Prayer flags whipped and snapped in the fresh breeze. Timyin Tim gathered his robe around him with one hand as he went along the perimeter of the monastery grounds, turning the prayer wheels with his free hand. From the temple, the sound of chanting rose and fell, carried in stoccato snatches on the inconstant wind.

Timyin stopped and looked at the flags. One of them was his. He could never remember which. The flags hung limp for a second, then leapt up again as the breeze was renewed.

Outside the walls of the monastery was the trail that some said led to Shangri-La. Timyin Tim didn't believe in Shangri-La. "Paradise -- what is this but a word for the stillness we could find within ourselves, if we only knew how to look?" the master had said.

Timyin believed everything the master said, until the master died and his family buried his body by the banks of the river. Then Timyin was cut free from his entire motherless past, floating and snapping on the breeze like the prayer flags on the monastery walls. He wandered the highlands for weeks, until his soft shoes wore through and fell off.

When he came to the monastery, he was in rags, hair long and bedraggled, dripping with rain, shivering in the wind. The Lama took him in and gave him a cell, a hot meal, a robe, and a purpose. His purpose was to weed the garden, and turn the wheels. Throughout the pale light of day he pulled weeds from the garden which fed all the monks of the Lost Way Monastery. Timyin hated pulling the weeds. He knew the monks (including himself) needed food, and if the weeds were allowed to grow unchecked, they would choke out the food crops, and the monks would go hungry. But somehow he felt the weeds had a purpose, too. If he could just figure out what it was.

And at sunrise, and sunset, and noon, and two other times in-between, he rose from the garden, and walked the perimeter of the compound, turning the prayer wheels. Some monasteries were located on a river, where the waters were harnessed to turn the prayer wheels. The Lost Way Monastery was not, but it had Timyin Tim.

The chanting had stopped some time ago; Timyin just now noticed it was missing. He turned the last wheel, as the pale night sky was turning to a deep black-blue. Some of the monks complained that Timyin turned the wheels too slowly, but he liked to feel the prayers inside against the palm of his hand. He believed that the power of the prayers might flow through to him through the sides of the wheels. The Lama did not criticize anything he did, and that was good enough for Timyin Tim.

He stood and watched a single star blink in the blackening east. It seemed to beckon him, somehow. An unease -- such as he had never known since he had come to Lost Way, suddenly leapt into his heart.

Fighting it, he yawned, stretched, and shuffled off to his cell to sleep for the night.