He knew that making it so would consume at least as many years as he had already devoted to the making of the street, the park, and the forest. Earlier, he might gladly have perched atop a large rock and spent years on the patient improvement of the waves’ shape and surge, but now the awareness that souls were arriving made him loath to spend more time than he needed to here. He beat his wings against the spray and lifted himself up above the great rock and took a last look down into the spray, a mere fog, not yet shining or reflecting as it ought to. Then he soared up the coast.

He could see this idea of the mirrored ball almost as if it were hanging in space before him—as if he were supporting such an object on the tips of his fingers and gazing into it.

Supposing that he could now summon up a mirrored ball—or a mirrored anything—and gaze into it, what would he see? What did he look like? The question had never occurred to him when he had lived alone. A tree could not look back at him. The souls who had recently begun flocking to his abode probably lacked the power to see anything clearly. In time, though, they might acquire such powers, just as Egdod had, and then they would gaze on him, just as they gazed on trees and rocks, and they would see something. What would it look like, what impression would it make upon them?

He could not very well know the answer until he knew what he looked like to himself, and so he formed a resolve to fashion a mirror one day, and gaze into it. But it was of little importance now and so he put it out of his mind. He flew above the world that he was creating.

Another fully formed thought came into his head: this was what he did. It was fitting and proper that he make the world out of chaos and better what he had made and make room in it for newly arriving souls, for he—not the dead Egdod flying above the forest, but the living Egdod who had once held leaves in his hand and looked at mirrored balls—had done it before. He was good at it. And the other souls that he had noticed in his domain were, perhaps, not invading it so much as seeking his protection.