The man's face paled, but he waved back to the cemetery entrance. An actual force of Nathlekh guardsmen in uniform was assembling there, and the man seemed to take confidence from that sight. The guard yelled. Raidon made out his words above the mob's din by reading his lips. "If you hurt me, you’ll face them!"
Raidon soundlessly mouthed back, "I don't care." Then he bounded over the heads of the reaching throng to another clay marker, closing a quarter of the distance between himself and his target.
"Raidon, this man is not responsible for Ailyn's death. If you kill him in your despair, your soul will be stained," came a new voice, somehow audible over the screaming rabble.
It was the same voice that had warned Raidon of the mob's appearance. Whoever or whatever it was, its reasonable advice inflamed his ire all the more. He replied, as he leaped again to a marker a mere ten paces from the guard, "Invisible spirit, mind your own affairs and leave me to mine!"
"Your affairs are my affairs, Raidon," came the instant response. "You have become my sole view into the world, and though I am pledged to obey a holder of the Sign, my pledge to the Sign itself is the greater duty. If you force me to it, I must protect its sanctity before your wishes. Past lapses must not be allowed to repeat themselves."
The words of the invisible demon intrigued that small portion of Raidon's mind not overwhelmed with murderous grief. But he did not pause. The monk hurdled the last of the screaming Shou that surged between him and his target. He charged, leaping high off one last clay monument as if it were a ramp. A flying elbow to the guard's crown would-
An ozone scent and crackle of light appeared in Raidon's line of flight. He spasmed and twisted, violently attempting to alter his body's trajectory in midair. He failed. He passed through the discontinuity's dark orifice and was gone.
Raidon fell through a void littered with a million distant points that sparkled eternal white, ruby, emerald, and sapphire. Before he could gasp, he passed through another discontinuity.
He dropped sideways into weeds lurking around the base of a granite boulder. Disorientation and sunlight blinded him; he wasn't quite able to avoid knocking his head on the great stone.
The pain and unpleasantly loud crack of his skull meeting the rock produced a blaze of light and pain.
His anguish and anger spiraled away into a daze of dulled vision and distracted wit.
He lay where he'd fallen, flat on his back, blinking up at a blue sky streaked with high scudding clouds. Rotating his head to the right, he saw grassy foothills of some unfamiliar, though reassuringly terrestrial, mountain range. No multicolored stars.
He gradually rotated his head to the left, wincing at a muscle strain, and saw more far hills, more miles of empty prairie between. No roads, fields, lone homes, or walled cities lay their straight, artificial lines across his perspective. The uninhabited landscape, in its irregular and unexpected outlines, was a physical balm he absorbed across his entire body. Raidon lost himself for a time, watching the wind blow wave after wave through the green and yellow grass, while white clouds boiled in molasses-slow movements above.
An indeterminate time later, the call of a prairie hawk shook the monk from his inadvertent meditation.
"So I am losing my mind," he said as he sat up. He leaned back against the boulder on which he'd hit his head. From the new vantage, he gained a view of a distant feature he'd earlier missed, and gasped.
A great splinter of rock hung unsupported above the plain. Its lowest point narrowed to a ragged and splintered needle, but the unmoored rocks opposite, upper surface was broad and level. Even from where he sat two or three miles away, Raidon observed trees, grass, a lake, and even a tiny waterfall feathering off the side of the gravity-defying, floating tract.
"To what realm have I come?" he whispered.
"Changes to Faerыn's landscape, such as the earthmote you see above the plain, are not uncommon since the Spellplague swept through," said a bodiless voice.
"You are still in Faerыn, in the southeastern foothills of the Giant's Run Mountains." It was the same voice as before.
Raidon jumped to his feet, swiveling to see if he could catch a faint gleam or wavering in the air that would betray the speaker's presence.
"I remember you!" yelled Raidon. "I heard you beyond the gates of demolished Starmantle! And again, in…" he trailed off. His head still resonated with the thump it received upon his arrival. He sensed some great dread hiding just beyond his attention, biding its time.
"Correct, Raidon. However, Starmantle was not the first time you and I conversed. We spoke at some length many years ago, when you traveled to where my physical body lies. My name is Cynosure."
"Cynosure?" The name was familiar, but he couldn't recall why.
"Yes. You visited me in Stardeep several years before the Year of Blue Fire. You accompanied Kiril Duskmourn on her return to the citadel dungeon where she once served as Keeper."
"Stardeep!" exclaimed Raidon. The threads of memory connected, and he remembered.
Cynosure was an artificial entity. A golem, but more than that.
He… it? It was an immense humanoid forged of crystal, stone, iron, and more exotic components, though when Raidon had met the golem, it was rusted, pitted, and stained by centuries of existence.
Cynosure was a golem whose sophistication eclipsed all other artificial constructs. It stared unblinking into the containment fires of Stardeep's inner most prison cell. Raidon had seen the golem descend into that cell and do battle with the thing housed there. A thing called the Traitor.
The monk remembered the design fused onto Cynosure's metallic chest-the Cerulean Sign. The placement was similar to the one Raidon himself now sported.
"How is it I hear your voice? Are you not restricted to Stardeep's buried corridors?"
"I remain so bound; however, I can act through any suitably prepared vessel, even far from Stardeep. Somehow, I can now also manifest my attention and some few surviving magical abilities of Stardeep through you."
"Through me? What abilities?"
"Speech, for one. Also, I teleported you from Starmantle to the edge of Nathlekh when you were hurt a few tendays ago, and again just now to pull you out of Nathlekh. Unlike speech, however, moving you such great distances saps my finite and failing reserves."
"You… pushed me through a portal? Without an actual portal gate? And without being physically nearby?"
"Yes. In a way, I am physically with you. Special circumstances allow you and me to interact, Raidon, though you and me only. I could not transport another, unless they were with you. My connection with you is possible because of the new fusion between you and your Cerulean Sign."
Memory painted an image of his amulet dissolving in ravening blue fire. He recalled the agony as the lingering symbol branded him. He dropped his gaze and opened the silk jacket he'd purchased in Nathlekh. The symbol of his amulet still marked him, its size scaled up to cover his entire upper chest, as if the Sign's power was sufficient to expand to whatever medium that contained it.
Cynosure's voice continued, "The Spellplague stitched your amulet's power into your mind and body. Raidon, you have become a breathing manifestation of the Sign."
The monk said, "In Starmantle, I was able to tap the Sign's power when aberrant ghouls attacked me. But I did so almost instinctively…"