I rode east on the heels of a great dust devil, the trailing dust and sand off my horse and distant pursuit all swept away into a higher and more monstrous form in that storm. On this windwhip demon maelstrom I did ride into Bangkorai, like some mythic jockey of nemesis, and my horses tracks did vanish as I laid them. I rode on, face sandshorn and raw, no rations spared the grit of it. The storm swept me along to the far edges of the river’s charges of grass and shrub, past trees and bramble further in, and eventually to the city wall: gray breton buildings shaggy with green vine, protrusive like the teeth of a supine giant. That brings me to where I stand now, gazing up at the clearing clouds with sand a memory, at the gates of Evermore — free of Sentinel’s pursuance. Evermore, throat of the Bangkorai Pass, murmurs its secrets in a language of black flapping wings and stirred dust motes. Breton merchants fill the markets, whispering money. The Bjoulsae laps wet syllables on the city pier as small skiffs and light schooners cut up and down its glass back, strangers from further ports. Soldiers clatter down the streets in formation, the many legged hulks of regimens, creaking like a Dwemer derelict as they pass, steel fluttering with shocks of covenant blue in sashes and standards. The chapel bell chimes for any matter of small notice. Laborers percuss with mallet, peg, and saw, undoing the wreckage of past decade’s cruel sackings. The town is a cacophony of life and that din envelopes me- I am become silence, untouched. The creak of a back door is lost, the turn of a key, the footfalls on granite cobblestones, the flutter of a startled crow, the jingle of a cut purse- all is washed away in the steady hum of Evermore’s song.