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lay the pleasant land of Everday. Its capital city, Ginkerle-Pale, had been named for Henery Ginkerle and Nylan Pale, twenty-first century west-coast ship-builders who had been on a ship when the Happening occurred, a ship that had been washed up, along with many others, on what had previously been a landlocked highland, perhaps in Idaho or Montana. Though the world lay mostly in darkness at this time, a hole in the cloud blanket hung above this particular spit of ocean and its adjacent coast. The opening allowed the daylight to penetrate and at night admitted reflected light from an orbiting ring of ejecta, which led the refugees to name it Everday.
    Though the climate had chilled considerably, the area was largely untouched by flood, fire, ashes, plague, or monsters, and the resident population, which was tiny, scattered, and very confused, found comfort and strength in the arrival of new people. Both residents and the accidental arrivals eagerly joined in doing whatever needed doing to guarantee their survival over the terrible years that followed when the hole in the cloud cover closed.
    The country around had been agricultural. As the silos had been full of grain when the Happening occurred, as an enormous food repository from the former age lay nearby,and as a seemingly bottomless abyss had opened between this repository and any neighboring population to the east, the people of Everday were able to preserve themselves and their breeding stock throughout the dark years. Rarely totally covered, the skies in Everday were among the earliest to clear, and when the sun reemerged, the people began building their stocks of fertile seed and tilling their fallow fields. Throughout this time, almost all the new arrivals had continued to live on their ships.
    When the skies had cleared more generally, the shipwrights set to sea with their sons and grandsons to explore the ruins of the great cities they had known before the Happening. Though the boats returned laden with salvage, those who manned them said the original monsters had grown great and were everywhere among the ruins. No culvert was empty of them, no pipe but contained a foully crusted rootiness that emerged squirming and oozing to grasp at whatever person might be near. Those who returned from the expedition recommended that their voyage be the last. To make sure that no future generation ignored this advice, all the ships not suitable for coastal fishing were sailed up-river as far as was possible and there dragged ashore to be converted into housing for the new hamlet of Shiplea.
    The people early adopted a township council system of governance for most matters, but they added the frippery of a king simply because they liked the idea of having one. There was little entertainment in Everday, and some of the settlers felt that a prolific royal family would guarantee a fountain of continuous merriment. Thereafter, the Everdayans concentrated on building, farming, and enjoying the luxury of slow time and long sagacity spent in joyful celebration of living.
    It was to this mellowed land that the sign of the Guardians came to Camwar Vestavrees, an unlikely recipient for any such distinction. If one named any forceful attribute, there were a myriad others who had more of it than Camwar. He was a simple, slender, brownish man with an easy walk and plain clothes. His eyes were his most noticeable feature, for when he felt wonder or delight, theyglowed with an astonishing luminosity. Camwar earned his livelihood as a cooper. He loved wood: the slip of the plane along its surface, the mute curl of the shavings, the pure arc of a stave that knew itself to be perfect and needed no puffery. He had from time to time, under unique circumstances, loved one woman or another for similar attributes of quiet perfection, begetting upon several of them children of remarkable beauty. He was unaware of this, as his partners had in each case been married to men who quite properly considered