Grey mountains gather as the grass grows dry.
More dreadful than its fury is the rapture of the sky.
Miss Bethany is longing for the world she is denied,
But the wind is singing, distantly, and leaves nowhere to hide.

When the wind blows a mysterious, nameless drifter into a frontier town on the great plains – amid the land rivalries, small-town politics, money-making schemes, and star-crossed young lovers and the jealousies they cannot help but excite – one might very well expect the story to proceed in certain familiar ways.

But expectations, like everything else that mortals build, can be knocked down and blown away like so much dust, in the face of a strong enough wind.

The obsidian mansions plume themselves that they need not the sky
And so the wind must come again to teach them how to die.
The wind shall break their furnaces, and fling their wheels above.
They shall know not how to stop it. They know not its love.
And the wind sings high, and the wind sings low,
And none of the windswept people know
How all of the wind died, long ago,
Yet still knows how to fly.
The dark towers cowered as the blast went by
And the wind sang Alleluia the day it went to die.