For a little while, the war paused. It was not really a truce. Both armies drew back a few paces at the same moment to breathe and look at what was left of them.
On the eastern slope, the Shepherd's Unfathomables who could still stand gathered among the craters. In the west, Kir One and Kir Two swayed in the starlit grass where Lifthrasir had stopped them, dark streams still running from their mouths into the soil.
In the middle of the field, Noah set the Hoe against his shoulder, as he did at the end of a long row, and looked up.
The sky over the Carcosa was dark and empty, and the snow still hung in it. Far beyond it, beyond everything he could reach, hung the banner. He had felt it every day since he first rose onto it: the long banner of the Narrative of Kings, stretched across all of existence, with his own name written on it among all the others.
He looked at the field, east and west, and asked himself the simplest question of the day. Why had every one of them come here?
