Table of Contents

I left the tiny commune around Isra’s well, and I left the serene face of the goddess, and I wandered across the desert to the lands of the West. Somewhere beyond the northern horizon lay the lands of my people, where our gods walked the plains of endless ice in pursuit of the great beasts that ever eluded them, and my dragon-headed ship lay beneath water cold and dark as death. My journey would not lead me back there. I had to press forward. 

Once, my friend Aysulu had told me of the gods of the West. There were seven of them, she had said, like the seven Ascended of Phyreios, though they moved between faith and legend and metaphor and not in the streets of their cities. Isra was one of them. Like her, the others had wind-scarred faces and the faded implements of their stations held in their stone hands: a shepherd’s crook, a set of balancing scales, a scepter, a smith’s hammer. They towered over the dunes, their eyes long since etched away, the human hands who carved their figures buried beneath centuries of sand. At their feet, the remains of their temples crumbled into dust.