“No,” said Effie. “But please take it. And have this vial of deepwater, too. And my bag. And I don’t think I need clothes anymore or even my body—”

“You’re right,” the woman said. “A true hero doesn’t need anything. You don’t need anything. You don’t even need yourself. Not this lower self, anyway, this silly old bag of bones. And of course, when it comes to the higher self, we’re all one. But most people find that terrifying, and spend their whole lives resisting it. And so they live again and again in the Realworld until they find out enough to go to the Otherworld, and then the learning begins again, in a different way.”

Effie felt herself beginning to float into the air in front of the woman’s cottage. She seemed to blink in and out of existence, like a twinkling star. It was a curious feeling. If she was just brave enough to let go of this . . . Of herself, whatever that was. If she could just . . .

The woman spoke again, and this time it was with a voice Effie recognized, although she had never heard it before.

“Will you give everything to me?” it asked.

Effie hesitated.

“Will you give yourself up to the mystery and depth of the unknown? I can’t tell you what’s in it or how it will feel. You may never know your lower self again, but without casting off your lower self, you can have no idea of who your higher self really is.”

Effie hesitated again. After all, who chooses to give up himself or herself? It would be like choosing to die. But it didn’t feel as if that was what Effie was being offered. It wasn’t death being put in front of her, but eternal life.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Yes. I’ll give myself . . .”

“I still think,” Lady Tchainsaw was saying, “that my cut-up poem ‘No Flow’ will achieve the best result. If we disconnect the Flow, then we remove the link between the worlds. I have done a lot of research on this, and I am sure that once this connection is severed, magical energy will return to the Realworld.”

“She would think that,” said Jupiter Peacock to Gotthard Forestfloor. “Any opportunity to push her dreadful so-called poetry. But I still say all we need to do is to put my new edition of Galloglass in the Great Library. I have removed the Flow from Hieronymus Moon’s great vision and restored the poem to the individualist glory that Moon so very nearly achieved. . . . I confess that while doing it I felt a little like Ezra Pound editing T. S. Eliot, or . . .” He visibly struggled to think of another example of a famous writer being edited by another famous person.