Titans of Chaos

If we fell into enemy hands again, they would take that memory from me, the firelight, Victor, hisgolden hair on my bare leg, his green eyes filled, for once, with warmth and humor. A man ofduty, and a man of honor: a man without fear.

One night not long after that, while I was asleep, I saw Colin walking toward me in the moonlight.

He was dressed in black, and he wore a coronet, and his face was the face of a many-antleredstag and not that of a man. In that odd way that dreams have, it did not seem abnormal.

He drew a colored light out from his pouch. "My father gave me presents. Look what I found foryou, Amelia. It was yours once, and I found it. A lost dream."

I never quite saw the thing in his hand. Perhaps it was like a wafer, and I ate it; or perhaps it waslike a syrup, and I drank it; but most likely it was like a goblet of perfumed vapor, and I dippedmy head to the rim of the cup and breathed the dream into me.

I saw Myriagon.

It was my home. I saw the thousand-sided towers reaching through the myriad dimensions, goldenwith the layers of time-energy, windows shining with reflected thought-progressions likemany-faceted crystals. I saw the highways made of nine directions of contemplation and fourmodes of existence, reaching down-up past folds in space to the Uttermost Singularity, thatmysterious source of all-ness, brighter than a sun, whose infinitely recurving rays shone from thegravity-spires and polished mind-forms and hypersphere domes of Myriagon, glittering onmemory-images, or glancing trails of fire across the ten thousand layered sides ofmany-dimensional oceans held in tiny grails and falling teardrops.

The symphony fountains bubbled with fractal spaces and fractional dimensions, and strollingfigures would pause, gemlike subuniverses in their hands, and draw the living waters into theirvest-pocket dimensions, where each person kept spare bodies folded, useful laws of nature likecolored webs of string. I saw grandees leaning on staffs made out of micro-time, to allow them towalk sideways across probabilities, and poets fingering instruments made of macro-time, to allowthem to play the years, and send months and seasons like flowers over the heads of smilingdemoiselles.

Between the towers were gardens made of folded origami shapes of virtue, crystallized forms ofthe morality energy, resplendent, wondrous, but much more glorious than the simple strands andwebs of reciprocity I saw here.