Successor's Promise (Millennium's Rule, #3)

by Trudi Canavan

CHAPTER 16 Since her stranding had begun, Rielle had thought of only three ways she could escape the world. Her first option was to do as Valhan had done to free himself from her home world: wait until enough magic had been generated. He’d been stranded for over twenty cycles—and had to travel from one side of her world to the other in order to gather enough to leave. This world was small enough that she could reach all the magic in it, so she would not have to travel. How quickly the people would generate enough magic for her to leave was difficult to guess. It depended on how large the population was. A greater population meant a higher percentage of people undertaking creative activities and a better chance that one or more Makers existed, creating magic in greater quantities than the average person. No matter how many Makers there were, or how many people were creating, it was still likely to take many cycles for enough magic to be generated to allow her to escape. Her second option had been simply to hope that Qall would return for her. She had given up on guessing what the chances of that were. Waiting depended on him being alive, willing to retrieve her and free to do so. She refused to think that he would never come back if he was able to, but would he be able to relocate the world and find her within it? Here, among the multitudes of locals, her mind would be one among thousands. She would have been easier to find in the farm, as one among hundreds. It would be ea...