The Skraelings had not actually left the site where they had camped just outside Isaiah’s encampment.

They had just slewed slightly through reality. Just as they vanished from the sight of Isaiah and Axis and all who accompanied them, so also Isaiah and his companions and army vanished from the Skraelings’ sight. The entire Isembaardian army could have marched through the Skraeling mass and felt nothing more than the brush of air against their legs, while the Skraelings themselves would not have been aware of them.

They had sequestered themselves from reality in order to debate their future.

The Skraelings were consumed by a welter of emotions. Foremost was anger — aimed, initially, entirely at Isaiah. Isaiah had turned them from their enchanted, powerful form into these repulsive creatures who had no beauty and no dignity and no power. He had then forgotten them, leaving them to drift for aeons as creatures hated by all other races. Then, having suddenly remembered his oversight, Isaiah had returned to the Skraelings the power to choose their own destiny, the power to return to their form of River Angels, but only via the medium of water, of drowning.

That was, for the Skraelings, the ultimate cruelty. The ultimate spitefulness. Isaiah knew they hated and feared water. He knew it, yet he’d made it a precondition that they embrace this terror if they wanted once again to be River Angels.

And who really knew if this wasn’t simply some plan to just slaughter them? Tell them some fabulous tale about long lost mystery forms, convince them that all they had to do to regain this form and mystery was to drown themselves.

Maybe Axis had planned the entire thing.

This stank of the StarMan.

Probably backed up by Inardle. She was a Lealfast. She hated them as much as Axis did.

From their anger at Isaiah the Skraelings morphed seamlessly into hatred of Axis. He was the BattleAxe, the StarMan, he the one who had slaughtered so many of their cousins in Tencendor. He was their implacable enemy.

Why had they not killed him when they had the chance? When he sat among them? Why had they not also killed Isaiah and Inardle when they, too, sat among —

“Stop,” Ozll said into the maelstrom of rising, black emotion. “Stop. Isn’t this what condemned us in the first instance? Isn’t this what we want to discard and leave forever behind us? Or is this what we want to remain, forever? Brothers and sisters, cousins and friends, look at us. Look at us. Then remember what Isaiah showed us. That was not a lie. It was memory. Truth. It was from whence our memories of Veldmr came. Stop. Think. We’ve allowed our emotions to overcome our intellect.”

He paused, looking at the doubt in all the faces surrounding him. “Yes,” Ozll said, “we do have intellect, and we could have pride in ourselves again. But we need to discuss this rationally and we need to come to a decision about what to do from a place of calmness. Not from a state of fear or anger or suspicion. Now, who will speak?”

The mass was quiet a long time. The Skraelings found it difficult to damp into quiescence their habitual suspicion and fear and anger. All three states were by now so natural to them it was difficult to let go of them.

Finally, a young female Skraeling by the name of Graq spoke. “What are we now?” she said. “Do we want to stay this way?”

That was rare straight speaking, and the Skraeling mass responded by moaning, their bodies weaving to and fro in distress.

“We are hateful,” one among them hissed.

“Ugly,” said another.

“Far uglier now than before,” another said. “We grow uglier with each day. And more hateful.”

“But don’t we like being ugly and hateful?” someone asked. “All run in fear of us. Don’t we like that? Don’t we feed from their terror?”

Many among the Skraelings began to weep, great painful sobs that left their silvery orbs quivering in distress.

“No,” Ozll said for them all, “we don’t like that. And perhaps we’d like to change, now we have been given the opportunity.”

He hesitated a moment. “And perhaps we have been too consumed by emotion these past days and hours to have noticed something. Something important. Who knows what it is?”

No one spoke for a long time, although many brows creased and mouths mumbled.

“The One is gone,” Graq said, eventually. “The One is gone very, very far away.”

“Yes,” Ozll said. “We are now masterless. Again. And maybe that is a good thing, for maybe we might like to consider the opportunity to be our own masters, for a change.”