Their surroundings began to materialize as the blinding light withdrew into a dazzling, searing disk, impossible to look at directly. They were in a new world—not merely a new environ of Ursathrax but an entirely new dimension—one that extended in all directions for as far as the eye could see.
They had emerged at the top of a towering cliff at the edge of a vast body of water—a towering cliff among other towering cliffs, most of which were still taller, so that layers of shale-like rock in varying colors were exposed spectacularly in the fierce orange haze. Even through her dizziness, Shekalane had a sense that the differently colored bands told a story, somehow, like the layered pages of some great book. Water birds roosted and circled and reeled in breezy flight patterns everywhere and
