“Perhaps I should have, when the opportunity was there, in the Palace. But in those early days I did not yet understand that this power was mine. And now that I do know it, I am too far away. I must be close, close enough to look the other soul in the eye, in order to use this power.”

“Is Spring subject to that power?”

“Yes. And all of the bees and the wasps and other lives that she gestates.”

“Once I would have called that death, and would have dreaded it, and feared you,” Dodge said. “But even when I walked among the living, I used to muse about this thread, and how it made us who we are, and how it was snipped whenever we slept and yet began to spin once more upon awakening. To sleep was not to die, only to suffer an interruption that might last for a moment or the better part of a day. To awaken was to go on as if no interruption had ever occurred. Likewise death, which snipped my thread once but which I now perceive as not different from sleeping. For what matters is not the continuity but the coherence of that thread and the story that is told by it. El may have sentinels and wards to bar Dodge. But having made himself up out of chaos once, Dodge can do it again. As I have slept only to wake up, and as I have died only to resume living, I now submit without dread to the fate you alone have the power to wield. I regret only that our reacquaintance was so brief.”

Water sprang forth from the face of Sophia. Dodge had never seen such a manifestation in the Land but remembered it now from the land of the living. He rose up and folded Sophia in his wings.

Sophia said, “We were separated once and I found you and made you remember me.”

“And love you,” Dodge added. He released her from the folds of his wings and drew back so that he could gaze upon her face and adore her.

“So it will be again, I promise,” she said. Swooping in, she kissed his cheek. Then she drew back and swept her wing like the blade of a scythe. It struck Dodge in the neck and severed his head cleanly. First the head of Dodge, then his body, toppled slowly into the pit. For a moment it appeared that they would fall all the way through into the Fastness; but before passing through the back door, they were infected by chaos that dissolved the remains and left no trace of their existence in Firmament or Land.

Part 7

Part 7

Chapter 42

Chapter 42

Sophia died, or was murdered.

El died, or committed suicide.

Both of them showed up in Bitworld.