Wizard Commander Maxim looked beautiful.  Adessa held tip his head, wrapped her fingers in his spiky dark hair.  His dead face sparked a thrill of satisfaction that flowed through Adessa like warm honey.

Maxim's decapitated body lay sprawled in the dirt in front of the cottage.  Ribs poked out like broken twigs from his smashed chest.  Wind rushed through the boughs of the surrounding dark spruce nets like whispered cheers.  The morazeth leader raised the head in front of her face in the moonlight.

The wizard commander had been so handsome once, the haughty leader of Ildakar, but now his face was slack, his lids like loose fleshy flaps covering his eyes.  His mouth hung open, and blood dribbled down into his goatee.  Gore glistened on the stump of his neck.

After she sprang her trap, the man would have perished soon enough from his smashed chest, but Adessa didn't want Maxim to die on his own.  The Keeper would have him one way or the other, so she had hacked through his neck and lifted up the head in triumph.

"My mission is complete."  Adessa's voice was a hard whisper, muffled by the stirring spruce trees around the cottage.  "I always knew I would kill you, but you were too arrogant to believe it yourself."

The dead wizard commander did not respond, but his slack cheek muscle twitched, startling her with the unexpected movement. Maxim's mouth fell open wider as his jaw muscles relaxed in death.

Adessa drew a deep breath.  She had done as Sovrena Thom commanded.  Finally, she could go home to Ildakar.

Wizard Commander Maxim had betrayed Ildakar by creating unrest among the lower classes, provoking a revolt - just because he was bored!  Such betrayal was unthinkable to Adessa.  She and her fellow morazeth were utterly loyal to their city and to the wizards' duma.

On the night of the uprising, when mobs killed their masters and destroyed thousands of years of the sovrena's perfect society, Maxim had fled the city laughing.  As the chaos continued to build, Thora had sent Adessa after the wizard commander with instructions to hunt him down and bring back his head as a trophy.  For many days, weeks, she had tracked the man through the swamps, down the Killraven River, until finally trapping him here at this isolated cottage.  She recalled the delicious impact of her sword against his neck, the crunch as she cut through his spine.  A shiver went down her back as she thought of it now.

With her highly attuned reflexes, she whirled at the sound of a crackle like melting ice.  Pale statues stood just at the edge of the cottage's garden: a broad-chested man in patched clothes, and his wife with her hair bound in a scarf, her wide hips covered by a patchwork skirt.  Three children were by them: a young girl of about five, a boy of eight, and an older boy of eleven or twelve.  The petrified figures began to move sluggishly, inhaling deep breaths as they came alive again.  Confused, the family bent their arms in wonder.

Adessa relaxed.  She should have expected this would happen once she killed Maxim.  The Farrier family lived in this cottage in the forested hills above the river town.  Apparently, the kindly people had welcomed the wizard commander and offered him shelter, but when they tried to flee, he had turned them all into statues.  Now that the wizard commander was dead, his petrification spell had worn off.

Their skin softened and flushed with color again.  In the minds of these terrified people, they had been running into the night, terrorized by Maxim, when their existence had suddenly stopped.  Now, like a snapped string, it was a different night sometime in the future, and everything had changed.  They didn't even know how many days had passed or what had happened in the world.