A bitter wind blew, flinging up the dust from the dry highway, as Korin Landy dropped off the back of the wain he'd clung to for most of the afternoon and started walking towards the nearby crossroads. The thud as his boots hit dirt did not go unnoticed, however, even above the steady creak of the wain's wheels, and before long the angry red face of the wagoner peered around from the front. "Damn Elf-loving freeloading scum!" he roared back at his heretofore unseen passenger.

"Top of the morning to you!" Korin called back brightly, and gave the wagoner a wave as he moved away down his turn-off, though he made sure his jaunty swagger was too quick to discourage easy pursuit. The wagoner yelled a few more choice insults after him, then turned back with a snarl to stare over the heads of his two draughthorses, rolling away in a cloud of dust to the north.

Korin, for his part, slowed down to enjoy his walk east, though in fact he was not much in favour of exercise and was already hoping for another wain to pass by. He remained in good spirits, however; he was now on the west highway to Port Aieren, the largest port in the world … however isolate by land … and it was only a matter of time, probably just an hour or two, before just such a transport came along.

"Elementals beloved, why does the wind always blow in the West?" he asked the autumn sky as he walked along through the swirling dust, viewing the scrubby bushland on both sides of the highway with typical Midlander distaste. Coming as he did from the country seen as the 'pinnacle of Khactain culture', the 'cradle of human civilisation', he found the empty landscape of the West – and the South, for that matter – decidedly unnerving in its wildness. Even out here, a mere two days from Port Aieren and the shore of the Sea of Shadows, the land had been left to its stunted trees, its dry bushes, its waist- and armpit-high grasses.

"And not a tavern in sight," concluded Korin, rounding off his thoughts with deep tragedy. He moped along down the road for a little while, more for the enjoyment of moping than for being particularly downcast, then decided abruptly that he was now in a proper artistic mood to do some composing. Glancing hopefully down the highway – still no wains – he sighed, moped over to a stone by the road, sat himself down and unslung his cherished little wooden harp from his shoulder.

Feeling properly in touch with the tribulations and sufferings of the heroes of old, since the dust was really starting to bother him, Korin tuned up his instrument, skipped the normally vital step of arranging his golden hair in deference to the wind and thoughtfully started to play chords. What to write a song about? An heroic adventure? No, he'd just spent the last half-hour moping; it wasn't right for a stirring ballad. A pious hymn to the Immortals and Elementals? Korin worked on that for a while, lauding gracious Immortal Fate and lamenting her gloomy brother, Immortal Death, then switched to praising the Elementals: Siannath of the Fire, Amar of the Air, Ord of the Earth, Ilinda of the Water, Silver Fairalyn of Life and Spirit. No divine intervention produced a wain for him, not even when he lingered on Fairalyn's fondness for singers, so he abandoned the topic entirely and pondered a new one, feeling fatalistic.

It took him only a few minutes to decide to write about the sorry state of a world with no wains, so he turned to the old romanticist's pet of 'the end of the world'. How to end the world, he wondered? Fire and lightning and angry, neglected Elementals? Demons and the benighted souls damned to the Void?

"Elves," Korin decided out loud, partly because it was one of the oldest greybeard fears in all of the Greater West, partly because he still felt miffed at the Fire Elven merchant in the Midlands who'd seen him catch hold of his wain. He liked to fancy that he still had a twinge in his side where the merchant had drubbed him with a staff. "Elven invasion. Yes."

None of the human nations drew much distinction between the six very separate Elven races, and Korin saw no need to start. He started to formulate a poignant lament for the inescapable danger of Elves in general. "The glory of the human age is swiftly sweeping by," the bard began dramatically. "The … hmm … something-something sky …"

The steady rumbling of a wain, overlaid with trotting hooves, started Korin's head up suddenly and erased his carefully arranged tragic grimace. Deliverance! Artistic mood gone in a trice, he slung his harp over his shoulder again and ran out into the middle of the road, choosing a charming smile for the encounter that served him well when the wain rolled into view: sitting there in the seat in front was a greying wagoner with a pretty young daughter.

"Morning, young sir," said the wagoner guardedly as he reined in his tired-looking horse, though not too guardedly, since a beaming bandit was not the likeliest thing in the world. His fair-haired daughter maintained her silence and simply stared in the direct, uncompromising way that Western women had, reminding Korin all over again how much he fancied them.

"And a fine morning to you, goodman, and to your lovely daughter!" Korin enthused in return, doubling the width of his beam and giving a flourishing Northern-style bow that rarely failed to impress. "I beg your pardon for belaying you like this, but I am in rather dire straits. My horse, you see, has bolted –" it hadn't – "and I am due to meet with the Lord Governor of Port Aieren in a scanty three days' time –" he wasn't – "so I have rather a desperate need for some generous gentleman such as yourself to …"

"You want a ride? We're not going to the Port, I'm afraid," the wagoner interrupted. "Going to Kayrine. My Brinne's off to her wedding."

Korin beamed brilliantly in silent Brinne's direction, and beamed a little more brilliantly as he noticed the mutinous look on her face at the mention of a wedding. "May Lady Siannath's brightest face illumine the day!" he declared, repeating his Northern bow. "If, indeed, there is any more need for illumination than evinced in your radiant countenance, mistress."

"Yeah, all right, lay it on," said Brinne in typical Western no-nonsense fashion, but her lips twitched.

Definitely a good wain to find. Korin bowed a third time and said to the wagoner, "If you take me as far as you can, goodman, I am sure that I will find another generous man of the West to impose upon."

The wagoner grunted. "All right. Back's empty, just climb in."

Wasting no time, Korin obeyed, and commenced to give the most flowery introduction he could compose at short notice, which was flowery indeed. As always, the news that he was a bard was received with enthusiasm by both of his fellow travellers; the Westerners were no different to Midlanders, Southerners, Northerners or even uncivilised Easterners in their love of the bardic profession, and Korin was – self-admittedly –a bard among bards. Before long he'd produced his harp for Brinne to admire, impressed her father with made-up news about goings-on in the North, and started working on his new lament again for their benefit, though he felt decidedly less inclined to melancholy than before.

Perhaps as a result of his improved mood, the lament proved a little difficult to get out. He carried a tune for it well enough by evening, but seemed to be stuck at just three lines of lyrics, magnificent though he considered them.

"The glory of the human age is swiftly sweeping by;

"The light that lit the crowns of kings is sinking in the sky;

"The swords that sang in human hands are suffering for rust …"

"Well, what rhymes with 'rust'?" prompted Brinne over their campfire that night, leaning inordinately close to pass Korin his plate of corned beef.

"Oh, lots of things," replied Korin smoothly. "It's more the rhythm, and the cadence, than the rhyme. To get a rhyme one simply substitutes letters at the start of the word, though there are a few I would avoid in this case … b, say, or maybe l …"

Brinne gave a dry smile and glanced at her father, who was staring out into the night as he chewed on his beef. "You think you're pretty neat whiskey, don't you, bard?"

"I'm certainly nothing that neat whiskey wouldn't make nicer," the bard quipped, sighing to himself.

"Well." The Westerner smiled less dryly and sat back. "Not much nicer, Korin."

The next line of his lament was still evading Korin the next evening when Brinne's screaming father chased him into the wilderness, having found him and Brinne in the middle of 'gathering firewood'. The scratches and tears that the scrubby bushes had torn in Korin's clothes in flight put him into an excellent mood for lamentation as he staggered into a field of bracken and collapsed, puffing, to wait out the night. Trying to go back to the road again seemed unwise in the dark, let alone trying to return while there was a furious wagoner prowling the highway.

"Bleeding West and its Westerners," he complained, sucking on a scratched finger as he took out his harp. "Cold, dusty, dry nowhere full of unlettered, cousin-marrying churls." After a little more wound-nursing, physical and verbal, he glared around the whispering bracken-field and the ridiculous, tangled, half-size trees around it, then began to play, plucking the plangent notes and singing the meagre few lines of his song.

"The glory of the human age is swiftly sweeping by;

"The light that lit the crowns of kings is sinking in the sky;

"The swords that sang in human hands are suffering for rust …"

Korin stopped, abruptly, as the last few notes of his voice rang with the uncomfortable clarity of one sound in the midst of total silence. That same silence pressed in again as he went quiet – not the famous tranquil 'silence' of the Western bushland, which was in fact quite noisy when it came to scritchy crickets and the rustling of small creatures moving through the grasses, but real silence, the absence of all living sound, the breathless pause for the predator.

The bard couldn't stand that silence. Fighting off a strange tightness in his chest, Korin went on in a forcibly loud, jaunty tone that rang out all alone. "Must. I like 'must'. But how will it fit? Something, something, 'for they must'? 'As they must'? Dum-dum 'perish as they must'? W-well …"

Chills were creeping over Korin's body now, outright shivers of something deeper than cold, and the Midlander heard his clarion voice falter as it never had before. Slowly he stood up, but the knot of fear doubling and redoubling in his chest would not let him do anything but turn and stare along the silhouetted shadows of the trees. The mere thought of choosing a direction and walking into those trees made his knees quiver, so Korin sat down again.

Curiosity … amusement …

A strange awareness reached out to touch Korin's mind for a moment – a slow, detached interest that was certainly not his own. The fear was rapidly becoming worse now, much worse, and all he could think to do as he crouched in his terror was to sing and play again …

"The glory of the human age is swiftly sweeping by;

"The light that lit the crowns of kings is sinking in the sky;

"The swords that sang in human hands are suffering for rust …"

"Very good, songbird," said a soft, sibilant voice from behind him as his own voice choked and failed in his throat. For all its softness, every syllable that the new voice uttered tightened the cold bands around Korin's chest. "I like it. No, do not turn around; I will kill you if you do. Sing me the rest, hmm?"

Something stirred in the air, and the bands of terror strangling Korin loosened by the slightest of degrees for a moment, as if the unseen speaker were making an effort to let Korin sing. The nape of his neck was not prickling – it was outright needle-jabbing at the thought of what could possibly be behind him. "I haven't … I haven't … I haven't …" he gabbled, then gave up trying to force the words out, and sobbed with equal incoherence, "Please don't …"

"Na'ai," said the voice, sounding amused again. "You sing better than you speak. If you cannot finish it, I shall."

But the soft voice did not sing; instead it spoke the verses of Korin's song, uttering them like a grim prophecy, and he shivered to hear it; but he shivered more to hear the harsh, hissing words that followed them, serpentine as snakes.

"The glory of the human age is swiftly sweeping by;

"The light that lit the crowns of kings is sinking in the sky;

"The swords that sang in human hands are suffering for rust;

"The race that fell shall rise again, and this race turn to dust.

"As ethen'charn idrinna yar parrhanyar dionnar;

"As charyn tur ari'rilith charanar lei cuin myar;

"As marai tur lei idrinn'reyth lanyahant mei mhianath tathant;

"As ellien' ymiandh shinnachyr morghin shi idrinn' loredhant."

The feathery voice laughed, low and dark, and Korin flinched. "It sounds almost as well in my tongue. Yes, very good, songbird. Safe journey to you … unless you are bound for Port Aieren, of course."

The grasses whispered behind Korin, causing the bard to fall forward and press his face into the dirt in abject terror. Not even the most powerful curiosity in the world would have made him lift his head to see who … what … was striding by, particularly when the grasses began to rasp all around him; there was more than one. He was surrounded by unspeaking, marching shadows …

Korin lay on his face in the field until well after dawn.