Shadow.

The word had been echoing in Shen's mind since Fletcher uttered it. To Fletcher it was just a term, it seemed, nothing unordinary. He had used it without a hint of hesitation, as if he'd expected Shen to know exactly what he meant. That was unsettling.

Perhaps more unsettling to Shen was that he did know what the word meant. He didn't know it the way Fletcher did, in such casual and certain terms, but he knew what it meant to him. It meant the unasked question was being answered. It meant the change he had felt in parhen last season was here. This visiting stranger was a world-wanderer, if that meant anything specific at all, and perhaps of the same people as the woman who came long ago, and bore Shen, and left again.

The dead grasses, churned with soil and suppressed by the wetness and the falling rains of the winter afternoon, squeezed themselves out like sponges underfoot as the pair made their way into the field, Shen's mind heavy with thought.

He'd thought the tea ceremony would have been about Fletcher. He had decided not to worry about the questions he had, the fears and anxieties. He would focus on the stranger's needs, and let his own rest. The plan was sound and noble. ...and cowardly.

The wind spirits had other plans, however, and the ceremony did little more for Fletcher than rile and shiver him. For Shen, however, the questions that he'd refused to ask asked themselves. He saw visions of his mother's shape, smelled her strange scent, recalled the little his young dark eyes had seen of her. As the ceremony went on, more images came: she and Fletcher side by side, walking in strangers' clothes, walking across worlds...

And Fletcher knew her. When Shen had described her, he had said that she was the woman who'd led him here. "Salome" was her name, and she'd led him here, and then left him here.

Shen plodded on, the empty wind pushing coldly against him.

Shen couldn't decide which prospect was harsher. If his vision had meant to show that Salome was his mother, then why would she have left so swiftly? Why would she leave Fletcher here instead of coming to him herself? Had she been back here before? Why hadn't she come for him? If Salome was someone else, then why place her image before him? Why connect her with his mother? Perhaps to show common blood? It all only left more questions than answers.

Shen barely noticed that Fletcher had paused for a moment. The strangely clad man silently and carefully considered the area. It was near here that Shen had found Fletcher, frozen in some odd meditation, prone amidst the grasses. It was near here that he had felt the strange spin to the space around him during his last parhen. Fletcher seemed to see something here, and prepared to move on.

"It is your kea," Kaliakeri had said to him. His kea? To walk worlds with this stranger? "Wherever this vikanshen takes me, I will return," he had said. This alone was the certainty he found in all the thoughts of this journey. He would return.

"Parhen vitan," a brave Nariaken had told him during a goodbye that seemed so terribly rushed, "vitan..."

Trust should be easy, thought Shen, but it isn't.

All to whom he had taken a few moments to say goodbye - Nari, Kali, Rhea, his father - and all of the tribe that saw him off from the village, all of them seemed to feel the same thing. Deep, below their goodbyes, behind their words and wishes, there was this sense that this was right, that Shen's leaving, following some wandering stranger away from this tiny place, was something that was meant to be from the moment of his birth. Everyone seemed to know it, as clear as the spring skies.

...except for Shen, and he felt alone. His tranquil world was challenged now, as he watched Fletcher seem to somehow invisibly twist the air, resaddle himself and prepare to step forward, to lead them away from this place. Away.

Shen was filled with fear. He wanted to hear Nari's voice, calling him back to the village, her golden eyes still wet with the tears she had left on his cheek in their last embrace. He wanted to see his father materialize from the grasses, sternly standing in his way, silently telling him of his responsibility to his people. He wanted, at least, to hear that whisper, his mother's voice in his mind's ear, somehow assuring him along, calling him to this path before him.

But he did not. He didn't need to turn, to look back, to know that there were no figures looking on from the edge of the bamboo. He could see the empty field behind him through his closed eyes, hear it in his shallow sigh as he lifted his foot to stay on the stranger's heels.

This is no different from the icy rains or winter hunger, he told himself, no different from the harshness of the world of his birth. There was a sweetness in this. There was a peace in it, deep and simple. Somewhere.

He took in a long breath of air from the Rheari. He held it.

The world fell apart, mountains and stone made meaningless, the falling rain and mighty sky as ephemeral as a child's dream. The earth and stars whirled arbitrarily around him, like the passing whims of some carefree god. Then, almost as suddenly, it came to rest, slowed nearly to a stop in time for a moment, forming some alien world, some very other place, before releasing itself again into careful madness.

Seven times it did this. Seven frozen moments within a new kind of plain, wherein whole universes blew by like roaring winds past numbened ears, before it settled again for more than just that moment, but instead remained, a new world with its own winds, its own motion, and its own earth firm beneath him, offering him to its own sky like a newborn child.

He let go of the air within him, but it simply fell away on the steady breeze, already changed to the air of this foreign place, and as gone as the one from which he'd come.