When he had taken the quest, he knew only that he must somehow continue
the labors of Shannon's life---find some way to avenge the death of it.
He had wandered alone for a period of days, remembering, until one
morning, at the rising dust of a fiery dawn, he had felt the North
calling to him. He felt it still, though less strongly, and he deemed
that this was right. What he hoped to find there he could not say. He
only knew that he must find it.

The most difficult aspect of his journey thus far had not been the long
flight on short provisions. To the mai such things meant nothing.
They lived to work and serve the greater need, that was all. No, it
was more the feelings and emotions that the long pilgrimage evoked in
him, seeming almost to rise from the vast loneliness of his world. For
though the man's spirit had died or moved on, his sensations and
experience had not. They lived on within Simin, and sometimes puzzled
or even frightened him. He understood, and knew this was necessary;
but the knowledge did not make it easier.

WHAT A TORTURED RACE THEY MUST BE, he thought. SO TORN BETWEEN DESIRE
AND FEAR. THEY ARE GIVEN NO ROLE, NO CLEAR PLACE. THEY MUST FIND IT,
AS WE MUST FIND MOISTURE IN AN ARID LAND.

It was this fear of frustration and fruitless searching that he felt
most deeply, because it had for so long been a part of his own
existence. Through all his twenty months he had sought after some
intangible, some elusive quality of being, with no more guide than a
restless and smoldering hunger inside him. TO NOT KNOW, really not
know who he was or where he was going.

This, he decided, must be the doom of humanity: to be born a burning
question of itself, a paradox of beauty and destruction, love and loss.
To take personally and introspectively the irresolvable conflict of
life and desire over stillness and the void. Again, he felt it so
deeply. That the struggle could also be beautiful he knew. But still,
such a hard and lonely fate.....

When dawn came he crawled out of the niche and looked about him. The
great crack was shadowed and still. He felt the presence of many
creatures, but they were not yet near him. The rockface offered little
resistance as he climbed, and soon he stood atop a hooked spire that
sprang from the pillar's crumbling eastern shoulder, high above the
plain. Two long lines of wingless wasps were mounting towards him.
The first of their number touched the spire.