On the Sea of Meneanor, a storm touched them.

Achamian awoke from another of the dreams, hugging himself.  The ancient wars of his sleep seemed tangled with the blackness of his cabin, the pitching floor, and the chorus of thundering water.  He lay huddled, shivering as he fumbled to sort out the real from the dream.  Faces haunted the blackness, cramped in astonishment and horror.  Bronze-armoured forms struggled across the distance.  Smoke smeared the horizon, and rising, knotted like branches of black iron, was a dragon.  Skafra...

A thunderclap.

On the deck, braced against the sheets of rain, the Nroni sailors wailed, supplicated themselves to Momas, Aspect of storm and sea.  And God of dice.

The Nroni Nroni merchantman weighed anchor outside the harbour of Sumna, the ancient centre of the Inrithi faith.  Leaning against a weathered rail, Achamian watched the pilot's boat row toward them through the swells.  The great city was indistinct in the background, but he could discern the structures of the Hagerna, the vast compound of temples, granaries, and barracks that formed the administrative heart of the Thousand Temples.  In its centre rose the legendary bastions of the Junriüma, the holy sanctum of the Tusk.

He could feel the tug of what should have been their grandeur, but they seemed mute in the distance, dumb.  Just more stone.  For the Inrithi, this was the place where the heavens inhabited the earth.  Sumna, the Hagema, and the Junriüma were far more than geographical sites; they were bound up in the very purpose of history.  They were the hinges of destiny.

But they were eggshells of stone to Achamian.  The Hagerna called to men unlike himself, men who could not, he supposed, escape the weight of their time.  Men like his former student Inrau.

Whenever Inrau had discussed the Hagerna, he would speak as though the God himself had laid the keel of his words.  Achamian had felt more than faintly alienated by this talk, as so often happened when confronted by another's excessive enthusiasm.  There would be a momentum to Inrau's tone, a mad certainty that could put cities, even nations, to the sword, as though his righteous joy could be attached to any act of madness.  Here again was reason why Maithanet should be so deeply feared: to possess this momentum was disease enough, but to be a carrier...  There was pause for thought.

Maithanet carried a plague whose primary symptom was certainty.  How the God could be equated with the absence of hesitation was something Achamian had never understood.  After all, what was the God but the mystery that burdened them all?  What was hesitation but a dwelling-within this mystery?