[Child of the 7th Age]

Too soon....too soon.

Khandr's face had registered no surprise as he had watched Jord spring forward on his path wielding a narrow blade of cold iron. This had been coming. He had known it for some time. Whether she was woman or something wholy different, he still could not say. But her ravenous appetite for hatred and division had become all too clear in recent weeks, slowly made evident by the few words that Embla and his retainers had brought back to him. There was no regret for his own life, and certainly no surprise. It was a price he must pay for one last stand against the forces of the shadow lord who threatened to engulf them all. The ending, he had known, was never in doubt. There was no way to avert it. He was no Elf, nor one of the great and mighty....only a simple man.

Still, he cursed his own ineptness. Why now? Why here? Just a few more steps, a bit more time, and he would have stepped inside the palace. He would have made his way to the woman's chamber. There, he might have found something to prove his hunch that a great evil was about to descend upon their heads. Without that confirmation, he dared not raise his voice to speak with Lachrandir. The Elf, he knew, would only laugh at the bumbling guesses of one of the secondborn. If things had been different, if could talk freely man-to-man.....perhaps the story would have a different ending. But none of that was possible in the world in which they lived. Khandr still was uncertain what the woman was conjuring, but the fate of Beleriand and all of his beloved Borrim surely lay upon it.

All this slipped through the old man's mind in the merest instant. Khandr reached out with what little strength was left in a fruitless effort to communicate his suspicions, all the while praying that someone would blunder onto the path so that he might warn them of the woman's evil. He had been too closed in his dealings. If only he could share his suspicions now. But the streets were empty. Everyone was at the hunt. Still he clung stubbornly to life, though the blood spilled out from his great wound staining the skirts of his assailant a brilliant crimson.