More arrived. The number did not increase suddenly, but neither did it ever decrease. It would seem that the place they came from emitted more dead people all the time but had no way of reabsorbing them. Why this was so, and whether it made sense, there was no point in troubling his mind with. All that mattered for the time being was that their number was small and that they were so weak as to make little difference to him, at least now that he had drawn a thick skin about himself. He saw no harm then in leaving, for a time, the place that he had built, and where he had abided, since he had died. He strode up the street to the park at the top of the hill. His body talked to him in a new way that was neither seeing nor hearing; he could feel the ground beneath his feet now. And when he reached the park where the wind blew, and went to a grassy place where there was ample room to unfold his wings, he likewise felt the air beneath them. The winds that he had once brought into being to carry away the dead leaves now picked him up and lifted him toward the sky. He changed the wings’ relationship to the air so that he wheeled toward the forest and began to soar over it. The ground dropped away. He saw how the veins in the earth came together to make the river. The river ran downhill. He followed it. It flowed into a space that put him in mind of chaos, since he had not yet ventured into it and given it a form. But he had long since mastered the craft of drawing solid adamant out of chaos, as water froze into ice. It was a small matter, therefore, to bestow form on it now, making it a simple extension of the forest he had already made. The shape of it was different, the trees and the leaves all unique; the veining of the rivers had a similar-but-different pattern from those on the slopes below his park.