V
THE SLEEPWALKER
1
here was a wilderness, and Cal was dust in the wilderness, and his hopes and dreams were dust in the wilderness, all driven before the same unforgiving wind.
He had tasted Uriel’s condition, before its healing. He’d shared the spirit’s loneliness and desolation, and his frail mind had been snatched up into the void and left there to die. He knew no way out. In the final arithmetic his life was a wasteland: of fire, of snow, of sand. All of it, a wasteland, and he would wander there ‘til he could wander no more.