The winding dance against the bright canvas of the Core stuns them all to silence.

After some time, with a well-practiced shuffle to gather their attention, Memory begins to speak. Vaddum smiles: the pleasures of her voice, its cadences and tricks and pauses, its impersonations…

Finally, the Maker has found an art form she is good at.

As Beatrix promised, Memory tells the story of heaven, and with a book of days connects the unraveled strands of Vaddum's memory. Here, every night, he is completed. Though as she speaks, Vaddum wonders if the tale changes slightly every night, a word or two misplaced, so that after an eternity of transpositions and replacements, another story altogether might arise. Like the turnover of cells in a human's body, or the petrification of a tree. A fable rather than the truth; though even Darling and Beatrix might believe Memory's fabrication by the time that glacial switch had been effected.

But that would take a long time, longer than ten years. Her tale is hours in the telling under the blazing sky. She starts farther back than the theft of Vaddum's memory, deep in the origins of Heaven's founding:

"It started on that frozen world, among the stone figures in their almost suspended animation.

"Through her eyes, the irises two salmon moons under a luminous white brow, like fissures in the world of rules, of logic. The starship's mind watched through the lens of their wonder, and began to make its change…"