Slade took his time packing.  It was Hobson’s choice--the comfort bubble would collapse, as far as he could tell, at a random moment, and he wanted to be fully dressed and packed before it did, but while it lasted he wanted to enjoy the warmth.  He would rather not move out into the cold while the warmth was still inches away, but he recognized both that it would be a bad choice to stand fully bundled in the warmth for any length of time, and that it would be a worse outcome if he were not fully dressed when the cold came.  In the end, he finished packing and stepped outside.

Shella’s packing spell was working--not well, but adequately.  She used it to pack her own gear, and then to seal his blankets and her own.  She was only a few steps behind exiting the magic shell.

Now that he was out, he was uncertain which way to go.  When they had set up their temporary habitat he had been careful to arrange things so that they would mark which way was south, and he still knew that as he standed on the seemingly featureless landscape.  A plain, flat and level in all directions, is what he perceived--but was that the reality?  He closed his eyes and considered it.

The surface of the water in the bathtub would be level, because the water all settled to the lowest point.  The floors in the house were also level, but that was because someone took great care to make them so, using levels and plumbobs and measuring tapes to get things exactly right.  Although a Creator might have been responsible for this plain, unless this was a video game or some similar computer-generated world, it would be extremely unlikely for it to be flat and level.  If it were the surface of a lake, it could be, as water would settle as it does in the tub--and it struck him that this could be the surface of a lake, several inches or even feet of solid frozen water under the covering of wind-swept snow.  On the other hand, mammoths weren’t going to be finding grass under the snow atop a lake, and probably had some way of knowing when they were on water instead of dirt.  This was probably land.

He was not certain what sort of geologic forces might create a flat plain.  Perhaps a pool of molten lava would behave similarly to a pool of water, and harden into a flat and level surface--but not at these dimensions, or at least, he hoped not.  It seemed unlikely that this was either perfectly flat or perfectly level.  The snow might make the ground appear flat, filling irregularities and drifting into a smooth top, but would it make things seem level?

He closed his eyes and stabbed his sword into the snow as a marker.  He stared into the distance, and slowly turned to his right, focusing as far into the distance as he could.  Level--no, wait.  There was a slight angle to the horizon as he turned, and then it was reduced, and eventually as he was staring into the distance he decided that he was looking, ever so slightly, downhill.

He checked the position of his sword, which should mark a roughly southerly direction.  It appeared that this ground sloped down to the northeast.

North was not the direction he wanted to go, but if they were to find water they needed to go downhill, and this was downhill.  Pulling his sword from the ice, he said, “This way,” and started walking.

There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #531:  Versers Roam.  Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter.  It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.

As to the old stories that have long been here:

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