Egdod, for his part, spent many days in the Garden striving to achieve a thing more difficult than any he had ever attempted since he had first brought himself forth out of the chaos.

Seeing the souls moving about in the Park from high above had put him in mind of another one of those almost-memories. He was growingly certain that the world in which he had lived before he had died had been inhabited by creatures that moved about of their own volition. In this, they were unlike trees and grass and flowers, which lacked the power of movement except when stirred by the wind. But neither were they like souls. They belonged to an order that lay somewhere between. The notion had been in his mind for a long time, and he had sensed that the Land was not complete without such beings. But it was so ill formed that he had made no headway with it until he had stumbled upon the notion of clustering flowers together into beds—a project that Freewander had made her own once Egdod had seeded the general idea of it. Thanks to her, flowers were now growing all over the place—even in places where they did not belong, such as on the branches of trees. Longregard would spend hours gazing at them with a vaguely troubled air about her, difficult to put into words but easy enough to convey through a bridging of auras: the flowers, though beautiful, were somehow lonely, and could be bettered if they were aswarm with tiny souls-that-were-not-quite-souls. These would fly about on small wings and visit the flowers and fill the air with a faint hum.

Once Egdod had this idea in his mind he could not rest until he had learned the knack of making such things and bringing them into existence. He would toil on it in the Garden until the beauty and fragrance of the lonely flowers became a distraction, and then he would fly away to the Fastness, where he could try to draw it forth from chaos. He put a somewhat ill-formed picture of it into the mind of Thingor, who tried to fashion wings from new materials he had learned the art of making, such as metal and glass. The wings were beautiful and seemed to capture some of what was wanted, but they could not fly of their own accord. For that, an animating force was required, and making any such thing was beyond Egdod’s powers. When he returned from the Fastness he would carry Thingor’s latest creations with him and place them in the Garden, where the cold winter sun would glint in the glass and shine on the polished metal veins that held it in place, but no matter how small and delicate he made them, they would not move.