

Yves could not see past the crest. Through Second Sight, however, he caught compressed bursts of light on the far side. He recognised them only just. As a child, he had lost the ability to perceive light fragments in their dispersed state. Now, his Second Sight showed him nothing but the faintest of flickers, blurred beyond recognition, and even those appeared only when enough fragments were forced together to rupture in tightly concentrated bursts, as they did here and now. From those compromised impressions, and from the roar rolling over the dune, Yves understood what raged beyond the rise.