Noah let a portion of his consciousness slip loose from the farm and follow the thread. It ran out of the snowing corner of THE Infinite Carcosa and away across existence, thin and bright and very old, one of the strands of his first Infinity that he had once left inside an old friend, and his attention went racing along it through the dark faster than any Conduit.
Behind him, his body stayed where it was, leaning on the hoe in the snow while Lygara's strands of destiny worked slowly at the great beetle shell overhead.
As he went, he watched the map that only he could see. His own small lights fell away behind him, the farm and the grassland and the scattered sparks of his Dream, and the vast dark shape of THE Undefined Gaps opened up ahead, enormous and hazy and almost entirely unlit. Deep in the middle of that darkness, far from any of the places his authority had ever touched, a single small dot was blinking, and the faint letters beside it read Eckert.
