Night Seventeen since Being Called at Maira Mór
 
Bonfire smoke ascended from a cone of firelight, somewhere between Maira and Sopór. Blos coughed until his eyes watered. He had climbed up the impressions of steel plates on a huge shoulder, buried into the ground; on its rise he squatted and watched for Highdark over the woods. The hour that is called Highdark fell on the eighth night of each week in the Dusk, and only on clear nights. It was almost always overcast. Two other columns of bonfire smoke rose from the other side of the aspen woods, flickering against the endless biome of Winter, where a forgotten thoroughfare drove.
 
“They should be here by now,” he murmured again.
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Blos balanced the swordstaff of Med on his knees, and he side-eyed the Dusk beyond the edge of the cone of firelight. Their small bonfire spewed smoke below him. His breathing slowed. He sank into his crouch until his thighs burdened. Knotted pain still throbbed in the twin gashes, half healed, down his side. And Blos looked past the sword until his periphery imploded, entering a state of mind for seeing things differently. Dream-bruise burst upwards from that swordstaff, each pink trails of keratin, knuckled and twisting; pink, ivy-like simulacra. They marked the way to Blos’s personal, sulphur Moon, within and above too. He drew a slow, cold breath in. Within that state, he could hear the bladed legs of his lord, a crack shooting out as each blade sank into the ice—all vibrating along the dream-bruise. The swordstaff of Med shook each step. Held, chilly breath jack-knifed in Blos’s chest. “And remember the siege of Ybdenneis,” his lord had said. “Remember it, and then I will be with you.”