“You don’t consider lighting the night sky showy?”
Sterren pretended to consider that. “Well, I suppose,” he admitted. “But it’s not new. Everybody’s used to it now.”
“And why should I want to be showy?” Vond asked.
“To impress people, to remind everybody what their emperor is capable of. If you got the awe you’re due, you wouldn’t need to worry about disloyalty, and we could avoid unpleasantness like that meeting this morning.”
Vond nodded.
“Besides,” Sterren added, “I thought you liked using your magic as much as you could.”
“I do,” he said. “In fact, I’ve been getting irritable lately, and nervous. I wonder if it might be because I haven’t been doing enough. The power’s there to be used, after all. It’s always there in the back of my head, and I feel it so very clearly now...” His voice trailed off. Sterren nodded encouragingly.
“What would you suggest?” Vond asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, move a mountain, maybe?”
Vond snorted. “I’d need to build one, first; there are no mountains in the empire. Besides, where would I put it?”
Sterren waved that away. “Not a mountain, then. Well, the edge of the World lies a few leagues to the south of here; could you do something with that?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, peel it back and see what’s underneath, maybe. I’ve heard theorists argue about what holds the World up and keeps it from falling into the Nethervoid. Or maybe just go see what lies beyond the edge and bring back a piece.”
“There isn’t anything beyond the edge, is there?” Vond asked.
Sterren shrugged. “Nobody knows,” he said.
Vond considered that, clearly intrigued.
Nothing more came of it that night, but the following morning, the tenth of Harvest, Sterren awoke not in his own bed, but hanging in mid-air, just outside the open window of his room.
“Good morning!” Vond called from above him. “I thought you’d like to come along to the edge of the World and see what it’s like!”
Sterren looked up nervously. This was not really what he’d had in mind. “Good morning!” he called in reply. “I hope you slept well!”
Vond frowned.
“Actually,” he said, “I didn’t. I dreamt... well, I don’t know exactly what I dreamt, but it wasn’t pleasant, whatever it was.” The frown faded. “Never mind that, though,” he said. “We’re off to the edge!”
Sterren concealed his lack of enthusiasm for the venture, and rolled over in midair so that he could see where he was flying.
They sailed quickly past Semma Castle and across the few leagues of farmland beyond, into the empty southern desert.
Sterren would have watched the scenery, but there wasn’t any below; and to either side he could see nothing but mile after mile of sand spattered with tough, patchy grass.
Behind him he could see the towers of Semma Castle and the Imperial Palace gradually shrinking.
And ahead he could see nothing. The edge of the World was wrapped in yellow haze.
Sterren had seen that haze from the tower, but had assumed it was just windblown sand, or glare from sunlight reflecting off the edge itself. To his surprise, he could now see that it was neither, but a sort of very thin golden mist. It would have been almost invisible in any imaginable confined area, but here it seemed to go on forever. He could look through the golden mist, but all he saw beyond it was more golden mist, and still more golden mist, until eventually it added up to opacity. If there were anything beyond the mist, he could not see it.
And of course, nobody had ever suggested that anything existed beyond the edge of the World, except perhaps Heaven, where the gods lived, and that was more usually thought to lie somewhere above the sky.
He had nothing to provide him with any scale, but Sterren thought he must be seeing literally hundreds of miles of nothing but that yellow haze.
Vond called down to him, “What is that stuff?”
“How should I know?” Sterren called back. “Do you think we can get above it?”
“I have no idea!”
“I’m going to try.” With that, Vond began to rise, pulling Sterren up with him.
They ascended for what seemed like hours, and eventually the golden mist thinned still further, but so did the air about them. The blue sky above turned darker and darker, and grew steadily colder, until Sterren was shivering so badly that he could scarcely shout his protests to the warlock.
They did, indeed, come to the top of the yellow fog, but they were unable to see over it or through it; all they saw was a seemingly infinite expanse of golden haze, stretching on before them forever, while behind them all the Small Kingdoms were laid out, the central mountain chain curving down between the rich-green coastal plain and the paler, drier eastern lands. The ocean appeared on the western horizon, the burning sands of the great deserts on the eastern, and still they saw nothing to the south but golden haze.
When they could see the haze on the eastern horizon, beyond the desert, wrapping around the southeastern corner of the World, even Vond gave up.
Sterren had been ready to give up long before; unlike Vond, he had no supernatural power source to warm him or gather in air. Frost had formed on his face and hands, and he was having serious trouble breathing by the time Vond finally began descending.
When they had once again reached the warm, thick air of the everyday world, the warlock remarked, “I’d never gone that high before. It’s quite something, isn’t it?”
Sterren’s frozen muscles had not yet thawed; he could not answer.
They landed, and Vond stepped forward to the edge while Sterren waited atop a small dune.
The edge looked like an ordinary cliff; it was not particularly straight or even, but just a place where the dunes ended in a drop-off.
What made it unique was that it extended as far as Sterren could see in both directions, and that he could see nothing at all on the other side except that infinite golden mist.
Vond stood atop that cliff, looking down. “I can’t see anything,” he called back, disappointed. “Just that damned haze.”
Sterren stepped cautiously forward and peered over, still several feet back.
Like Vond, he could see nothing but the yellow mist. “Wait here,” the warlock said. He rose into the air and drifted forward.
Almost immediately, he stopped and flew back to hang in the air near Sterren and said, amazed, “There’s no air! I couldn’t breathe. And that yellow stuff smells horrible and it burns your throat. And I still couldn’t see any bottom. The mist just goes on forever!”
Sterren looked up and down.
“What holds it back, though? Why does the mist stay on that side, and the air on this side?”
Vond looked up and down, as Sterren had, and then shrugged. “It must be magic,” he said. “Wizardry, maybe.”
Sterren shrugged. “I never saw magic do anything this big.”
“The gods must have done it,” Vond said, in sudden enlightenment. “The tales say they brought the World out of chaos, don’t they? That yellow stuff must be chaos!”
That did not sound right to Sterren. The story he had heard was that the World had been a bit that was left over, unnoticed, when the universe split into Heaven and Hell. The gods had found it later, and helped shape it, but they hadn’t created it out of chaos.
Besides, why would chaos be yellow? Why would it be any color at all?
He didn’t think that there were any explanations for the golden mist; it was just there, and they would have to accept it.