“Now, if there’s nothing more,” I said, “I’d like to retire. I’ve made that French library my lair and it’s waiting for me and I need to rest perhaps more now than ever before in my life.”

“One thing more,” said Seth. “You hold the Core now. You are the Source. You are the Primal Fount.”

“Yes?” I responded calmly, patiently, waiting.

“Your fate is our fate,” he said.

“Yes?”

“You must vow never to slip away from us, never to seek to hide from us, never to be careless with your own person, any more than any earthly monarch on whom the peace of a realm depends.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said. I suppressed a little flash of anger. “I am yours now,” I said, as difficult as it was to say this. A chill ran through me, an awful foreboding. “I belong to the realm. I know.”

Suddenly Everard spoke up, the young blood drinker from Italy.

“But is this thing quiet inside you now?” he asked. “Is he quiet!”

A ripple of alarm ran through the gathering, though why I’m not sure. This question was on the mind of nearly everyone here. It had to be.

“Yes, Amel is quiet,” I said. “Amel is satisfied. Amel is at peace.”

“Or maybe he’s somewhere else at this very moment, perhaps,” said my mother.

“Yes,” said Everard, “off making some more horrible trouble.”

“No,” I replied.

“But why?” asked Rhoshamandes. “Why is he content?” It was said with total sincerity, and for the first time in his face I saw a glimmer of actual pain.

I reflected for a moment before responding. Then:

“Because he can see and he can hear more clearly than ever,” I said. “And this is what he’s longed for. That’s what he has always wanted. To see and hear and know in this world, the physical world, our world. And he is watching, and learning, as never before.”

“But surely,” said Zenobia, the diminutive friend of Gregory, “he saw and heard when he was in Akasha all that time, before Mekare ever came.”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t. Because in those times, he didn’t know how.”

Pause.

The various amazing minds of the room pondered.

Inside me, Amel gave the softest most eloquent laugh with nothing of humor in it and everything of wonder that I could hope to hear.

I raised my hands for patience.

I had to sleep. And the morning was creeping up on the young ones with its sly burning fingers, and it would soon be creeping up even on me.