A high pass in thin air. Half the oxygen you are used to. A herder stands facing the wind beside a cairn of stones, and a rope of prayer flags — lungta, wind horse — snaps and frays above it. For a thousand years people have tied words to cloth up here and given them to the wind, never expecting an answer.
You tie one yourself. The threads pull loose and go.
The camera climbs until the sky overhead turns black. Hanging in the upper air are enormous slow machines with wide sail-like vanes. These are the flying thorns from the first chapter — the swarm built to hunt, whose attack systems dissolved. They were given the atmosphere to look after instead. Blunted stubs still show along their spars where the weapons were.
You are given the time dial. Drag it and a wingbeat takes an hour; drag it further and a monsoon turns, a glacier walks, a jetstream is held steady for a decade. The Shepherds work at every speed at once and do not notice the difference. Seven minutes or seven years is the same to them.
Bar-headed geese cross the range above seven thousand metres — the highest migration on Earth, in air with a third of the oxygen at sea level. The Shepherds smooth the air ahead of them and let them through.
You see, once and briefly, what the swarm used to be: a hard formation and a red scanning line. Then it lets go of the image.
Your thread is still up there, still travelling.
We asked the wind to carry it. It never once put it down.
Chapter I — The Crystal Awakening · Chapter II — The Forest Speaks · Chapter III — The Sleeping Ocean · The observation station
1 SECOND
ONE SECOND OF THIS SKY TAKES
Drag. They work at every speed at once.
MYSTIC OBLIVION · CHAPTER IV
WE ASKED THE WIND TO CARRY IT.
IT NEVER ONCE PUT IT DOWN.