When last we left our heroes, they stood ringed by the Vulture Cult in the torch-lit square of Kyron Karr, their smiling friend looking on, the unmasked priest Varjalikan promising to reach back through time and murder Sencan in his cradle. Inayin opened the fight before he could begin it — a perfect thrust of the Red Fang longsword into his side — but the wound closed itself even as it bled, and as Varjalikan turned, the kindly scholar's face fell away like a dropped mask to show the horror beneath. Inayin felt the cold grip of Carrion Fear settle over him. Then the bone-white cultists came on from every side, and the square became a grinding business of clash and counter and falling heads. The party bled for it — Inayin worst of all, struck down with blood running from his ears and eyes and nose into a dream — but they were the better blades, and one by one the cult was cut down. Varjalikan broke and ran for the river with a speed no old man should have; Ineia's arrow took him in the back, and Tenuyala ran him down at the dock's edge, kicked him flat, and took his head from his shoulders as he stared at the shaft jutting from his chest.
In the dream that took him while he bled, Inayin smelled woodsmoke and woke to find Panathfei standing over him, poking him with a stick — and the smiling friend beside her, the two of them "catching up." When she laughed, it was the wizard's voice that came out of her mouth. He told Inayin he was a failure at many things, that he had "failed his way into your story," that his road and Panathfei's had diverged in strange ways, and that before long they would meet "the original versions of the two of us." Asked whether he meant to wipe Amboria from existence, he answered only: not erase it — just reset. Then Inayin's eyes snapped open to Ineia's hands on his wounds, and the smiling friend, very much awake and unbothered, grumbling that he had tried his best to warn them and it was hardly his fault if none of them could read. The fight was won. The cult was dead. And the smiling friend told them to hurry — the sky was greying far too early, the play's hold on the dead city already slipping, the genius beginning to wake.
He led them to the boats, declined to row, and watched the water as they pulled for the eastern shore — and when they looked back, the island behind them was no ruin at all, but Kyron Karr whole and shining in the days of her glory. While they had fought, he had turned the city's opened gaze away from the priest's chosen moment to one of his own, and carried them along it. They came ashore at dawn before green and rolling plains where the withered wood should have stood, in an age before the Nalshbori were so much as dreamed of, with the Seven Hills of Jade — that would one day become the Black Hills — rising some miles east. He told them at last a little of why: that everyone he had ever loved was stolen from him long ago, their souls drowned in the Well of Silence at the end of the world, and that he believes a road to that Well can be found among the cities of Lanenomen as they stand here, now, in their splendour. His name, he allowed, they could call Thargash — though he admitted it was not truly his. And so, time-lost and a long walk from anywhere, the company set out beside their smiling friend into a world ages gone.
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