I was alone.


    which ring is sometimes clear from context, but for me it never ever hurt to be precise.


    liked to fly. Hinte said it would tire me out, but unlike her, I would take breaks. Yet something she said echoed in my frills.


    “I need to feel the crysts.”


    really?” I said aloud. Hinte had fanned her frills to feel that annoying hum. It tasted so obvious! How else had she found all of those half-buried crysts?


    <hr style="margin-top: 2ex; margin-bottom: 2ex">


    Even after a while, my frills hadn’t felt anything interesting. Only my amplified footfalls and the low, slow groan of the Berwem as the currents below distorted the skin.


    was given me my only result since trying this gambit.


    again, I steeled myself. I needed to stop wasting time! So I dropped myself mid-flap, as if to trick myself into falling. And it worked; I crashed against the dustone. The crash beat the breath out of me, and the ground hit my legs like a lightning bolt. I bent and gave, falling onto my belly, but too late to save my legs from the pain.


    that, though, so maybe the crash had done something unseen?


    my stones. He deserved a name. I should give him a cliff-dweller name, since he had hatched in the cliffs, in a way.


    <hr style="margin-top: 2ex; margin-bottom: 2ex">


    In my bag, Sterk rumbled and rumbled, and never waned or faltered. It almost grated, really. When I had passed the stones off to Hinte, I hadn’t heard a single click or keen afterward. It just showed, again, how little I knew about sifting. Sterk sat in my bag, yet when my feet pressed against the glassier, more resonant plates of dustone, I could close my eyes and hold him in my feet again, feel his sonorous rumbles against my scutes.


    had been walking to one of the shores.


    had to form closer toward the center of the lake.


    would find five crysts.


    that starless. Right?


    You have a time limit, it might say. I shook my canteen. My sixth of water had halved.


    After I stopped moving; because I would not trip again! In the almost clear air, the hazy outline of a sun hung above, rendered purple by the vog. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the sun’s partner. Taken with the color dying fading on the west horizon, you guessed it: first dusk had fallen.


    five.


    hiccuped. I jerked to a stop. Sure, he acted weird for a cryst, but I had never heard a stone’s vibrations change so???—??abruptly. Granted, I hadn’t heard much of the stones anyway, owing to that mysterious silence whenever Hinte took a cryst. Maybe stones had acted this way all along? There had to be a sense to this. The endless stars bid the world lawful.


    <hr style="margin-top: 2ex; margin-bottom: 2ex">


    Something skittering in the distance crunched. I crouched, flattening on the ground, and peered toward the source. And a shadow emerged from the shadows.


    thank you, Sterk. You are such a good rock,” I said before I leapt, some instinct taking over. I landed with a crash. The crab bolted! I growled. How could something so resembling a rock scurry around like an oversized insect?


    stunk. The crab’s smell? Urine?


    that one was simple. What to do about this one?


    ripped its last eyestalk out in its struggle! And, it scurried away like that. How were these things so agile!


    bug expected, and growled. Tired of playing with the crab, I punched the ground between us. Frowning, punching again, harder, the leg plunged into the lake. Little crab dug in, like fear. I grinned and lunged forth. My foreleg still prickled, plunged in the glass. It ripped wincingly through the skin as I leap forward.


    were the scuttling fragments? I’d taken them to be some living part of the stones, but maybe the vibrations just attracted them as well.


    had grown darker this close to second dusk.


    * * *