They rode across Belloc's fields which had been harvested; the gently rolling lands of stiff, broken stubble now lay empty and still about them, as Brogan gestured to those following to halt.
"We will leave you now, Master Belloc. If we should meet again, it will be at Alin."
Belloc considered the terrain that lay to their immediate north; gentle, rolling hills covered by heather and bracken, with stands of copsewood in the low hollows. Atop a hill, directly to the west, lay the ruins of Nith, once the fairest of all elven cities.
"The future is uncertain, and our time upon this earth is fleeting," Belloc said quietly, as though to the slanting autumn sunlight, its air and mists and smells. "The Great Ending is begun." He turned to consider Brogan, and Dorain in her turn. "What renewal will there be, if there be renewal at all in the coming age?" The old wizard became lost in thought a moment. "The future seems closed to me . . . and that is enough, perhaps, to tell me that it is not a future I will know." He considered the two a moment, frowning. "Nor can I foresee the outcome, which itself is being wrought, even now, by the necessities of the New World that will follow, even as the forces which remain and make up the Old play themselves out to their conclusion. The two, the Old and the New, though inextricably linked, are as nothing to one another.