As we got closer, step­ping around and over the irreg­u­lar chunks of molten-looking glass that lit­tered the desert, a strange feel­ing came over me. A kind of dis­lo­cated feel­ing, a float­ing feel­ing, like my mind was slowly float­ing fur­ther away from the brain that used to imprison it. Of course, I was kind of used to that sen­sa­tion by now. Ever since child­hood, I’d been able to let my mind drift away, and let it see things that my body couldn’t. Dremia kept try­ing to tell me that it’s called “astral pro­jec­tion”, but that sounded a bit too sci­en­tific for me. I pre­ferred to call it looking-through-sunlight. It made more sense to me, any­way. I didn’t think it had any­thing to do with astrals, what­ever they are, and pro­jec­tion is what you do when your hands make shapes in front of a lamp and show up huge on the wall, so I didn’t think it should be called that really. All I did was let my mind drift and I could see any of the things that sun­light fell on.

Any­way, this dis­lo­cated feel­ing I was get­ting wasn’t quite like that. It was stronger, a much stronger sense of being pulled away from real­ity. The glass boul­ders strewn around slowly began to look insub­stan­tial, some­how at once both there and not.

I tried to walk through one, and ended up with a face full of sand and a com­plain­ing ankle. My attempt at say­ing “ouch” only gained me a mouth and nose full of sand as well.

“You okay?” Tsuki asked, lean­ing over.

I rolled onto my side, looked up, and accepted his prof­fered hand as he hauled me to my feet.

“Yeah. Sorry,” I said, and grinned.

We car­ried on walk­ing, and before long the down-to-earth thoughts that my fall had caused evap­o­rated and my mind began to drift again. This time, at least, I remem­bered to avoid the glass frag­ments, even though my brain was insist­ing that they weren’t really there.

Before long, I started to catch glimpses of peo­ple, just for frac­tions of sec­onds before they blinked out of exis­tence again. Not just peo­ple, either. Some­times there were sol­diers, whole groups of them, and some­times there were big scaly things with huge wings. I’m sure I saw one of them, insub­stan­tial and misty in the dis­tance, descend from the sky and pick some­thing up in its claws before dis­ap­pear­ing like all the strange visions did. Some­how, though, they didn’t seem scary. In fact, they almost seemed friendly, although in a kind of dis­tant and aloof way. I was so engrossed in look­ing around me to see if I could find another of the strange crea­tures that I didn’t notice another huge shard of glass in my path. Over I went, again.

I looked up ahead of me, and stopped try­ing to stand. Right in front of where we stood (or in my case lay), where pre­vi­ously there had been noth­ing but empty sand and a few insub­stan­tial chunks of glass, there now rose a vast palace. It must have been three or four times the height of any build­ing I’d ever seen, and it stretched for hun­dreds of yards in each direc­tion. It was huge, beyond my wildest imag­in­ings. The whole thing rose organ­i­cally from the sur­round­ing sand, as if all the mate­r­ial for miles around had been piled in one spot and some­how turned into a build­ing. Which, when I thought about it, was prob­a­bly the case. Kyren had said when we first started cross­ing this debris-strewn desert that you could make glass by mak­ing sand really hot, and indeed it was entirely from glass that this palace was made.

I jumped upright and punched the air. “We’ve found it!” I shouted.

“Found what?” was Rachel’s response.

“The palace, of course! The thing we’ve been look­ing for!”

“What do you mean? There’s noth­ing here, Caramel.”

“But… I can see…” I began, as Rachel turned and walked away — right through the wall of the palace, which became a lit­tle more insub­stan­tial as she did so.

It finally began to dawn on me, then, what it was that I was see­ing, and what it was that I was feel­ing. The view my mind was pro­vid­ing me with wasn’t drift­ing in place, but drift­ing in time instead. I was see­ing flashes and dis­solv­ing moments of this place at dif­fer­ent points in its his­tory — and per­haps its future, too.

I won­dered why. But, when I thought about it for a while, I realised that it had never been cer­tain that I’d always seen the present time when my mind wan­dered. Who knows what strange and won­der­ful things could hap­pen out here in the desert, with the blaz­ing sun light­ing up every facet of the vast palace that was barely vis­i­ble now in front of me. I’d always asso­ci­ated my abil­ity with sun­light, and this place prac­ti­cally was sunlight.

I was sad­dened, I guess, to realise that a build­ing this majes­tic didn’t seem to exist any­more; its sole remains scat­tered as debris around the desert. What could destroy a place that impres­sive, I won­dered, and what would want to?

And… Could it be rebuilt again?