Each step on the stairway down to the Cove dipped slightly in the center, worn away by countless years of footsteps. How long had Hunters been living and training here, Jordan wondered? For the stone to wear like this suggested a tradition stretching back and back into unknown years. One at a time, solitary, the initiates came here, walking down into flickering darkness on trust alone.

Why should he trust, after what the elder Hunters had done to him in the name of training and evaluation?

What other choice did he have?

The air warmed around him as he cautiously descended the steps, rather than cooling as he would have imagined. What lay at the bottom of the steps was not what he had expected. This place's name had suggested a wild place, a beach open to the ocean, perhaps sand, perhaps shingle. Instead, he stood in a room, neither large nor small, lit by a single torch. The flame leaped and wavered as his approach stirred the air, steadied when he stopped to look around the stone room. The walls were lined with inscriptions, runes, a steady march of regular tablets. When he stepped closer to the wall, curious, the runes seemed to light fitfully from within, flickering and fading.

Each, he realized, represented a weapon, almost abstract in form; here, he thought he could see a spear, there a sword. Not his. He put his hand out, fingers hovering a bare centimeter away from the stone of a tablet. No. Not his. At the lightest touch of the ridges of his fingerprints, the rune flared, hissed, pushed him back and away. No physical touch, but rejection, firm and certain.

Now that he listened, he could hear sound, barely perceptible; whispers, grumbles, a soft, rhythmic, barely audible pulse. That last drew him, irresistible and compelling, a sound like the wheezing breath of some great beast, like the steady clacking beat of the wheels of a train. He couldn't pinpoint it, not by looking, but when he closed his eyes, the sound guided him, step by cautious step. The light of the torch flickered red and black against his eyelids. One more step, two -

- and his outstretched hand encountered stone, graven lines beneath his fingers. He opened his eyes to see that the tablet he had found bore a rune he'd never seen, yet knew like his own hand. Stylized, abstracted, unmistakable: a hammer.

He was ambushed by the sensation of cavernous darkness, the phantom smell of metal and damp and dust; he still stood in the room of stone tablets, but somewhere inside him, he was elsewhere. Far above him in the tenebrous gloom of that other place, a mouth that could have snapped him up in a single gulp opened, illuminated by a flickering, exhausted flame.

Took you long enough, said a voice, deep and grinding and rough, so clear and present that Jordan almost looked around to see who was addressing him. Like a dream or a hallucination, the voice in his head so real in spite of the silence his ears reported.

"I had to - " he started, then shook his head, pushed back the excuses. "I'm here now," he said firmly, and pulled the tablet from the wall. It came easily, no more than a moment of resistance before it fell into his hand.

That you are, said the voice, sounding pleased. You are Jordan, and you are mine, and we met while you were sleeping. I am Ferros, and you will not call me anything else, or I will be very cross with you. The tablet dissolved in Jordan's hand, like holding smoke; for a single disorienting moment, he held nothing. Then, just like his dream beyond death, the solid weight of the hammer's haft pressed into his palm, and he curled his fingers around it. Its weight was startling and comforting. Heavy enough to swing hard, light enough to carry one-handed.

Only for you, Ferros said, sounding smug. No-one else may pick me up. I have chosen you and I will have no other. Greetings and good health, Jordan; we shall be together a very long time.

"Yeah," Jordan said, feeling stupid for having nothing more eloquent, but words had deserted him. Ferros was settling into him, filling and occupying a place in his mind that he had never realized was empty. Since he had stumbled out of the pod, he had half-sensed an absence; he wondered now how he had stood it it all. Complete, now, the unknown missing element found.

So young, Ferros sighed. Be thou my Hunter, and keep thyself alive, would you?

"I'll try," Jordan promised. "I'll try."