And when you neither wanted nor needed anything at all and there was no risk, no sense of family or attachment, nothing — what was there?

This sense of nothingness in her life, of a gray lack of meaning and purpose, along with the failure of her quest for a way out, was now bringing her back toward Terindell, back toward the only people who meant anything at all to her, now or ever.

But there was also something more, something much harder to pin down, a kind of grayness seemed to be settling in, permeating Husaquahr, almost as if it were some strange sort of vampiric fog, draining the energy from the land. It really wasn't anything you could see or put your finger on; rather, it was something you sensed, felt, lurking there, all around, omnipresent yet just out of sight in the corner of your eye.

It wasn't just faerie sense, or imagination, either. They all felt it, or so it seemed, mortal and faerie alike, although they could no more put it into words than she could. It was as if something ancient were stirring, something none of them had ever known before. Something impossibly old, unimaginably powerful, and of a nature that might be called evil but was something far worse.

It was the kind of gray that made the whole world seem tired, made ambition seem not worth the effort and inhibition a sucker's play. People tended to be surly; violence was up, tolerance was down, and nobody really knew why he or she was feeling and acting this way.

It gave whispered voice to thoughts she didn't want, too. If Joe survived the lava, no matter how transformed, then why not Boquillas as well?

What about it? What did the damnable Rules have to say about that?

She shook the dark thoughts from her mind and looked around.