It was midday before they breached the far verge of the forest. It seemed a dismal place, heavily overgrown with dense tangled foliage, ropy vines and thorned creepers; the earth in between littered with great malevolent-looking mushrooms as lividly white as snow. But there seemed little in the way of fauna. What birds inhabited its upper reaches were strictly nocturnal, disappearing before the sun heaved its bulk above the torn horizon. They were both relieved to quit its dark and intense interior. But what they saw now surprised them, for the Deathsea was a deep and waterless scar upon the face of the land, a rotting skeleton divested of all skin and flesh. The Deathsea was dust and swirling ash, glittering unrelievedly in the sunlight, undulating sharply, its sloping sides turning it into a baking oven. They paused at the edge of it, staring directly across its length, and there, upon the far shore, just visible, were the shadowy towers and fenestrations of Mistral, the home of Sardonyx.
