“Appearances are easy,” Hermes said, and as fast as that we were both wearing kitons, his pale gold and mine red, both with embroidered borders in a blue and gold book-and-scroll pattern exactly like the one Pytheas had been wearing, and both pinned with identical gold pins. Mine had been on my jacket collar before. Hermes seemed solidly and completely himself now, as much himself as the trees were themselves. “Red is a good color for you. You should wear more red.”

I didn’t say it didn’t matter what I wore because I’d never be Thetis so I might as well not make any effort. I didn’t say that I had dreamed about him for the last eight years, and I hadn’t even known he was a god. I did not in fact say anything. I looked down and saw the kiton and the loam I was sitting on. Then I rubbed the kiton between my fingers. It felt combed almost smooth, like good Worker-woven wool. “Isn’t this supposed to be the World of Forms?” I said. “The true reality outside the cave we live in that only feels like reality? So how can you change things here?”

“That’s only a Platonic thought experiment, an analogy.”

“Are we in the third hypostasis? The hypostasis of soul?” The Ikarians and the Neoplatonists of Psyche believed that there were five layers of reality, and that things could change in the lower three.

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Hermes said. “Things don’t age and die here, but they can change and grow. And I haven’t truly changed your clothes, only the appearance of them. It’s still your rain suit really.” He stood up. “Come on.”

“But I can feel it,” I objected.

“It’s simply sensation,” he said. “That’s as easy to change as any other sense.” He held out a hand, and I took it. It felt real, he felt real, but so did the wool of the red kiton which I knew was an illusion.

He pulled me to my feet, and once again there was no sense of transition. We were standing in the glade on Olympos and I was enjoying the touch of Hermes’s hand, and then we were floating in the air above an immense volcanic eruption. It was night. A great plume of flame was billowing up through the air below us in red and gold and orange and all the colors of fire. I had seen plenty of eruptions, but never from this close, and never below me. The fire flickered and changed shape against the darkness. We weren’t falling, or moving at all, but the fire seemed to be reaching up great greedy arms toward us. I hate to confess such a loss of control, but I screamed.