Author's note; the descending years

I wasn't really paying attention to anyone else then. That didn't stop some of the most important things of other people's lives from happening. Kora received the first of the visions that would become 'the stone prophecies'; the first of which spared many lives in the very near future. Knarf and Kara encountered a dragon in the arena; by accident they were trying to get ahead of the game by spying out their next challenge. Knarf gave his right fore-arm and left eye to save her; she gave up her own eye to replace it in gratitude. I don't know how deep their friendship went; but for an Anatolian like Kara to give a Ga-Vok anything was, and would be for millenia, quite exceptional. Those two events set the framework for coming events.

Vlad actually dropped out of school the summer between years eight and nine. Azriak sent a shade towards the end of year eight and told him that he had four score hundred years to ready himself for a rematch. Vlad never has been the sort to waste time getting ready for things.
Kora took it hardest; the two of them had been good friends. She tried to send a letter, it ended up sitting on my desk for nearly five hundred years before I even knew what it was. She said a man who called himself 'the paymaster' had told her that he would have a Nieldic heir, and that he would know the child's mother by her depressed hair and the storm in her eyes; which would be unmistakable.

And Though I did know it at the time; I failed to truly appreciate just how much Chesi did in those years. Her uncle died during her eight year; It never even occurred to me that Chesi would have had to abdicate the heirship to have stayed at school. She pretty much gave up everything for a friend who didn't even give her the time of day most days. I never got that; Petra would never have done that for her. HE has plans, and HIS plans work out.