It had been high upon Colvir's slope that Shen had taken the time. He had produced his flute, which had been long neglected in his travels, and had begun a slow song on the wind. In the rhythm of his meditative breath, thoughts had risen from his quieted mind, found their way through his body and instrument, and bled into the sea that moves through all things...

"Nariaken...

"I think on you from a world that to you is only a dream, just as yours is but a shadow in the eyes of mine. Seers and scholars of this new place tell me that the kingdom in which I sit is whole and singular, but that there are many of you, and that you are made in a weave arbitrary and insubstantial; in my understanding of this, it is true. But their view is devoid of the key that, in some moment of revelation, perhaps in the facing of death, or in the confidence of swift and invaluable action, or in raging through worlds, has to me shown itself.

"This anchor lies not in understanding, or in vision, or in some secret waiting to disclose itself to the chosen seer, but in the heart.

"Each of us is a spirit, despite our bodies being the ephemeral and arbitrary shreads of shadow that they are, and it is the spirit that gives us distinction. There are many of each of us by body, by memory, and perhaps even by mind, but by core and consciousness we are each a thing that cannot be copied or mimicked by the play of light and darkness and material. We are the whisp of wind that has called itself self for a time, and though there is no end to the gale that moves through and about that ribbon of shape, there is no other that is as it is for that time, and in likeness all beings are so.

"It is the spirits, too, that define a place. It is not a color or contour or particular of the stone or sky, but the beings that walk them. What path a place takes and which fork of the tree its spirits follow is still a mystery, but just as one wonders why the rain chooses to fall on this day as opposed to another, or why the bamboo shoots windward or leighward as it pierces the soil, we wonder without fear that it happens as it must. And while there is ever the dream wherein it has not come to pass as such, and while those dreams be real in ways we cannot always see, it is only our one world wherein I clearly see your mane wet and the green sprout beside your golden feet in the quiet shades of the forest.

"We dance and trickle down worlds, we spirits, as do those raindrops along the thatching of woven rooftops, at each of so many junctures a tiny choice so quick and merry as to be without thought, an improvisation that casts us all onward, for better or worse, and leaves a bit of us behind to cast another version down another path, and then again, and so on until every route of twine and wicker is soaked in passes innumerable, awaiting the drying sun.

"It is in the Rheari, my Rheari, where our spirits paused to take hold of clay and rain and wind and take form. It is in that Rheari that I see you now, the true you, and to that world, that one and only dance through the pattern that bears your footprints, that I send to you my warm breath and thoughts...

"...and love.

"From near the fiery etching of the rhyme in the mind of the artisan who crafted the wind's twists into form, from the citadel of the essence of the rainsoaked walls of our metaphor, from the top of the universe to the center of yours, from one crystalline shard of concretized imagination to another, I send these to you, and only you, my whole and discrete and beautiful Nariaken, fellow spirit in the dance, and fellow ribbon in the wind."