The Chasm gaped below the Knot as ever, and the workshops and watchtowers of the Fastness overlooked it. The other souls who came to visit the place looked on it as a defect. Pluto in particular was of the view that it was an error in need of fixing and had ideas as to how this rift in the Land’s fabric might be stitched up. But Egdod forbade it, and reminded him that he himself had first emerged from that same pit.

“What else might then crawl up out of it, I wonder?” was Pluto’s answer.

“Anything whatsoever,” Egdod said, “and that is the promise and the danger of it. For the chaos that you see down there is the source of all you see and all you are.” But in his private thoughts Egdod weighed the words of Pluto and of the others. During idle moments he would perch on the edge of the wall he had thrown up around the Fastness, gazing down into the chaos below and testing himself by seeing what new forms he could draw forth from it. Motes of color he saw in the static, such as he had painstakingly shaped into leaves in the very beginning, and these he sought to form into new shapes that might clothe the flying creatures he was building with Thingor. And in the roar of noise that came up from the pit he sometimes heard strains that had about them some character of melody or rhythm. Those he pursued in the windings of his mind, and lost them more often than not. But when they did not elude him he was able to draw them forth out of the noise and to discover music in them. He was not creating the music but rescuing it by stripping away the harsh and formless noise in which it had somehow become ensnared. Rich strains of music began to fill the Fastness. All who visited the place remarked on its beauty, and it gave new vigor to Thingor, who seemed to possess some art of transmuting sounds into new objects of beauty and ingenuity that had not before been seen in the Land.