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Chapter 1371: The Structure of the World

“You actually saw it that way?” Roland rose from his chair.

“I apologize.” Camilla Dary looked down at the paper. “This is the best I can manage.”

The illustration spread across the work desk had been drawn by Camilla from Joan’s memories. Short hatched lines for grasslands, a lopsided circle for the sinkhole, lumpy mounds for mountains, a child’s wavering strokes for seawater. Beside the work of Scroll or Soraya — beside even the junior students at the art academy — it would not merit a second glance. As a map it was useless.

But not for Roland.

He had walked the Bottomless Land in the Dream World.

The final location of the Battle of Divine Will. The passageway through which the winning race ascended. The terrain above would persist unchanged even as tsunamis consumed the cities built upon it — flat in places, jagged in others, a faintly visible continent rising in the far distance. He had known it for years only as legend: the Northern Region above the Land of Dawn stretched over a thousand kilometers, and no one before the Union had ever mapped it. There had always been doubt that it existed at all.

Only Lan had ever named its location.

Now Joan had found it, in the waking world.

“No — this is enough.” He pulled the continental map from the bookcase and spread it on the floor, then set Camilla’s drawing to the northeast. “Approximately here.”

“What is it exactly?” Camilla couldn’t stop herself from asking. “It doesn’t seem like any natural formation.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It simply doesn’t look like one.” She folded her arms. “A sinkhole that perfectly shaped. That strange seabed. The sky and water in the wrong positions — all of it is wrong.”

Roland was quiet for a moment. “I don’t think anything you’d call natural was ever really natural.”

“What does that mean?”

“The Misty Forest and the plains west of Neverwinter were almost certainly barren ground once. Birds and beasts carried seeds, and over enough time the land became what it is now. Someone born after the forest would simply assume it had always been there. Don’t you find that curious?”

Camilla frowned. “I can’t follow you.”

Roland sighed inwardly. These principles sit too far outside the familiar world. No fault of hers.

“I think I follow.” Nightingale, chewing dried fish in the corner, clapped her hands once. “You’re saying we’re no different from the birds and the beasts, aren’t you?”

“Is that supposed to be mysterious?” The Chief Butler pressed her fingers to her temple.

“Think about it.” Nightingale gestured toward the city, dark beyond the window. “Birds carry seeds and make forests. Humans move down from the North Slope Mountain and build Neverwinter. To the world, those are the same act. What we call natural is only our view of it — ask a bird, and the rooftops of our houses are just another kind of branch. Why else would birds build their nests there? By the same logic, the circular sink and the upward current are as natural as the Misty Forest, as natural as Neverwinter.” She paused, eyes brightening. “Who knows — maybe even the moon and stars formed the same way.”

Camilla stared at her, speechless.

Roland raised an eyebrow. Nightingale is a terrible student, but her mind runs clean and direct on certain questions. The advantage of not overthinking — or simply that a fool’s horizon is wider.

In his mind the image surfaced: rocks colliding in the dark of space, accumulating across millions of years into a spinning world. God had poured magic into this one. From that day on its history had bent away from everything else.

“To your original question.” He cleared his throat and drew Camilla back from her daze. “The island Joan reached is almost certainly the Bottomless Land, and the black aperture is the passageway for a race’s ascension. When God assembles the pieces, the path to heaven appears — but that doesn’t mean the path leads to true salvation, or that God smiles on whoever walks it. Even so, we have to reach it. The Bottomless Land is the point closest to God’s Domain, and it may be the only place where we can find a way out of the Battle of Divine Will.”

Camilla’s eyes went wide. She looked as though she wanted to ask where did you infer all of that from, but swallowed it.

“As for the continent floating in the sky —” Roland turned and lifted a pen container from the desk, setting it west of the Land of Dawn on the floor map — “I believe that is what the demons call the Sky-sea Realm. The Shadow Islands form a distorted passageway connecting to it, which is how Joan crossed from one side of the sea to the other without covering the distance. But she wasn’t unique in this. The connection between the two bodies of water is stable. At intervals, a great volume of seawater is drawn into the Sky-sea Realm through the passage, then falls back into our world — and that is the source of the hundred-thousand-foot waterfalls Joan described.”

Camilla’s expression shifted. “Could that also explain what Thunder witnessed, seawater crossing the Sealine? Water always finding its own level?”

“Most likely.” Roland nodded. “The seawater requires no backflow because the two sides are already joined at the base. The rise and fall follow the frequency with which the passageway opens and closes — nothing to do with the world’s tides.”

“You mean there are multiple passages, not just the one near the Shadow Islands?”

“To generate a whirlpool of that scale, a single passage would never suffice. Whether any trace of an ancient civilization survives there, we may never know.” He felt the pieces settle into place. “As for the stone tower ruins Joan saw on Shadow Island — I believe those belong to the Sky-sea Realm.”

“What about the door someone spotted through a telescope?” Nightingale interrupted.

“Perhaps only its maker knows.” Roland shook his head. “But we can conjecture freely. It may have been an observation tower — ruins submerged in water make a poor vantage point. Which raises the question: was the terrain around the Shadow Islands once much higher? Or was the Sky-sea Realm once much lower? The Battle of Divine Will changed everything. The observer and the observed are long gone, but whatever magic sustained the telescope aimed at its original target has simply never stopped pointing.”

“With respect — this is absurd.” Camilla took a slow breath. “Two continents shifting in altitude? Do you understand what that would do to every ocean in the world?”

“Kill every creature living on land.” Roland thought of the wave walls rising above mountains. “That may have been God’s intention from the beginning.” He paused, pressing back against the thought. “Of course, every word of this is conjecture. We shouldn’t take it as established fact.” He let his mind clear and changed course. “One final point. Joan described countless sea creatures launching an assault on the black continent northeast of the Land of Dawn. Combined with every report we currently have, I believe that is the demons’ territory.”

He walked to the map and wrote, in pencil, the name Valkries had given him.

Blackstone Region.

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