The plains are long as thought, my fathers, as memory, where the traveler sees at the edge of the sky the dead children walking, and closer, as the sky recedes, the children accept his name, in the terrible dust becoming, as the sky recedes, the skins of himself he abandoned in wandering. Or this is the way it always happens, the story they tell us of blindness in the country of leopards when our eyes say no more, say we are done with looking, with the children, with skins and with dust and with memory.

But the time of the Staff was no time, as Old Man told him it would be, knowing, reading the hawk's heart, reading the switch of the wind, knowing the Staff was calling, changing the country, changing the heart and the way the memory wanders the heart. And the moons crossed at impossible angle, Solinari to rest in the source of the sun, Lunitari to rest in the dragons. So Riverwind knew when the leopard approached him, skin full of light, of dark, of darkness boiling in light, bone and muscle giving way in imagined tunnels of plains and movement. Something behind him sang with the leopard, his left eye shining straight through the leopard to the edge of the world, and behind him something saying lie down, give this away at once, give this away before it begins, our son, our young one, for you can learn nothing of this mystery, nothing from this mystery but dry grass but dark but yearning but the graves of your childhood open to moonlight, and the dead the unspeaking dead you see where the sky meets the plains will be always your own, approaching.