Pale grey stormclouds rush by.
After a moment, the title appears against the clouds.

There is an abrupt pan down to a sunny day.
Briar lays beneath a tree, daydreaming.
Above her, a dark bird flies by. Tinted blue by distance, an island floats far above.

Briar sits up and waves at three other girls who come to join her, laughing and grinning.
The wind whips Briar's hair around her face and she looks to the distance.

Two women travelers climb over some rocks on a hill. The wind whips their hair.
One of them has long pale hair, down to her hips. She is barely twenty. Her companion is in her forties, and has closely cropped hair. They look very similar.

Meilyr, his dark cloak flapping in the wind, stands beside Carillon.
Perched in the tree behind them are Carillon's flight.
Stormclouds are building behind them.

Ki sits up in bed, her eyes wild and frightened.

Images begin to flicker very quickly.

Sohlu holds her hands together, cupped, and then spreads them and a gale of snow pours out.
Yalaine floats naked, darkness spiraling around her. Her eyes are closed and her hair is spread out as if she were floating in water. Her hair lifts up over her head. Her eyes open.
A flight of faeries swarms a man.
Ki faces her parents in a field of clover.
Maggia stares, wide-eyed, at her reflection in a mirror. Her reflection becomes an image of Ki staring back at her from the audience hall.
Antarik stands in a great empty enclosed space and flings up his hand. Red light and fire spirals out of it, and a dragon forms.
A man with white hair and a beard tells stories to a group of children sitting outside in the sunshine. He laughs.
A green-haired girl pokes her head out of a lake to talk to a cluster of people on the shore. Then she flips over, diving, and displaying her mermaid tail.
Yalaine is writing on walls wildly.
A dark-haired Empire princess walks in a garden with a brown-haired nobleman.
A set of wings float high in a sunlit tower. Other wings, blurred, line the walls. The floating set has two pairs of ghostly translucient wings as well as a more typical pair.
Askayra stands on the edge of a skyland with another woman. A storm roils and swirls all around them, behind, above and below. Lightning strikes.
An enormous stone covered with moss juts out of the ground at a 45 degree angle. In its shadow are the twinkling of lights of a town.
A man with thick white hair lays asleep on a crystal slab.
An old man in a long silk robe kneels to pray at a shabby wooden altar.
A dry fountain overgrown with dead ivy abruptly bursts into flow. The ivy sprouts new life and flowers bloom.
A brown-haired nobleman crouches on the ground, his finery ripped and town. He spreads the fingers of both hands wide and bows his head as he places his hands on the ground.
Jahane touches a kneeling Sohlu's face tenderly and steps backwards, dissolving into sparkles.
An extremely tall man in a smith's apron pulls a sword out of quenching and inspects it. There is writing along the blade.
Arett gesticulates as he speaks to a company of men dressed in ragtag armor. He points at the sky.
Alenne smiles down at a wire and glass butterfly in her hand. It comes to life and flies away.
A pair of pale-haired women stand together in a city.
A young man works in a garden.
A pair of entwined hands.
Yalaine is writing on walls wildly.
The dark-haired Empire princess has a pair of wings, the frame carved of wood, the joints pieced of aquamarine crystal, and silk stretched across the frame. She is dressed like a soldier, and she snaps at somebody.
A brown-haired boy looks uneasily at a rose.
Somebody kisses a surprised Sohlu.
Ki leaps on Antaric from behind, hugging him.
Somebody bows over Alenne's hand.
Two tall teenage boys, one with dark brown hair, the other with sandy brown hair sit and watch something. The dark-haired one is perched on a rock, one foot balanced against it, while the sandy-haired one leans against the rock, his head turned to watch. They both have swords and tattoos on their right arms.
Maggia stares, wide-eyed, at her reflection in a mirror. Slowly, her reflection becomes an image of Ki staring back at her from the Empire Audience Hall.
A huge lynx sits in the forest of statues at the Statuary.
Alenne combs her hair in front of a mirror.
A young Empire prince grins at the camera and blows a kiss, tossing hair out of his eyes. He turns to look at something over his shoulder.
Meilyr touches a fire with a finger and the fire freezes into an ice sculpture.

Meilyr has a swordfight with the white haired man.
Askayra has a swordfight with the sandy-haired teenage boy.
Ki, clad in silver armor and with a sword of light, strikes down at a thick tentacle of darkness.
Briar dances backwards, holding a long knife. She dodges a sword swung at her.
The lynx leaps on a small, ragged, dark man. They roll around.
A legion of kite soldiers dives towards Sahalle. Arett instructs his company of men to fire bows with flaming arrows.
Evon, naked, curls forward around her knees, weeping.

The images slow down again.

A skyland close to the ground, casts a shadow over a city squarely beneath it. The city is grey, and many ropes connect ground to skyland. Suddenly the tethers snap, flying upwards, as the skyland begins to move.

A skyland floats ahead in the sky, motionless. Above and behind it, blued with distance floats another skyland

From extremely far above, looking down, the chain of skylands drifts across the map-like land.

The waves of the lake wash the shore. The silhouette of a woman stands there, and then a man walks along the shore to join her.