“The Knot!” exclaimed Thingor, who likewise had spent much time there. He nodded his head. “I could almost believe that I was looking down from a window of the Fastness.”

Dodge nodded. “Chaos is no form or place, but all chaos is like other chaos. This then will be the manner of my return to the Land. Behold!”

Directing his attention into the pit and the static that swirled and stormed below it, Dodge deepened and broadened the hole. It seemed to lead nowhere besides an infinity of nothingness. Thus it remained for hours and days as Dodge brooded upon it and marshaled every scrap of the power that he had built up during his long years in the Land. From time to time some figment would become visible below, and those of the Pantheon who had the patience to watch would exclaim, and gaze into one another’s eyes as if to ask, Did you see what I saw? But by the time they looked back it had flickered away. The change that Dodge wrought was so slow that it could not be perceived by those who sat and watched. Others who went away for a time and then returned would insist that they saw changes: light was shining from out of the pit now, and it was not the red light of fire but the white light of the Land. In that light shapes were beginning to manifest themselves, fleeting and fluid at first but later taking on permanence. At first these were difficult to make sense of.

But then one day Pluto came to visit the place of Dodge’s labors. He had been absent for a long time, building up the dark tower that the Pantheon were making into their new abode. When he arrived at the edge of the pit and gazed down into it, he knew directly what he saw. For Pluto had seen it before. “When I first emerged from the chaos-filled hole beneath the Knot, it was exactly thus,” he said. “As we stand here, we seem to gaze downward. But the view is the same as one sees while looking upward from the depths underlying the Knot. What we are gazing upon here is the Fastness, though it seems to be upside down. Closest to us lie its massive foundations, shaped from the rock by the hand of him who in those days was called Egdod, and stretching away from us are its walls. Farther away yet are its high towers, and deep below, as we see things, are the convoluted forms of the Knot.”