Shen sat in parhen, struggling to clear his head from the noisiness of this strange land. He tried to focus on the familiar things, trees and earth, sky and wind. He pressed his hands into the grass with almost desperate ferocity, narrowed his eyes near to shut, and sat in the unsettlingly warm air, tense and still.

He was able, at least, to find this time on his own. He needed it. Parhen took longer since his travels had taken him from the Rheari; it took so much to find his way to numbness with his head full of images and questions of this place. At every turn, he'd found himself faced with the makings of visions and nightmares: world-wandering peoples, roads of flat black rock, devices that made images and sounds of faraway things, and countless machines.

Machines were perhaps the most startling of these things. Once he'd developed an eye for recognizing them, Shen had seemed to find them everywhere, some great and others small, some in motion, and others still and silent. Some were fashioned to look like beasts, and moved themselves about with similar aspect. Others were huge contraptions, towering and extending over the lands beyond sight, looming with unspoken threat of suddenly rising from their dormant state. The people here seemed to think nothing of them, and Shen had recalled the legends of how some peoples mastered them, creating whole worlds so densely filled with them that one could lose the very earth.

The mere thought frightened him now - losing the earth - and he almost broke parhen to curl his fingers into the soil beneath him. The Rheari was out there somewhere, he knew, but it occured to him that now it lay wherever this world had been all his life. His home, his people, his father, Nari - they were all in the land of dreams, out in the unseen part of the Ni, part of the worlds that only seers could visit and only spirits could touch. The concept paralyzed him. It almost felt easier to believe that it was he who was in the dreamworld, that he was only part of some medicine's vision, or that he lie somewhere asleep, or dead, and was now just a leftover shadow of himself, left to wander the chaos of all that wasn't the Rheari.

That's what it had felt like walking though shadow with Fletcher. When at last they had come to rest, the world they were in was not terribly alien, nor were the people they had met, the traveller Griffin and the mysterious guide Blaise. From there they had come to a road and followed it as Blaise directed, but moving along it brought more changes like those Shen had seen travelling through shadow the first time. It was thankfully gentler, more gradual, one world blending into the next as they walked, and had seemed somehow a property of the road itself rather than the works of anyone among them.

But the world they finally came to rest in the last time was different. The place to which the road had led them was itself much harder to grasp. Fletcher and Griffin, as well as Cecily, Stark, Harrison and the others, were of a kind that called themselves "human", and all of them had said that they had never seen the likes of Shen. Nearly all of the people of this place were of this kind. The places were filled with machines and structures, and devices of many kinds, some of which were alarmingly destructive. Life here appeared fast and uncautious, lived almost recklessly, but seemingly without any alternative.

All of this alone had been enough to keep Shen overwhelmed, but the workings of these worlds presented more than simple earthly differences, and it was these deeper issues that puzzled him moreso, and deeply occupied him with confusing reminders of how far he was from home.

Blaise had spoken of a people who lived far at the other end of the road they had taken who would attempt to kill any who came to them. This was a question Shen couldn't seem to shake. Even amidst the tales of the ancient warriors of his father's people, he had never heard of a tribe attacking any and all they met without reason. There were some beasts, deep in the wilds of the Rheari, that might attack any they met, but it was understood that this was merely out of real concerns that barriers of thought or language made impossible to resolve. Perhaps these people were like those beasts somehow, but it seemed difficult to conceive, given how similar to humans and Shen's people Blaise had made them out to be.

And then there were the demons. Cecily had explained that in her world, a shadow she called Blythe, demons were more than just the malevolent spirits and objects of legend that they were in the Rheari. Here, they actually walked as beasts as easily and often as they wished, it seemed, and some people actually hunted them. Cecily, and others, had even killed them in the past, and constantly needed to prepare for more who always came in vengeance.

This was perhaps the core of it. The twisted worlds, the machines and people, the ways and paces of things, these differences were all somehow to be expected. It made things difficult, but it was tolerable. The concept of hunting demons or being hunted by them, however, was wherein the true conflict lay. Griffin and Fletcher, to whose paths Shen had willingly resigned himself in plan, if not merely in that he had no idea how to get home without them, had chosen to aid Cecily in dealing with one demon who was insistant on killing her. While Shen felt his kea somehow lay in helping them, he had been left wondering how and why the wind spirits would ask him to hunt another beast. Demon or no, Shen knew nothing of causing harm, or dealing with others at all intent on it.

Shen had offered, as he believed he ought, to do what he could. There was one among the humans that was even teaching him ways to apply his stength and mind to motions he could use to steady and defend himself, and much of it rested well with him. But amidst all of this something still troubled him, and the more he threw his thoughts at it all, the more questions came.

He struggled to quiet himself. He reached for the invisible ocean beneath this foreign earth with his mind, down into darkness, but only saw images of his own ocean, his own earth, filling the void. Perhaps he was trying too hard. Perhaps he needed to stop thinking and just listen.

Just listen. Parhen vitan. Somewhere in the whirlwind inside him he heard Nari's whisper, and almost instantly found himself near panic at the recollection of where he was relative to her, but just as suddenly found his panic gently checked. There was a breeze, and it slowly pushed through him an invisible ocean. It wasn't an ocean of this world, nor the imagined image of one of home. It was some more massive body that somehow moved through both places, that was common to them. It went beyond everywhere he was, turned a kind of corner in his mind's eye, and became something larger, filling some immense and overwhelming space...

...and then it was gone. His body, numb, burned with awareness, his eyes streamed tears across a blurry day. He opened them to Blythe, this shadow where he was, and remained unmoving for a moment. He looked about him, he, a strange beast even amidst this land of demons. He almost smiled at the thought. He broke the whole of his body from its stillness and slowly rose, breathing deep the alien air. He took another long look over the land, imagining this new ocean somehow juxtaposed with it, waving the trees and grasses, crawling through earth and sky.

"Shenrakari, you are more..."

He let the unanswered questions, old and new, rest. He let go a long breath, turned, and made his way to rejoin the others, the lands and oceans lying steadfast and patient in his wake.