The Faraway Lands

The first thing Kael noticed about the other side was the sky.

It wasn't above him. It was everywhere — a deep indigo wash streaked with rivers of slow-moving silver light, as if someone had poured glowing ink across the inside of a sphere. The sky curved down on all sides until it met the ground, which meant there was no horizon, no sense of distance the way he understood it. The world folded in on itself like the inside of a marble.

The second thing he noticed was that the air tasted sweet. Not sugar-sweet but the sweetness of overripe fruit, of flowers left too long in a vase. Beneath it lurked something sharper — the faint mineral bite of stone dust and old rain.

"Don't stare at the sky too long," Thistle said, already walking. "It makes people forget what they came for."

"Where are we?"

"The Approach. The outermost ring of the Faraway Lands. Everything is gentler here. The deeper you go, the stranger it gets." She pushed through a curtain of hanging vines that chimed faintly when disturbed, like wind chimes made of glass. "Vellum's keep is at the Center. Three rings in."

The landscape of the Approach was beautiful in a way that made Kael uneasy. The trees were too symmetrical, their leaves too uniformly colored — or rather, too vividly colored, shifting between emerald and teal like oil on water. The grass beneath his feet was soft as carpet and exactly the same height everywhere, as though maintained by invisible gardeners.

"Tell me about Vellum," Kael said. He didn't want to ask — didn't want to give shape to the thing that had taken Lira — but he needed to know.

Thistle walked in silence for twenty paces before answering.