C’Nut Three Beard Sings the Sky Song, the Earth Song and the Song of Loss. But never the Song of the Water because the water belongs to her, and she whispers her joys to the People in the quiet sanctuary of the hallowed Hot Hut.

C’Nut Three Beard then has no more to sing. C’Nut looks around from the Hot Hut lifting his sodden tangle of braids from his eyes and C’Nut sees the forest, and the tree needles that coat the forest floor far below the fungi ledges upon which his people make their branch homes and Hallowed Hot Huts in the immortal trees of the Kryptgarden Forest. He sees the path winding away through the grain fields to a distant blue edged horizon.

And C’Nut knows what he is to do. For the world is the source of Story and Song and a Skald of the High People cannot resist its call anymore than the Talking Sloat can resist the frog’s egg sacs.

With great and momentous solemnity, C’Nut pours a precise measure of the Hot Hut waters on his jeroboam, then fills it with the Tea of Living. He slings his Lungs of Life under his arm, lustily grabs his stoutest stave and strides onto the path of the Great Telling and into the Great Harmony.