“Oh, it is not,” scoffed Xilsi. “Don’t tell the novice such nonsense. People don’t talk when crossing Palls because they feel uneasy, that’s all.”

“It is strange there is no wind,” said Elen, “because the clouds are moving, and there was a breeze at the Vigil.”

It was strange, stranger even than she could explain to the others.

Fifteen years ago, Elen and Aoving had crossed Flat Pall with toddler Kem. At that time, they had crossed Flat Pall a hundred or more miles to the southwest of South Flat Vigil. They had crossed on the Feldspar Spur, the witch road that ran closest to Duenn Manor. The southwestern stretch of Flat Pall had been flat, like this, but she recalled it as not quite this still and not quite this empty. She recalled seeing ripples in the mist, as if unseen creatures swam within its dense bank of foggy white. The movements had intrigued her so much that, once or twice during their crossing, she had halted to stare in wonder. Graceful curves and patterns ran like a language being written beneath the surface of a page. Aoving had wept in fear for the entire crossing, but she had kept walking despite how frightened she was. That was Aoving all over: everything scared her, but she kept walking straight into the heart of what terrified her most because she refused to give in to death. She’d been so fragile and so stubborn, and Kem had gotten all of her stubbornness, thank goodness, even if he had become impatient with Ao’s fragility as he got older. Maybe if Elen had helped him understand where it came from, he’d have found more peace with his mother in the months before the avalanche had taken her, but she’d respected Aoving’s wishes and said nothing of a past that Aoving had not wanted to revisit ever again.

Now, remembering, she puzzled over the silent Pall. Why the difference between the southern stretch of Flat Pall and this northern region? Had this part of Flat Pall always been emptier, always a backwater? Or had all of Flat Pall undergone changes in the last fifteen years? Could it be the haunt had sensed the Pall’s impending death? Could Palls actually die? Were they alive in any meaningful sense? Yet, something had happened during the reign of the Mulberry Emperor that had drained the inland Pall then known as Imperial Pall. That had turned it into a desolation, the Desolation, a land empty of life, all of it devoured—and yet now free of the Pall that had once covered it. More strangely still, if Berri was correct, its contours no longer fit the pre-Pall maps of how the topography had looked before the Pall had inundated it. Had the Pall transformed the land itself into a new landscape? Spore transformed things, even if most people thought of it as distorting ordinary creatures into monsters.