Instead, the weight in the room crashed down on me like a waterfall.

The world around me was golden, the color of a warm summer day, but with no sun to light it. The earth itself gave off brightness, mountains glowing with cheer and good purpose. A river cut through the land, gold as the sky and ground, and reached to the horizons. They were farther away than I expected, a certain curvature to the earth, unlike the flatness of the burning world or the near mountains of the blue world. It wasn’t the Middle World, certainly not with the warm glow of the land and no sun in the sky, but this place was the closest yet to my own time and place that I’d seen.

Around me, in the distance and close by, I half heard and half knew that men and women and beasts and plants, all the creatures and things of the world, spoke the same language, communicating easily with one another. It reminded me of Babylon, though the land I’d entered was as different physically as it could be from that city of twisting spires and hanging gardens. That had been a metropolis, and this world was an agrarian desert. For an instant I grasped how they might still be the same thing, but my understanding was lost as red streaks appeared in the sky, pocked and marked like comets.

People fell ill and struggled to survive, their distress worsening with every heartbeat. Accusations rose up, turning a land of joy and peace into something far more like the world I knew. Blame fell down gender lines, anger and fear thrown all around me. The women said it was the men bringing illness, and the men said it was the women. They separated themselves from one another, making the streaks in the sky and the pain of loss even more difficult to bear. A protest formed in my throat and caught there uselessly; watching the world collapse around me was like watching a time-elapsed video of a train station. It moved too quickly and too violently for me to affect. I stood outside it, gasping for air as the world fell down.

And then something slipped through the midst of the world’s breakdown, moving at the same slow, normal rate of speed I did. My eyes, accustomed to the lurching hurry of the dying world, took a few seconds to pick out details that were as much physical as known within the depths of my mind. It wasn’t a human creeping through the world’s end, not on four legs, not furry and sly and furtive.

Coyote.

My heart leapt and lost hope in almost the same instant, leaving me with an ache bordering on whimpers. This coyote’s fur was acid-etched, each thread of it gold and copper and bronze, strong with power. Not a spirit, not a guide, but an archetype, the trickster who helped make and unmake the world. I wondered if every trickster was Coyote, and Coyote every trickster, one eternal concept that took form however the people thought to see it. That left me with the bemusing idea that Coyote and Brer Rabbit were exactly the same thing underneath, and for an instant I saw through to the truth of that. Saw, not just saw, the very concept that lay beneath Coyote’s recognizable form.

A fractal pattern exploded in my vision. Chaos bled in bright beautiful spikes, sometimes doing damage where it struck, other times ricocheting into mutation, creating new life. It wasn’t caring or uncaring or anything but there, senseless in the way that most of the universe often seemed to be.

Curiosity hung over it like a cloud, not an inherent part of its random magic, but so heavily imposed by limited human understanding that it seemed to wear that impulse like a cloak. I kept my eyes wide, afraid to blink for fear I’d lose sight of that thread, and while I watched the cloak shifted. Rabbits and spiders, gods I could name, like Loki, and an astonishing series of creatures and beings I couldn’t, interspersed with a handful of icons so familiar they made me laugh despite the oddness—Charlie Chaplin and Daffy Duck—shimmered through that cloak, and then it settled down again into a coyote shape, leaving my eyes burning.

I had thought Cernunnos with his Wild Hunt had been a thing of chaos. I stared, still unblinking, at Coyote darting through the people of the yellow world, and understood with great surprise that Cernunnos had been an agent of order, if there was such a thing. He belonged to rules and a pattern of life and death, only able to lead the Hunt in certain times, in adherence to specific ritual. He had made his play to be a creature of chaos, trying to break free of the place written for him in the laws of creation, and I’d put him back in his box.

I wondered where the hell that put me, in that pattern of life and death, order and chaos. Did I straddle some kind of neutral line? That seemed pretty much unspeakably arrogant. I made a face at myself and pushed the thought away. With any luck there would be plenty of time later for navel-gazing and deciding my place in the universe. For the moment I scurried after Big Coyote, just as grateful, all things told, that my sight had settled out and I didn’t have to look at his discordant soul.

Behind me, the men went to live on one side of the river and the women on the other, never to be together again. The crimson slashes faded from the sky, and Coyote explored the world in front of me, nosing high and low. He dipped his nose in the river and pulled something out, and even I knew enough about Coyote and chaos to think uh-oh.

Storms rose up all around, dark colors coming from each direction. Rain fell and water began to rise. I turned back to the village separated by the river, finding men and women together again and climbing frantically up an endlessly tall hollow reed that stretched to the sky. I waited for all the men and all the women, all the animals and insects and the winds and the people of every sort to climb as high as they could, and then climbed up myself, looking for a new world to live in.

But the water kept rising, and the reed didn’t reach high enough. Spider-people wove webs for us to climb, and the insects made their way to the hard shell of sky and began to gnaw and chew and break their way through, until finally there was a hole big enough to scramble through. All the creatures of the world made their way through and gathered around the hole, watching to see what happened.

And the water kept rising, threatening to flood this world, too, just as it had done with the old one. Every world had an end, and I realized I was once more throwing power out, this time like I was the little Dutch boy. The hole in the world wouldn’t plug up, and from the corner of my eye I saw Coyote slinking away, his head hung low from the weight of carrying something. I shouted “Coyote!” and he stopped, shoulders hunching high.

I strode to him, men and women and beasts and bugs making way for me, and stood above him. “What are you carrying, Coyote?”

He wouldn’t meet my eye. Instead he lowered his head farther, gently putting a bundle on the ground. A black-haired baby looked up at me, his dark hair streaming very long.

For one wretched moment visions collided with memory and dreams, and the child lying wide-eyed and serious, bundled there on the ground, was my own. For that moment all the sorrow of a child lost was my own, and the breath I took caught in my chest until it brought tears to my eyes.

I had never planned to keep them, not at fifteen. Not having been myself dumped on a father who didn’t want me by a mother I’d grown up assuming didn’t like me. I had wanted them to grow up in a home where they were wanted and loved and could be raised by adults able to care for children. I wasn’t ready. The only way I could see to love them was to let others be their parents. I’d known from the start they wouldn’t stay with me.

But the girl, Ayita, first to dance in Cherokee, had left long before I thought she would. She was born second, the only moments of her brief life that she spent apart from her brother Aidan those few while he blinked at the outside world and waited for her arrival. They nestled together in life just as they’d done in the womb, tiny bodies huddled in an incubator as I watched Ayita fade away. Aidan’s eyes seemed clearer after she died, as if the two had only had enough life force for one, and she, smaller and weaker, had given Aidan the strength he needed to survive their early birth. It was his gaze I saw reflected in the serious little person before me, though I’d only seen him for a matter of hours before he went to live with his family.