Greyhame, Ward, and Longregard. All of them, as well as many smaller ones, crashed into the black firmament at greater or lesser distances, and Dodge knew that souls in the Land, gazing up into the night sky, would tonight see a new constellation of red stars.
The fire did not cause him pain. Yesterday it would have burned him and he would have recoiled from it. It would have unmade those parts of his form that it touched, reducing them to chaos and obliging him to make himself whole again and to shape once again the boundary that separated Dodge from not-Dodge. Today he understood that all of it—the world he had made, the form he had crafted for himself, and the cauldron of fire he had dug in the hard black firmament—were all figments.
In truth he had long suspected as much. Indeed it was self-evident from the manner in which he had been able to summon forth all of these appearances from his own mind. But those appearances had given him comfort and pleasure and the society of others, and so he had not looked too deeply or thought with very much penetration about the nature of things. From El now he had learned a lesson he dared not forget. To treat of appearances as if they were real was to make himself foolish and weak in the grip of one such as El who knew and was the master of the powers upon which those appearances were founded. In token of which he paid no heed to the pain of the fire, and refused to be burned by it, and was not burned. Nor did he make any effort to douse the flames, much less to replace them with green fields and blue lakes and other such pleasing visions. For he understood now that to be seduced by those self-made pleasures was to place himself into the power of El.
For years he might have lain there in the bowl of his crater, pondering all that he had seen in those moments when his mind had connected to El’s and the light had burned away the shadows in which the memories of his past life had for so long been secreted. But he knew that the other members of his Pantheon, and hundreds of lesser souls as well, were scattered all about him in the black shell of the firmament that he had brought into being to break their fall. They had not seen what Dodge had seen. Consequently they lacked the understanding that would give them the power to vanquish pain and to ignore the ravages of fire, cold, and chaos. For their sake Dodge therefore drew himself up and walked up out of the burning lake. His damaged wing dragged behind him, but as he went he formed it again as it ought to be, so that by the time he stepped up onto the black rim of the crater it was whole again. In the absence of air his wings had no power of bearing him up and so he caused there to be air. Where there was air there was now sound: the crackle of the flames, the thunder of boulders and the chatter of smaller stones cascading from high places to low, and the cries of nearby souls bewailing their pain and their desolation. Dodge spread his wings and flew into the air that he had spread over the Firmament, taking the measure of the place, beating its bounds and counting the larger and smaller craters where various souls had crashed into its surface. He thought it not much smaller than the Land, which hovered in the sky above, blue and green and white, and now of a size that he could hide it behind his outstretched hand. Likewise the souls in the Land, gazing into their night sky, must now see a constellation of the same size. So he guessed it would be for a long time to come. Not wishing to be seen in this estate, he drew across the Firmament a veil of smoke and chaos to confuse any light such as might escape from it. Then he took stock of all that lay beneath that pall: his new domain. The Firmament had been a smooth sweep of rock, like a potshard, until Dodge and the others had reshaped it into a field of craters. Now it had greater variety of form, though not so much as the Land.
Dodge’s first impulse was