The old man shivers a little, and settles his cloak about his shoulders; they confront for a time, man and planet. But then in an instant, sunrise proper has splattered everything below with blood – the sea, the shore, the hemlock and the old man's cloak all smeared and dappled with it – and he turns urgently away to drag from cover a small crude wooden boat. Its keel grates on the shingle, oars fall whitely on the water. The day brightens, but as he rows, the old man winces from the ominous sky. Beaching his boat on the western shore, muttering and panting with the effort, he pauses at the water's edge for a final glimpse of the tower, locked in its long struggle with decay; then shrugs and hurries up a flight of steps cut long ago into the cliff. While behind him, a single fish eagle with wings of a curious colour beats up out of the bright south and swoops over the island like a valediction.

In the Time of the Locust it is given to us to see such things.

The Reborn Men do not think as we do. They live in waking dreams, pursued by a past they do not understand, harried by a birthright which has no meaning to them: taunted by amnesia of the soul.

Alstath Fulthor, the first of them to be drawn by Tomb the Iron Dwarf from millenial interment in the Lesser Rust Desert, remembered nothing of his previous life: instead, his steps were dogged by a suspicion he could not make plain even to himself. His body, his blood, his very germ cells knew (or so it seemed to him), but could find no everyday language in which to tell him what his life had been like during the frigid lunacy of the Afternoon. Dark hints reached him. But the quivering fibrils of his nervous system were adjusted to receive messages dispersed a thousand or more years before, intimations faded on the winds of time.