“Once she started awake to a sound like the low roll of drums, and to the south she saw an endless congregation of antelope that moved across the nighted plain, raising a cloud of dust behind them that swallowed the stars and turned the moon rusty brown as a scrape of ruined iron. Near dawn, in that darkest hour, she raised her head again and saw to the north the passage of sails. They hovered across the deep like a parade of phantom cavaliers tilted upon hellish steeds. They passed in waves, ranks upon ranks of ghostly warlords bent toward the coming dawn as if to impale the sun itself and set it atop a spike in the blackened sky.”