Dastion swayed where he sat, and Vince saw the almost empty bottle in his hand. It must have been the dregs of a drink he’d brought with him. They exchanged names and some of their histories, spoke of what had happened and what might come, and although Dastion was quite welcoming, Vince quickly came to realise that he was just like the other deniers. Kin, although he had not yet accepted the fact.

His acceptance came quickly.

Dastion’s underground explorations had progressed rapidly, and the refuse piles from his excavations grew across the hillside, forming a new landscape that looked moonlike and alien. For a while the large swaths of detritus were home to nothing alive, but then grasses quickly spread, and plants made this new fertile soil their home. Vince hadn’t seen Dastion for a long time. Perhaps the dwarf now preferred to spend his time deep down below the surface.

Maybe he was hiding from Grace down there. Maybe he was digging towards the boundary, only to find his direction reversed, much like when Vince walked up over the hilltops.

Grace was the Kin who remained most elusive. Vince had no idea where she made her home—if indeed she lived in any single place—and although he sometimes saw her from a distance, she always ensured that they never drew close. She often travelled back and forth across her domain, and after all this time if they were destined to simply bump into each other it would have happened by now. He might have welcomed a chance to confront her. She kept apart from Vince on purpose.

With a map growing in detail in his mind every day, the one place that still disturbed him most was the clearing by the river where he had last seen Angela.

It wasn’t only the memories that plagued him when he went and sat at that place. It was as if it did not belong inside the Fold at all.

His walks often veered that way, and he’d given up pretending to himself that it was not on purpose. There, he was as far away from Angela as anywhere else, but he felt close. She felt closer. The ground was twisted into swirls, grass stripped from the surface and mud turned fluid and hardened again into patterns that might tell a tale, if viewed from the correct angle. It reminded him of the trace-work of burn scars that had bloomed on Sammi’s arm and shoulder. He had not been able to translate them, either. Rocks were scorched, plants withered, and even the air seemed to carry an uncertain tinge, like heat haze where there was little heat.