Annemarialana had been sleeping fitfully for the last several weeks. She still had not recovered from Sabrinaela's birth. She was fairly convinced she never would. Cewyn, on the other hand, repeatedly assured her that she would be better soon. Yui'ko had visited a few times, in the beginning of the strange illness, but she offered only silence and a sad glance when Cewyn asked anxiously after Annemari's health. He was trying to convince himself more than he was convincing her. She went along with it, for his sake, but she didn't really believe.

Finally, after several days of poor sleep induced by recurring dreams of Aldus's funeral pyre, Annemari begged in her night time prayer to be spared, if only for the night. She had tried to lay her memories, her love, for Aldus to rest with his ashes, and she felt guilty for the lingering dreams. She felt ashamed and disloyal.

That night she slept deeply and peacefully. In fact, she slept for several days and nights; it was a sleep so complete and so deep it could be nothing but magical. If she were not in the doomed portion of the Vallenwoods, she might even have woken fully healed and whole once more.

It was not to be. Annemari awoke in the midst of a raging inferno. Flames licked along her floor and up her curtains. The air was thick with choking smoke. Her eyes ran with tears. She was losing precious moisture too quickly; she hadn't long to live.

It suddenly occurred to her that the fires of her dreams had not been Aldus's remembered funeral, but her own death. She also remembered, vividly now, the fantasy she had-briefly-entertained, of flinging herself, in a romantic but futile gesture, onto the burning pyre. She remembered how clearly she had seen her own body burning in that fire. Even then, she didn't recognize the vision for what it was.

She laughed at her own stupidity.

That final lungful of air overwhelmed her and she lost consciousness, mercifully, before the flames actually consumed her body.