One by one, though, as the Sionnachans took notice of me at the door, they fell silent. Somewhere, a goblet smashed to the floor.

At the centre of the pub, where the long benches finally ended their inward swirl, was a large circular counter with a hollow in the middle where the pub master stood. For a brief moment, I thought I recognized him, with his distinctly spotted black and cream colouring and pale blue eyes. But he was taller than the last pub master I’d known. And younger. Another descendant, no doubt.

He was louder than the last pub master, Gershen, had been too. Louder, and apparently bolder. Where Gershen would have given me a brief, gruff greeting, barely audible over the sounds of the pub, this new one called out to me, his voice rich and clear, meeting my eyes with a grin when no other Sionnachan in the vicinity seemed capable of even drawing breath in my presence.

“Lord Wylfrael! Ashken sent a burrowbird with word that you’d returned. We all wondered if you’d come here.”

“I have returned,” I said, a perhaps redundant confirmation of what my appearance had already told them. But it seemed as if they needed more confirmation. Most of them looked like they couldn’t make any sense of what they were seeing.

A whisper from a bench on the other side of the pub caught my keen ears. “So old Ashken hasn’t lost his lane in the snow, then.”

“No, he has not,” I said crisply, reining in my annoyance at the way the villagers had so obviously doubted the word, and the sanity, of my old Master of the Grounds. “You would all do well to respect my staff whenever you come into contact with them, and to heed their words as if they were words direct from my lips.”

Flattened ears, and muttered phrases of “Yes, Lord Wylfrael. Of course, Lord Wylfrael,” rolled along the benches like wind bending the flowers in a field.

I frowned, not liking the way this interaction had begun. I did not enjoy the role of the angry lord, but angry was all I’d been since I’d awoken. I breathed in deeply, smelling firestone and meat and Sionnachan fur, fur just like my mother’s, and reminded myself to be calm. Civil. The Sionnachans were gentle and good, but they were clearly wary of me. I also reminded myself that, though they called me Lord Wylfrael, they were not beholden to me. My castle, and the forests around it, were my mother’s ancestral lands and now belonged to me. But I did not own the land they lived on in this village – they did. They called me lord, as they had also done for my father, not because we required it but out of their own half-fearful deference to stone sky immortality and power. Sionnachans had no kings, no landlords, and each village was completely autonomous of every other.

But because I was a stone sky god, with powers they could scarcely imagine and had never even witnessed in their lifetimes, to them I was not simply Wylfrael. I was the long-lost immortal lord, carved out of stories passed down by their parents and grandparents, a childhood legend brought to life right before their very eyes.

I did not want to be a half-forgotten legend. I wanted to exist here, to be real in this time and place. To be known as I had once known this world so well. A living god. Not a ghost.

“I’ve come to greet you all,” I said, my voice a controlled boom in the space. “To let you know that I have indeed returned, and to inquire about activities near my castle. A little over thirty days ago, a machine landed, bringing with it interlopers called humans. What do you know of them?”

The Sionnachans shifted on their benches, eyeing me and each other uneasily.

The pub master was the one who answered, the only one who seemed at all at ease with me in their midst.

“We know only what Ashken sent by burrowbird, my lord,” he called while polishing a goblet with a spare rag. “We heard tell of these people and their sled from the sky, but have not seen them ourselves. We thought it best to give them a wide berth, and they have not come to seek us out.”

So, basically what Ashken already told me, then. There had been no real contact between the invaders and my mother’s people. It was for the best. The Sionnachans were too peaceful to launch an attack against invaders the way I had done. I did not like to think what would have happened if the aggressive humans and their weapons had made their way here eventually...

“I will inform you now, then, that the humans have left. I do not believe they will be back.” I did not tell them that I’d killed nearly as many humans as had escaped on the machine. They were already unnerved by me. No need to frighten them further.

I decided not to tell them about my prisoner, either.

The crowd noticeably relaxed at my tidings, and I claimed that as a small victory.

I spent all afternoon in the pub, learning the names of the Sionnachans there and speaking with the pub master. As I’d assumed, he was a descendant of the old Gershen. His name was Garrshek, and he proved himself to be a gregarious, grinning sort of Sionnachan. He recounted the local history with a finely honed memory for detail, filling me in on their village’s growth since I’d been gone.

There was something refreshing about it. About chatting with a Sionnachan who did not seem afraid of me, and who was not employed by me. If I did not have more pressing matters to attend to, I would have stayed there longer.

But as it was, I did have more pressing matters. I could not hide from Skalla and star-darkness and a certain honey-eyed prisoner for long. I’d gotten what I needed out of this visit - confirmation that the humans hadn’t done anything nefarious to the nearest Sionnachan population. Now, it was time to leave.

I exited the pub and stepped onto the street. The sun was setting, smearing the pink of the sky with scarlet and a deep, resounding purple that matched the village’s buildings. I was about to unfurl my wings and leap right into that sky when a building across the road caught my eye.

Like the pub, it had been standing before. I remembered it. Based on the silk and fur banners outside, the business was the same sort as well – a fabric shop. Wanting to hold on to just a little bit more of the world I remembered, I crossed the street and went inside.

Firestone lanterns flickered on the walls, casting a rosy glow over tables and shelves laden with fabrics. Not just fabrics, but also garments – vests and trousers and boots and cloaks. The man behind the crystal counter was wide-eyed at my entrance, but recovered quickly, flattening his ears and greeting me.

“Lord Wylfrael! Welcome, welcome!”

He didn’t seem nearly as bowled-over as the Sionnachans in the pub had been at my arrival. I wondered if someone from the pub had run over here, had spread the word through the entire village, that Ashken was sane after all and Lord Wylfrael really had returned.

“Hello,” I said, folding my wings carefully behind me so as not to knock down any of the fine fabrics and dirty them. “I am glad to see this shop is still here.”

“Yes, of course, my lord! Thank you, my lord! I am Hoshta. This shop has been in my mother’s family since... Well, since you were last here.” The shopkeeper was old, but tall, with a straight back and a mixture of grey and white down and fur. Despite a slight nervousness about him, I could sense the pride he held for this business.

I walked through the shop, stopping here and there to finger an especially fine bolt of silk or piece of leather. It was something that had already occurred to me, but that came back much stronger, now – the human would need clothing if she was to stay here.

A part of me scoffed at that. Let her wear her one outfit until it is filthy and falling apart. And then, let her be cold and naked in the tower.

But the idea of her naked and caged, waiting for my interrogations with nothing to cover her body but her abundance of silken dark hair spilling over her shoulders, was so shockingly, abominably erotic that I had to sharpen it into cold rage to keep myself from combusting on the spot.