The world got quieter the further east they went.
Not the listening-quiet of the ancient forest. Something different. The quiet of places that had been loud once and weren't anymore. The specific silence of absence where presence used to be.
Manix walked through it and catalogued it the way he catalogued everything — not strategically, just because his mind reached for the shape of things the way hands reach for familiar tools.
THE ORC AND GOBLIN TERRITORIES
Brak's people had spread further than the three they'd met on the road.
The territory was rough country — rocky hills, sparse forest, the kind of land humans had decided wasn't worth taking because there was better available. Which was, Manix understood immediately, the only reason anyone was still living here. Not tolerance. Not coexistence. Simple arithmetic — the land wasn't profitable enough to bother removing its current occupants.
The settlement was perhaps two hundred people. Orc families, goblin families, a few kijin who had found their way here through the same logic: pushed toward the margins until the margins became the destination.
The chief was an elderly orc woman named Gruda. She had the specific patience of someone who had survived long enough to run out of anger and arrived at something quieter and more durable on the other side of it.
She looked at Manix's group — at the three divine beasts, at the size of the procession, at Brak standing beside Manix with the ease of someone who had already made his accounting.
"You're building something," she said. Not a question.
"Yes," he said.
"For us?"
"For everyone who needs it," he said. "Including you."
She looked at her settlement for a long moment — at the children playing between the rough stone buildings, at the adults going about the work of survival with the focused efficiency of people who couldn't afford inefficiency.
"When it exists," she said, "send word."
"You'll be among the first to know," he said.
She nodded once. The nod of someone who has decided to believe something and is aware of what that costs.
They left with food the settlement could barely spare and the specific warmth of people who give what they have because the giving matters more than the having.
THE KIJIN TRIBE
The kijin were harder to find.
They had gone further into the margins than anyone else — not hidden behind illusion barriers but simply gone, into the deep wilderness that had no name on any map, the territory that existed in the space between kingdoms' claims.
Sera guided them. She had been quiet since joining the group, carrying herself with the particular bearing of someone who had put down their weapons a long time ago and was still adjusting to the weight of not having them.
The tribe was small. Forty people, perhaps fewer, spread across a camp that had the deliberate impermanence of people who had learned that staying too long in one place had costs.
Their chief was a tall kijin man named Vorrath — red-skinned, with the specific stillness of someone who had been a warrior and had found, after the war he'd been fighting ended, that stillness was the only honest response to what was left.
He looked at Manix with the evaluating patience of someone who had assessed humans before and had extensive data on what that assessment usually produced.
"Sera speaks well of you," he said.
"Sera is generous," Manix said.
"Sera is honest," Vorrath said. "She doesn't do generous."
Sera, standing beside Manix, said nothing. But something in her posture acknowledged the accuracy of this.
Vorrath looked at the divine beasts. At Shiro sitting at Manix's left with her ancient silver eyes. At Ray in his reduced form still somehow requiring more sky than most things. At Ember cycling colors on his shoulder.
"The beasts follow you," he said.
"They chose," Manix said. For the fourth time. He was beginning to feel it was a sentence he was going to be saying for a long time.
Vorrath's expression moved — something underneath the stillness, something that had been waiting for a specific kind of evidence and had just received it.
"When you build your place," he said, "we will come."
"I'll send word," Manix said.
"Don't bother," Vorrath said. "We'll know."
He said this with the flat certainty of someone stating a fact rather than making a claim. Manix filed it under things about this world I don't fully understand yet and kept moving.
THE DEMON SETTLEMENT
The demon settlement was the most dangerous arrival. Not because of the demons — because of what surrounded them.
The settlement existed in a ravine three days east of the kijin camp, hidden not by magic but by geography. Accessible only through a narrow approach that created a natural chokepoint, which was presumably why it had survived.
What didn't survive was the approach.
Human hunters had found it. Not the same group from the road — a different operation, larger, better equipped, with the specific professional organization of people who had received payment in advance and intended to deliver.
Manix heard them before he saw them. Void Sight registered the approach from two directions simultaneously. The pincer movement of people who had done this before.
He stopped the group.
"Stay here," he said.
Garo looked at him. "How many."
"Forty," Manix said. "Professionals."
Garo's jaw set. "I'm coming."
"No," Manix said. "Protect the group."
He looked at Ray.
The dragon looked back with eyes that had stopped being tired sometime around the road ambush and had become something considerably more present.
"With you," Ray said.
They moved.
The fight was not long.
Forty professionals with equipment and organization encountered Manix with Killing Intent at full setting — not partial, not calibrated, the complete presence of something that existed outside every power ranking system in Aethoria — and Ray visible behind him in a size that required the ravine's walls to have opinions about it.
The Killing Intent alone stopped twelve of them. Not unconscious — simply stopped, the way animals stop when they encounter something their instincts have no category for except this is where I stop.
The remaining twenty-eight ran the calculation faster than the first twelve had managed and arrived at the same destination by a different route.
They left.
Ray watched them go with the expression of something that had been prepared for considerably more and was mildly disappointed.
"That was brief," it said.
"Good," Manix said.
The demon settlement emerged from the ravine cautiously — weapons out, the specific wariness of people who had heard fighting and were assessing whether the outcome required flight.
They saw Manix. Saw the divine beasts.
A demon elder — ancient, with the deep grey skin of someone who had lived long enough for the color to settle into permanence — stepped forward with the careful authority of someone who had been making hard decisions for a very long time.
"Human," she said.
"Yes," he said. Same answer. Same steadiness. He was going to keep saying it until the word stopped being a threat.
"You drove them off."
"Yes."
"Why."
He looked at the settlement behind her — at the faces emerging carefully from the ravine, demon families of various ages, children pressed against parents with the familiar posture he had been seeing since the slave market. The posture of people who had learned that humans appearing meant something that required preparation.
"Because they were wrong," he said. "And I was here."
The elder looked at him for a long time.
Then, quietly — with the specific exhaustion of someone who has been surviving so long that being helped feels like a language they've forgotten how to receive:
"Thank you," she said.
Vera, standing three paces behind Manix, made a sound he didn't hear but felt — the specific quality of someone encountering their own people after a long absence and finding them diminished and finding the diminishment personal.
He stepped aside. Let Vera forward.
She walked to the elder and stopped. The elder looked at her — at the chain-mark scars faded now, at the girl who had survived two years in iron and was standing on a road in the open air.
The elder put her hands on Vera's face.
Said something in the demon language that Manix's Divine Tongue rendered as: you came back.
Vera said nothing. But her eyes, which had been the careful managed absence of someone who had learned to need nothing, did something that had no name except the name of a door finally opening all the way.
He looked away. Gave them the moment.
When they left, three young demons joined the group — not permanently, just to the next waypoint. The elder's parting words to Manix were simple: "When your place exists, we will fill it."
He believed her.
THE UNDEAD SETTLEMENT
The undead were the most unexpected.
Not because of what they were. He had the Enemy Analysis and Soul Reading to understand that consciousness and death were not mutually exclusive in Aethoria. But because of where they were.
They were in a ruined city.
Not a small ruin — a proper city, one that had been large once, with the architectural bones of something built to last by people who had intended to live in it for a very long time. Human construction. He recognized it immediately — the proportions, the street grid, the particular logic of a city designed for commerce and military movement.
The undead had been living in it for two hundred years.
Not haunting it. Living in it — continuing to exist in a place and maintain it and build community around the fact of shared existence, even when the form of that existence was unusual. They had repaired what was broken. Built new structures in the gaps where old ones had fallen. Made a city of the ruin.
Their leader was a woman who had died approximately one hundred and fifty years ago and had been running the settlement for one hundred and thirty of them. Her name was Vael. She was entirely conscious, entirely present, and entirely tired of people being surprised by this.
She looked at Manix with the specific patience of someone who had encountered every possible human reaction to her existence and had categorized them all.
"You're not afraid," she said.
"No," he said.
"Most humans are."
"Most humans haven't thought about it carefully," he said. "You're people who died in a place saturated with residual magic and came back changed. That's not monstrous. That's just unusual."
She looked at him for a long time.
"You're the first human to say that to me," she said. "In one hundred and fifty years."
He looked at the city around them — at the undead going about their existence with the quiet efficiency of people who had a lot of time and had found useful things to do with it. At the structures they had maintained and built. At the particular quality of a community that had survived not through hiding but through the specific stubbornness of continuing to exist in a place that had been theirs before they died.
"This is good work," he said, meaning the city. "The repairs. The additions. Whoever designed the eastern expansion understood load distribution."
Vael looked at him. Something moved in her expression — the specific movement of someone receiving recognition for something they had done well and had stopped expecting anyone to notice.
"That was me," she said. "I was an architect. Before."
He looked at her with new attention.
"I'm building something," he said. "I could use an architect who has had one hundred and fifty years to think about what good construction looks like."
She was quiet for a long time.
"When it exists," she said finally, "I will come."
"I'll need you before it fully exists," he said. "I need someone who thinks the way you think."
She looked at the ruined city she had spent a century maintaining. At the community she had built in the ruin.
"Send word when you're ready," she said. "We'll come."
THE DWARF VILLAGE AND THE MARINE FOLK
This was where the chapter stopped being a collection of brief visits and became something else.
The dwarf settlement was built into a cliffside three hours from the coast — the specific location of people who had found a defensible position and built into it with the dwarven thoroughness of people for whom built into was a philosophical commitment rather than a construction technique. The settlement descended into the cliff face in levels — workshops at the top, dwellings below, the deep tunnels at the bottom where the oldest dwarves lived by preference and tradition.
The marine folk — Tidesong people, they called themselves — lived in the shallows below the cliff, in structures that existed between the water and the air with the architectural ingenuity of people who had needed to solve a problem nobody else had ever needed to solve. Not merfolk exactly. They could breathe both air and water, with forms that were human-adjacent but carried the specific adaptations of generations spent between worlds. Scaled at the arms and neck. Eyes that processed both air and water with equal clarity. Webbed fingers that didn't impede tool use.
They were dying.
Both of them. Together. For the same reason.
The dwarven elder who met them at the cliff's base was a woman named Dura — broad, grey-bearded in the dwarven tradition regardless of gender, with the specific exhaustion of someone who had been managing a crisis long enough that exhaustion had become the baseline.
She looked at Manix's group. At the divine beasts.
"You're the one," she said.
"I don't know what one," he said.
"The one Vael's runners described. The one the beastkin villages are talking about." She looked at him with the flat directness of a dwarf who had decided ceremony was a luxury for people who had time. "We don't have time for the usual."
"Tell me," he said.
She told him.
Three months ago a human mining operation had begun twenty miles north. Not near the cliff settlement — near the river that fed both the dwarves' underground water supply and the coastal shallows where the Tidesong people lived.
The mining used a magical process — a human technique developed recently, one that extracted ore efficiently but discharged waste into the water system. The discharge was magical contamination. Not immediately lethal, but cumulative, building in the water over weeks until the water itself became the problem.
The dwarves had sent three delegations to the mining operation. The first had been turned away. The second had been threatened. The third had not returned.
The Tidesong elder — a woman named Coral, scaled to the shoulders, with eyes the specific blue-green of deep water — had joined Dura at the cliff's base. She was visibly unwell. The contamination affected her people faster, their greater exposure making the accumulation worse.
"Our children," Coral said. "The youngest ones. They can't — the water is where they breathe. They can't avoid it."
Manix looked at both of them.
"How far is the mining operation?" he said.
"Twenty miles," Dura said. "Two hundred workers. Armed guards. Human operation with kingdom backing."
He looked at Garo.
Garo looked back with the expression of a man who had already run the calculation. "I'm coming this time," he said.
"Yes," Manix said. "You are."
He left the group at the cliff settlement — Mizuki managing the camp with the competent authority of someone who had been doing this since Aethenmoor, Shiro staying to guard with the particular presence of something that made threats reconsider themselves, Kira distributing herself between the dwarf children and the Tidesong children with the democratic warmth of someone who had decided all children were within her jurisdiction.
Ray came. Garo came.
And Vera — who had been quiet since the demon settlement in the specific way of someone who had found something in the encounter and was still processing what to do with it — stepped forward and said: "Me too."
He looked at her.
She looked back. Her dark eyes steady. The chain-mark absence on her wrists where the iron had been. "These are my people too," she said, gesturing toward where they were going. "Not the miners. The ones being poisoned."
"Yes," he said.
The mining operation was exactly what Dura had described — two hundred workers, professional guards, the efficient machinery of human industry applied to a territory it had decided it owned because it had decided everything was territory it owned.
The approach produced the usual response. Guards moving to intercept. Warnings delivered with the confidence of people who had a kingdom's backing and knew it.
Manix looked at the foreman — a human man with the practiced authority of someone who had never had to revise his certainties.
"Stop the discharge," he said. "Into the water system. Stop it now."
The foreman looked at him. At the school uniform. At the group behind him. At Ray, who had chosen not to reduce for this conversation and was therefore visible above the treeline in a way that required the sky to make accommodations.
His eyes went to Ray. Came back to Manix.
"The operation is legally sanctioned —"
"It's poisoning people," Manix said. "Stop it."
"The non-human settlements aren't —"
"They're people," Manix said. For the hundredth time. Still flat. Still patient. Still the tone of someone stating a fact to someone who needed to hear it until they understood it. "Stop the discharge. Today. Or I stop the operation."
The foreman looked at Ray again. Made a calculation with several stages and arrived at a conclusion that required considerable revision of his previous certainties.
"Today," he said.
"Today," Manix confirmed.
He turned to Vera. "Can you manage the contamination already in the water?"
She looked at him. "I don't have —"
"You do," he said.
He opened his status window, found what he needed, and activated Skill Absorption in reverse — not absorbing her skill but transferring one of his, temporarily, the way you lend someone a tool.
Matter Creation. Limited version. Enough to address the contamination.
She felt it arrive. He saw it in her face — the specific expression of someone handed something that changes the calculation entirely.
"Can you do it?" he said.
She looked at her hands. Looked at the river.
"Yes," she said.
He nodded. She went to the water.
What she did took three hours.
He watched from the bank — watched her work with the focused intensity of someone who had found the specific application of something new and was discovering for the first time what she was capable of. The contamination in the water responding to Matter Creation the way all matter responded to it: not instantly, not dramatically, but with the patient compliance of physical reality accepting instruction.
The water cleared gradually. Then fully.
She came back to the bank and stood beside him and looked at what she'd done.
He said nothing. Let her have the moment.
"Thank you," she said, finally. Quietly.
"You did it," he said.
"You gave me the means."
"You had the will," he said. "That was always yours."
She looked at the clear water for a long moment. Then she looked at him — directly, fully, the managed absence completely gone, something behind it that had been building since the slave market and the inn and the night she'd pressed her back into a corner and the demon elder's hands on her face and now this.
"I'm going with you," she said. "To the abandoned land. Whatever you build." A pause. "I want to be part of it. Not as someone you freed. As someone who chose."
"You've been choosing since the market," he said.
She looked at him.
"I know," she said. "But now I'm saying it."
They returned to the cliff settlement as the sun went down.
The Tidesong children were already in the water — the youngest ones, who had been kept out for weeks, returned to the element they breathed, moving through the shallows with the specific joy of something restored to its natural state.
Coral was in the water with them. Standing chest-deep, watching her children breathe properly, with the expression of a parent who had prepared for the worst case and been given the best case instead and was still running the calculation.
She looked at Manix on the bank.
He looked back.
She put her hand over her chest — the Tidesong salute, the gesture of her people for something that required more than words.
He received it.
Dura was beside him. She had been watching the water clear from the cliff's edge and had come down when it finished with the expression of a woman who had been managing a crisis for three months and had just had the crisis managed for her by someone she'd met this afternoon.
"What do you want for this," she said. Direct. The dwarven way.
"Nothing now," he said. "Later — when I build something — I'll need people who know how to build things that last."
"Dwarves build things that last," Dura said.
"I know," he said. "That's why I'm asking."
She looked at her settlement. At the levels cut into the cliff face by generations of her people who had found this margin and made it into something. At the craftwork visible in every surface — the specific intelligence of people who had been making things for longer than human civilization had been recording its own history.
"When you're ready," she said, "we'll come."
"I'll need an engineer," he said. "Someone who understands underground systems. Water. Foundation work."
Dura looked at him for a long moment. Then she put two fingers in her mouth and whistled — sharp, specific, the particular whistle of someone calling someone specific.
From the cliff above, a young dwarf appeared at the edge — twenty years old, perhaps less, with the focused eyes of someone who was always thinking about something structural and the ink-stained hands of someone who drew those thoughts down.
"My granddaughter," Dura said. "Brin. She's been designing things since she could hold a pencil." A pause. "She hasn't had anything worth designing yet."
Brin looked down at Manix.
Manix looked up at her.
She had the expression of someone who had just been told they were going somewhere and had been waiting for that sentence their entire life.
"Can I bring my drawings?" she said.
"Bring everything," he said.
THE DIVINE BEASTS
The dark god beast found him at the coast.
Or rather — it had been at the coast for an unknown length of time and chose the moment of his arrival to make itself visible, which amounted to the same thing.
It came out of the water. Not dramatically — just emerged, the way very large things emerge when they have decided that concealment is no longer necessary. Dark, the specific dark of deep water, of places where light had given up being relevant. Its form was difficult to categorize: something between a serpent and a wolf and a shadow that had decided to have opinions about its own shape. Its eyes were the color of the space between stars.
It looked at Shiro.
Shiro looked back.
"Senior," it said.
"Junior," Shiro said, with the composed patience she had deployed three times now and showed no signs of finding repetitive.
It looked at Manix.
He looked back.
It said nothing. Simply studied him, with the specific attention of something that existed in darkness and therefore understood what things looked like when stripped of the light that made them comfortable to see.
"You carry void," it said.
"Yes," he said.
"Void is mine."
"Void is many things," he said. "You're one of them. I'm another."
A silence. The sea moved. The dark god beast considered this.
Then it attacked — brief, total, the darkness it carried becoming a weapon with the absolute commitment of something that didn't do things partially.
Manix stood in the dark.
Void Sight rendered it as light. He moved through it with the ease of someone fighting in their own element, because he was. The void had been his since the goddess placed it in him, and this creature's darkness was a dialect of a language he spoke natively.
He caught it. Not violently — with Spatial Lock and the specific calm of someone who had done this enough times to have a process for it. Held it still.
Looked at it in the locked space.
"Done?" he said.
A pause.
"...Done," it said.
He released it.
It looked at him with those star-space eyes.
"What is your name?" it said.
"Manix," he said.
"I will remember it," it said. "I have not remembered a name in four hundred years."
Kira named it Nyx before it had finished its first sentence to the group.
Nyx accepted this with the specific resignation of something that had survived four hundred years and could survive one determined seven-year-old.
The elder leech was in the deep forest two miles inland — ancient beyond the other beasts, ancient in the way that made ancient feel like an insufficient word. It didn't fight. It simply looked at him when he found it, with the patience of something that had been waiting specifically and knew it.
"Finally," it said.
It was vast and still, with the quality of something so old it had become indistinguishable from the landscape around it — roots and earth and the slow patient absorption of everything that had died nearby for millennia.
"You took long enough," it said.
"I didn't know you were here," he said.
"I know," it said. "That was not a criticism. I have been here for six thousand years. A few extra months is not a long time."
He looked at it. "What are you?"
"Old," it said. "I am the oldest thing you will meet that is not a god. I absorb. I preserve. I hold the record of everything that has ended near me." A pause. "I have been holding a great deal for a very long time. I would like to give some of it to something worth giving it to."
He received what it offered — not through Skill Absorption but through something simpler, something the elder leech did directly, placing six thousand years of accumulated knowledge into the Permanent Archive skill with the patient efficiency of a librarian who had finally found the right library.
It then reduced itself to a form small enough to travel — something like a very old, very still creature that looked like it was made of bark and patience.
Kira looked at it for a long moment.
"Old," she said, by way of naming it.
"...Accurate," it said.
The elemental gods came together.
Earth, water, lightning, wind — four beings who had been in conflict with each other for the same reason Shiro and Ember had been in conflict, which was proximity without resolution. They occupied the coastal territory in a state of permanent mutual interference that had been making the regional weather aggressively unpredictable for approximately two centuries.
He didn't fight them.
He sat in the middle of their territory and waited.
They came to him — drawn by the presence of the other divine beasts, by the void he carried, by the specific gravity of something that had accumulated enough to be felt at a distance.
He talked to them. Not a speech — a conversation. The same kind he had with everyone. Direct. Honest. What are you fighting over. Is it worth it. What would you rather be doing.
It took four hours.
At the end of it, four elemental beings had arrived at the same conclusion Shiro and Ember had arrived at in the cave — that fighting over territory was less interesting than the alternative. The alternative, in this case, was following someone who was going to build a place where their particular natures would be useful rather than a problem.
Kira named them in sequence: Stone. Tide. Spark. Gale.
They accepted their names with varying degrees of dignity.
The demon god beast was the last.
It found them on the final day before the abandoned land — came out of the south with the specific chaos of something that had been containing itself for a long time and had decided containment was no longer the correct strategy.
It was large. Larger than Ray. The chaos it carried was visible — not metaphorically but literally, the air around it doing things air normally had opinions against doing, the fabric of local reality expressing mild concern about its proximity.
It looked at the assembled divine beasts — Shiro, Ember, Ray, Nyx, Old, Stone, Tide, Spark, Gale — with the expression of something that had expected to be the most significant thing in any space it occupied and was revising that expectation in real time.
Then it looked at Manix.
"You," it said, with the specific weight of something that had been hearing about him from the territory's network of divine beings and had come to form its own opinion.
"Me," he said.
It attacked with everything it had.
The fight was the longest of all of them — not because the demon god beast was the strongest, though it was formidable, but because chaos fought differently than other things fought. No pattern. No rhythm. Each attack different from the last in ways that made Counter Instinct work harder than it had worked since the cave.
He let it run.
Let the chaos find its edges — the places where even chaos, deployed long enough, revealed the specific shape of what it was trying to protect. Because chaos was always protecting something. Every aggressive thing was always protecting something.
He saw it eventually — the specific wound at the center of all that noise. The thing it had been fighting around for centuries because fighting was the only vocabulary it had for the feeling.
He stopped moving.
Stood still in the middle of the chaos and looked at it directly.
"You're lonely," he said.
The chaos stopped.
The beast looked at him.
"...Yes," it said, after a very long time.
"I know what that is," he said.
He did. He knew exactly what that was.
He held out his hand.
The demon god beast looked at it. At him. At the assembled divine companions who had all, in their various ways, made the same journey from their various starting points.
It stepped forward.
Kira named it Storm.
Storm looked at her. Then, with the specific careful gentleness of something very powerful that had just decided to try something new, it lowered its enormous head and let her pat it once on the nose.
That night — the last night before the abandoned land — Manix sat outside the camp and looked east.
The group was asleep behind him. The divine beasts arranged around the camp's perimeter with the natural efficiency of things that had found their role and were occupying it. Brin the dwarf was still awake, drawing by firelight with the focused intensity of someone for whom darkness was an inconvenience and drawings were a necessity.
He sat and looked east and felt the weight of everything behind him — the people, the beasts, the tree spirit in his pocket, the six thousand years of accumulated knowledge the elder leech had placed in his archive, the promise made to every village and settlement they had passed through.
He reached into his pocket.
The torn map page.
He unfolded it for the first time since the school rooftop. Spread it flat on his knee. Looked at the city he had drawn at 2 a.m. in a world that hadn't wanted him — the gates, the streets, the market districts, the river curve through the lower town, the watchtower at the northern pass, the library at the center.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he turned it over.
Took out the pencil.
Began to draw.
Not the old city. Something new. Something that incorporated everything he had seen in the past weeks — the beastkin village's natural architecture, the elf village's negotiation between built and grown, the undead city's patient repairs, the dwarven cliff settlement's structural intelligence, the Tidesong people's between-worlds ingenuity.
He drew until the pencil needed sharpening. Sharpened it. Drew more.
Shiro came and lay beside him. The cold she carried made the night air crisp and clear.
"What are you building?" she said.
"I'm figuring that out," he said.
"You have been figuring it out since the slave market," she said.
"Yes," he said. "I think I'm close."
She looked at the drawing. Her silver eyes moved across the lines with the attention of something that could read intention in marks on paper.
"It's large," she said.
"It needs to be," he said.
"It will take time."
"I know."
"You have time," she said. "You have us. You have all of them." A pause. "You have everything you need except the ground."
He looked east.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow," she agreed.
He folded the new map carefully. Put it in his pocket alongside the torn old one.
Two maps now. The city he had dreamed alone in the dark. The city he was going to build.
He lay back on the ground and looked at the stars and felt, for the first time since the goddess's light, something that wasn't quite peace but was in its general neighborhood — the specific feeling of a person who has understood what they are for and is moving toward it.
Behind him the group slept. Around them the divine beasts kept watch. Somewhere ahead the abandoned land waited with the patience of a place that had been waiting a long time and had learned not to mind.
He closed his eyes.
Tomorrow.