The world around Eathel was a flurry of action. Retainers scurried to stanch the bleeding coming from their young lord’s leg.

Serixiphina returned to him, as she sometimes did, in a dream.

Thought thee lost back there, man, said Sera.

She leaned into the ‘man’ part of the jape. One of her recurring characters was a man equal parts hapless and bumbling. This pastiche served as her general way of impersonating military men, and really men in general.

Whatever the joke was, it was on men.

It was strange. In this vision, he could see more form to her. She was a compound of shadowy curves. But one curve was bright, and right where a woman's mouth would be if one stood beside him. A glowing crescent of moonlight, that grew brighter, but then waxed and then waned with the rise and fall of her voice.

No one else ever saw these things but he; no one else ever seemed to hear her voice; and he had learned better than to tell of her to anyone else.

Her canini¹ were more prominent than her other teeth.

Though they were enveloped by darkness all around, the space in his vision occupied by Serixiphina was somehow a deeper dark; it looked like peering into some impossibly endless chasm, a void aphotic.

Where were you? He asked.

She grinned. That smile the color of pale moonlight.

You left me when I needed to talk to you. When I needed a word of comfort, where were you? he asked.

Wherever I wanted to be, said she.

Serixiphina said the words with such finality. Her delivery thereof left no space for any countermand.

She was a pool of nocturne dye that glowed deep indigo.

She was a cackling performer, and she distended to reach up and down, forever, in both ways.

The colors of the stars and the night moved as though inspired with life themselves

Then her smile was moonlight no longer. It was the now a flash of lightning. And her voice was a blast of thunderhead.

This is what it had been like when she first showed herself into his heart so many nights ago.

And this is what the ghost in his mind said:

There are three secrets I will tell you.

Each one when the time is right,

and you will know them all as true

all shadows they, undone by light.

you will not die before such time

as have I relayed these facts in full.

I have the way ahead in mine eyes,

but after that a darkness pulls

Then Serixiphina told Eathel what would happen and how things would be.

She told him the things that would be done to him, and the things that he would do to others.

And Eathel saw that all of it was true and he wept.

Even though he was in a dream, Eathel curled himself into the shape of a baby in its mother, and sobbed with renting anguish.