Tipping back the hood of his black cloak, leaning on his staff of curdled light, the traveler contemplated the land where he had incarcerated the elemental called Litorgos.  That being hated both salt and silt; accordingly, here had been a most appropriate choice.

Half a day's walk from the edge of the sea the land reared up to form a monstrous irregular battlemented cliff twenty times the height of a tall man, notched where a river cascaded over the rim of the plateau above.  Thence it spilled across a wedge-shaped plain of its own making and developed into a narrow delta, following sometimes this and sometimes that main channel.  In principle such land should have been fertile.  Opposite the river's multiple mouths, however, a dragon-backed island created a swinge, such that at spring tide ocean water flooded ankle-deep over the soil, permeating it with salt.  Therefore, only hardy and resistant crops could be grown there, and in a bad year they might be overtaken by the salty inundation before they were ready to harvest.

This had not prevented the establishment of cities.  One had been founded close to the waterfall, and flourished awhile on trade with the plateau above.  A crude staircase had been carved out of the living rock, up which slaves daily toiled bearing salt, dried fish and baskets of edible seaweed, to return with grain and fruit and sunflower oil.  Then the elemental slumbering below stretched to test the firmness of his intangible bonds; they held him, but the staircase crumbled and the city disappeared.

More recently a port had been built on wooden piles at the mouth of the main channel; the island opposite was thickly forested.  With the clearance of the woodland, marble was discovered.  Cutting and polishing it, exporting it on rafts poled along the coastal shallows, the inhabitants grew rich enough to deck their own homes with marble and with colorful tiles in patterns, each of which constituted a charm against ill fortune.  But now the marble was exhausted, and so was most of the timber, and the city Stanguray, which had once been famous, was reduced to a village.  Its present occupants lived in the attics and lofts of the old town, and as they lay down to sleep could listen to the chuckle of water rippling within the lower part of their homes.  To get from one surviving building to another even toddlers deftly walked along flimsy rope bridges, while the needs of the elderly and better-off - for there were still rich and poor in Stanguray - were met by bearers of reed-mat palankeens, adept at striding down the waterways and across the mudflats on stilts taller than themselves.  This mode of transport had no counterpart elsewhere.

And it was entirely fitting, the traveler reflected, that this should be so.  For once the river, which here met the ocean, had run under the ramparts of Acromel, and was known as Metamorphia.  No longer did it instantly change whatever fell or swam in its waters, it having been decreed that after a certain span of altering the nature of other things, it must amend its own.  Yet and still a trace of what had gone before remained, and would forever in the work of all rivers: they would erode mountains, create plains, cause the foundation and destruction of countless cities.

Moreover, in all the settlements along it, including those around Lake Taxhling on the plateau above - the first earnest of the inevitable change in the river's nature, for there it spread out and grew sluggish and reed-fringed before it ultimately spilled over the cliffs and became the opposite, violent and fast and sparkling - the residual magic of Metamorphia had led to schools of enchantment.  Of no very great import, admittedly, nothing to compare with the traditions of Ryovora or Barbizond or the Notorious Magisters of Alken Cromlech, but dowered nonetheless with a certain potency.

Such matters being of the keenest interest to him, the traveler set forth along riverside paths toward this paradoxical village of marble columns and tiled pilasters.  It was dawn; the clouds in the east were flushing scarlet and rose and vermilion, and fisherfolk were chanting melodiously as they carried their night's catch ashore in reed baskets and spilled them into marble troughs, once destined for the watering of noblemen's horses, where women and children busily gutted them.  The smell of blood carried on the wind.  It was acute in the traveler's nostrils when he was still a quarter-hour's walk distant.

And then it occurred to him that in fact there was only a slight breeze, and that it was at his back: blowing off the land, toward the sea.