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still needed fixing.
    She stepped toward the conical canvas tent. The gryphon seal of House Jorasco was painted in bright colors above the entrance. The soothing pattern of chanting and woodwinds continued from within. She pushed the tent flap open just enough to peek through. The gentle scent of sandalwood incense hung in the air. A quartet of halflings knelt in circle around a pallet in the center of the tent.
    Omax lay upon the pallet, covered with a thin blanket knitted in a riot of color. Seren couldn’t help but smile at the odd sight. The blanket did a warforged no good, but Omax was too polite to remove it. The warforged’s head turned slightly as she entered. His face was, as always, an expressionless mask of scarred metal. The flicker of blue light in his eyes brightened when he saw her. At least both his eyes now shone again and had lost the sickly red light they radiated after Marth wounded him. Seren was no expert in warforged anatomy, but that seemed to be a good sign.
    “Seren,” he said. His once rumbling voice was now cracked and hollow.
    One of the halfling healers followed Omax’s eyes, looking at Seren. The little man smiled warmly and gestured for her to enter.
    “Omax,” Seren said. She hurried into the tent and knelt beside the warforged.
    “You may visit him, but do not tarry. He needs his rest,” saidMother Shinh, the elder halfling kneeling at Omax’s right side. She rose, as did the others. The flutist slid his instrument into a leather case at his hip. “If you need us, we will be nearby.”
    Seren murmured her thanks as the healers filed out of the tent.
    “I keep telling them that I do not rest,” Omax said. “They do not listen.”
    Seren laughed softly.
    “Mother Shinh has done what she can, Seren,” the warforged said, “but she can do nothing more.”
    “You don’t know that, Omax,” Seren said. She reached out and grasped his hand. The three thick metal fingers coiled around hers with surprising gentleness.
    “Tristam believes that his failure caused this,” Omax whispered. “He is wrong. It was my own failure. A warforged does not heal naturally as a creature of flesh does. If I had told anyone how truly injured I was …”
    “I thought Norra Cais repaired you,” Seren said.
    “She tried,” Omax said with a rueful chuckle. “She helped, but the full extent of the damage was beyond her skill. How strange that with all the threats and terrors that haunt this world, the deadliest enemy is the self.”
    The warforged lay back on his pallet. He stared up through the hole in the ceiling at the sky, lost in his thoughts.
    Seren wanted to offer words of encouragement, but could find none. She could not speak at all.

F OUR
     
    I f something was at all important, it either began in Sharn or ended there.
    It was an old saying—one Norra Cais was fond of. It was coined by a Sharn poet, of course. Norra’s own bias was fairly evident, as a native of the city, but she was fond of the saying nonetheless.
    Norra sat alone in a small passenger compartment, watching the landscape as the lightning rail sped through the heart of Breland. She had taken pains to appear inconspicuous. Her short robe and breeches were a conservative gray. Her blond hair was braided and coiled into a severe bun. She clutched a small leather duffle against her lap and kept to herself in a private cabin. With international relations as they were, a traveler who kept to herself and caused no trouble received little attention.
    As the lightning rail crested a hill, Sharn came fully into view. Even to Norra’s jaded eyes, the City of Towers was an amazing sight. Impossibly tall spires of metal and stone reached into the sky. Islands of magically enchanted clouds hovered above the city, hosting even more towers that had never known contact with the crude earth. Even from here she could see the graceful skycoaches and much larger airships that soared through the city. Sharn was, quite literally, an