They walked through the ruin of the town, their feet scuffing along the stone streets. This was Amber, the center of the universe, the zeroth shadow, the place where all winds meet, the world that holds the Pattern that makes being possible.

Shen was beginning to understand certain things, even though they made no sense in a traditional way. Ygg being fallen was connected to this fallen place, not necessarily by some tangible cause and effect, such as raiders selectively rampaging through all of shadow, but by a different kind of resolution.

In the Rheari, it is taught that spirits not only move through the world, bringing winds and visions, but that, at another level, they create it. The earth and sky, water and bamboo, even the nations of creatures that live and roam are all a kind of hardened wind. All things real and heavy, it is said, are in truth woven of strands of the winds, twisted into patterns so intricate, tight and tiny as to make the threads seem as one. The winds are slowed and tangled in this weave, but are, in their own time, just as ephemeral as the morning breeze that passingly kisses the skin and disappears. The krhe rheari, or shadow storm, as the humans had called it, is a demonstration of this: a wind so great that it can unravel the fabric of things, setting back into motion the winds that had been frozen into form.

Now, here was Amber, the place from which those winds perhaps come, and keeper of the Pattern from which all things woven were fashioned. The air and sky here, the rock and sea, all silently reflected this to Shen, and he felt he could imagine how nothing would happen here without it pulling at the tapestry of other worlds. The world here felt different, somehow strikingly hyperreal, which made its condition of ruin all the more disconcerting.

Shen looked at Random, his face a blur of amnesia and the hypnotic daze into which Griffin had placed him to protect his mind from the effects of the curse, surmised to be dangerously potent in this return to his home. He looked at Gerda as she struggled to portray the dry stoicism that the humans seemed to value so much as she walked through her homeland. Had the the group not found them, who knows how their encounter might have ended - Gerda dead, and Random, so lost he'd forgotten his own name, wandering forever after something he couldn't even recall? And what of Benedict, the king to which Gerda seemed infinitely loyal? Had he charged Gerda to track Random out of concern for his brother's well-being, or out of fear of his brother's success?

At this thought, Shen watched Gerda carefully. He remembered how she'd travelled to follow them out of Avalon. He presumed she had a trump of Benedict, and he one of her, and that before long one of them would aim to use it. Shen knew very little of Benedict except that he was a man who liked his rule, not only of his world, but of the lives within it. He recalled how the king had supposedly layed some claim to the life of Syrana, deciding her mate and future for her in an unnatural paternalism that seemed to Shen to be almost a slavery. He thought on the many implications of the extent of Benedict's power he'd gotten from Fletcher's passing comments. He could not help but wonder what such a man might want out of finding Amber, and how quickly in humans the joy of finding home and family might pass to familiarity, and then to routine.

Routine for Benedict, and likely most of his siblings, seemed to be struggle.

Shen looked over to Lucas and Merlin, another curious pair. They seemed so well travelled and in possession of so much knowledge, he could only begin to guess what their perspective on arriving at Amber would be. Together they had mapped the group's way to Amber with mathematics and information from Cecily's scrying mirror. Together they had built machines that could trump people unwillingly throughout shadow, and simulate human conversation. It seemed sadly doubtful that the innocent awe and gratitude that Shen felt in finding an ancestral home would be the overwhelming extent of their reaction to being in Amber. Shen had learned quite well how poor a model he was for predicting the feelings of his companions.

The humans had strange ways of thinking about things. They seemed to very intentionally enhance their intrinsic seperations, instead of trying to overcome them. Rather than endeavor, as Shen's people did, to seek the natural union of all things, they so often appeared to try instead to carve themselves free of the Ni somehow, chiselling out sharply defined edges to self and world, hoping the shape they give themselves will be crisp enough to provide understanding, and maybe even the meaning they so starvingly seek. It was as if they wanted to rip themselves free of the weave, just to show they could, like growing children, only to then find themselves so cold and frightened in the black night that they must come running back to the home and life and love they always valued, at least until they forget again.

The greater curse, thought Shen, would be one that makes you lose your home before you've ever left. How terrible a thing had been Amber's family's curse, after all, if it made a house of war and strife have to find it's way home again, along the way questioning the real reason for being there, and asking itself why it had wished to divide? How much worse must have the preceding curse have been, the one that kept a kingdom divided and forgotten despite its castle standing high and filled with life?

Shen could only wonder if the humans recognized this. He could only wonder if the real curse had begun long before the Patternfall War, the event that reportedly began this time of lost souls, and if the new curse that kept the people of Amber from returning there had dethroned the old, or if it merely lay atop it, masking it for rediscovery.

He brought his mind back to the present, and heard someone call at the castle gate for Prince Matthias, who they'd been almost sarcastically told now ruled this place. Shen looked up at the huge structure. Somewhere inside was the Pattern, the promise of finding Harry, Syrana, Leiko and maybe even Salome, the promise of long-awaited answers, and the promise of home. But somewhere inside Shen also imagined a very saddened man held under a great weight, a prince lost from family holding a ruined kingdom, and the target of more enemies near and far than anyone could know. Shen darkened and shuddered with a terrifying realization: this man has had the Pattern all along.

He stood coldly amidst the others at the threshold, thinking on just how few promises had truly been made, and how uncertain they all had been.