This will most likely be the last entry I am going to make on this planet because in two days we will be boarding the shuttlecraft that will take us to the spaceship in orbit around Tereskàdhar. Needless to say, both Jhorhea and Rheža are looking forward to leaving this planet. They may have been conceived and born here, but there is nothing here for them. Even Rhalhea and I, after spending much of the last couple of months trying to recapture the past, had to realize that the past no longer mattered. You can’t go home again; Jhar Morněl had seen to that. By trying to change what Krysa Rhona had written about a thousand years ago he had effectively changed the lives of every Tereskàdian and whistling dragon.

So what were we doing these last two and a half weeks? Visiting, talking, reminiscing. The subject of Alharhan came up, and when I told the villagers that I lived in a city with a population of 23,000,000 Alharhanians and Tereskàdians, they could not grasp the concept of such a large number. To them, their world was the small villages on ‘Hănharys, the only place they knew and comprehended. They did not understand the concept of buildings that reached up to the sky, fifteen, twenty, thirty stories high. They asked me if I feared living there, and I told them that when I first arrived in Treskebhar I was afraid, but I was used to it now. I was getting so used to it, that I thought ‘Hănharys was perhaps a bit too quiet. Since I’ve been here I have turned my hearing up to maximum, just to hear some animal rustling in the grasses, or birds chirping in the trees. Now that snow season is here, there is not much to hear. If I were on Alharhan, in Treskebhar, I would hear more noise than I wanted to, and my hearing would be decreased. There is no happy medium.

We returned to the village where Rhalhea and I lived, and decided that we would not spend the night here. I had made arrangements that we would be picked up by bus and taken to Bhakeb where a jetliner would take us across the ocean to Jinhas. We would spend a day there before traveling to the spaceport and boarding the shuttlecraft.

Even though we would be leaving this planet in two days, I was already beginning to have regrets. One part of me wanted to stay here, to live out my life in the village, to hunt like I used to, to watch my cubs grow up and learn the ways of the island, the ways of the forests, but this other part of me… that had no regrets about leaving.

When I drank from Kykherhenha that evening, I tried to suppress those thoughts, but that was impossible, of course.

Pešhŏkelhashen 2.489/Day 534