Peregrinus paused at the crest of the hill. The city lay open before him, a dead thing no more alive than the marshes he had crossed to reach it. Buildings rose beaten and torn from the gray earth, rearing gray heads toward a gray sky, silently howling the Song of the End. He’d heard the song before, in the cries of refugees following the last death rattle of war, in the wailing of the starving and the sick, in his heart when doubt had taken his brightest hope from him. The fight had gone out of man. Try as he might, his will alone was not enough to rekindle the flame. So he had wandered until his name went from him like a painful memory and he became the wandering.