““Now that I know how many people there are in the world, I can see how it might have been lonely growing up under the Lake. We lived in the ruins of what must have been a vast civilization, long since sunk beneath the waves. We went to the surface rarely, and always under my mother’s guidance; even then, the nearest villages were many miles away, and in my entire childhood I saw them only a handful of times. But back then, I never thought of it. My whole world was the drowned city, with its crumbling chambers and flooded corridors””
