Fifty years ago, Sinon had visited the Welsh-ethnic planet Llandilo, where he'd spent a cold three hours straddling sunrise to watch a clan of New Druids welcome the first day of spring.  As pagan ceremonies went, it was a fairly boring affair for an outsider, with off-key singing and interminable Gaelic invocations to the planet's mother goddess.  Only the setting made it worthwhile.  They'd gathered on the headland of some eastward-facing coastal cliffs, where a line of tremendous granite pillars marched out to sea.  God's colonnade, the locals called it.

When the sun rose, pink and gold out of the swaddling sea mist, its crescent was aligned perfectly along the line of pillars.  One by one, their tops had blazed with rose-gold coronas as the shadows flowed away.  Gladdened by nature's poignancy, the congregation of white-clad New Druids had finally managed to achieve a decent harmony and their voices rang out across the shore.

It was a strange recollection for Sinon to bring to his new serjeant body with its restricted memory capacity.  He certainly couldn't remember his reason for retaining it.  An overdose of sentiment, presumably.  Whatever the motive, the Llandilo memory was currently providing a useful acclimatisation bridge to the present.  Nine thousand of the serjeant trapped on Ketton's island had gathered together near the edge of the plateau to exert their will, with the remainder joining their endeavours via affinity as they walked resolutely over the mud towards the rendezvous point.  They weren't praying, exactly, but the visual similarity with the New Druids was an amusing comfort.  The beleaguered Edenists needed whatever solace they could garner from the dire situation.

Their first, and urgent, priority had been to stem the gush of atmosphere away from the flying island before everybody suffocated.  A simple enough task for their assembled minds now they had acquired some degree of energistic power; the unified wish bent whatever passed for local reality into obedience.  Even Stephanie Ash and her raggedy little group of followers had aided them in that.  Now it was as though the air layer around the outside of the island had become an impregnable vertical shield.

Encouraged and relieved, they stated their second wish loud and clear: to return.  In theory, it should have been easy.  If a massive concentration of energistic power had brought them here to this realm, then an equally insistent concentration should be able to get them back.  So far, this argument of logical symmetry had failed them utterly.

"You dudes should give it a rest," Cochrane said irritably.  "It's real spooky with all of you standing still like some zombie army."