With Moud she crosses arid wastes where the swirling sand blasts the feeling from her skin, scrub forests where the luminous sap that has dripped from the broken moon-pieces pools in fallen leaves, and fields of tall grass where snakes play their warning music by strumming the little harps strung between their fangs with their forked tongues.
The paper bird, voiceless and useless now, falls from her hand, and she turns away from the Xalash-man. She no longer cares that her second face is exposed, and she stumbles to another stump and curls against its roots, waiting for the world to take everything else she has left.