Free 04c Dreams of Fire and Gods: Gods by James Erich Page A

out the sky. He glanced up, but the sky above him was still unobscured, cloudless and bright. Koreh looked down into the water and felt a chill come over him as he saw the outline of a human head and shoulders in the water… and eyes looking back at him.
    Sael . He mouthed the name but couldn’t make a sound, as if his vocal chords were frozen. The image of Sael in the water appeared to be just as startled as he was. Sael opened his mouth as if to say something, but the trout chose that moment to swim across the pool and nibble at the bait on Koreh’s hook. Sael’s face dissolved in the ripples it left in its wake.
    Koreh was still staring into the stream, his mouth hanging open in shock, when Emik plucked the head off a mannet flower and tossed it at him. Koreh flinched as the ball of bright red petals bounced off his cheek and made a halfhearted attempt to swat it away, but he couldn’t tear his eyes off the streambed.
    “What are you looking at?” Emik asked impatiently.
    “I don’t know. It looked like… a face. Someone I know.”
    Emik set his fishing pole down and crawled closer to peer down from the grassy bank at the water a few feet below them. “It’s just a trout.”
    “I know what the fish is,” Koreh replied, irritated. The damned thing had swum right across the vision and destroyed it. Now the trout was regarding Koreh’s baited hook with suspicion, as if debating whether or not to take another nibble.
    Koreh pulled his line up out of the water before the fish could make up its mind.
    “What did you do that for?” Emik protested. “He’s a big one!”
    Koreh didn’t care about the trout. He needed to get out of there, preferably without Emik trailing along after him. The vision of Sael gazing up at him, looking just as shocked as Koreh felt, had shaken him to the core. In the years Koreh had been living with his family, he’d thought of Sael every day, but to suddenly see his face like that….
    “I’m done for the day,” he announced, winding the twine around his fishing pole and removing the bait and tossing it into the stream for the trout to gulp down without endangering itself. “I’m going back to see if Da wants help in the field.”
    He knew his little brother hated working in the field, so he wasn’t surprised when Emik made a rude noise and replied, “I’ll stay here and catch that trout you were too dumb to catch.”
    Koreh left the river and followed the path through the forest back to the farm. There was a hill between the woods and the pasture, and he climbed it, lost in thought while a gentle breeze tousled his hair and brought the sound of singing to his ears. It was a man’s deep voice—his father’s—singing a song of laboring hard in the fields from cockcrow ’til evening. That life was almost forgotten by Koreh’s family now. His father sang the songs because he enjoyed them, but they no longer held much meaning for him.
    Kiishya was high in the sky, forcing Koreh to squint as he looked up. That was why he didn’t immediately recognize what appeared at the top of the hill. It was large and black, and when Koreh shaded his eyes with his forearm, the shape resolved itself into a beautiful jet-black stallion. The horse looked down at him with large brown eyes that seemed somehow familiar, but it made no move to approach him.
    Koreh took a few more steps, and suddenly he knew why the horse looked so familiar. He felt another chill run through his body and stopped moving.
    “Sek?” he asked, his voice faint and breathless.
    The horse turned and walked away from him down the opposite side of the hill.
    Koreh forced himself to move, scrambling up the hill in an attempt to catch the horse. But when he reached the top and looked down upon the fields and pastures between him and the cottage, he could find no trace of the animal.
    “Sek!”
    His father looked up from where he was packing hay into the wooden press he used for making bales and waved at his son, but