He didn’t know.

But whatever it was, it was coming.

As surely as he knew his own name, he knew that.

And so he stood on that strange shoreline, stood and stared and hoped, as the sun sank below the horizon and darkness claimed the sea in its inky grasp.

Still he waited.

Still he watched.

And when a light shone out across those dark waters, a light that shone with a sense of living vitality that could not be denied, his heart leapt in recognition.

Unfortunately, his time had run out.

Behind him, a snarling cry rose up into the night air and it was quickly echoed by others. Dozens of others, so many that the night seemed filled with their cries.

He spun around, reaching for the sword strapped to his back before he fully registered doing so on a conscious level.

He knew that cry; had heard it often enough on his journeys here to recognize it as the hunting call of a pack of corpse hounds, one that had cornered their prey.

He braced himself for the fight ahead.

They came at him out of the fog, charging across the stony shoreline toward him. Now that the pack had been gathered, there was no need for their hunting cry and they swept forward in an eerie silence that had a weight all its own.

Cade met the first one without hesitation, sidestepping and slashing its body in half as it leapt for his throat. He did the same with the second, then plunged his sword through the chest of the third, holding the carcass with his foot as he dragged his weapon free once it had expired.

By then the rest of the pack was upon him.