Shen was beginning to understand, or, more accurately, better grasp his lack of understanding. Something about the view seemed to catalyze it. He looked about him as best he could, surveying the unusally immense area of land circumscribed by the horizon as modified by his position. He watched the treetops and meadows roll by, passing far beneath his feet.

This was the Ni. He was in it. He had travelled through it. He had walked amidst the expanses of it, between whole universes of it, as if it were just one place. He was wandering the ephemeral lands of dreams, the places that seers and dreamers gain mere whisps of in their meditations. He was part of them.

The concept used to frighten him. His blood used to run cold at the thought that he was trapped out in an imagined world, a purely theoretical space that seemed to threaten to vanish out from under him at the whim of some deep parhen, whisked away by the wind as quickly as it had come.

He froze for a moment. The krhe rheari...

He shelved the thought in his mind. He looked deeply at the sky and land around him. They were real, as real as the Rheari. Even were they somehow only a dream, surely his companions were real. He needed no convincing. This journey had become the proof of what he'd always been taught: all worlds are as true as our own, as real as the one in which you breathe.

Of course there were demons. Of course there were cities, strange beastly machines, armies of men with strange weapons and magics. Wizards who danced with spirits, roads that joined whole chains of worlds, magical cards, and whole nations of people with odd and complex ways - they all must exist, simply because they can.

And everything else, thought Shen, must exist, too. Everything that hasn't yet been dreamt, or seen, or imagined. It must all be there, as real as real can be.

He felt odd. All of this had been believed all along, but now it was known. Technically there should be no difference, but there was, and it was formidable.

He returned to the present. The strange winged men dotted the sky through which he was being carried, and his own escort held fast his heavy frame while throwing the air down and behind them with mighty wings. This people served the wind spirits, as well, it seemed, and Shen was honestly thrilled to hear them spoken of, even though he somehow knew in the back of his mind that they must come differently to these people than they do his own. He felt almost inclined to revere these creatures, for their shape and gift of flight seemed purposefully suited to understanding the wind itself. They rode the wind, joined it in part of its journey, not merely bathed in it as it washed by.

Still, Shen felt secure in his place. He thought on his night run across the earth of Blythe a few nights ago, before he and the others left for their journey and short visit to Avalon. He had felt the power in his frame then, the pride in his blood. He thought of his people, and of Nari, her gentle eyes and golden mane, and his father, bending massive twists of bamboo to his will. He had seen flickers of those images in himself, running beneath and beside him as he had hurled himself across the land that night. It was not a vain love that filled him, but rather a giving, yielding one. It was a shedding of things, and a joy of living. Even out here in the Ni, he thought, there are shadows of home.

He relaxed himself for a moment, narrowed his eyes, and took in the air, as if to test this intuition. He let the wind burn him, and it tore in tiny ways at the sharp wounds on his body still leaking blood. He let himself disappear into it, and let the sky and land blur together in water and motion. He faintly felt the ocean here, too. In some places, he had found it deep below the earth. In others, like this one, it rode high upon the wind. But it was always there, waiting for him, hiding in the silence of a thousand moments, ready to be sought. And through it, in every world, there was something of the Rheari.

Perhaps he brought it with him.

His carrier shifted a bit, making to begin a gentle decent, and Shen snapped back to the moment. He saw a few of the other flying creatures carrying some of his companions toward the landing in makeshift cloth stretchers stained black with blood.

It hadn't been pretty. Five demons, like Hakthla, but greater in power, had ambushed them, and even Shen had been thrown about by them like a plaything. His thick skin had parted to their razorlike claws, his alien blood drawn to fall on this place. Had it not been for Griffin, Shen may have simply frozen in place, overwhelmed by the massive beasts, but before he had realized it he was in the air, leaping to engage them.

The feeling was foreign only in that it wasn't. He had never needed to strike out against a fellow creature before, even in the most dire of circumstances at home, and he honestly didn't know how he knew to. It was something in the image, he thought, something about seeing Griffin being held - no, drained by that demon had sprung up a well inside of him and pushed his body to pounce.

He didn't know what to make of it. Part of him feared it, because in it he felt traced of the unseen fire that he had felt in the humans' ways, and in the risks to which it drove them. Part of him trusted it, though. Shen knew Griffin was favored by the wind spirits; perhaps they had rushed into him and raced through him to throw his strength to the wizard's aid. That's certainly what it had felt like.

The ways of the humans were strange, but Shen found that he cared about them. In ways they were not unlike the fellow tribes and nations of the Rheari. They walked their paths, sought their needs, and fought when frightened or forced to. They seemed uniquely troubled by their plight, their roles of rule and bondage, but ultimately they only yearned for peace. They thirsted to quench the same pains and fears that all creatures do.

Shen wondered about Syrana, and how she spoke of being held in Avalon against her will. He thought on Gerda, and how she had followed after them, even across shadows, presumably to retrieve her escaped half-sister. He wondered about Benedict, and how troubled a man he must be. What great service to his kingdom must Syrana's imprisonment be that is it worth his detaining her? What service to him is a land he cannot listen to, but instead must struggle to reign? Perhaps the curse upon him is somehow greater than that on Greyson, Shen thought, and has forced him into this life.

And what of these new people? Their ways seemed yet again strange, despite the deep peace they seemed to carry about them, no doubt gifted them by their master spirits. Even given their familiar source of guidance, they felt at least as distant to Shen as any human had.

Maybe the winds themselves changed from shadow to shadow, thought Shen. Maybe the callings of life itself, the very nature of peace, was different in every part of the Ni, just as simply as the grasses and earth and stars were different. Perhaps each world and each people had its own unique path.

He brought again to mind the concept of the whole, and he was filled with images of spaces and oceans.

Yes, he thought, there are many paths, as many as there are worlds yet to dream. But there is something beyond them all that binds them...

...and within it, they all have a common end.