Shen walked through the dark, his eyes hungrily drawing the shape and paths around him from it, and his mind wandered.

They were ten days out, further than he had ever been before by at least a factor of three, and he hadn't yet seen a thing. His father guided him to a small rock and told him to sit, and he did, and they rested awhile in silence.

The cold wind told him it was well after dark, and his body told him that it'd been more like half again a usual day's travel they'd covered that day. He drifted at the edge of consciousness for some time. At one moment he became aware that there was a small fire, then at another, hot tea. He carefully drank the cup offered him.

"Sleep," came his father's voice gently. He curled up his tiny frame at the base of the stone and easily complied.

He was nudged with a whisper. "It is time. Come."

He quickly took his bearings, padding small hands around the ground, feeling the environs and reminding himself where he was. He rose to his feet and followed the sound of his father's deliberate footsteps.

After nearly an hour, they stopped. There was a strong wind that burned at his frame, but the feeling, even the shivering, wasn't quite unpleasant. It was the feeling of being so feverishly alive that one cannot decide if they wish to collapse or explode; the elusive self-perception between feeling exhausted and immensely powerful. It was a new feeling to him, and it was so bittersweet he almost felt the need to cry.

"Tell me of the Rheari, son."

He turned his head in confusion, looking up at his father as if he could see him.

"Yes, child. Describe it to me."

He turned his head loosely back into the wind.

"It is wood and plain, father. It is grasses and a thick forest of bamboo that sprawls from the wandering river, and along that our villages. Around it all are the mountains distant, some just close enough to see on clear days from atop the little hills, but the rest so far that no one has seen them."

"No one?" his father interjected.

"No one but seers, father," he corrected himself, "and the travellers that have never returned. And spirits."

His father grunted a didactic affirmative.

"Is that all?"

"Yes," he replied hesitantly.

"And what color are things?" his father asked before he might ammend his answer.

He thought for a moment. "Pale golds and grey greens, mostly, and brown and grey earth beneath the grasses and clear river, and blue whitish sky. Black at night, and the sun orange red when low, and yellow when high. And our people, pale gold and green and brown like the grasses... except for me."

His answer was complete, but trailed off as if it weren't quite, fading in a child's version of deep thought as he looked off into the breeze, again as if he could see.

"Is that all?" came again the gentle question.

He had heard it, but stood thinking on it this time. He didn't answer, but just stood softly quaking in the cold. He didn't have to reach and speak the answer; his father knew he was just upon it.

Then he felt his father's hand lay softly upon his head. it was somehow warm. The other hand came gently and strong across his face, and it slowly slipped the blindfold up from his eyes. It washed through his thick black fire of a mane and freed itself of his head.

His young eyes slowly adjusted from eleven days of silence, and the white that flooded them settled to imagery. Before him was a valley, rolling down from the wide ridge upon which he stood, down from the reddish rock at his feet, across a huge dark and dramatic expanse that filled his visage until it rose back up to the horizon, a blurrily distant parallel line of mountain that, like his own, seemed to stretch to and roll off both edges of the world. The sky above him was a magical indigo the likes of which he'd never seen, and fell down from his zenith though rich blue and green until it silhouetted the black land before him in a yellow-white so bright it seemed it was about to consume its very stone in unearthly flame.

He started to turn his head, but had to check himself for a moment longer before pulling his gaze away and up to his father. He looked questioningly for a few seconds at his father's stoic frame, which stood lit in the alabaster light as if it were a statue cast from the mountain itself, set to forever watch the spectacle before them.

He turned his amazement back to the light, drawing tiny breaths deeply into his few year old lungs.

The sun unveiled to him its stardom, cracking into the thin mountain air a hot clean white that was light itself. The rock beneath his feet caught fire with color so intense it startled his peripheral vision, its molten iron hue oozing down the ridge, coating its drab predecessor at the speed of sunrise. The boy stood transfixed, his downturning face glowing with color from below as if he were slowly opening a chest of gems and dreams.

He turned again to his father in astonishment. The man stood, eyes ablaze, subtly smiling and seeming almost not to breathe, still instructing with his unbroken attention.

The child looked back to the valley, watching the edges of the crimson curtain below him start to gild themselves with a deep bright green. Before him, from the darkness just beyond the curtain's hem, tiny stars of green and lemon and purple and orange were sprinkling into being farther and more numerous by the minute, each growing into islands of treetop flowers that washed and danced in the godly winds like shapeless spirits playfully trying to free themselves of some invisible bondage.

The treetops became trees, and the trees a canopy, and before he could again feel the passing of time in any usual way, the valley was a forest of flora and life he hadn't even seen in dreams. Clouds of butterflies and dragonflies swam in the mist of tiny insects that floated up from the leaves and petals, and blurs of bright red and blue birds occasionally burst from the foliage, bubbles rising up and out of sight toward the surface of the ocean of sky above him. The sound of blasting winds had unnoticably changed itself into a syphony of humming wings and birdsong.

When again he looked to his father, his gaze was met with a gentle smile.

"What is this?" asked his father.

The child looked back out across the view.

"It is the Rheari..." he said breathlessly, almost as if stunned by the statement.

His father let him stand in that for a moment. After a short time, still watching the last pools of shadow disappear, the man calmly spoke.

"And how is it unlike dreams?"

The child thought a moment, himself also lost in the scene, then answered uncertainly, "It is real."

His father seemed to accept this with his next question.

"And how is it akin to dreams?"

The child thought again, but after a time turned away from it with a puzzled look.

"I don't know, father... how is it?"

His father stood, his feet still where they'd been at sunrise, and finally turned to look upon his son, now smiling openly, almost playfully.

The child now broke a slight smile himself, and asked again, "How is it akin to dreams?"

His father drew a breath and gave his reply with the aire that accompanies those answers whose deliverers know wont be truly understood for a long time.

"It is real."