When that day comes, the ocean will forget the shape of its waves, life will forget how to die, flame will not remember how to burn, wind will cease to blow, and clouds will fall from the sky onto the sea — that will be the final curtain of the world's sinking, watched coldly by the exiled one from beyond the world who looked upon this sanctuary with detached eyes and saw through the future of all things.
Across the whole world, the clouds were descending from the sky — or, strictly speaking, some “layer” that contained the element called “cloud” was uniformly lowering its altitude.
The falling clouds looked like another flowing sea, gradually closing overhead.
Some of the lower swaths reached down to the ground or the water, turning into a gauzy veil of mist; other structures hovered hundreds of meters or even mere tens of meters above people's heads.
The layers of the sky halted at that height, then continued an extremely slow, almost imperceptible process of descent.
Frem stood on the ice plain beneath the night and tilted his head up to watch the churning sea of clouds.
Now it was so near, veiled by a thin mist, as if he could reach out and touch that magnificent cloudscape.