He keeps repeating that, like he's trying to convince himself it's true, Kayan said. I'll bet he hasn't had a visitor in here since the cataclysm.

Probably not. Jedra tugged on the vines binding his hands. They tightened around his wrists with more strength than he could summon to pull them free. If he and Kayan were going to get free, they wouldn't be able to do it with brute force.

Yoncalla staggered back as if Jedra had struck him, his right leg snapping off a tree in the process. He didn't even notice. "What? They still live?"

"Some of them," Jedra said. "About half of them were dead."

"Only half?" Yoncalla reached out to a treetop for support. "I thought-it has been thousands of years! Millennia, all alone. I was sure they had all perished."

"Not yet." Jedra would have crossed his arms if the vines had let him. "I've got one more live one in the very next room."

"Who is it?" Yoncalla's eyes glittered. He leaned forward eagerly.

"I don't know," Jedra said. "I haven't entered it yet."

Yoncalla laughed. "You had best take care when you do. Few immortals are as benevolent as I."

Kayan shook her tethered hands at him. "You call this benevolent?"

"I do." Suddenly Kayan's body sagged in her restraints.

Her hair turned white and her face wrinkled, and her eyes glazed over with a milky film.

"You see what I am capable of?" said Yoncalla.

Kayan! Jedra sent, struggling to free himself, but she replied, I'm fine. None of this is real. It's all appearances here. In fact, I'm beginning to get an idea...

Her body grew younger again, and she said to Yoncalla, "You could learn a few things about dealing with women." She gestured with her hands and the vines lowered her gently to the ground and released her.

Hey, how did you do that? Jedra tugged frantically on his own vines, but they didn't budge.

I just wished for it, Kayan said. That's apparently how this place works.

"You cannot escape me," Yoncalla said. As he spoke, the grass grew up around Kayan and snared her legs.

She looked down at it and the grass turned brown and brittle. She kicked free of it and stood there in front of Yoncalla's right foot, her head barely reaching his shin. "I'd love to play longer," she said, "but I'm sorry, I really have to be going." A hole opened up in the ground, and she jumped into it.

"No!" Yoncalla shouted. He stomped on the hole, but she was already gone. Jedra felt the mindlink grow more tenuous, stretching out as if over a long distance, but it didn't break. Kayan's voice, nearly drowned out in the sudden wind that shook the tree, said to him, Just wish to be free.

What do you think I've been doing? he demanded, but he realized what she meant. He'd tried psionics and he'd struggled against the vines, but he hadn't actually tried to manipulate the crystal world on its own terms. He imagined it now, trying to visualize a way out. Instead of Kayan's hole in the ground, he imagined the wind whirling around him, enclosing him and carrying him off through the crystal sky.

Sure enough, the vines snapped like string, and the wind bore him aloft. Yoncalla made a desperate lunge for him, but Jedra's whirlwind surged upward and the would-be god's oversized hand swept by yards below.

"Don't leave me!" Yoncalla shouted. "If you stay, I'll worship you!"

Then the whirlwind reached the sky. Jedra felt the same disorientation as before, and he found himself in Kitarak's library again. Kayan was struggling to sit up beside him.

We're still linked, she said.

He nodded. They were both so tired they hardly felt it, but he knew what would happen when they

separated. Promise you won't hate me, he said. I'll try.

He reached out and took her in his arms. It felt like hugging a skeleton. Her face was all harsh angles and sagging skin, but he kissed her anyway. The mindlink momentarily strengthened, then weakened again when they drew apart.

Here goes, Kayan said.

Her presence faded from Jedra's mind, and all the troubles of the world came crashing down to replace it. Of two worlds. He thought of Yoncalla, suddenly abandoned again after millennia of isolation, and he felt bad for doing that to him. If he hadn't been so weak, he might have tried to go back.

And then there was what he had done to Kayan. He couldn't look at her. She got up and staggered into the kitchen, but even though his stomach screamed for food, he stayed in the library.

How long had he been gone this time? The candle had only burned down an inch or so-not even an hour then. An hour, and all he had eaten had been used up. No wonder Kayan had fallen unconscious before he did; she hadn't eaten before they entered the crystal, and they had been gone for nearly a day.

He thought briefly of calling for Kitarak. He and Kayan obviously needed their mentor. But the tohr-kreen had been gone only a couple of days; he probably wouldn't return even if Jedra could contact him, which was unlikely. Kitarak probably wouldn't lower his shield for a week, just to make sure Jedra and Kayan truly solved their differences before they called him back.

Jedra went into the kitchen just long enough to take a drink and pick up another bag of nuts. Kayan's bulging eyes followed him as he went past her, but she said nothing. That was all right. He didn't know what to say to her, either.

Kayan slept in the library again, Jedra got up periodically to check on her, but her breathing remained steady and she didn't convulse the way he'd seen some starving people do. She'd evidently gotten food soon enough to prevent permanent damage. He left her to heal in her sleep.

When the morning sun finally began to filter through the skylights, Jedra wondered if they had been covered with sand. The light was deep red, almost like candlelight. But when he checked the skylights he saw that they were clean, and then he realized he was seeing normal sunlight. His eyes had adjusted to the brilliant sun inside the crystal, and now Athas's coppery red cinder seemed dull by comparison. He hoped he would grow used to it again, or he would be spending the rest of his life in dim twilight.

Hot, dim twilight. Even inside the stone house the temperature rose with the sun, but when Jedra went outside to relieve himself the intense heat felt like a physical force beating down on him. He had never realized just how oppressive it was until he'd sampled another world.

But that one was just the construction of a crazy person's mind. Such a thing probably couldn't exist... or could it? Legend told of a time when Athas's sun was brighter, and Kayan had said that the Sea of Silt was once an ocean. Who could say?

Jedra always went around to the back of the house to urinate, giving the tree that grew there a little more water, but today when he rounded the side of the rock pile he stopped short when he saw what had happened: The storm had toppled the tree. Its trunk had splintered about three feet off the ground, and the top had fallen with enough force to break two of its three big limbs. The remaining one rose into the sky like a tree itself, but its leaves had all been ripped loose, leaving only the skeletal branches.

Jedra walked up to it and snapped off a twig. Brittle. The fierce desert heat had already baked it dry. Jedra stood there and idly broke the twig into pieces while he contemplated the bare corpse of Kitarak's shade tree. This was how everything on Athas ended-everything that escaped being eaten, anyway-bare and dry under the hot sun. Like the sun-bleached piles of bones that he and Kayan had seen in the deep desert, marking the lairs of underground cacti. Only the cacti themselves escaped the relentless rays of the dark sun.

That wouldn't stop them from dying, though, Jedra realized. Sand cacti had an even more prolonged death awaiting them, for after they trapped and fed on a desert creature, they had no way to get rid of the pile of bones. Nothing else would venture near, and the cactus would eventually starve to death, probably after sending forth seeds-most of which would in turn be eaten by scavengers before they could germinate.