Cassima tucked her pendant away. She had discovered an answer to the problem of crossing the mountains while she was talking to Edgar. The magic bracelet she was wearing and the forms carved into it. One of those forms was a raven. She could change into a raven and fly to that land. It was so obvious; she wondered why it hadn't occurred to her sooner – and she had only recently been talking to a man with a bird's wing instead of an arm!

She breathed deeply, relaxed and mulled over the name associated with the raven for several seconds before speaking it out loud:

"Corvus."

There was a loud rush of sound as she changed, with a distant call of a raven piercing the maelstrom of noise as it began fading away. She investigated her new shape as well as she could without the aid of a reflective surface. She was considerably smaller, and the two legs she stood on felt awkward beneath her; her heels seemed to be where her knees once were. She still had her headdress, but it had apparently shrunk to fit her raven's head, as had all the items that were beneath it now. She unfolded her wings and examined them, flexing one, then the other, and examining her jet-black feathers.

Feathers. She had feathers. What an odd feeling. She had imagined that having feathers would be horribly uncomfortable with those sharp quills, but in reality, her plumage felt scarcely different from the fur she had as a wolf…it was slightly thicker and stiffer, but still surprisingly similar. She wouldn't care to go through a molting season in this form, however. She now had a vague idea how Sing Sing, her pet nightingale, felt. Of course, Sing Sing had been born as a bird, not a human.

After a few minutes of growing accustomed to this new form, Cassima focused on the gap between the mountains. It seemed like a long way to that gap, and she couldn't see any land beyond it. Still, she trusted the wiseman, and he seemed to trust her ability to make it to that mysterious land to the east.

Cassima spread her wings, feeling slightly giddy at the thought of being able to fly, waited for a light breeze, then pumped her wings with all her might. In moments, she was airborne, soaring through the mountains of Serenia, finally realizing just how meaningful the expression "free as a bird" was.

For years afterward, Cassima tried to make sense out of what had happened on that first flight she took. Her memory of the event seemed oddly blurred and distorted. She remembered reaching the coast and heading out over the ocean, taking advantage of the strong updrafts and soaring instead of flapping whenever she could. She had looked down and noticed a tiny, black speck in the sea which had to be the island fortress of the wizard Mordack. Cassima had hoped the wretched place would eventually sink into the salty waters or crumble into dust...although she fervently hoped that Dink and Sam and the rest of the poor beasts that Mordack had enslaved and she had befriended would find a way to escape it first.

She had flown onwards, out towards the open sea, then after some time, she recalled something that her parents had told her about Serenia: aside from the Land of the Green Isles, it was farther to the east than any other northern kingdom…and consequently the closest to the Edge of the World.

Cassima recalled saying a few words that her mother would have been appalled to hear her say, contemplating turning back, then realizing that Serenia had long since vanished from view. After that, she hypothesized that she probably wouldn't have had enough strength to return, then said a few more words unbecoming to a young queen. The wiseman had told her that the land she needed to visit lay to the east…but could he have possibly been mistaken? He seemed so confident, but what if he had misread whatever signs or visions he used to acquire this knowledge?

That was about the time the darkness started to appear – a thick black streak that engulfed the horizon and began to blot out the sky at an unnaturally quick speed. Still, in her frazzled state of mind, Cassima decided she would rather die trying than die running – no, flying – away, so she continued on, into the darkness…and whatever lay beyond.

The next thing she knew, she was in broad daylight again. The shock was so great that she almost fell into the sea, but the sight of land some distance ahead made her forget her confusion and flap onwards.

Cassima had tried to come up with a logical explanation for what had happened. One hypothesis was that against all odds, she had gone beyond the Edge of the World, only to wind up on the other side of the opposite edge. This flew in the face of the accepted belief that the world was flat, and Cassima found her own theory quite implausible at times – she had been at the Edge of the World barely a day before, for Samhain's sake! Did her little winged excursion somehow prove that the earth wasn't flat, but perhaps rolled into a cylinder with the ends sewn together? What a ludicrous idea!

Then there was the theory that the Creator, the Gods, or whatever Powers that Be had noticed her winging her way east of the sun, and had somehow plucked her out of the air and placed her west of the moon in order to steer her away from whatever lay beyond the edge. If this had truly happened, Cassima would earnestly thank every deity she could name. If there was something out there more terrifying to mortal eyes than the Realm of the Dead, it certainly was thoughtful for whatever higher forces at work to keep those eyes turned away. As much as Cassima hated to think it, curiosity did have its limits.

Cassima knew that she had somehow wound up on the western edge of the world after she landed on a yellow beach a half hour later, returned to her human form, looked around at the surrounding land, walked into the nearby woods, found a quaint little hut built beneath an enormous oak tree and knocked repeatedly on the hut's tiny door. She was then shouted at by at least six small, ornery men before getting her question out, to which one of the men snarled, "You're in Tamir, you bean-brained Missy! What rock have you been hidin' under?". After this, she had a pretty good idea where in the world she was at that moment.

The question was when…

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