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BOOK I

The Book of Going Forth

Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces This is the gulf between universes, the chill deeps of space that contain nothing but the occasional random molecule, a few lost comets and

but a circle of blackness shifts slightly, the eye reconsiders perspective, and as apparently the awesome distance of interstellar wossnahts of ill charitably be called civilisation

For, as the world tumbles lazily, it is revealed as the Discworld - flat, circular, and carried through space on the back of four elephants who stand on the back of Great A'tuin, the only turtle ever to feature on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagra, dusted with the frost of dead comets, meteor-pocked, albedo-eyed No-one knows the reason for all this, but it is probably quantum Much that is weird could happen on a world on the back of a turtle like that

It's happening already

The stars below are caes high in the forested mountains Towns are sreat sprawling city of Ankh-Morpork, for exaalaxies

But here, away froreat centres of population, where the Circle Sea meets the desert, there is a line of cold blue fire Flames as chilly as the slopes of Hell roar towards the sky Ghostly light flickers across the desert The pyra their power into the night

The energy strea up from their paracosmic peaks may, in chapters to come, illuminate many ion is bad for goats, and what it is that handmaidens actually do

It will certainly shohat our ancestors would be thinking if they were alive today People have often speculated about this Would they approve of modern society, they ask, would they marvel at present-day achievements? And of course this misses a funda, if they were alive today, is: 'Why is it so dark in here?'

In the cool of the river valley dawn the high priest Dios opened his eyes He didn't sleep these days He couldn't remember when he last slept Sleep was too close to the other thing and, anyway, he didn't seeh - at least, just lying down here The fatigue poisons dwindled away, like everything else For a while

Long enough, anyway

He swung his legs off the slab in the little chaht hand grasped the snake-entwined staff of office He paused to make another mark on the wall, pulled his robe around hie and out into the sunlight, the words of the Invocation of the New Sun already lining up in his otten, the day was ahead There was iven, and Dios existed only to serve

Dios didn't have the oddest bedroom in the world It was just the oddest bedroom anyone has ever walked out of

And the sun toiled across the sky