Ka

All this she later related to Dar Oakley.

For Dar Oakley, too, years had perhaps passed in a season, but it was harder to tell. Certainly he found many strangers at the new winter roost, but then there always were strangers there. The one he called Younger Sister had returned to the flock, alone and gloomier than ever: the Vagrant her mate had one day gone out to the far border of the little freehold they had got, she told Dar Oakley, and not returned; she couldn’t find him ever after. There was no more to be said about that. It did puzzle Dar Oakley that, when he asked her if she’d had young after all, she sighed profoundly and said, Oh yes, many, many. But when he tried to question the other Crows about how long he’d been gone, they mostly said they hadn’t remarked his going away, and so hadn’t noticed him return again.

He took a place among them, and asked no more.

So that’s how Dar Oakley, who wished to go to a place where there are no Crows, became of all the Crows a traveler for real, and without flying far, to pass from his own realm into another, a realm so distant that life and death were different there, and then come back again with news of it, if back was where he came to. He believes that he was the first and only being not of Ymr to know such a realm—and though it may be that he’s wrong about that, he is certainly the first and only Crow to go on passing between Here and There from that far time down to this. How that long power or burden came to be his is the story that he tells—it might as well be called the story that he is.