Going through the door felt surreal. From the exterior, it had appeared to be suspended on the platform with nothing around it. Walking through it, however, revealed a tunnel made of glass through which the outside world was clearly visible. The floor of the tunnel consisted of a staircase made of the same material. It was impossible to tell where the steps led, but they formed a spiral leading resolutely upward.

  The guards hurried ahead so that half of them were ahead of her, and the other half were behind her. They understood their assignment well: "Watch the prisoner at all times."

  She found some amusement on the journey, at least. While she had an easy time of the flight, the humans soon grew tired of climbing hundreds of staircases. The least fit among them were soon huffing, but even the more fortunate grew irritable when the first half-hour passed with no sight of their destination.

  Someone remarked that perhaps the staircase was endless and, as silly as that was, it sparked some panic among the group. Mirab quickly reassured them, however.

  The tunnel's end came just as suddenly as its beginning. They turned a corner, and there was the mouth, opening into a pure blueness like that of the sky on a perfect day. Above them were more clouds, and below...

  Eluvie stopped to inspect the ground below her. Some of it was made of glass and perfectly revealed the clouds below them. But other parts were raised and colored an earth-like brown. Some of the brown portions were hundreds of meters wide, while others were only as thick as an arm. Their arrangement was odd, too. It resembled a spider's web or a tangled mass of threads. She touched one of the sections and found it solid, not crumbly like dirt would be.

  Responding to instinct, she rose higher into the air to gain a wider view.

  Then, she understood.

  The raised, brown sections were branches, much like hers. Where hers were golden and luminous, these were brown. And where hers were merely large, these were massive. These were what she had seen while staring at the sky on her first day in the sun: dead Illrum.

  The branches spread over the entire landscape, crisscrossing each other, clustered in some places, and further apart in others. The bodies came in a variety of sizes. Some were large enough that entire mansions could be built on one branch, while others were so small that they could have been younger than her.

  "We should be moving," it was one of the foreigners. And he said it in a small voice, like someone who knew that he was in the wrong but had no intentions of acknowledging it.

  Eluvie almost turned around. She saw herself flying back into the tunnel, ignoring their voices calling her name. She saw herself destroying the ladder and leaving them stranded in the sky. She saw herself ordering the box back to the ground and flying far, far away from them.

  Then she recalled that they had her trapped. She had never discovered the source of her prison bubble. Perhaps she could retrieve it from their dead bodies.

  Mirab walked until she was standing in front of and below Eluvie. Her face took on an impressively pained expression as she spoke.

  "I won't trivialize your pain by apologizing," she said. "In your place, no apology would suffice for me. I will only ask that you see what we have come to show you before doing anything else."

  Eluvie stared intently down at Mirab, wondering how anyone could be such an excellent liar. For years, she had tortured Eluvie with calm purpose. And now that her tactics had changed, she carried out her manipulation with the same level of competence. There was no sign of a ruse in Mirab's eyes. Had Eluvie not possessed her memories, she would have felt confused by the woman's manner. Instead, she felt pure, burning fury.

  She failed to hide that reaction. She knew that, but the sudden worry in Mirab's expression.

  Well, she decided, there's nothing to be done about it now.

  "Where are their seeds?" she asked.

  Some of the company looked confused, but Mirab, the rulers, and the foreign king suffered none of the sort.

  "I won't repeat myself," Eluvie said. "Where are their seeds? Everyone has two backups."

  "They're all gone," Mirab said, with the tone of a compliant but unrepentant murderer. "We found every one. We had to."

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  Eluvie nodded solemnly. She had expected nothing less from Mirab of the East.

  "Show me what you wish, then," she said. "It should prove interesting."

  Her voice was ice-cold to her own ears, but she suspected that it sounded even worse to the others. Most wore looks of ill-disguised worry. Some looked outright terrified. She tried to see herself from their perspective. She had stopped a magical storm, torn holes in the ground, and made a glass box fly them miles into the sky. If she turned that power against them, whatever their defenses, they would find the battle challenging.

  So, why had she not yet attacked them?

  The group walked some more in silence. Eluvie saw that most tried to avoid stepping on the dead branches, but that was not often possible. Their minor attempt at decency meant nothing to her, however.

  The long, silent walk terminated at another staircase. This one stood alone in the middle of the landscape, without walls or supports. More curiously, it seemed to go nowhere, instead terminating about 200 yards into the air.

  "I'll go with her," Mirab said. "Everyone else can wait here."

  No one objected.

  Eluvie began to fly up, but Mirab called her back.

  "Let's climb instead," the ruler said.

  There was such an odd look on Mirab's face that Eluvie's curiosity overrode her contrarian nature.

  They climbed the staircase with slow, deliberate steps. The whole time, Mirab maintained a weighty and deathly silence, as did those waiting below them.

  Eventually, they reached the top of the staircase. There was a small landing, but nothing else. Eluvie searched for another door, one she had missed on her first inspection, but nothing of the sort appeared.

  "Why are we here?" she asked.

  "Fly up from here," Mirab said. "But go slowly. Very slowly."

  Eluvie obeyed. She rose in small increments, only a foot or so at a time. About a man's height later, her head collided with something.

  For a few seconds, she could not understand what had happened. The sky was clear far above her. There was nothing to collide with. She readjusted herself, moved to a different position, and tried to rise some more. Once again, her head hit something.

  She switched to inspecting the space with her hands and found a flat, solid surface above her. It was strangely non-existent to her eyesight but present everywhere she searched.

  "Make it show itself," Mirab said. "Control it as you did with the door and the transport."

  With her mind, Eluvie asked whatever was in her way to reveal itself. Pieces of the sky began to fall away. One by one, scale-shaped portions detached from the sky above her, fell a short distance, and dissolved into nothingness. They fell faster and faster as she watched, until the entire sky above her was gone. Nothing remained but a stretch of nothingness as black as tar, from one horizon to the other.

  "Don't worry," Mirab said. "No one on the surface sees any of this."

  Eluvie turned back to Mirab and stuttered out the only words she could find. "What, by heaven's mercy, is this?"

  "The sky," Mirab said flatly. "What it actually looks like. It does not matter how far you travel. If you fly high enough, you will find this barrier, spelled to look like the sky we often see. Think of the world like a ball. We live on its surface. This area we are in is another ball around the first ball, and that barrier above is the surface of an even larger ball.”

  Eluvie stared blankly at her.

  "Are you familiar with a toy glass?" Mirab asked. "One of those glass balls with an entire town suspended inside it?"

  Eluvie nodded.

  "Our world is a toy glass. We live in the town trapped inside it. Outside that barrier is the real world."