It took more than a morning. Daylight and nighttime were confused now, as the sky was blotted out by great sheens of dust, gas clouds rolled across the altered and still-changing landscape and the sun seemed to have hidden itself away. After what he judged to be the first day of his new voyage, spent walking through tunnels exposed to the sky and across grassy plains now hidden belowground, Ramus began to think the God had left him with something. After the second day, during which he descended a sheer cliff into a new valley of sharp rocks, venting steam pits and boiling lava pools, he became more confident of his survival. Rain fell and he gathered water from rock pools, and here and there he found strange animals killed in the chaos and ate their flesh raw. If it poisoned him, so be it.

Sometimes he sat and wrote in his journal, aided by volcanic glows and arcing streams of lightning. He tried to tell everything that had happened. He drew pictures. But he knew that reading these words in the stark light of day would paint them a very different color.

It was a place filled with spirits. He saw them from the corner of his eye, whispering things, trying to form words that would not work. When he looked he saw only shadows or veils of steam, but he knew the spirits dwelled within. They watched him pass and they were many, and he sensed age emanating from them, as though each fleeting wraith was a lost memory of the fallen thing he had awoken, cast adrift and floating in search of somewhere else.

He did not know their language, but he was confident that they would make a home of this new place.

RAMUS WENT DOWN, and every step should have been his last. The land was in turmoil and no natural features remained steady for long. Yet he missed landslides, dodged eruptions and found his way around new ravines and pits that seemed bottomless.

All the way down he mourned Nomi and tried to understand what they had done. And he wondered whether there would be a Noreela for him to return to.

RAMUS RHEEL, VOYAGER, should have died. Yet he lived. After four days walking, climbing and descending into pits and ravines that should have been his grave, the land about him began to level out. Dust clogged the air and he coughed up thick wads of black phlegm. Tiredness beat him down but he ignored it, knowing that if he did stop to rest, perhaps death would catch up with him. For a man who had lived life for so long knowing that he was dying, his determination to survive was a fire in his chest.