We began by talking about Trump cards. She gave me the standard lecture on their uses. It was nothing Fiona hadn't already told us, but I listened and watched her eyes. I asked about contacting people in their sleep. She said that one shouldn't do it. The contact would not work and it was impolite. She tried to convey a sense of ethics that was a bit foreign to me. It had to do with reading a mind without the subject's knowledge. I had no objection on moral grounds to doing that, which was difficult for Flora to understand. She saw ethics as just short of law. My ethics seemed loose in her opinion, but really they were just different.
I shifted the subject to shadow. I related to her my experience in Essex where I had counted on the ratio of local time to Amber time to stay constant, but it had not. We discussed Chaos. Was there a way to judge how close to Amber or Chaos a shadow was? What will happen if Ygg falls? How did the Logrus effect shadows on the Chaos side of Ygg? She found the topics interesting, and discussed them eloquently, but admitted that many were outside her fields of expertise. She was more directed towards diplomacy and the smooth running of Amber. I learned that she had been an ambassador to Choas and lead a unit of archers during patternfall.
She was the youngest of the children of Oberon from what I could tell, but it was impossible to tell her age. She didn't seem like a warrior or practisioner of the magical arts, but she'd surely grown powerful during her centuries in amber. She said she was the guardian of shadow Earth, which sounded like a shadow very close to the one Locke, Jessica, and Connie come from. I'd love to see her at work there. Her tactics seamed very different from those of Bleys, Fiona, Benedict, and the others.
Soon Llewella relieved Flora of her watch. I gave Flora a hug goodnight, but before going to bed for the night I appologized to Llewella for my seemingly incoherent Trump contact earlier and posed the question of the fluctuating time ratios in my home shadow. She said that was a good indication that my shadow lies close to Chaos. She also said I could find out which side a shadow was on by travelling directly to Chaos and noting whether you passed the Ygg barrier. I thanked her, and made a mental note to try that test in reverse travelling directly from my shadow to Amber.
Finally I called it a night. I slept well. I can remember only a small shread of one of my dreams from that night. It was not as lucid as the masks dream. By morning I had all but forgotten it.