He watched them leave, the brown feathers three, soaring up on the billowing haze, soon lost in its deceitful rise. They could be anywhere ahead. One metre, or a hundred: still lost, all the same. Ma, Pa, and Cedric were their names. Gone with the dust, and by now a part of it. Where he sat in shadows, by the steps under the ruined slab, hunched over the insensate form, dry air washed over him, always when he breathed, trying to taste his bones. That could wait. The last feather of four would not leave, anchored by the fractured god, white and round, flat in his outstretched palm, bound to him and like him, by a duty and promise they shared. 'Traveler,' the three had called it. Hate had filled his every breath, been the taste that woke him, a red torment in what he'd dreamed, like the dust and their blood wasted upon it. But when its expanse had embraced his mind, that hate had drowned in the torrents of magic gushing from its broken skin, washed away by a deluge that terrified and enthralled him: a cascade of endless blue. Azure blazing through his veins, it had liked the name 'Blue', naming him, in return, what it had felt whilst wrapped in his worn and starving flesh: Haggard. That same blue hung now between his bent left fingers, shards cold as ice curling over themselves like hungering flames, until that hand plunged through the unconscious captain's face: it jerked and fell still. Pocketing the feather and stone clutched in his right hand, he drew his revolver, something bequeathed him by the man named 'Pa', and watched the many-armed shadows behind the churning veil. They stalked the dust. They fed the dust. Soon they would join the dust.