Exiled, Sheeana tumbled through the door and landed amid quartz. She made her way through the forest, trying to spear on her gaze the faces of Reverend Mothers who had been dead for thousands of years. She parted crystal leaves to find her lost Sister in the pose of wisdom as old as the religious impulse. Sand (earth, the substance below them, the bedrock of the psyche) and a sandtrout (the larva of the Spice-producer and thus the beggining of wisdom) hovered above her hand.

Sheeana marveled.