As Liébo walked amid the tombs of ancient Masters, he thought of his final examination, and the dark revelations yielded by the omen condenser and his own scalpel. He shivered at the memory. “There are wars in the sky,” he'd pronounced to the Proktor-Superior bare days ago. “It is nearly finished. Those who survive will seek us out; they know of us, and they know what we do to members of their breed. They know of the dangers our world poses to them. They count Aeromancers among those threats, and they despise any dangers to themselves. We are not alive, in their reckoning, and so it will not be murder to kill us. Their emotions are different. It is cold rationality that dictates their actions. If we die, they survive. That is how they see it. Their survival is preferable to them.” There had been more, much more than that, but those were the words that echoed through Liébo's mind now. If we die, then they survive...that is how they see it. Life and death, there were no alternatives or compromises in this view. The Proktor-Superior confirmed Liébo's reading, and by night, whispers coursed through Castle grounds as couriers took messages to the other Aeromancer keeps. Samples of the dead omen went with them: declared confirmation of Liébo's reading, embedded deeply in the brain-meat of the sacrificed and distilled creature. Today, Liébo knew what other Aeromancers knew. He could count himself in their hallowed ranks, but there was no pride in this knowledge. In the span of a single reading, the entire world had changed. Each day bore a number, and with each sunset, that number diminished. Soon, the guild of Aeromancers would be gone...dead or worse. “We will have to hide,” the Proktor-Superior proclaimed. “All that we are must be made hidden.” He didn't go so far as to say that the Castles had to fall, but Liébo knew that they would. The cities would fall as well, and those who lived in the cobbled citadels would disperse. There was no other way. There were crude communities in the world: a rambling scatter of lesser human tribes. Those of the cities and the towns would move, slowly, and carefully among them, adopting ways more primitive than the slums of the lowliest city. Humans, Liebo knew, would survive, but Aeromancers would not...not as they were. “We are the last,” Liébo said to Beoli, in the silence of the night. Now, walking between tombs, he thought those words, again. We are the last. We will survive, we will live on...but not as we are. A chill coursed through his blood as he read the names of the hallowed dead. * * * * * Though I've ended Fragments of an Echo here, there will be a fleshed-out story concerning the Aeromancers, their culture, and the details of its disappearance. As for the image that accompanies the text, it's a manipulation. Though the source of this image is the cemetery at Vyšehrad, in Prague, the place depicted here does not exist, nor does the character walking along the cobbled path. The line of arches on the left side of the image is a mirrored copy of the arches on the right side, and the character (in his third rendering by me) is something of a Frankenstein/Golem composite. The mismatched portions of his body have been sewn together from various other pictures I took and obscured to hide any single identity, though hints of a single, fictitious identity do emerge. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting...and hopefully you've enjoyed this brief series.