He was here.
He could not believe it, and yet the truth of it was sprinting down the meadow in the frantic, unpolished stride of a winded scout, ahead of his very own eyes. Every last defensive layer of Alpheo's cynical mind,every desperate wish that his visions had been nothing more than the fevered, dying delusions of a soldier bleeding out in the mud, came crashing down in a single, terrifying instant.
Should he have been happy? Should he have felt a sense of dark satisfaction that the four-year-old itch of his curiosity was finally about to be scratched? Or should he be in utter, cold dismay? For now, without a single shadow of a doubt, the King had to believe. He had to accept that he had not simply hallucinated in the red waters of the Ford.
Some god was real. And, cursed as he was, he had something to do with it.
