Winter came then. Egdod felt the cold in a way he had not before and began spending more time inside the Palace. Flying over the Town, quiet under the snows, he saw very few souls about and knew that they were feeling the cold as well. This, he came to understand, was all because they had eaten. To consume food brought pleasure but also made the body liable to less agreeable sensations. Egdod, who could alter the world in any way that suited him, could surround himself with a cloak of warm air if he so chose, and protect himself from it in a way that other souls could not. He had Town all to himself as its souls huddled together in their houses. Knotweave had shown them the art of making blankets that they could draw about themselves for greater warmth.

Walking past one small house Egdod heard two souls inside of it making loud vocalizations that were not quite words. He gazed into the window and saw two souls wrapped up in each other’s auras.

“They are giving pleasure to each other,” said a voice.

Egdod looked up and saw a soul sitting on the roof of the little house. She had soft wings, luxuriant with many thick feathers as white as snow. She had folded these and wrapped them about herself for warmth.

“That is an understatement,” Egdod returned. “Or so it would seem, if I am any judge of such matters.”

“There is an art to it that, once mastered by both, causes the pleasure to wax beyond all bounds.” Having delivered this information, the other soul was content to sit in her warm tent of wings and gaze down on him in silence for a time.

“There are many ways,” Egdod said, “in which one soul may afford pleasure to another. By making things that are of great beauty. By utterance of pleasing words, or making of music. Or simply—” He looked at the soul on the roof, and went on looking at her for some time. “By embodying beauty that is pleasurable to gaze upon, as do you. What these two are doing is indeed of another order.”

He understood that the two had felt, and surrendered themselves to, cravings of the same sort that he had lately been feeling in respect of Spring.

“Why do souls so long to recover sensations that belong to a different world?” he mused. “It began with the eating of food. And now this.”

“Do you remember it?” asked the soul, whom Egdod had named Warm Wings.

“Now that I have seen it,” Egdod said, “I am most certain that I did likewise, before I came to this place.”

“We all did,” said Warm Wings. “It is in the nature of souls to want it, as bees go to flowers.”

“Why are you on their roof?” Egdod asked. “Is it you who brought them together?”

Warm Wings smiled. “They required no assistance in that.”