Submission (#3388) Approved

Hazard had always wanted to visit Kyendi. His mother had taken him and his siblings to many of the regions across Eyre, but Ilfrit’s tales of the mist-veiled peaks and dense jungles of his homeland had always captured the imagination of this impressionable young kittom. Ilfrit had even once mentioned a village called Ilrian nestled atop a cluster of floating islands!

Now, Hazard had seen many strange and wonderous things during his kittomhood, but floating islands? That was something he had to see with his own eyes to believe. It just sounded so outlandish. How could islands float in the sky? What was keeping them there and how did they get there in the first place? And most importantly – what would happen if one day they just suddenly decided to fall? Questions had buzzed around the young Elnin’s head for weeks after that and no one seemed to have any answers.

Perhaps one of the things that interested Hazard most was Kyendi’s elder tree. He was pretty confident at this point that he’d seen (almost) every elder tree in Eyre, but all he knew about the one in Kyendi was from the books he’d read and the stories he’d heard. If he closed his eyes, however, he could clearly picture the colossal entity based on those stories – long, draping tendril-like branches hung like curtains over the still waters of Eiloen, wafting in synchronized currents with each gentle caress of the wind. In the background, he could see the cliffs of Sulapei, so high in the sky that their peaks were hidden in a near perpetual cover of cloud. And if he got particularly imaginative, sometimes Hazard could even picture the floating islands he had so many questions about as small specks in the distance.

When he opened his eyes, however, the images faded and he was left with only one thought in his mind: Kyendi was a place he just had to visit someday.