It could be worse than it was already. Soulcatcher could have found and taken those grim books.
She had not. They remained safe upon their lecterns, open to early passages.
I hustled back to the gang.
Some of them sensed me moving. They focused their anger upon me. Which was maybe good. Water sleeps, I thought at them. They were locked in some sorcerous stasis. I was trapped only in my flesh, presumably because I had been away at a convenient time.
Water sleeps. Catcher might be the darkness but she would learn. Water sleeps, but Enemy never rests.
In the night, when the wind no longer whines through a fortress that was there before the plain that was there before the first Free Company marched, stone whispers. Stone sprouts. Stone grows. Stone buds and stone flowers. A thousand pillars rise where no pillar has stood before. Moonlight sweeps the plain, setting aglitter the characters taking form, remembering a few of the fallen.
It is immortality of a sort.