Skandra thought about her question instead of her statement. It was easy to speculate when there were no facts to contain your wild thoughts, but he gave it a go in any case. A village like this one was remote. It was unlikely that anything would be discovered, and by the time it was discovered, it would be too late. If this was an action on behalf of an individual, what made more sense than doing something like this in the middle of nowhere? You couldn't test something like this in Ellothorien, or anywhere else that Skandra was aware of. At least not without having all manner of unwelcome attention coming down on your head. Was this the work of the man in blue? Only there had been no light, just a black sphere. There hadn't been a black sphere the last time, had there?
Of course, it could have been naturally-occurring. But Skandra had never heard of something like this before. It seemed possible that it was created by the world itself, some reaction of environment and intruder, but what intruder? What reaction? And why, if this was possible, was this the first time it was happening? Was it the first time? Or just the first time it was happening in a sufficiently populous area? Someone would have noticed by now. Someone would have been the right kind of smart and cowardly. Just walking away from the scene so they could report on what they'd found.
It had to be the first time. It had to be the result of... something.
"He seemed a decent fellow," Skandra mused again. "Why would he...?"
It rose without warning. A passionate rumble in the bowels of the earth. Those heavy stones, nearly immovable, shifted when the rumbling increased in intensity. Skandra planted his feet carefully to avoid an incident of some kind. Yet it wasn't the rumbling in and of itself that concerned him. It was the cause of that rumbling.
A glance to his left. His right. The noise was near deafening. Then up.
"What the hell," Skandra barked, loud as he could. "Is that?"
One of those gray shapes in the sky, a blob of colorless terror, was shifting direction. Instead of circling above them it was spinning into a tighter spiral, closer to the ground. Of course, it was not doing so quickly, but one had only to follow its movements to see what was happening. Why in the hell was it changing now?