Braele left for the night, going back to the women's barracks, and Falnee and Heosun were talking as they walked back to the men's barracks.

"What's it like, where you live, Heosun?"

"Ohhh, like anyplace. There are ancient ruins of when the giants first lived here and brought us here, while Tesut was still above water. But they left when Tesut drowned, to consolidate the giant civilization over there on Cathrarho. So we were free for a thousand years before anyone had heard of the Cathurias. It's fairly hot where I am, an insland kingdom called Nyasi. It's a hundred miles or so from the Forbidden Lands that surround Chialta. At night...sometimes, if the air was clear, I could see it."

"You could see Chialta???"

"Sure. It's hard to miss the mountain it's on...it's immense beyond all belief, if I could remark it from there. Between us were the Forbidden Lands...the Jungles of Desire where Mayalaph lives. Any who enter there will have a pleasant time..." Heosun smiled,"but will rarely return, from the lands of incubi and succubi, nymph and satyr. It's rare that we can get the hunters who stray there to return. The idea that they could keep going past that is a little...much.

Even if they did...past that are the Misty Lands, where Zaer lives. Where the kas, the shades or ghosts haunt, echoes of the lives they lived...even though their souls are in the Greater World. What explorer would venture there, to walk among the dead?

Further even that that is the beginning of the great mountain Angeng, vast and immense, hundreds of miles wide and fifteen miles high. There the fiery jinn sport, and keep the few who could pass that far from trying to ascend the mountain to the White City. Always assuming that you can climb a fifteen-mile high mountain.

From my kingdom, over three hundred miles away, we can barely make out the shape of Angeng, but we can make out its shape on a clear day...and at night, we can see the White City, Chialta, gleaming like a star from Angeng's peak...like a star brought to Earth and pulsing on a mountaintop."

"Is it any different?"

"Having 'gods' so near? Maybe a little...but it's not like we expect Angusin to visit our village or anything like that. Still, it's odd to be where we cannot see Chialta, far to the west."