The wind was chill as it crept through the many intersecting streets of Rhy'Din. It smelt old and stale and musty, old pages that had been turned after months. Still the streets echoed the Seer's name, still her little fingers and big, aquamarine eyes lived in the fleeting memories of the past year, some communion with the dead Lerida hoped was not happening. Was she alive? Where was the Seer?


Their relationship had been tried at best, not quite friends and not quite enemies, a lot had gone unsaid when the Four Pillars had sat at a table and blown smoke, literally and metaphorically, into each others faces. Things had happened between Mish'Cael and Viki, Mish'Cael and Lerida, Lerida and Domikai, Domikai and Viki. Lerida had been a bridge between the two sides that sought the missing Seer. They all tasted the wind and pulled omens from the ether in their own way, they were all supernatural, paranormal, occult trends in this town, not quite the norm, they were powers, exponentially and then a flatline, but along the way one of the four would creep past the margin and assert themselves.


Mish had always been around. He was a strange one. So much if him in the furniture of the bar, so much of his self hung around, and yet when he wasn't there it was as though he'd never existed at all. He left traces, and then sometimes rendered one mad; did he exist? Or just a grotesque figment of a fanciful mind?

Domikai, he was the true eluder; with his taloned hands and toothy eyes, every part of him was a hungry mouth. He'd wanted her blood, hadn't he? For hours they had spoke, danced along the very precipice of some friendship, for her dangerous and to him mere prey. Or was she?

And Lerida herself? What did she inspire in the others? She didn't know.


But all Four were linked. Bound. Like some siamese dreamers, all threaded to the same great, eerie consciousness.