Something about Agent Ket's smirk set off alarm bells in Steirdrar's head but at this point it was too late to retreat. When they reached the loungeroom, the android he had briefly met yesterday looked up from the tablet in their hands, looking between the two with a blank expression. "Commander Urrang, meet my partner-in-hunting, QWERTY. QWERTY, meet Commander Steirdrar Urrang," Agent Ket introduced.

They were not called Night-Lights, back in the earliest days of Pryzis. They were Pryz'ozlen, masters of the gifts of the powers that be. They protected the Pryzis and Pryzia.

The first memory Beyari has is fear. Indistinct, blurred by a toddler's lack of comprehension. But she does remember the feeling of something dangerous watching her and what she would, at a later age and with better understanding, describe as a toddler's equivalent of "if I don't move or make a noise, the monster can't find me".

Had someone told Steirdrar last year that he would not only meet a warrior of the Eskel-Zai culture — a rarity this long into the war, many of the clans that had joined it having dwindled close to nothingness — but also become friends with them, he would have looked around to see who had dared this someone to present such an absurd claim to him.

"'The Incident'?" Thokel could not help huffing out a laugh when the two siblings adopted near-identical blank expressions. "What did you do?" --- "Best you don't know." Beyari took a prolonged sip of her drink. "Yes, it is best that you don't know indeed," Steirdrar insisted.