"There were six of them," the Namer began, leaning to scratch the sleeping dog at his feet. Seated around him beside a hundred campfires, the People looked up expectantly. His voice floated over them, clear at even the farthest fires, drawing the listeners deep into his story.

There were six of them, moving silently amid the wind-tilted shades of the vallenwoods.

Even the most vigilant and experienced scouts would have been surprised to find a band of Plainsmen this far north. They were wanderers, capable of great endurance and greater journeys, but Abanasinia was their home, months south of Solamnia and the Vingaard Mountains.

In the rising night, their shoulders were slumped and their steps shuffling and slow. Above them, high to the west amid the Vingaard Mountains, dark clouds settled like ravens and lightning flickered between the peaks. Wearily the Plainsmen wrapped blankets and furs more tightly about their shoulders, as if in their bones and memories they already felt the approaching rain.

One of them, a man almost unnaturally tall, his black hair braided and dappled in shadows, motioned silently at a clearing among the trees. In unison, with a sigh scarcely audible above the rustle of wind through the leaves, the rest of the Plainsmen sat, knelt, fell over-most of them in the very spot over which they had been walking or standing.

With his comrades lying still and silent around him, the big man crouched in the center of the clearing, his hands busy at some hidden task. Suddenly light burst from between his long, slender fingers, and, setting his hands to the ground in front of him, he sat back on his heels and watched the fire, smokeless and fueled by nothing more than the air. Its red flames rose higher, and the light spread to illumine the faces of all the company. In unison, as though they had practiced it for years, they rose with the creak of leather and rattle of beads, arranging themselves in a semicircle behind their leader, their eyes on the scarlet fire.