The sense of release was immense. The lightning ball was all her stresses combined—the effort of hiding herself behind a smiling mask; the fear at what she was becoming; the grief at what she might leave behind. Sitting by those roaring falls she became someone else for a little while, and her human concerns faded away as the sparking electricity diluted itself through the violent waters.

She became the Sammi she would one day be.

4

4

This might have been Vince’s hundredth time walking around the edge of the Fold. It usually took him a whole day, with a few stops to pick berries and nuts or eat scraps of food he took with him. He tried to make every walk slightly different. Today, the sun beat at his back as he walked along what might have been the eastern ridge above the valley. Some days the same ridge appeared more like the northern extreme. The sun rose and fell, the dark skies were speckled with stars he did not know, and there seemed to be no patterns to any of it.

The only certainty was that there was no escape.

He strode along the hilltop with the Fold spread out across the valley to his left. From this high up he could make out familiar landscapes and features. The winding river was one of the constants, its path cast into the rock of the land, water always flowing in the same direction. Where it came from, where it went, he did not know. Trying to follow the river presented him with the same problems as attempting to leave the Fold in any other direction. Past the river towards the other side of the valley were the rocky slopes where he had made his home. There were several caves there, and he had taken the shallowest and smallest for his own. Deeper, darker caves were home to other things. He saw the woodland that smothered the head of the large valley, the sharp escarpment and cliffs that provided a distant boundary, and somewhere down on the valley floor lay Mallian.

He was too far away to see, and Vince was not interested in looking.