I look back through that tangled forest of memories, through the tree trunks and the lanterns, the paths and the pools, through all the many things that happened afterwards, and that time still shines brightly brightly in the dimness, far brighter than any other. In fact it shines so brightly that it can be hard to see, like the veekle from Earth was hard to see when it first came to ground. You’d think a time like that would be easy to remember, wouldn’t you, since nothing like it had happened to me before or since? And yet it isn’t. It was all so so strange that there are whole big chunks of it that I can’t properly remember at all, and other parts I remember but don’t know when they happened or how they fitted in with everything else. It’s the same for everyone who was there. When we talk about it, we can never quite agree what happened, or in what order. And so many stories are told about it that it’s hard for us to be sure if we’re remembering what we saw, or just remembering a story.

I’m as certain as I can be, though, that after a short time, the lights from the veekle stopped shining all at once. For a moment afterwards – I remember this so clearly that I’m sure this is real – everything round us seemed completely dark. Then my eyes got used to the Eden light again, and I could see the treelanterns and the starflowers. I remember how dim they seemed, in a way they’d never seemed to be before. We’d always thought of them as bright, as shining, but compared to the lights on the veekle, all they gave out was a dim dim glow.

Mainly, though, we watched the dark shapes of the heads behind the glass, me and Trueheart together, still holding each other tightly by the hand.