Shadowheart

Epilude

The morning sun had pulled itself up above the eastern horizon, and the sky was brightening. Despite the paucity of clouds, a low rumble filled the air, beginning so low that it disturbed only a few slumbering creatures deep in the earth, but then rising until it made the slender branches of the birch trees quiver. Birds burst squawking from their upper reaches and a deer sprinted across the Coast Road.

The rumble grew until it sounded much like thunder, then the air seized, roiled, and cracked like a drover’s whip. Something fell out of the nothingness onto brown Southmarch earth still wet with dew.

For long moments Raemon Beck, merchant’s son, husband, and father, only lay facedown in the middle of the road, frightened by yet another forced, lightning-flash journey from one nowhere to another. At last, when the rumble of his arrival had subsided, he worked up the courage to lift his head. A moment later, he clambered up onto his feet, staring in astonishment to the southeast. There, across a short distance of green bay, stood the familiar towers of Southmarch Castle—some a little the worse for wear, scarred by fire and cannonballs, but unquestionably and recognizably the four cardinal towers and the even taller black-and-white prominence of Wolfstooth Spire.

Beck stared. He touched his own face as if unable to believe both he and Southmarch could exist at the same moment in the same place, then let out a whoop of delight and began a clumsy dance in the middle of the Coast Road. Two more deer, a doe and a fawn, sprang from the underbrush and bounded away into the depths of the woods, terrified by the disheveled man’s capering.

“Praise the gods!” Beck shouted, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Praise all the gods! I’m back! I’m home!”

And then he dropped down to his hands and knees and kissed the ground over and over before he rose, still loudly thanking Heaven, and trotted off in the direction that would at last lead him again to Helmingsea and his family.