all the night was gone and there remained one great glorious and sourceless illumination.
I smiled. I felt my smile with blind fingers on my lips, and as the light grew brighter still and ever closer, as though it were an ocean of itself, I felt a great saving coolness over all my limbs.
"Don't fade, don't go away, don't leave me." My own whisper was a woeful small thing. I pressed my throbbing head into the pillow.
But it had spent its time, this grand and overriding light, and now must fade and let the common blink of candles move against my half-closed eyes, and I must see the burnished gloom around my bed, and simple things, such as a rosary laid across my right hand with ruby beads and golden cross, and there a prayer book open to my left, its pages gently folding in a small stir of breeze that moved as well the smooth taffeta in ripples overhead in its wood frame.
How lovely it all did seem, these plain and ordinary things that made up this silent and elastic moment. Where had they gone, my lovely swan-necked nurse and my weeping comrades? Had night worn them down to where they slept, so that I might cherish these quiet moments of unobserved wakefulness? My mind was gently crowded with a thousand lively recollections.
I opened my eyes. All were gone, save one who sat beside me on the bed, looking down at me with eyes both dreamy and remote and coldly blue, far paler than a summer sky and filled with a near faceted light as they fixed so idly and indifferently upon me.
My Master here, with hands folded in his lap, a seeming stranger viewing all as if it could not touch his chiseled grandeur. The smileless expression set upon his face seemed made there forever.
"Merciless!" I whispered.
"No, oh, no," he said. His lips did not move. "But tell me once again the whole tale. Describe this glassy city."
"Ah, yes, we've talked of it, have we not, of those priests who said I must come back, and those old paintings, so antique, which I thought so very beautiful. Not made by human hands, you see, but by the power invested in me, which passed through me, and I had only to take up the brush and there the Virgin and the Saints were mine to discover."
"Don't cast those old forms away," he said, and once again his lips showed no sign of the voice I heard so distinctly, a voice that pierced my very ears as any human voice might do, with his tone, his very timbre. "For forms change, and reason now is but tomorrow's superstition, and in that old restraint there lay a great sublime intent, an indefatigable purity. But tell me once again about the glassy city."
I sighed. "You've seen the molten glass, as I have," I said, "when taken from the furnace, a glowing blob of horrifying heat upon a spear of iron, a thing that melts and drips so that the artist's wand may pull and stretch it, or fill it full of breath to form the perfect rounded vessel. Well, it was as if that glass came up out of the moist Mother Earth herself, a molten torrent spewing to the clouds, and out of these great liquid jets were born the crowded towers of the glassy city-not imitating any form built by men, but perfect as the heated force of Earth had naturally ordained, in colors unimaginable. Who lived in such a place? How far away it seemed, yet utterly attainable. But one short walk over hills sweet with willowing green grass and leafy fluttering flowers of the same fantastical hues and tints, a quiet thunderous and impossible apparition."
I looked at him, because I had been looking off and back into my vision.
Tell me what these things mean," I asked. "Where is this place, and why was I allowed to see it?"
He gave a sad sigh and looked away himself and now back at me, his face as aloof and unbending as before, only now I saw the thick blood in it, that once again, as it had been the night before, was pumped full of human heat from human veins, which had no doubt been his late repast this same evening.
"Won't you even smile now as you say farewell?" I asked. "If this bitter coldness now is all you feel, and you would let me die of this rampant fever? I'm sick