of the former and that Sophia was one of the latter and that he had known her when she was small.
Many other fleeting impressions were recalled to his mind in those moments that he stared El in the face, and he knew that all of them had resided in the shadows of his mind from the very beginning and that he had been slowly recovering them in a haphazard and diminished form the entire time he had been in the Land and that all of the things he had made here had originally come from them.
But too he saw memories and perceptions that came to him from the mind of El. These were of a different flavor, and he could sense that they came from a mind that was in some sense disordered. He perceived buildings, faces, vehicles that the eyes of Dodge had never looked upon.
A moment of connection occurred then between the minds of El and of Dodge as El knew that Dodge was seeing what ought to belong only to El. From this El recoiled in a kind of horror or disgust, and hurled Dodge as one might throw away a burning coal.
Dodge saw the Palace falling away from him. Or perhaps he was falling away from it: falling into the sky, as up and down had been stripped of meaning. Before the Palace receded into the distance he saw it: the roof torn open, terrified souls spilling out of its gates into the Garden or simply taking flight into the cold air surrounding the top of the mountain, hieing away to whatever refuges they thought most remote from El. Some were being harried by El’s minions with their white wings and their flaming swords, but there was not a sufficient number of those to follow those who fled. Other Feast guests did not get away, and Dodge’s first thought was that they were being held at bay; but then a more troubling notion came to him, which was that they had chosen to remain of their own volition, and to make common cause with the newcomer. More urgently, though, he thought of Spring, and directed his gaze toward the wet green vale in the Forest where she had ever dwelled. Visible there was a ring of stars arrayed about it, which he knew to be angels of El, standing in a circle, brandishing their thunderbolt swords at any who might approach—or try to leave. Spring, he knew, was in the middle, both protected and imprisoned.
These things grew more difficult to resolve as he hurtled backward through cold space, burning as he fell and leaving a fiery wake behind. About him at greater or lesser distances were shooting stars that he knew to be other members of the Pantheon, as well as lesser souls likewise hurled away to banishment. The Land dropped away. He saw the Street lined with red trees, spiraling down the Pinnacle to the ruins of the abandoned Town. Spattered across the landscape were the new habitations that had been built up by the various kinds of souls who had gone out into the Land after Dodge had brought down the Tower. Their faces must now all have been lifted up toward the bright prodigy that was El upon the mountain. Perhaps some as well looked higher and saw the streaks of fire being drawn across the firmament by Dodge and the others. Dodge could now see the entirety of the Land: the white shores where the waves of the sea crashed against it and the snow-covered mountain in the middle, blurred by eternal clouds and flashing storms above the place of the Knot.
About him the sky had given way to chaos. Dodge drew strength from it and knew that he had fallen to a depth where he was so solitary that the sweep of his powers had returned. He did not wish to fall so far that he would no longer be able to gaze on the Land, and so with a sweep of his wing he made the arc of chaos below him into a black shell of adamant. This he fell into with a crash that pocked its newly made surface with a fiery crater.
Dodge became conscious.
In the center of the lake of fire he lay for a time, gazing up at the Land as a distant moon in his sky, and counting the impacts of the others as he felt them: Daisy, Thingor, Knotweave, Pluto, Warm Wings, Paneuphonium, Speaksall, Freewander,