Confused mutterings were spreading outward among the various souls still straggling in. “Egdod was but a fancy of mine,” Dodge explained to them, making his voice louder so that it could be heard by all. “It was a fiction created for amusement. An appearance built upon something of a different nature altogether.” He knew that to describe Egdod as a character in a video game would mean nothing to these who had not seen into their memories as profoundly as Dodge had done when the light of El had pierced him. “In the place whence we all came, such amusements were commonplace, and at times very nearly took on the attributes of reality. Those who partook in them were called gamers, and saw those figments and appearances as if they truly existed. They created imaginary selves, with faces and forms and powers, which journeyed and fought and adventured. But when one of those figments was struck down by the sword of a foe, behold, the gamer was not in any way injured, save in his self-pride. All that was true of gamers and their imagined selves is true of you as well. It is not that I passed through the fire unscathed. All of you were at the Feast. All of you saw my wing crushed by a stone and my body gripped helplessly in the fist of El. Now my wings are whole and I fly freely because I have shed the false form that was Egdod, and with it both the pleasures and the pains to which it was, by its very nature, susceptible.”

“Might we acquire the power of doing likewise, O Dodge?” asked a melted and misshapen creature whom Dodge recognized, by the tone of her voice, as Warm Wings.

“Nothing prevents it save your own attachment to the appearances and figments of which that place is made,” said Dodge, extending his hand upward to draw their gaze toward the Land.

“That is hard news for me,” said Warm Wings.

“You above all others, Love,” Dodge agreed, “who so reveled in the pleasures of the body. I do not say that we can never enjoy such things again. Only that we must accept pain with pleasure, and that never again will we perceive any of it in the simple and childlike way of before.”

He then paused. This word “childlike” had come to him naturally as a thing he knew of from his living memories. But it had never been uttered before by him or any other soul of the Land, for there had been no children. And this struck him now with force because he knew that Spring was gestating new souls, which she should soon bring into the world. And he knew that when they sprang forth, they would do so as children, with a simple understanding of matters, and with no memories of past lives to shape—or to misshape—their thinking.