Now, please bear in mind that this was a new thing. I had been trapped in what looked like a pitiful little statue for the better part of five hundred years, and in all that time no one saw my prison for what it was. Driana did. She knew someone alive was trapped there, and she was curious. Frankly I was curious about her as well.

Inky grabbed his pick off the ground and put his weight behind the next swing, shearing off a piece of coal the size of a small apple. He almost laughed with a combination of relief and joy, tossing the lump into his cart. "See?" Spec said, laying a hand across his shoulders, "You're getting it already...."

There's no reason for anyone to visit our empty scrubland. Civilization, comfort, memory: these must all be on the opposite bank. On this side lies only madness. Nature itself here is unnatural. Ants sometimes fly in the air. The prince says that of course ants fly. On the other side of the river, he claims, his golden carriage was pulled by swarms of winged ants. I remember none of this.

The wizard’s house had drifted with herds of cumulus for a hundred years over the low sky of the Shallows. When I looked down from the windows, it had always been onto a patchwork of rolling hills, farms, and small streams. Now that had ended, and the land fell away in dizzying cliffs. I had lived my entire life on a mountaintop and never known it.