[i]Antioch was ablaze when she arrived. The city burned from within and without, and all the sky and the land were alight. 

Massive braziers filled with smokeless fire heralded the positions of the Shah's army, and forever on it stretched. A quiet landscape of hills and olive groves was by night rendered an inferno, and the watching beasts of the zodiac were snuffed by the flaming comets of oriental siege works. In the night the fire seemed like a living thing, like the waves of the ocean that cast themselves upon walls of stone and desperation. The Empire of Eagles would fall, proclaimed those fires, and a third great temple would be built upon the sacred mount of Jerusalem.

She hadn't wanted to fight - her knees had trembled and the screams had echoed in her ears and she'd wondered how any dared to stand when the fires of Sekhmet raged. She had been a creature of many fears, but it was there beneath the walls of Antioch where she'd obtained the chief among them: the fear of burning.

She'd tried as best she could to talk Alitel - Lady Sandsfern - out of joining the battle. They were here as pilgrims, not as warriors. No oaths held them to the Empire of Eagles. There was no need to divert away from Jerusalem. Her pleas had been weak, and Alitel had scorned her for what she correctly saw as her cowardice. And so they'd stood together atop the walls of Antioch - Robena trembling, but Alitel's eyes filled with brilliant fascination as she watched the ocean of fire come towards them...[/i]

Robena's left hand twitched. Beneath her glove the skin was raw and creased with the memories of that battle, and it needled her still. 

But now she is here in the land of milk and honey, watching two priestesses natter how to best bring the harvest and bounty. No sermons screamed from the mouth of berserkers who wore fire as a cloak, no reference to light and pain and rebirth, no black pyramids to be built in honour of Emperors to wait out eternity. For a moment it's all unreal. That these could be matters of religion! That a harsh stare and folded limbs might suffice for holy dialogue! She had wondered if she had been naive as a child, unaware of a mad evil that had surrounded her in her younger years as it did in her later. But all here in England, blessed land, seemed removed from that world. 

Again the wave of nostalgia comes over her and again she learns that never more shall she wander.