Owlknight

so faint that he had to clear his senses again and refocus. He fed it a wisp of power to reenergize it and make it more easily recognizable for what it was.

He had just found a possible first trace - the first sign - of his parents’ fate!

He hardly slept at all that night; only good sense and the need to replenish the energy he’d spent kept him quiet after he’d burst out with his news to his traveling companions.

Knowing he would not sleep, he simply kept quiet and allowed his body to rest, although his mind refused to. He carefully catalogued all the possible things he could find, and made a simple plan for what he would do for each possibility. It was the equivalent of counting sheep - the only equivalent his emotions would tolerate at this point. At least he had the illusion of accomplishing something to comfort him. . . .

He dropped off to sleep from sheer exhaustion at some point, for the next thing he knew, Wintersky was shaking him awake and the stars were fading in the first light of predawn. They packed up the camp together and saddled Jonti and Larak, whose tails were twitching with suppressed energy and excitement. He and Wintersky planned to eat in the saddle, for Wintersky had brought journey-rolls for just that purpose. So they were on their way to the spot he had marked out, riding the dyheli and followed in the trees by their birds before the first hint of sun appeared in the sky.

He rode in a kind of fever, afire to be there, that very moment; wanting to hope, afraid to do anything of the sort. He couldn’t even think, not really; his mind jumped from one thought to another without any real coherence. Kuari picked up his agitation, and flew back and forth, surging ahead of them, then swooping to the rear to check on their backtrail.

If it had been remotely possible to Gate there, Darian would have tried. During the entire interminable journey, his stomach churned, the muscles in his shoulders and neck were in knots, and his mouth was as dry as sand.

Their goal was as clear to outward eyes as it was to his inward senses. It loomed up, enfolded in the white haze of early morning low fog around its base as if it had shrugged off a mantle of clouds. A huge, perfectly spherical piece of gray-white rock, easily the size of his ekele or larger, reared up between the trunks of the trees ahead of them. The moment they spotted it, the dyheli went from their lope into a full-out gallop, leaving Darian and Wintersky to hang onto the handles built into the saddles and stay on as best they could.

The dyheli skidded to a halt as they reached the artifact, hips slewing a little sideways with the momentum of their run as they dug in their hooves, and Darian leaped from the saddle the moment they came to a halt.

The surface of the rock was perfectly smooth. Darian tentatively put out his hand to touch it, and the rock beneath his hand might as well have been perfectly polished by a jeweler.

“It’s amazing. Look at this, Wintersky. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

But he had no thought for how that unusually smooth finish might have happened; what he wanted was on the opposite side of the boulder. He hurried around it to search in the grass at the junction of forest floor and rock. “It’s near here,” Darian murmured. “I felt the sign from near here, on the northwest side of the rock formation. In the soil.”

Wintersky joined him, the two of them kneeling side by side and carefully parting the grass stems, pulling apart the leaf litter and dead vegetation of so many years, sifting through decayed grasses and earth for some tiny artifact -

Then, Darian’s fingers tingled as he touched something small and hard under the surface.

He stopped dead for a moment - then slowly, carefully, probed at the object, fishing it up out of the moist, crumbling soil. His breath caught.

It was a bone; a tiny bone no larger than a thimble.

Now Wintersky took over, pushing Darian aside gently, and hunting carefully and methodically through the loam. Darian went to the dyheli who had followed them to this side of the rock. He pulled his ground-cloth out of his pack and spread it out beside Wintersky, numbly taking what Wintersky dug up, cleaning it meticulously with spit and a handkerchief, and laying it out on the ground-cloth. Of all the things that he had imagined last night, this was not one of them.

“Lay them out in the order I give them to you,” Wintersky ordered after the third tiny bone emerged from the soil. He excavated the site meticulously, using the tip of his knife as well as his fingers, after cutting a square of turf going back to the rock and pulling it up. Darian obeyed him, and piece by piece, bone by bone, a pattern began to emerge.

Bones flared at each tiny joint, then nestled into the longer ones of the same general shape; bones gone gray-white from weathering, the surface cracked and pitted. Wintersky worked more slowly now, and there was a pattern to his excavation as he worked out the direction that the bones lay.

They were toes.

The heel - the ankle bones - then -