[b]The Ceveline![/b]

It is a truism of storytelling: when you are at your wit's end, have a woman come through the door with a sword.

This is particularly true of detective stories.

The door opens. The door closes. Injimo has followed starlight and purpose straight to the loud, vibrant heart of Eclair Espoir, her hands in the sink, her companion applying sacred bandages to the wound of a Paladin. It is a cramped space, the sort of space that is made for martial arts, for fights where victory is found in inches.

I declaim knowledge of what is to come.

[hr]
[b]The Outside![/b]

There are cards half-hidden in the grass. Stones lie on each other like links in a chain. There are cherry blossoms on the high and mournful winds. This is a reflection of Card and Captor and Sakura, yes? This is the half-awake, the dreaming of the world, a place where heroines find what they are looking for (except, apparently, how to undo a knot!!).

We're all in the Outside, a place of Random Encounters, a place of Quests, a place of Dragon Dreaming, after all. In such a place, maybe even I seem small. The stars aren't out - the marvelous artifice of the Sun is blocking the view - but they must seem awfully small all the way up there, wouldn't they?

There's something about this world that gets into you, for all that I am its counter-goddess, which means for all that it's a fanciful story. Because it's still real to all the people in Vespergift, and in Crevas, and out here in the plains of the Serigalamu. There's more reality in a goddess being bullied in the back of a wagon than there is in all the whirling dances up there, even if starlight is what makes things solid and real and more than the passing fancy of the sleeping dragons far down below.

You have to keep traveling. The Ossuary is farther still.