Strange days. Cryptic messages pinned to walls and words. Rumors of destruction and death. Ghosts in the guild.

I am awake beyond the dark and dawn. Wild music soaks through the wall, bones hewn from the forest and reunited with the earth. I and my staff are both propped against the wall and connected to the rhythm. It's good to lean against things, to take the weight from feet and spine and shoulders, and recline as lazily as any old stone in a field. To wait for the music to end, or a new song begin.

Spiders stalk the summer-sweet grasses. Motionless, I am unnoticed. Leaf-dark and tangle of shadows. My bare heels smear yellow flowers, for I've propped them in a bed of butter-bright color. My toes point at the sky.

Stars sleep, silver light swallowed by the Sunrifter's nascent glory. I tilt my pack towards me, a languid motion that still startles and scatters the spiders. A gem tumbles free, and glows against the green. It is the last of token of my hunt for gold. I'm keeping it forever.

Trinkets and treasures and memories, all stuffed into my pack. Books and boots and a borrowed stone, a shell that sometimes sings, a parchment scarred by demon's teeth and dirtied by a demon's touch, a luck-pouch filled with silver rings and water gems, timeless oceans trapped and without tide. Do they rage within the stone tomb and earthen shroud? I have given them moons for company. Hollow moons.

Ribbons of dreams and rivers of thought, all spun into a maelstrom.

People come and go, and sometimes they return. I don't know what to think of death. Bitter belief wars with denial. Racicot said that some people must fear death as a true thing, a forever cessation of life. That was long before he offered the possibility of Thorne's death. Words to scatter thoughts like spiders, but only if death matters.

It matters to the spiders.

Tisran returned. I didn't question it. I never considered the possibility of her death. She disappears for seasons, but I often see her when I'm dreaming, and we speak of silly things, nonsense utterance, inconsequential as a raven's flight across the sky, or a scattering of stones upon the ground. When she and I hunted the Caves of Night, we were neither of us ghosts.

I'm not so certain about Thorne Blackrose.