In the middle of nowhere in the ages unknown there was a fabulous realm of Nevèrÿon inhabited by doers and thinkers… There were powerful lords and miserable slaves…He was learning that power – the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of the nation – was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge. Yet, as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it. He lay on damp fur and remembered walking through such a foggy field in a line with other slaves, chains heavy from his neck before and behind.There were divine myths and miraculous legends… There were brave adventurers and ravenous dragons… ‘Did you see the dragons, earlier tonight, flying against the moon? I climbed up on the rocks to the corrals, to watch the riders go through their full-moon maneuvers. You know the fabled flying dragons are cousins to the tiny night lizards that scurry about the rocks on spring evenings. There’s a trainer there who showed me how the great flying beasts and the little night crawlers have the same pattern of scales in black and green on the undersides of their hind claws.’The unchartered exotic shores always promise priceless prizes.