Book One – Chapter 17

As the shaman changed, so did the air around her.

Yu’s feathers rose all at once.

The air around her had been hollow. Now, it was not.

Something immense had stirred — not with the shifting of earth or the cry of wind, but with a saturation of presence, ancient and terribly patient.

Yu heard it, the slow, inexorable turning of a will vast beyond reckoning. Something vast and sentient had turned its attention toward them, not with movement but in a silence that was so profound it roared in his head.

This entity had never arrived. It had always been here, bound to the shaman, wound around her like a veil of breathless shadow just beyond the edge of perception. Something ancient was now aware, and it had offered to listen.

Yu had recognised it the moment he heard it listen.

And in that hollow silence that had always been claimed, he knew. He knew it in the same impossible way he heard the breath of the mountains and the whispers of rivers and the screaming of sands and the wind’s soft voice through ash and the ghost-hum of dead waters still echoing in long-dry riverbeds. He knew it with the wizard-part of himself, the part turned to all things that had no tongues but spoke to him still, and to all those things that were only voice, and nothing else.

He knew that he heard the silence of a Mountain King.

The shaman extended one hand. “Present your arm.”