The Moonflower.
Its vitality consumed by the ambient energy of the air itself, stripped away so quietly and completely that he hadn't noticed until there was nothing left to notice.
He stopped walking.
Stood still in the cold and looked north into the darkness ahead, where the bones pointed and the energy flowed and the air carried the particular, ancient weight of something that had been waiting in that direction for an amount of time he couldn't calculate.
Something was up there.
Something that drew ancient giants to their deaths by its mere existence. Something that consumed vitality as casually as the air consumed sound. Something that the energy moving past him — the energy that felt, impossibly, like a part of himself — was flowing toward without any sign of stopping.
He stood at the edge of what he knew and looked into what he didn't.
The Moonflower had been stripped to a husk.
He was completely unharmed.
