The following days of travel passed in a river of orange stone and open sky.
The canyons changed as the group advanced east. The rock formations grew taller and closer together, then lower and wider apart, then taller again, as if the land itself was breathing. Twice a day, sometimes more, Bee would point out something Raider had never seen: a natural stone arch wide enough for ten dragons to fly through side by side, a canyon whose walls were streaked white with ancient salt, a field of round boulders that were actually sleeping shell-beasts best left undisturbed.
On the third day, they began to see people.
At first it was only specks in the distance. A line of dots crawling along a canyon floor turned out to be a merchant caravan pulled by six-legged pack beasts. A glint of light on a far ridge was a lone cultivator flying low and fast. By the afternoon, the specks had become a scattered stream, all of it flowing in the same direction they were.
"We should walk from here," announced Gregor as they landed in a quiet gorge. With a wave of their hand, the water dragon lost its shape and collapsed into a cloud of mist that Gregor drew back into themselves.
"A Stream Realm conjuration would attract more eyes than we want. From here on, we are three unremarkable travellers from an unremarkable tribe. There are hundreds of those in the East Canyons. No one will look at us twice."
They pulled up the hoods of their travelling cloaks, and Gregor did something Raider couldn't see or feel — but Bee later swore that it made the two of them seem no stronger than the third stage.
It had to be said that walking felt impossibly slow after days of flight. Raider didn't mind. Every step brought new travellers into view, new faces, new clothes, new beasts of burden, new snatches of languages he didn't know existed.
Then the road climbed a long slope, turned around a final wall of rock, and the world ended.
Raider stopped walking.
The land simply stopped. Ahead of them, beyond a last stretch of stone, there was nothing — no more canyons, no more rock, no more ground. Only sky, going down.
He walked forward slowly, past travellers who chuckled at his open mouth, until the edge of the world revealed what it was hiding.
Below the edge, so far down that his mind refused the distance at first, spread a sea.
A sea of sand.
Golden dunes rolled away from the base of the cliff all the way to the horizon, wave after unmoving wave, glowing under the afternoon sun. Here and there, white clouds drifted along the cliff face below him, their shadows sliding across the sands like the shadows of great fish. The wind rising off that endless gold carried fine glittering dust and a dry warmth that brushed his face like breath.
The radius in his hand pulsed, slow and content, like something stretching in its sleep.
"The Sea of Sand," said Bee, appearing at his shoulder with an enormous grin. "Told you you'd see."
"How far does it go?" asked Raider once he remembered how to speak.
"Nobody knows," they said happily. "Master says even the birds don't cross it."
"Some say it was once a sea of water," added Gregor from behind them, "in the age before the great war. Whatever it once was, it marks the end of the East Canyons. There is no further east than this."
Raider tore his eyes from the sands and looked where Gregor was now pointing, north along the cliff's edge.
There, in the distance, stood East Cliff City.
It was built on the very rim of the world. Ancient walls of dark stone rose at the cliff's edge and sprawled inland, so vast that Raider could not see where the city ended. Towers stood over the drop itself, leaning out above the golden abyss as if daring it to do something. Dozens of roads converged toward its gates from every direction like streams feeding a lake, each one alive with travellers, caravans and beasts. Even from here, a low hum reached them — the sound of a hundred thousand lives being lived at once.
"East Cliff City," said Gregor. "It has stood on this edge for tens of thousands of years. It held through the great war that ruined the world. Over a million people live inside those walls, and on any given day, tens of thousands more are only passing through."
A million.
Raider turned the number over in his mind and found it had no shape. The entire Clan — every face he had ever known in his life — numbered two hundred or so. The queue he could see at the nearest gate alone held more people than that.
"Rules," said Gregor as they joined the flow of the road. "We are travellers from a small tribe. We buy, we look, we leave. Speak little of home. And whatever you see..." their voice dipped lower, "...however strange or unjust or wonderful, do not stop walking."
...
Passing through the gate took the better part of an hour, and Raider spent every moment of it staring.
The gate guards wore lacquered armour and carried long hooked spears, and each one of them, according to Bee's whisper, held third stage power — "elites, here". They waved through caravan after caravan with the boredom of men counting pebbles.
Then the city swallowed the three of them, and Raider understood that until this moment, he had seen nothing at all.
Streets wide enough to swallow the whole Barren Settlement ran between buildings of stacked stone four and five floors high. People flowed through them in currents — hooded travellers, robed cultivators, porters bent under sacks, children darting through gaps in the crowd like fish through reeds. Stalls crowded every wall, selling things Raider couldn't name, in colours he had no words for, filling the air with smells of spice and smoke and sweetness until his head spun.
And everywhere, casually, power.
A forge-keeper snapped his fingers and the fires of his forge roared taller. A woman outside a teahouse poured a ribbon of water from her palm into a kettle held by her daughter. A hulking man walked past with a boulder floating serenely over his shoulder. A youth chased a runaway scroll through the air on a gust of wind.
Fire. Water. Earth. Wind. And other things beside — Raider saw a man wreathed in faint lightning, and a robed elder whose shadow moved a heartbeat after she did.
"Different tribes, clans and cities practice different cultivations, based on different elements and other things too," explained Gregor quietly as they walked. "The power each one emanates is different. The power each one attains is the same. Everywhere under the sky, cultivation is measured in eight stages, and everywhere under the sky, the third stage is where the ordinary end and the powerful begin."
"What stage are all these people?" asked Raider, watching the man with the floating boulder.
"See for yourself. Or rather — feel."
Raider looked. He couldn't sense cultivation the way cultivators did, but a lifetime of watching the clanspeople practice had taught his eyes what power looked like. The forge-keeper had needed a visible effort for his little trick. The woman's ribbon of water had trembled. The boulder-carrier was sweating.
"They're... weak?" he said, half a question, unable to believe it.
"Most people you will see today — grown adults, working their arts all their lives — hold power comparable to the Dew Realm," said Gregor. "Your Clan's newborns arrive in this world holding what these people spend decades reaching."
Raider walked in silence for a long moment.
In the Barren Settlement, the Dew Realm was for children. The fourth stage of this wider world — the Lake Realm — was where the Clan drew its line between the common and the powerful, and it was considered embarrassing for an adult to sit below the Pond. He had known, in a vague way, that the clanspeople considered themselves special.
He hadn't understood. Not until now, watching a city of a million marvel at tricks the Clan's toddlers performed in their sleep.
'No wonder,' he thought, with a strange chill. 'No wonder they were driven out. No wonder they hide.'
"And here," said Bee brightly, "most children can't cultivate at all!"
Raider stopped walking.
"...What?"
"Mortals," said Bee, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They swept their arm across the street. "Look properly."
Raider looked properly.
The woman selling skewers of glazed meat by the corner — she had shouted prices for an hour without once drawing on any power, because she had none. The old man repairing sandals in the shade of his doorway, nodding to every customer. The innkeeper across the street, arguing cheerfully with a supplier over crates of vegetables. The gaggle of children playing chase between the legs of the crowd, shrieking with laughter, not one of them faster or stronger than a child should be.
Mortals. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Walking among cultivators who could crush stone with a hand — haggling with them, laughing with them, scolding them, living beside them.
While Raider stood frozen, a cultivator in fine robes stopped at the skewer stall. The mortal woman said something; the cultivator protested; the woman folded her arms; the cultivator paid her price. She grinned and added an extra skewer to his bundle anyway, and the two parted like old friends.
Nobody found it remarkable. Nobody but the boy in the travelling hood, staring like he had witnessed a miracle.
"You're staring," said Bee.
"Where I grew up," said Raider slowly, "there was only one mortal."
Bee's smile faded a little. They didn't need to ask what a mortal's life had looked like there.
"Come," said Gregor gently. "Let's find rooms before dark."
...
The inn Gregor chose stood three streets in from the southern wall, far from the city's heart and its curious eyes. The innkeeper was a round, loud, delighted man — a mortal — who took their coins, promised them 'the second-best stew on this side of the city, because honesty is a virtue', and shouted their room numbers to a mortal girl who led them up the stairs at a run.
Dinner was exactly as promised.
Afterward, Raider sat alone on the sill of his room's window, knees drawn up, the radius resting against his shoulder, and watched the city refuse to sleep.
Lanterns hung from every eave, painting the streets gold. Somewhere below, the innkeeper was laughing at his own joke for the third time. A night market was opening down the block, mortal and cultivator stallkeepers raising their awnings side by side. A patrol drifted overhead on a carpet of pale light, and the children in the street waved up at it, and one of the patrollers waved back.
No one down there swept floors because they would be beaten otherwise. No one carried water at dawn for two hundred people who would not once meet their eyes. No one was kept, like a tool, like a lesson, like a pet shame — fed just enough, forever reminded of what everyone else was and they were not.
Mortals lived here. Freely. Ordinarily. Happily.
It had always been possible.
Something old and heavy was moving in Raider's chest, grinding as it turned, like a millstone that had never once been used. It was not quite anger, though anger was in it. It was not quite grief, though grief was in it too.
It did not have a name yet.
By morning, it would.