The windwhale went up where the air was chill and thin. To the east, the south, and northwest I spied the glimmer of change storms. They were becoming more common.

I guess I was getting blase about windwhale-riding. Shivering, huddling into myself, ignoring Tracker, who was a positive chatterbox yammering about trivia, I fell asleep. I wakened to a shaking hand and Tracker's face inches from mine.

"Wake up, Croaker," he kept saying. "Wake up. One-Eye says we got trouble."

I rose, expecting to find Taken circling us.

We were surrounded, but by four windwhales and a score of mantas. "Where did they come from?"

"Showed up while you were sleeping."

"What's the trouble?"

Tracker pointed, off what I guess you would call our starboard bow.

Change storm. Shaping.

"Just popped out of nowhere," Goblin said, joining us. too nervous to remember he was mad at me. "Looks like a bad one, too, the rate it's growing."

The change storm was no more than four hundred yards in diameter now, but the pastel-Iightninged fury in its heart said it would grow swiftly and terribly. Its touch would be more than normally dramatic. Varicolored light painted faces and windwhales bizarrely. Our convoy shifted course. The windwhales are not as much affected as humans, but they prefer to dodge trouble where possible. It was clear, though, that fringes of the monster would brush us.

Even as I recognized and thought about it, the storm's size increased. Six hundred yards in diameter. Eight hundred. Roiling, boiling color within what looked like black smoke. Serpents of silent lightning snapped and snarled soundlessly around one another.

The bottom of the change storm touched ground.

All those lightnings found their voices. And the storm expanded even more rapidly, hurling in another direction that growth which should have gone earthward. It was terrible with energy, this one.

Change storms seldom came nearer than eight miles to the Hole. They are impressive enough from that distance, when you catch only a whiff that crackles in your hair and makes your nerves go frazzled. In olden times, when we still served the Lady, I talked to veterans of Whisper's campaigns who told me of suffering through the storms. I never wholly credited their tales.

I did so as the boundary of the storm gained on us.

One of the manias was caught. You could see through it, its bones white against sudden darkness. Then it changed.

Everything changed. Rocks and trees became protean. Small things that followed and pestered us shifted form…

There is a hypothesis which states that the strange species of the Plain have appeared as a result of change storms. It has been proposed, too, that the change storms are responsible for the Plain itself. That each gnaws a bit more off our normal world.