I cannot express how much of a relief it is to be out of the jungle tonight. It’s nearby, but tonight we can actually see the stars and moons, and we don’t have the constant danger from the close proximity of carnivorous plants. Kar and Tezar will begin their return to Razhinoch tomorrow, leaving the five of us without horses.
We decided to plan our course for the next few months or more, so I asked Dawn how we would get to the ‘passage’ she knows about. She drew a modest map in a patch of dirt, showing the western coast of Etnyben, and five increasingly longer ranges of mountains stretching from north to south. In the northern edge, the ranges all seemed to group together. From what I understand, we traveled completely around the first of the ranges when we first had the telefs. If Dawn’s map is correct, we can easily pass south of the first four ranges, but there was no way around the final range along the coast. She claims the ‘passage’ is where the last two ranges meet in the north, but it leads to the coast west of the mountains.
However, we cannot go straight to the passage. Niahla’Sen demanded that we travel north between the third and fourth ranges. When asked to explain her reason, she gave an interesting story. The previous man who attempted to explore this land disappeared somewhere between those two ranges, and she wants to find him. Apparently, the man was her father, and her mother was the old crone in Perduva, a Sisterhood operative who accompanied the explorer. They fell in love during their time together, and married. The woman, pregnant with Niahla’Sen at the time of his disappearance, never found her husband, and began a long, dangerous journey back to civilization with only a piece of parchment containing a letter he wrote her. The woman never had a chance to return to this land, but Niahla’Sen now plans to find her father, and reunite him with her mother. Since Zhethou said Niahla’Sen would find what she was seeking, the rest of us are willing to assist her with this search.