Feet first, King plunged toward the distant floor.

The living coronas were still crawling indoors. He watched their necks wrap around machinery and each other, yanking with the last of their life. Then the other corona began to move—the gigantic black corona already in a place far beyond life

One of those dead heads rose up on the end of a dead neck

Impossibly blue eyes were gazing up at her brother.

They were falling and maybe the fall would never stop. There was no way to deny that possibility. And for a moment that stark, simple future not only felt possible, but inevitable and perhaps for the best.

The air had turned thin and cold to a corona’s sensibilities.

The demon floor had vanished. The Eight were plunging towards what should be the sun, where the sun belonged inside the proper Creation, except up was down and nothing was below but chill perfect blackness that was working hard to drown a few weak smears of scattered, desperate light.

When the sun vanished, most of the coronas had fled upwards, either by panic or plan.

The Eight might wish for their own bladders and wings.

But there was no time for wishes.

The lost old world was above them—the hard-purple of corona voices mixed with fire colors and heat colors too. The human forest was full of violence and great voices and brilliant voices, every kind of light smeared together, rendered as a faint whisper that almost, almost had passed out of existence.

Wishing was a waste of time, but not memory. One of the small voices suddenly mentioned a certain day and one brief incident wrapped around an inchoate nut. None even the small voice understood why that mattered now, but it did matter. Eight souls were suddenly talking about a Procession of the Harvest, sharing perspectives about a ceremony said to be ancient and important, except nothing about the Procession had seemed critical. The papio were regimented creatures who appreciated order and orders and acts of devotion. This was just another ancient ceremony. Even on that poor, barely inhabited portion of the reef, the local papio were compelled to mark the passage of another one hundred and thirty days, carrying the symbolic harvest into the nearest village, and the Eight were allowed to watch.

That was before Diamond and King, when their body was still helpless, ruled by every soul and by no one.

One of the caretaker children was given the weighty task of describing what was happening below and would happen in the next few breaths. A line of papio was passing beneath the ravine where the corona’s child could watch from deep shadows. At first, the only lesson seemed to be that the papio weren’t what they claimed to be. The boasts about discipline, about being orderly and obedient, looked like lies. From the moment it appeared, the holy Procession was deeply, urgently sloppy. Children broke from the ranks to chase and play. Adults were little better, carrying their symbolic harvests in the wrong hands and with the wrong form. The old people chastised everyone for their failures, but they seemed to do that in glad, half-hearted ways that only made the chaos worse. At one point, a pair of small boys ran wild up the slope, past the markers that were intended to warn people away from the ravine. That incident made the caretaker nervous, but the boys—young enough to be blameless in everything they did—stopped short of the Eight and began to play a new game, standing on tall points of reef to see how far each of them could pee.

Into that mayhem came a young woman and the inchoate nut.

In the standards of papio, she was prettier than some but not most. There was a little too much beard and too much breast and scars that had been carved by accident, not by any artful hand. Yet she moved easily, carrying her nut in both hands, speaking to it and laughing while she spoke. The nut had a name. Her voice was quiet, too quiet, and thirteen hundred days later, each of the Eight remembered a different name. But they were certain that the nut was a stand-in for some young man, real or imaginary, and she danced with him as she moved up the slope, past the same warning markers, oblivious to two boys who were throwing their urine into a world grateful for every goodness.

Inchoate nuts took forever to ripen, and even in the best times and in the best ground, they were rare and exceedingly precious.

What the woman carried wasn’t yet ripe, which meant that it wasn’t edible. But as the caretaker explained with a quiet, know-everything-about-everything voice, it was her food to do with as she wished.

She was pretending that it was a lover’s face.

Like any smitten young woman, she kissed the face to prove her devotion. ”I will not bite you; you may trust your lips to mine,” was what kisses mean. The rude boys saw her approach, and they tried to make her wet and angry. But discovering that they were out of ammunition, they threw out a few good insults, just enough to make their fierceness known, and then they scampered off, leaving the woman and her lover alone at the mouth of that shadowy, mysterious and forbidden ravine.

The Eight shared eyes but not every impression. What they had heard and what they imagined were rarely the same, which made the story worth repeating now.

The small voice inside them said, “This is what I thought would happen.”

Then she confessed her guess, and the others told theirs in turn. Most of them had imagined something crude, and none proved right. In the end, the young woman kissed her dear nut once again, happy to the end, and then she set it on the ravine wall, exactly as high as her boyfriend’s head would rise, and smiling, she made happy tears before pulling a pistol from a pocket, aiming at the imaginary boy before turning the gun on her rubbery heart.

Hundreds of days had passed since the half-pretty woman killed herself. The reasons for suicide were learned long ago: a boy had wronged her, and she left the world where he lived. What seemed important then had become just another small experience in a life full of more drama and suffering that any one failed love could ever cause. But only now, only as they tumbled into oblivion, did the Eight finally understand why the Procession was done this way and no other.

The papio deeply, truly believed in traditions and strictures and the value of old voices telling the species what to do.

Creatures with those qualities didn’t need to practice what their instincts knew, what their blood and hearts understood from the moment of birth. The Procession of the Harvest was a wondrous chance to be less of a papio, not more. It was an unpracticed dance of bodies and inspirations, with beauty in this half-wild chain that was dragged past an entity that had thought itself brilliant.

The Eight had been foolish about the Procession and quite a lot more too.

That was never more obvious.

The Eight were falling, and the next little while was spent searching for some little moment, some past incident or lack of incident, where a different turn or words or maybe one unspoken phrase might have saved the world.

Because the world was dead.

Gazing upward, they saw the purple light of the coronas fading away, and the human fires were spreading through the dying forest, and a few columns of electric light were pointing down at them, searching for answers that did not exist.

No light lasts forever.

That was this day’s meaning.

And maybe, hopefully, each of them hoped that no misery can outlast the end of All.

There was one light burning inside the corona. Master Nissim held the torch high until that arm grew tired, and then he changed hands and swung the beam in a circle, counting faces once again.

He wanted everyone to stay together.

Elata didn’t want to be here.

She stood at the edge of the group, grieving the fact that she had made the walk with everyone else. She shouldn’t have done it. Why did she? She could have walked in any other direction, and who would have stopped her? Nobody. Maybe Seldom would have tried to coax her back, but that’s all. She knew the boy, knew that he’d call to her and ache when she ignored him, and grieve after she left him. But Seldom wouldn’t have chased after her. Everybody but Elata would have stepped inside the dead animal, and the boy would have been too cowardly and too sensible to do anything else. And now she should be outside, enduring whatever awful thing that King was doing and the coronas were doing, and the soldiers, and the miserable sunless world.