On the fifteenth day... or maybe the sixteenth... a blizzard hit them.

It was a moving wall that reached up to the clouds. It turned Teal's world to a blur of huge flakes; the air was almost unbreathable.

"We must... must keep moving," Orange trumpeted. He buried his face in her snow-laden fur. She wrapped her trunk around his shoulders. "F... follow me," she said. "We will find... the Eight Rooms..."

He closed his eyes and struggled on.

The storm took days to clear.

Teal woke to a world silenced by snow. Brushing clear his clothes, he sat up to look around.

Orange was staring straight ahead, her fingers working in agitation.

"Wha..." Teal squinted in the direction she was looking, to the red-lit north.

There was something on the horizon: a patch of darkness amid the snow.

A structure.

It was a cube with sides about half as tall again as a man. The walls were unbroken save for a single large door set in the south-facing side.

The whole thing was hovering about an arm's length from the ground.

"The s-songss," hissed the mummy-cow. "That iss what... the songs describe..."

"The Eight Rooms," Teal sighed. "You were right. It's unmistakable."

Orange quivered; he studied her curiously. She was paralyzed by fear... but she'd known where to look. He thought of generations of mummy-cows, used and despised by the people they'd been designed to serve -- but all the time hoarding a knowledge and lore, a kind of courage, of their own.

He wondered uneasily how much else there was to learn about the world.

He stumbled to his feet, then patted Orange's flank. "Come on," he said. "Just a bit further..."

Orange wouldn't come closer than a few paces to the structure. Teal approached alone. He knelt in the snow and passed his hand underneath the cube. "Must take an awful lot of hot air to hold this up..."

Teal walked up to the door and pushed tentatively. He found his chest tightening.

Orange whimpered and buried her eyes in her trunk.

He opened the door wide. The interior was pale blue.

Teal hadn't seen blue for a decade.

Blinking away tears, he climbed into the room.

They spent the night under cover for the first time since Teal's exile. He woke in comparative warmth and took a slow breakfast on water and a cheeselike bud.

It had taken a lot of coaxing to get Orange to clamber into the room.

"There's nothing to fear -- it's just a big teepee."

"No, it is-isn't..."

"Well, maybe not..."

Now she huddled uncomfortably at the center of the floor, standing in her own muddy footprints.

Teal inspected the room. He'd found it empty save for a thing like a lamp bracket attached to the ceiling. There were doors leading out from all four walls -- even hatches in the floor and ceiling.

The doors watched him like blank eyes.