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Well-tended cottages were nothing more than broken,
burned stone foundations. The smithy was a pile of rubble,
and there was no trace of the mill except for the rotted
remains of the waterwheel, slumped by the bank of the
stream, looking like the twisted web of some enormous
spider. There were no people, no horses, no dogs, no
chickens. The dell was bare. The dark ground was hard and
cracked, as if it had been baked in a furnace.
Matya's heart lurched. She ran a few, hesitant steps
back across the bridge, toward the village, and she gasped
again. Tambor looked as it had before, the villagers going
about their business. Blue smoke rose from a score of stone
chimneys.
Perhaps I imagined it, she thought, but she knew that
wasn't true. Slowly, she turned her back to the village once
more and walked across the bridge. She looked out of the
comer of her eye and again saw the jumbled ruins and
blackened earth behind her. Slowly, she began to
understand.
Tambor HAD been destroyed in the Cataclysm. The
people, the bustling village, were images of what had been
long ago. It was all illusion. Except the illusion was
imperfect, Matya realized. It appeared only when she
traveled TOWARD the village, not AWAY from it. But how
did the illusion come to exist in the first place?
Resolutely, Matya walked back across the bridge. She
found that, if she concentrated, the illusion of the bustling
village would waver and grow transparent before her eyes,
and she could see the blackened ruins beneath
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