The monk continued his steady advance, eyes fixed on the guard. The smoldering height of fury burning in Raidon's visage wasn't the reaction the guard expected. He tried to retreat, and failed. The press of his riled-up followers pinned the man in place.
Realizing his danger, the guard yelled, "He is about to attack-grab the outlander!" The man's voice squeaked with alarm.
The rabble's chant turned into a roar as they streamed forward. The guard stayed back, his fear ebbing as the mob blocked Raidon. The guard's brave face returned, and he called out something in a jeering voice, but his words were lost in the screaming mob's imprecations.
A red-faced, screaming Shou grabbed at Raidon's new silk jacket. Another in pleated corduroy tried to club the monk with a rusted mace. A boy scratched at his face with painted but chipped fingernails.
Raidon evaded the grab with a counterpunch that dropped the Shou, and a simultaneous kick sent the mace spiraling into the face of a third man, who crumpled. The boy laid two long welts down his cheek, but his attention was already shifting to more significant threats.
Two corpulent women rushed him, their hair unrestrained and harpy-wild, their meaty fists gripping sharp cooking implements. Simultaneously a hard-faced smith, still in his singed smithy apron, came up behind Raidon with a hammer. Raidon bobbed around one woman's flailing knife and arrested the smith's hammer swing with a palm-thrust to the smith's shoulder with his right hand. With his left arm, he caught the other woman at the elbow with his own, joint to joint as if preparing to do a jig, then swung her around by turning his own body. He flung her down into the path of two new attackers: dockmen with boat hooks. The woman tripped one of the men and distracted the other long enough for Raidon to leap to the top of a nearby clay marker. His damaged foot burned, but Raidon's anger flamed hotter.
Above the fray he saw the original guard, who still hadn't moved as the mob surged to do his bidding. The guard's gaze jerked up and fixed on his nemesis. Raidon pointed a finger at him and shook his head slowly back and forth. It was a promise that no matter the obstacles, Raidon would not be denied his target.
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.