Ixidor paused again. Animals eating animals… people eating people… creators abdicating all… Behind this creative fury lay a different fury, the mania of loss. Every body he formed was an apology in flesh to the one body he would never touch again. Every mind he made was a vain search for the one mind that was irretrievable. He could hardly breathe. He had to focus, to think about something other than her, anything other than her.

The mud hung heavily in his hands. Cradling what would become the creature's head, Ixidor ran his thumb in to form an eye socket. Beside it, he formed a second. With his pinky, he created nostrils and began to carve out a mouth. The head lulled free of the shoulders. Ixidor scowled. He pinched clay together, trying to get the thin neck to reform. The head was too heavy. Grabbing a stick, Ixidor rammed it into the narrow body and up through the neck. The stick cracked the torso of the beast, though, and it crumbled into two clods. Ixidor tried to shove them together, but the mud would not bond. Angry, he hurled away the half-formed creature. It spattered against the river bank.

He stood there in the midst of the stream, clumps of clay falling from his hands. Fish snapped stupidly at the little clots.

Bugs swarmed him, their mad buzz in his ears. The trees thrashed with warring birds, and the undergrowth with tiny predations.

"Not enough room," Ixidor said to himself. "Not enough room."

Maybe he should make smaller creatures. Maybe he should make creatures that didn't eat, that didn't reproduce. Aside from those things, though, why live? What was the point of life except to eat and reproduce?

Ixidor stood, abstracted. There had to be more to life than that. If there wasn't, Ixidor would make more-he would create not just life but also meaning.

Before he could create either, though, he had to create room.

Ixidor slogged out of the stream and strode toward a desert agave. It was a light green plant with broad, sawtoothed leaves that jutted up all around it. Ixidor studied the configuration. He chose the widest frond at the base of the agave. Setting one foot beneath the foliage and the other on the flat of the blade, he bent it down and cracked it. He yanked back and forth until the fat leaf came off in his hand.

He was bleeding again. It was fine. He kept the blood off the leaf and walked along the bank. His feet knew the way. Ahead stood a burl of rocks, gushing water-the headwaters of the stream-and beyond those rocks, desert sand stretched like an empty canvas. Ixidor settle down on a shaded spot near the burbling spring. He laid the agave leaf beside him and stared out into the blinding desert.

Light flooded his eyes, blinding him. Overwhelming light and overwhelming darkness were the same-the unknown emptiness, begging to be made into something. In that blankness, figures moved. They were made of the same ethereal stuff that made up his spirit guide, his muse.

Ixidor reached for the agave leaf. In mud and blood, he drew a long, waving line up it. He widened the line and gave it depth, so it seemed to be a river with broad banks running through the trackless sand. He glanced up from the leaf to the desert and saw his vision imprinting on the world. At first, the curving line was only a retinal afterimage. He blinked, and it became real.

The stream reached its slender, intrepid way out across the desert. The rocky gnarl had become a bubbling prominence in the midst of rolling water. What had once been but a brief stretch of water had become a long stream.

"A river. I want a river."

His bloody finger widened the line, and a sudden roar told of the widened waterway. Without looking away from the agave, Ixidor created a distant lake-large and deep. Quick strokes raised a forest along the banks of the water.

At last, Ixidor looked up and saw the wide river, the thick stands of tree, and the deep and distant lake. He had created them out of his own mind, his own blood.

Ixidor trembled. This was new power, unbelievable power. Image magic could do more than raise mud pigeons to life. It could create whole landscapes.

He had created the oasis. The realization struck Ixidor with the pithy weight of fact. The oasis had come into being out of his own desperate desire for it to be. He had seen it in his mind and had made it.

A pit opened in the sand before Ixidor. A second and third formed in a curving line. They were deep pits, black, with no visible sides or bottom. Three more took shape. It was as if some great beast burrowed quickly below, causing cave-ins. Ixidor staggered back. He goggled at the agave leaf, only then seeing the blood spots that had dripped from his finger onto it. Those droplets had formed the pits.

Power indeed. His very blood could carve bottomless holes in the world.

With his uninjured hand, Ixidor wiped the spots away. Sands smoothed over the pits as if they had never been.

He had never created on such scale. He had to think of water flow, habitat, heat, and light. "The land needs shade."

Ixidor mixed mud and blood on his hand and sketched a tall mountain just beyond the lake. He made the peaks impossibly tall and curved so that they seemed like claws. One summit even reached up to pierce the sun. The jagged range of peaks cast deep shadows across the lake and much of the sandy desert.

It was time to transform that sand. Ixidor rubbed his hands together, forming a wet paste. Opening his palm, he smeared it across the agave frond, turning bright sand to brown topsoil. The light before Ixidor dimmed, and he looked up to behold his labors.

Where once the dunes had beamed, now rich, brown earth extended. Ixidor reached out beside him, plucking up fern fronds and grass. He scattered them across the paste. Jabbing and prodding, he righted each of the segments to make them seem trees in a forest. The effect was less than perfect. Ixidor focused his will upon them, imagining how he wanted them to look.

The trees came, not rumbling up from the earth or striding out across it but simply appearing where they would reside. Trees became glades, and glades became forests, and forests joined the already-verdant oasis. It was a rough-and-tumble wood, the best that could be expected from finger-painting in mud and blood on agave. He needed true brushes and paints and a real canvas if he were to make this place look the way he wished it to.

He would make one final thing out of his own blood. Lifting a sanguine fingertip, he sketched a small, leaning rectangle. Its two sides extended down into a pair of legs that rested in the grassy ground. Ixidor drew two more legs behind the first, reaching from the top of the rectangle. A slender dribble of blood formed a chain that would keep the front and back legs in a peaked frame.

Beneath the rectangle, Ixidor formed a small shelf. He set upon it round jars with wide mouths and lids. In a cylindrical tube at one end of the shelf, Ixidor created narrow stalks, tipped in horsehair. A shapeless board hung there too, with a hole just the right size for a thumb.

Ixidor stared at his painting one moment longer, closed his eyes, and said, "Pow!"

Opening his eyes, Ixidor looked out at his proudest creation-an easel with paints and brushes, water and oils, and the almighty palette. Tenderly, he set down the agave leaf, for fear its destruction would mean the dissolution of the land he had made. Ixidor smiled. That easel would give him astonishing new power. He took a step toward it.

A clod of mud fell from his forehead to smack upon the ground. No, he was not yet worthy.

Ixidor turned and descended into the fast-running river. It carried perhaps ten times the water that it had before. The currents dragged at the filth that covered him. Dirt turned to mud and washed away, the red stains across his flesh lifted, salt dissolved, and sand sloughed. Ixidor dipped his head beneath the water and let it cleanse every pore. He stripped off the rag that did so little to protect him and was created new in cleanliness.