Zantheus was standing still, staring up into the sky. He had almost forgotten that it existed. He had never realised that he had always taken it for granted. What a strange thing it was, this enormous, beautiful hanging, draped over the world and yet always out of reach. He had spent his whole life training himself to travel upwards towards that sky, coaching his body under an intense regime along with the other, Paragons in the hope of one day climbing up Mount Awmeer as high as possible towards it. It represented everything he wanted, everything he was trying to get back to: Qereth, Aythia, Awmeer, the mirror –they were all waiting for him in the sky. So, mixed with the wonder, it filled him with a nearly unbearable longing. But, even as he longed to return to the scene of his destiny, Zantheus remembered what it had been like to fall helplessly through that sky, and a feeling of dread crept into him along with the wonder and the longing. That was not an emotion he was used to feeling.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Anthē. She was herself extremely relieved to be out of the forest.

“Yes, it is...” said Zantheus. Normally he would not have responded to her unnecessary observation. But he was a different person now than when he entered the forest, somehow. Or rather, he was more of the person that he had always been. He turned his attention to what lay before them.

“There they are,” said Leukos.

Sprawled out in front of them were fields, reaching out as far as the sky. As the trees of Choresh gradually fell away the grass grew taller, settling at waist height, and its blades rustled in the breeze. Something in Zantheus almost despaired. He remembered the ocean as he had viewed it from atop the mast of Thalassa’s ship; he remembered the weeks-long trek across Avarah, and the labyrinthine mess of Choresh, only just at their backs. He had dared to hope that this last leg of his journey might be easy and quick. Why did it only come in huge, terrifyingly long stages? It was never the simple matter of a short road to follow, a small lake to cross, a little wood to navigate, rather he had to cross whole countries, whole oceans, whole sections of gargantuan forest.

“How long, how long left?” he said, half to himself, half to Leukos.

“No idea,” said Leukos, “but in any case the sooner we get going the sooner we shall arrive.” Remarkably, he started walking again, as if he simply expected the others to follow him, as if nothing of their ordeal of losing him and their encounter with the mad twin sisters had taken place. Zantheus, for his part, accepted this with silent resignation. He was fed up. He just wanted to get back. Leukos had gone, and now he had returned, that was the long and short of it.

But as usual Anthē was not ready to accept things so quickly. She ran up to Leukos as she had done before on Avarah and for a time kept stride with him, determined to find out where he had been now that he seemed to have surfaced from his deranged state. He appeared to have snapped out of whatever mood had possessed him in the forest. But it turned out that that did not mean that he was now going to condescend to answer any of her questions about where he had been, or whom he had been ‘chasing’, or how Conn and Feanna knew him, or anything else.

“Leukos, are you feeling better now?”

“Yes, thank you Anthē,” the writer said nonchalantly, still refusing to acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary had really taken place.

“Leukos, we met a man and a woman called Conn and Feanna in the forest while you were gone. They said they knew you –do you know them?”

“Can’t say I do, Anthē…”

“They said they came from the same country as you?”

“Hmm… Conn and Feanna… rings a faint bell I suppose…”

“Where are you from, Leukos?”

“Oh, somewhere far away.”

“Leukos, can I ask you a question?”

“If you must,” said Leukos, not pointing out that she had already asked him several questions.

“Why did you leave us behind in Choresh? Where did you go?”

“I got lost. I’m sorry.”

“Were you looking for somebody?”

Leukos did not reply immediately. “Why do you ask that?”

“Back in the forest, when we found you again, you kept saying ‘I was so sure I’d found her again’ or something like that. Remember?”

“Oh. Never mind that. I got a bit confused for a moment.”

“Who were you look—”

“Anthē, please stop asking me these questions. I’m back now, alright? Let’s leave it that.”

“But—”

“Alright?”

“...alright,” Anthē agreed, unsatisfied. “Well, it’s good to have you back again.” She dropped back again to join Tromo and Zantheus.

“What did he say?” asked Zantheus.

“He said he got lost, and that he got a bit confused.” Anthē reported.

“Stupid boy,” said Zantheus, frustrated.

“I just don’t understand it,” said Anthē. “He never lets on about anything. We still don’t really know why he’s showing us the way to Qereth.”

“Yes,” said Zantheus. “There is more going on than we are aware of. It sounds as though he is pursuing someone, or at least thinks he is –who knows? But he is the best we have for now, so we must accept that. And keep a close eye on him. Hopefully he will not run off on his own again.”

Not long to go now, Zantheus told himself. Not long to go now. He was nearly there, he kept on repeating to himself. And walking through the tall grass actually felt like achieving something. On the plains they had only had the grim vision of a bland, unchanging landscape stretching out in front of and behind them. That was until Choresh had suddenly popped up. In there it had been impossible to chart their progress, they had simply had to trust that Conn and Feanna or Leukos had known where they were going. But now, walking over the fields, he could look back occasionally and see a long trail of flattened grass running behind him, marking the distance they had travelled. He felt like he was getting somewhere, he was getting closer to Awmeer every minute. And he was so thankful to have the sky back, having been without it for so long. By day the same burning orb he used to look up to from Aythia moved across it, and by night he could lie beneath it and lose himself in the stars once more.

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He got on better with Anthē as well. Gone was the awkwardness of the early stages of their journey; the ordeals of the forest had brought them closer together. They were at times able to talk openly about how they felt, and each shared the other’s excitement that they were getting closer to Qereth. Zantheus actually began to offer to carry Tromo of his own accord in the evening when he became tired. They even took to playing a game with him where they would take hold of one of his hands each and swing him up into the air after a short run-up, which made Tromo laugh. Their spirits had improved. It was exciting, pressing through the long wavy grass, knowing that each step brought them a little nearer to their destination.

Now and again of course they lost sight of Leukos for a moment, but that was no longer really a problem anymore, since they could always follow the trail of flattened grass he had left in his wake to make sure they were taking the same path as he was. At least, this was the case until their fifth day journeying through the fields, when without any prior indication the long grass died away in the wake of a shorter variety. When that happened they resumed their habit of shouting at Leukos whenever he was going too quickly, and he would slacken his pace accordingly. By the sixth day, they realised that the grass was now arranged into sections, and they started to pass by little hedgerows. By the seventh day, there were wooden fences as well. They had entered a system of patchwork fields with marked-off boundaries, maintained by humans.

Once at lunch, Zantheus asked Leukos “Do people live in these fields, Leukos?”

Leukos began his answer with a question. “Do you remember, Zantheus, that map I drew for you in the sand, when we started out on our journey?”

“Yes,” said Zantheus.

“It started with Avarah, which we have crossed. Then Choresh, which we have crossed. Now we have come to the fields of Sadeh. They spread out to the south and west of Qereth. As they near the Great City, they become increasingly more inhabited. You will see; soon we will come upon small farms, the odd village. But they also grow more dangerous in certain places the closer you come to the City. They are rife with bandits, gypsy caravans, and solitary wayfarers who lost their way in Choresh and have wandered out in unexpected places.”

“I’m sure Zantheus will protect us,” teased Anthē.

To her amazement, he did not respond with some kind of serious comment like “I will endeavour to do so,” as she expected him to do, but quietly acknowledged her joke with a chuckle.

They soon found Leukos’s words to be true. They were confirmed when they chanced upon their first field of tilled earth. Zantheus thought that they should avoid walking over it, but Anthē had no problem with doing this, so he walked around it and met her and Tromo on the other side.

“I thought you were the one who was desperate to get to Qereth!” she said. This time his silence took more of an effort to maintain.

Soon Sadeh became a network of crops, grass-fields, hay-fields, and, Anthē’s personal favourite, wheat-fields. In these she delighted to dance around in the wavy gold, blissful in the warm sunshine. When Zantheus was carrying Tromo, which he was doing more and more, she took to lying down in the middle of the wheat, seizing a spare moment to stare up into the sky as it brushed delicately against her skin, and watch the clouds glide past. The first time she did this Zantheus called out for her, wondering where she had gone, but he quickly got used to her new habit when he realised. Anthē could almost forget about their journey at moments like this when she was happy to linger for a while, enjoying the beauty of their surroundings. Zantheus soon gave up his intention of refusing to walk over any ploughed or tilled earth when it became so abundant, though he took the utmost care not to tread on anything growing or to harm any of the crops. He too found that he turned to Qereth in his thoughts less and less. The trio began to feel as they had done during their times with Conn and Feanna and Ethall, unusually content in their travelling. But they continued on all the same. Anthē was tempted more and more to simply go on lying in the secret calm of her wheat-fields. But something always bore her upwards and onwards eventually. Something still tugged at her heart, pulling her towards Qereth, though she was less and less clear about exactly what it was. She thought about her conversations in the forest with Conn and Feanna a lot, and somewhere she still cherished a dream in her heart. Zantheus still saw Awmeer in his own dreams, both waking and sleeping, but he was less tormented by it, it was less of a pressure on him, and less often accompanied by thoughts of the enormous mirror or of endless hills. Tromo seemed happier as well. He had nightmares far less frequently, he shook and trembled less often, and he continued to grow more and more proficient on his ocarina. And Leukos...Leukos was still a mystery, ever propelled forward by some unknown motive at which the other three of them could only guess...

“Leukos, why are you guiding us to Qereth?” Anthē asked him once for what seemed like the hundredth time in the evening firelight. “I mean, you don’t have any special reason to go there, do you?”

There was a brief pause while Leukos considered today’s unclear answer. “I have lots of reasons,” he said eventually. “You want to go there to start a new life. Zantheus wants to go there to get back to the mountain he was climbing. Tromo wants to go there because needs to find his family. Are these not reasons enough?”

“But,” said Zantheus, “they do not tell us why you want to go there.” He had been thinking about this a lot lately too, especially after Leukos had abandoned them in Choresh and after later they had discovered him babbling about being in pursuit of someone.

“Do I need a reason?” said Leukos. “I am a lonesome traveller, helping the three of you on your way. Can’t you leave it at that?”

“Then why did you leave us behind in Choresh?” said Anthē.

Leukos sighed. “I have told you...I cannot tell you that. I got lost. I lost the plot a bit in the forest and I...I just got lost for a bit, alright? But you found me again, didn’t you? Leave it at that.”

Anthē sensed that this part of the conversation was over, so she changed the subject. But later, when Leukos had gone off to write on his own and Tromo had fallen asleep, she whispered to Zantheus in the darkness.

“He’s still refusing to tell us everything, is he?”

“You are right,” agreed Zantheus. “But it would be unwise for us to press him. We should be thankful we have him to guide us for the meantime, whatever his motive.”

“But what d’you think it is? Why does he want to get to Qereth?””

“I do not know. Perhaps he does merely enjoy our company.”

Anthē laughed with Zantheus. “I doubt it! He’s impossible to talk to! And he still always walks in front.”

“I know… Perhaps...perhaps he wants protection?”

“That’s a bit more believable, I’ll grant you that. You’re the best person to have around in a fight. But then why take on a woman and a young boy, as well?”

“Tromo and I come together, I suppose. And he seemed to think that you would be able to help us. And you have. But really…I do not know. Well, at least...we have always known him to be a bit...eccentric...”

The word echoed soundlessly in the darkness, a gross understatement. Zantheus yawned.

“That book!” said Anthē after a while. “What is he writing in that book?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“I reckon it’s a story. Do you remember what those women said to him in the forest? ‘He’s always making up pretend worlds.’ What d’you think? I reckon it has to be a story.”

“It could be,” murmured Zantheus.

“I wonder if it’s a good one. Maybe it’s an adventure, with battles and escapes and daring deeds. Or maybe it’s… maybe it’s romance, with a hero and a heroine who fall in love? Or maybe it’s a mystery, with a secret that you only figure out at the end, and some that you never do figure out? What d’you think?”

Anthē never got to hear what Zantheus thought. For once, he had fallen asleep before her.