Storm Breaking

'An'desha blames himself for the loss of the others, especially the Avatars,' the Kaled'a'in had said. 'You must persuade him to walk the Moonpaths, or—or it will be bad for his soul, his heart. I have not been able to persuade him.'

The older man had left it at that, but there was no doubt in Karal's mind that he knew how An'desha had managed to help him through his own crisis of conscience. Altra had seconded the Shin'a'in's request as soon as Lo'isha was off tending to some other urgent problem. After that, how could Karal have possibly refused?

'There wasn't anything you did or didn't do that would have made a difference for the better,' Karal persisted. 'How could there have been? We tried to do more than Urtho could, and it still came out better than we had any reason to expect!'

'I should have known about those other weapons,' An'desha said, his voice muffled by his sleeve. 'I should have known what they'd do when they started to fail.'

'How?' Karal asked acerbically. 'Those were Urtho's weapons, not Ma'ar's! How could you have known what they were going to do? Foresight? When not even the Foreseers were able to give us decent advice?'

One red eye emerged from the shelter of An'desha's sleeve. 'But—' he began.

'But, nothing,' Karal said with great firmness. 'You aren't a Foreseer, and you don't have Urtho's memories, you have Ma'ar's. And if you'd go walk the Moonpaths, you'd find out from the leshy'a that I'm right.'

An'desha winced, blanching, which looked quite interesting though Altra's eyes. 'I can't—' he began.

Karal fixed him with what he hoped was a stem gaze, even though he couldn't feel his eyes responding the way they should. 'That sounds exactly like what someone who's been thrown says,' he replied. 'What do you do when a horse throws you?'

'You get back on,' An'desha said faintly, 'but—'

'You've already used 'but' too many times.' Karal patted his elbow. 'Try saying, 'all right,' instead.'

'All right,' An'desha replied obediently, then realized he'd been tricked. Karal wasn't about to let him off.

'Go,' he said, and got unsteadily to his feet again. Instead of looking down, he sensed that his head was in a position of looking out, echoing Altra's head-posture. 'Go walk the Moonpaths. I want you to, Lo'isha wants you to. That ought to be reason enough, right there.'

Having finished what he had to say, and having partly tricked An'desha into agreement, he left and returned to his own pallet, far from the others, where he sank down onto it, exhausted by holding back his own emotions, and cried himself to sleep.

'Karal.'

He looked around, startled. He wasn't in his bed in the Tower anymore; he was standing in the middle of—of nowhere he recognized. There was opalescent mist all around him, and a path of softly glowing silver sand beneath his feet. Not only that, but it was his own eyes that he was looking out of, not Altra's.

Where was he? This wasn't like any dream he had ever had before. In fact, it was rather like the descriptions that An'desha had given him of the Moonpaths. But that was a place that only Shin'a'in could reach, wasn't it?

Wasn't it?

'Of course not,' said that voice again, teasingly familiar. 'Anyone can come here, they just see it differently. But Altra thought that after all you've been through, you probably wouldn't want to visit Sunheart for a little.'

This time, when he turned around, there was someone there—or rather, four someones, two male and two female. Two of them, the ones standing hand-in-hand, with vague bird-forms swirling about them, he recognized immediately.

'Tre'valen!' he exclaimed 'Dawnfire! But—'

'Oh, heavens, you didn't think we'd burned up or some such nonsense, did you?' Dawnfire laughed. 'It takes more than a storm of mage-energy to destroy a spirit! We just lost the parts of ourselves that held us in your world, that's all.'

'You did?' said someone else, incredulously, 'That's all?' Karal found, without any surprise at all, that An'desha had somehow come to stand beside him. 'But, why didn't you come back when I called you then?'