The walk was quite literally out-of-this-world. Well, out of my world, anyhow.

I couldn't even take the clouds for granted. On this world, the clouds moved with astonishing speed. "Clouds" wasn't even the best word for them; they were more like snippets of sandstorms—dust devils, gritty wavelets—that had broken free from the badlands. Swarms of minute creatures wove through the air like schools of fish in the sea, glistening with silverlight Charge. Their movements were artful in their fickleness, winding around the dust streams in flickering ribbons one moment, rushing through them the next.

Storm clouds rumbled where the clouds gathered. A cyclone raged over a jagged mountaintop in the distance, as dark as the rocks far below it. These and other tempests were palaces of light, and airborne life swam toward them, drawn by their Charge.

A sky-whale lowed as it banked toward the storm.

And the Sun! Holy Angel, the Sun!

To my D'zd body's eyes, this world's Sun was a fountain, forever erupting, sparkling the sky with streaks of life-light. And it sang! Every stray mote, every hurtling particle sang a spectral aria, and the effect had only gotten strong as their Sun sank toward the horizon.

"What's that sound?" I'd asked.

Stopping, Rzt'zk had stuck one of his scissorblades' tips into the ground like a cane and then turned, to look at the Sun.

"It is the Worldword," the warrior said, "singing the Great Chant. It's really beautiful today, isn't it?"

"Yes," I nodded. "Yes, it is."

The Sun's music was like the Angel's own hand, reaching out to caress us. I think everyone would have become Lassedile, if the people of my world could have seen the Sun like this.

While the mantises talked amongst themselves as we walked, I noticed that T'zz's two, sleeveless subordinates didn't say even a single word, seemingly indifferent to everything but their duty.

It made sense. If these Vvz'zsh were as dangerous as whatever had attacked us, I'd be wary, too.

As we progressed, it eventually became clear that we'd been on an expansive plateau—mostly because we came up to the edge of that plateau, and by the Godhead, what a view!

In its own way, the landscape was just as turbulent as the orange skies, only this tempest was motionless, etched in earth and stone. The land had the look of something ravaged and raw, geography at its most ornamental. The cliffs and mountains were serrated fangs, riddled with gullies and crevices beyond number. The water—liquid ammonia, I had to remind myself—shone in so many frequencies, but most of all, in a deep, unearthly blue. Stony prominences rose up like claws; cool, gritty earth arched over rivers in natural bridges. The sea lay beyond a broad, brown-grained beach. Its waves ate away at the land, carving cliffs and recesses.

Perhaps because of all this drama, the landscape was only sparsely populated. The forests of leaf-trees—szrg (jurg), Rzt'zk had called them—scattered like mangey patches across the badlands. I noticed several spots that had clearly once been whalefalls, but which had since fallen apart as the dead sky-whales—tchn't't (chuntut)—were reclaimed by the earth. Herds of animals of many shapes and sizes trundled across the plains, feeding off the Charge of the forests and the stretches of fanged brambles that carpeted the bluffs. Hexagonally-walled settlements huddled in the leeward sides of the forests, both down in the plains and up on the plateau.

Immediately ahead of us, a winding path led down from the plateau to the plain, which then broadened into a wide, well-maintained road. Squat towers dotted the road. They, like the other settlements, appeared to be made of some kind of concrete. Wagons and beasts of burden marched up and down the route, with all the visible activity ultimately converging at the largest of all the settlements, at the center of the plain.

Dk'brr rode his vrr't'k up to the plateau's edge, and then pointed at the city.

"May I present T'kznd." He glanced at us. "It might not be the grandest city in the T'dzd'ch Dominion, but you'd be hard-pressed to find people more honest, kind, or hardworking than these. We're bringing life to the North, one farm at a time."

"One day, Dk'brr," T'zz said, "you'll go to one of the big cities, and you'll understand just how big the world really is."

Behind us, the Sun was settling into the full glory of the coming dusk. Its warm rays—the Great Chant, as the D'zd called it—pelted my back and abdomen with its hymnody.

"If we hurry," Rzt'zk said, "we'll be back before sundown."

Rzt'zk and Dk'brr took the lead, and I had to say, it was much easier to walk on the road than on the raw, untrammeled ground.

We passed a couple wagons along the way. These were driven by vrr't'k, or other beasts of burden. The D'zd's wagons were covered, and reminded me of two rowboats that had been glued together, top to top. Overhangs extending from the wagons' fronts covered the animals that pulled them, likely to protect them from inclement weather. Given what Dk'brr had said about the rain in the South, I wondered if the wagons' sealed, boat-like shape might have been more than just an aesthetic choice.

The guard towers along the road gave me my first taste of the mantises' idea of architecture. All things considered, it wasn't as alien as I'd been expecting, at least from what I could see of the buildings' exteriors. The guard towers looked like upside-down coffee mugs, made from a ceramic or concrete material and topped with fibrous awnings. The tower's walls were especially smooth, and free of anything I could recognize as a staircase or a ladder. The windows were hexagonal casements, while the balconies were spigot-shaped, and pointed up or down as often as they pointed straight out. Were it not for their wide, hexagonal mouths and the mantises perched on their interior walls, I would have mistaken many of them for weird, oversized chimneys.

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There was a tall tower further along the road, quite literally grown in place, woven from long brambles that spiraled out along the dirt at its base. The structure was too narrow to serve as an outpost for guards, but that didn't appear to be its purpose. Then light blossomed from its apex and thundered through the sky, spreading far into the distance.

It was probably some kind of radio tower.

Bringing his mount alongside me, Dk'brr proudly gestured at the lands around us. "Pretty impressive, isn't it?" he asked.

I nodded. "Yes."

He pointed at the many farms and smaller settlements. "The Dominion's founders came to the North long, long ago, thirsting for freedom and opportunity that they couldn't find in the South. They established the city of Dz'zrt'zt (Duuz Zirtzit), further to the North." He bobbed his stinger approvingly. "You should see it, if you can. It's truly beautiful. That's where it all started. As light shined of the fortunes being made up here, more and more Southlanders left for the North, my ancestors included. Look around you, Zhn'nt. This land was once the heart of the Tz'dz (Tizdiz) Badlands, wild and untamed. But look what we've made of them! Our farms' fleshpits are the finest in the North, and, accordingly, the produce we produce from them is prized across the Dominion and beyond. All the poshest Southern urbanites import our bvbs (Bvoobs), you know, and I don't blame them. You can taste the land in their Charge. They've always been my favorite."

I kind of lost him at the end, there, mostly because I was still fixated on his use of the word fleshpits.

"Uh… fleshpits?" I asked.

"Yes?" Dk'brr asked.

"What do fleshpits have to do with agriculture?" I asked.

"Well, you can't grow vegetables without fleshpots," Dk'brr replied.

I hadn't been expecting that response. Fortunately, Rzt'zk came to the rescue.

"Perhaps it's different from where you live, Messenger," he explained, "but, in this world, our vegetables need plenty of meat to grow. Once we've consumed the Charge in our food and harvested the useful body parts, we cast all the useless flesh into the fleshpits. It feeds the plants."

"You… feed your plants?" I asked.

"Yes," Dk'brr asked. "Some shine rotten meat works best, but others shine that nothing makes for happy bobs and kz'dk quite like a freshly drained kill."

"So, I take it you don't feed the plants where you come from?" Rzt'zk asked.

"We sometimes put nutrients in the soil to help them grow," I said.

"Oh, so you bury flesh in the ground?" Rzt'zk asked.

"You know what," I said, "yes, let's go with that. We bury flesh in the ground."

"Life without fleshpits," Dk'brr said. "How strange that must be!"

"It's a big world out there, Dk'brr," Rzt'zk said.

"Yes," Dk'brr replied, "yes it is."

It wasn't long before we reached our first checkpoint: a small, hexagonal fort split down the middle by a river and a broad, fibrous bridge. The soldiers on duty up on the parapets and the guard tower skittered into view and got a good look at us. Three ground troopers stepped out of the half-hexagon doorway on the tower's side, halfway up, and marched onto the parapet.

Dk'brr and Rzt'zk raised their lower arms. The guards reciprocated the gesture, and then opened the gates and let us pass without incident.

Not long after that, once we'd crossed over the supernally blue river, subcommander Dk'brr rode up alongside me. The Vvz'zsh on the creature's back was still utterly motionless.

Call it morbid curiosity, but I couldn't help but inquire as to what had become of our attacker.

"If you don't mind me asking," I said, "what did you do to the Vvz'zsh back there? Also… what is a Vvz'zsh?"

"Migrants," Dk'brr explained. "Savages." He gestured at the broad sweep of the land. "They're D'zd who want all of the North to themselves." His flower revolved nearly 360° to glance at the unconscious D'zd behind him. "As for what we did, well… it's like the old story of the hazzan who trapped a devil in a bag," he explained. "In order to kill and terrorize more effectively, the Vvz'zsh have consorted with dark gods and found a way to unbind their souls from their bodies." His flower's eyeless gaze turned to the satchel strapped to his vrr't'k's flank. "After forcing the Vvz'zsh to move zyr soul into the body of the nn'zt, we put zym into the satchel."

"Yes, I saw that," I said. "I don't understand why."

"The satchel is songwrought. As long as the nn'zt remains inside the satchel, the Chant sung into the satchel keeps the Vvz'zsh's soul trapped in the nn'zt's body. It can't leap into anything else. Once we've safely secured zyr body, we'll open the bag and a hazzan will Chant the Vvz'zsh's soul back into zyr body for interrogation."

I didn't know whether to be amazed or terrified.

"Hazzan?"

Dk'brr gestured at the robed D'zd. "A Chant-wielder, like our friend T'zz, here." He turned back to me. "So, Messenger," he asked, "what do you think of our lands?"

Perhaps it was just my own mind trying to fill in the blanks, but I could have sworn there was more than just a trace of pride in the D'zd's "voice". Sensing that, I tried to be as honest as I could.

"It's difficult for me to say," I explained. "Make no mistake, it's certainly amazing, but at the same time, it's so unlike anything I've ever seen before that I really don't know how to judge it."

One thing I noticed that wasn't totally alien to me were the large numbers of beasts of burden working in the fields of what I presumed were the "lightning farms" Dk'brr had mentioned before. The creatures carried piles of refuse and scattered them among the crops. Truck-sized brzhts dug their stamen-horns into the ground, uprooting bloated electro-potatoes the size of boulders. The tubers' pitifully small propellers spun uselessly atop them, like demented beanie-hats.

"I guess I do have one question," I said. "Why are the farm animals left all unattended?"

"Our hazzans—that is, our Chanters," Dk'brr said, "have taken care of it for us." He flicked his stinger contemptuously over the Vvz'zsh strung up behind him. "While Vvz'zsh savages pervert the Worldword's power to shoot their souls into animals to hide away until they choose to attack their unsuspecting victims, the Dominion has found a more noble application of the divine song. Using Chant, we can make wild beasts into our servants, programming them to do work for us. The labor is already intensive enough, and with the weather growing colder every passing day—not to mention the threat of Vvz'zsh terrorism—it is safer to use animals than to put our people at risk."

"T-Terrorism?" I stuttered.

"Yes," Dk'brr replied, ruffling his flower. "They attack without provocation. Not even nymphs are safe. They have nothing but hate for us."

"That's awful."

Dk'brr flicked his stinger, apparently in agreement. "That it is. Songs, I wish it weren't so. I hate how we have to fight. Death is rarely noble, and, heretics or not, they are still D'zd, no different from me—but…" The vrr't'k's reins sagged in Dk'brr's grip. "…they leave us no choice. I've seen homesteads where good D'zd were cut into pieces." His flower shivered. "They'd mixed the different corpses' pieces together, and then spread out the severed bodies and limbs in an orderly grid. Because everything was jumbled up, the victims' kin were forced to sort through all the dead to piece their loved ones back together. It's a sign-act, meant to show their rage."

"Angel's breath," I said, "that's monstrous! It's sick!"

"It really is," Dk'brr said. "The Vvz'zsh hate us so much. Even so, I want to feel sympathy for them, but how can I? When someone overflows with that much hate, what good will goodwill do except put my own people at risk?" His arms drooped.

"H-How long have things been like this?" I asked.

"Longer than anyone can remember," he said. "It… it's truly awful. There's so much suffering, on both sides. They kill us. We kill them. But what else can we do?"

Lark strode up alongside us.

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