He laid his palms flat against the cold stone, his nose but inches from the wall. What did he expect? The wall to whisper its eternal secrets to him?

Nothing.

Alton debated whether or not to give up and return to his uncle’s tent when, like the shot of an arrow, silver lines streaked beneath his hands, forming glistening runes which swirled to life around the cracks, only to vanish in the blink of an eye.

Startled, he jumped backward, looking wildly about the wall for another sign, but finding nothing.

“Did you see that?” he demanded of Sergeant Uxton.

“See what, my lord?”

“The—” He stopped. The sergeant waited, watching intently. How could the sergeant have missed the flash of runes? Unless . . .

My imagination? I wished to see it?

He placed his hands against the wall again, cajoling, wishing, and even cursing, but the wall revealed nothing. After a half hour of this, Alton pulled away, disgusted with himself for thinking he alone would discover the secrets of the wall.

He turned his back to it and stalked toward the tent village with Sergeant Uxton in tow, the wall rearing up ominously behind them. Then someone cried out in fear and Alton whirled just in time to see a large dark shape winging toward him.

BLACKVEIL

The sentience awoke to silence. The voices that entrapped it were strangely absent, focused elsewhere.

Cautiously, it extended a thread of awareness, gently probing through the forest, remaining as tiny and inconspicuous as possible so as not to alarm its guardians.

It slipped along the slime trail of a glistening slug for a short distance. It hid beneath rocks, and tunneled in the damp underground as a blind mole.

Warm blood gushed through the mole’s body, pumped by its heart in a rhythmic throb the sentience found oddly comforting and familiar. The mole burrowed deeper, using its powerful shoulders and spadelike front feet to shovel aside soil.

It stopped abruptly, and twitched its nose. The sentience felt its hunger, and with unthinking instinct, it gnashed at something soft, damp, and wriggly.

Repulsed, the sentience expelled itself from the mole and traced its way back through the tunnel.

What am I? What am I that I have no beating heart? No pulsing blood?

The mole had a body, but it was a dim, stupid creature that relied on instinct.

I am no such creature. Perhaps I am the air that fills the creature’s lungs.

This did not seem correct either. The air could not be trapped this way, trapped behind walls and barriers.

The sentience resurfaced to the world above as moisture sucked from the ground by the roots of a limp, dark fern. It joined with an insect, which sped away on buzzing wings. Through multifaceted eyes, it spotted a young avian tearing into the carcass of some unfortunate prey animal, gulping down flesh to bulge out its sinuous, scaled neck.

The insect alighted on the avian to feed on its blood, giving the the sentience an opportunity to transfer itself to a new host. The avian flapped its wings in agitation at the intrusion, but the sentience stayed quiet, sensing the creature’s hunger and lust for blood, feeling the warmth of its prey easing down its gullet and into its gnawing stomach.

The avian was merely base instinct, aware of nothing but its own needs, a vicious creature on all counts, its very heart dark. The sentience decided to seize control of it.

The avian struggled mightily, waving its head back and forth and squawking in protest, but it did not take long for the sentience to overcome its small mind.

Through the eyes of the avian, the world of the sentience’s confinement sharpened—the contrast of dark tree shadows and gray mist, logs decaying into duff, insects hovering in the dim light, the fuzz of mosses carpeting the ground. Something slurped into a black pool, piquing the avian’s interest, and registering “prey” in its mind.

The sentience stilled the avian’s predatory excitement, and again sent out a pinpoint of awareness through the forest. The guardians had not yet noted its wakefulness. Something else had taken their attention; they strained to reach out to the other side of the wall.

Intrigued by their preoccupation, the sentience, too, wished to see the other side of the wall.

It released a measure of control over the avian so it could fly. The avian stretched its wings, flapped, and spiraled upward through the trees, deftly missing entwined branches, and surged above the canopy. Thick mist enclosed the forest below, except for the spires of tree tops poking through. Even above the forest, the mist was still thick, banishing the sun to a murky white disk.

The sentience forced the avian unwaveringly northward, toward the wall, seeking the place where it had once detected weakness.

It wasn’t long before the layers of mist peeled away, revealing the wall directly ahead. The avian wheeled away, barely in time to avoid a collision. The sentience reined the creature into a glide, the wall swirling past its wingtip.

A brightness shone where there should have been wall, signaling the place of weakness. The sentience forced the avian to land on the broken wall, talons scrabbling on stone as it backwinged. The avian extended its serpentine neck, and with a blink, peered to the other side.

The sunlight, so unfamiliar to the creature, was too bright. It dropped nictitating membranes over its eyes to protect them.

A myriad of structures billowing in the wind filled the world below, and moving among them were many creatures.

Men, came the unbidden memory.

They were scattered everywhere, these men, milling, moving, thriving. There was a power here, too. A power reminiscent of that which entrapped the sentience. Somewhere among these men, there was one who could speak with the guardians, one who could fix the weakness in the wall. One who could seal off the sentience’s prison forever.