A sorcerer sighed into a chalice of copper tea, lit by the flames of twenty-one lamps, beset by the smoke of twenty-one pots of sage, on the twenty first year of the twenty first century, and for the twenty first time. As his breath swept a shudder across the surface of the shimmering tea, and a cloud of crystals shrouded a pale red moon, life arose from the shadows cast by the twenty first lamp. When the sorcerer awoke the next dawn, twenty lamps remained, and the chalice was empty.
Seruka had slunk out during the night, little more than a tuft of smoke and a curious glow. His mind thrived and grew in the sunrise of his existence. As the sun's sphere floated above the endless swaying expanse of prairie beyond the sorcerer's modest brick house, the curious smoke lifted from the dew and Seruka became something more.
His pearl eyes opened to a midday mist, cold and quiet as the highest feathered clouds. The plated edges of his smiling lips pulled back to allow the fog to gether on his ivory fangs. Thin claws pierced the gnarled sod and pressed, and as the armored limbs lifted the snakish body from the grass, he began to drift. He rose above the white mist, higher and yet higher, until again he met the mist, in the white wisps above the lands where only the birds had been.
For nearly a century Seruka danced among the clouds without scarcely a worry, learning the intimate wisdom of the sky-bound ice and perfecting its practice until he could perfectly mask himself among them. The old sorcerer aged and died without ever knowing where his twenty-first lamp had wandered away to.
