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“My son, a flame lives in you…. My heir!”

What is the heir? The indifferent look of almost colorless eyes continued to live in my memory. Inhuman eyes! Too cold and almost dead.

You only came to life when you met your mother, and then you killed her....

His head was torn from an endless stream of images. Shadows, color pictures, some fragmentary memories suddenly decided to merge into a single round dance and fall on the mind. Right now, right at the moment when clear thinking was needed.

Perhaps this is how they start to go crazy?

I saw double, jumped from the distant cloudless sky to the deformed wasteland of the Valley, then to the forest, to the endless line of the dead, continuing to advance from Tinasa and again to the strip of mountains framing the black, ash-like earth, split by faults.

A wide road ran along the edge of the Valley, dust was raised by the hooves of horses. A long file of horsemen trotted out from behind the hills, all in battle armor, well-armed, all but three