Mithila closed the diary. The papers were already showing signs of sogginess. She stuffed it into her pack, and stood. The day had worn on, and around her, the world glistened in the aftermath of rains. And as she walked, the occasional drop slid down a leaf surface, splashed upon her neck, and trickled down her skin, making her shiver.

She kept the river at the edge of her vision as she scrabbled through the undergrowth, branches and leaves brushing against her skin. The scent in the air was growing stronger, as if there was something just beyond, that moved away as she walked. It seeped into her brain, jolted little nerve-endings, sending something dancing inside her.

The world began to change.

The trees grew sparser. Gaps in the canopy began to appear. She caught glimpses of a sky that still bore the promise of rain. And then she was walking in an open space — a clearing, but not quite — more like a thinning out, a fading away, the trees around the edges of her sight resembling a boundary.

Mithila stopped. Shading her eyes with her palm, she could see a last row of trees, and beyond that a patch of clear ground.

Beyond that there was something. Something that glimmered.

The world was molten.

Shafts of golden light rent the sky. The outlines of the clouds were blinding white, a brightness that almost seemed to crackle, before it gave way to rust-red, and then shadow. Streaks of ochre were daubed across the horizon, upon a canvas of deeper, darker blue. Somewhere beyond the rim of the world, the sun was going down.

Not Wallset. Sunset.

She tip-toed forward. The tree-line grew closer. The ground began to darken. Like a sigh, the turmoil of colour in the sky was dissolving into a pale, iron-grey monochrome. Around her the wind picked up, a rustling in the trees that matched the rushing of the river. But there was a deeper sound in the distance, deeper even than a roar. A still sound.

She paused at the tree-line, in a darkling world. She looked behind, at the clearing, at the scattered trees and their shadows, as if she was standing at the edge of a portal, readying to leave a lifetime behind, and walk into the light.

Mithila took one breath to steady herself, and stepped out beyond the tree-line.

She fell into openness.

Soft earth. Her feet sunk into it, almost pitching her forward. Soft earth, until it gave way to water: water that ran up its edges and then fled back away, leaving behind a curl of whiteness that dissolved into nothingness.

Water that went on — forever.

Until yesterday, the Wall.

Today, a boundary of trees.

And now the borders of the world were gone.

West of the river, south of the sea.

Sea.

Mithila tore her eyes out with looking. Her legs carried her towards the sea, but she only had a feeling of falling, of falling towards it. Beneath her, the soft ground turned wet. And then the water came to her: it chased her feet, spread itself around her ankles, making her gasp with the cold — and retreated, leaving her feet sunk in the ground once more, as if the world had moved beneath her feet.

It came back to her, lapped against her sandals. Mithila stood still, tasting tears upon her tongue. Once, long ago, she had lain on her stomach and tried so hard, so very hard, to make the ground beyond the water vanish. Now there was no ground, and no Wall — only water, and sky. A floating blanket before her, that moved and shifted with the wind, and never ended.

A horizon.

The horizon.

Taraf had known.

Through slits in the clouds, curtains of dying grey light speared the waves. In the far distance, she saw a group of garudas circling above the sea, their cries faint over the air. She followed the light, her head twisting, until she saw the river once more, and the canopy beyond. Mithila turned. To her other side, rising above the trees, away in the distance, she saw the Wall.

The wind hit her face. Mithila shivered, feeling the cold in her bones. She stepped back. Something crunched beneath her feet, an unfamiliar sound. She looked down, and saw a multitude of little objects that lay scattered upon the ground.

Ranging from the size of a fingernail to a fist, they were blank and coloured, plain and patterned, smooth, spiked, ridged, corrugated, and vertebrated; and all of them were variations upon a spiral, coils and whirls winding around each other in a swirling of structures.

Forgetting the cold, she felt her way among them, picking up the smaller ones — cautiously, and then more boldly, as she realized that they were only things — and examining them in her palm. Many of them were caked in the unfamiliar stuff that made up this soft ground, something that slipped through her fingers as she prised it away, like sawdust from her father’s workshop but somehow more real, a cleaner smell. The work of her fingers revealed polished surfaces, glimmering in the ascending starlight.

Upon the ground, a peculiar shape caught her eye: dark, with irregular stripes, it seemed coiled around itself, in spirals that widened with every turn, ending in a curved opening. She picked it up. Unlike some of the other, broken ones, this was whole, a complete, symmetrical design. She brought it up to her face for a closer look; and then, without quite knowing what she was doing, she cupped it against her right ear.

The boundaries between her body and the world disintegrated. It was as if the world was contained within the spiral, and it now poured into her ears: a rhythmic sound that swelled into a roar.

The sea spilled into her.

Mithila sank to her knees. She felt like her body was holding the world entire, a world without a Wall, and the ever-receding horizon was inside her, no, she was the horizon. This time she did not hold back the tears.

After a very long time, beneath a pale sky, she looked up again. There was the river to her right. She stood. The sky pressed down on her. Her feet dug into the soft ground. Water lapped over them from time to time.

Come find me when you walk ashore

West of the river, south of the sea...

Mithila began to walk.

It was then that she saw a strange-looking, oblong shape, which broke the monotony of the empty shore. It was half-buried in the ground, just where the river met the sea, on the edge of the water.

Feet sinking lightly into the ground, she approached it. It was shaped like an arch, covered with patterns, and a smooth black that reminded her of the Wall. As she drew closer, the pattern resolved into the familiar shape of Sumer’s alphabet. But it was only when she was standing beside it, with the roar of the river and the beat of the sea sounding in her ears, that Mithila was able to read the words.

Here lies Taraf

The last Man

The Horizon releases today from the house of HarperCollins India