[overhead, the stars wheel on.

down here it's cool and still. you're standing in the midst of a vast plain covered with the bones of small birds, pale and fragile. you feel a little weightless--walking around won't crush them, though they will shift and turn, delicate ribs and wings and skulls providing little points of pressure underfoot. here and there amongst the bones lie gleams of buried colour and gold, though it's not really obvious what they are without unearthing them.

despite the contents of this place, it doesn't feel foreboding. it's just calm, and perhaps a little lonely.

and as far as other landmarks go...there's a single small shape in the distance that could be human. you could investigate further around here, or head towards it.

what do you do?]

[whether you are led to the edge of the plain, or seek it out, you come upon it in time -- the surroundings blur like watercolor under rain, into rich smears of shade and light. with no clear transition between one and the other, you find you've left the bones, and you're walking on a path like a ribbon back up through the stars. it glitters under your feet, made of ghostly golden lights like fireflies. they feel like no surface at all, but you know that as long as you walk forward, they will bear you up.

(if you had a shadow guiding you, then at this point it is gone.)

at the end of the path is an equally ethereal viewing platform, or lookout point. there's a couple of tidy benches beneath a single broad tree, and a telescope affixed to the lacy railings, but everything's made of those clustered golden firefly-lights, not quite real. the platform looks out over the reaches of space, rather than any terrestrial place, and the view is even more rich and rife and impossible here -- the vast colourful spatters of nebulae; planets large and small, beringed and twinned; attendant satellites; asteroid belts.

there's a young woman seated upon one of the benches -- blue-haired, blue-clad, wings where her ears should be, the only solid thing here apart from you. she doesn't notice you right off, seemingly lost in the view.]

[you find yourself upon an island, adrift in the sky, part of a cluster of them that flourishes all around you, bounteous and beautiful and alien.

you can tell that the surroundings here are absolutely bursting with complexity and life, a sharp contrast to the relatively sparse areas you've visited so far in Meteion's realm -- the smell of greenery assaults your nose, and the flash of wildlife fast and strange can be seen between the leaves. there are howls and growls and buzzes and birdsong on the wind, some distant, some close.

this area of your current island is covered with large, shallow pools, where small creatures that look like axolotls wallow lazily about. one is hovering a little ways over the surface of the pool itself, suspended somehow in the air without wings. it seems happy about it. there's also a blue crystalline device by you both that rotates gently in place; you know when looking at it that it can be used to teleport to the other islands.]

Meteion is standing next to you. there's an aching feeling in the atmosphere here: this is a paradise so beloved and so lost that it tangibly hurts to look upon, in the sweetest of ways.]