The dream came to Ben, and he was plunged into a chaos of another kind. Fires raged around him. Men and women who looked like his people but were not streamed through the streets. Gold mps and nterns hung from their hips, and ghostly entities streamed in their wake. Their ghastly familiars shed out with cwed fingers and sharp teeth, blooded his kin, felled his cousins as his mother dragged him through the streets.

  He was just a boy, perhaps four years old, and he was frightened. The Temple of the Sun, Lazul’s shining jewel, loomed at center city, and ahead of them the great wall, so long a bastion of protection against all of those who loathed the zuli Giida was manned by foreigners. At its height were three figures, who observed the unfolding chaos with cold ambivalence as down below, Jua men blocked its towering gates, gates id open, a challenge to the people to make their final bid for freedom.

  He was cd in a hooded robe, the hood drawn up over his face and a sunburst died across the chest, sign of the people, the st of the Owl King’s charges. Jua women wielded their scripts, burning sigils into the sands, bleeding them into stone roads at crossroads, and people fell to their insidious traps, too.

  His mother dragged a pendant in the shape of a cross free of her robes. Fitted with topaz and peridot, he recalled the moment his father had given it to her. Somewhere deeper in the city, he y amid rubble and ruin, had been among the first to die at the hands of these invaders. The Ozites in their vibrant silks, their loose-legged trousers, with their ghoul harboring vessels fixed behind broad scimitars with serrated edges. The Jua people, dressed in straight leg trousers and dashikis that emuted colors found in nature.

  She held the pendant high over her head, a thick, gold “x”, ornately tooled across its face, peridot frosting the tips of each bar and a rger piece of topaz suspended in the puzzle-piece joint at their heart. A Jua woman stepped aside, let her past, and a man of the same tribe received her.

  “I’m…never mind who I am. Take the boy. Take him!” she demanded. “He is not part of this.

  “Take him to Lord Silvanes. Take him to Henry. Whoever is left of the Hammers.”

  She shoved him at the Jua man. Vice-like grips held him in pce as she liberated the pendant from her neck and passed it into his hands.

  “You will be okay. I promise you will be. Keep this. Keep it safe. Show it to their leader.”

  She pooled the fine, silver chain into his palms and folded his fingers over it. And she retreated.

  “Maman!” he screamed. He struggled against the Jua man’s grip. “MAMAN!”

  She retreated into the masses, into the chaos.

  “To think we have been reduced to this.” The Jua man said to the woman who had let her mother past. “Sughtering children.”

  “What would you have us do?” the woman said. “What happens here…it could happen to us.”

  The dream crashed around him, faded into dissolution, and he was left was left with a cold ache in his chest as his eyes fluttered open, memory of it rippling through his mind, remaining to remind him all was not well.