A silly question, he thought at first, but found he had no easy answer. I have a name, he insisted, I just can’t think of it right now.

So do I, she told him, still no more than a ghostly voice. And I can’t think of mine, either. How strange…!

Do you know where we are?

He could feel the negation even before he caught the word-thoughts. No. Lost, I think. We’re lost. For the first time he recognized the sadness in her voice and knew he was not the only one who was afraid. He wanted to help her, although he could not help himself or even say what it was that troubled him. All he knew was that he was falling endlessly outward through nothing, and that it was a blessing beyond price to have someone to share it with.

I want to see you, he said suddenly. Like before.

Before?

You were watching me. That was you, wasn’t it? Those things were chasing me, and the halls were on fire…

That was you. It was not a question, but almost a sweet note of satisfaction. I was afraid for you.

I want to see you.

But who are you? she demanded.

I don’t know! When he grew angry her presence became fainter and that frightened him. Still, it was interesting to know he could still feel anger. When he had been falling alone, he had felt almost nothing. I just know that I was by myself, and then you were here. I haven’t felt… It would have been almost impossible to explain in his waking life—in this wordless, directionless place it was far beyond impossible. I haven’t felt anyone in my heart since I lost her. He could not summon the name, but he knew her, his sister, his twin soul, his other half.

The other was silent for a long moment. You love her.

I do. But there was a misunderstanding between them, a sort of cloud of confusion, and again the girl’s presence became remote. Don’t go! I need to see you. I want to… There was no word for what he wanted—there weren’t even thoughts that could be strung together—but he wanted a reason to exist. He wanted a place to be, and to feel someone waiting for the thoughts in his head, so that he knew there was more to the universe the gods had made than simply a few whispers in endless darkness. I want to…

There is a place around us, she said suddenly. I can almost see it.

What do you mean?

Look! It’s big, but it has walls. And there’s…a road?

He could see it now, at least its faint lineaments. It was a space only slightly smaller than the endless dark through which they had been falling, and only a little more bright, but it had shape, it had boundaries. At the center of it he saw what she had called a road, an arching span of safety over an astonishing, terrifying dark nothing—a nothing even more profound than the void through which he had been falling. But this pit of blackness beneath the span was not simply nothing, it was a darkness that wanted to make everything else into a nothing, too. It existed, but its existence was a threat to all else. It was the raw stuff of unbeing.