No, that’s not a road, he said as the one stripe of something slowly hardened into visibility. It’s a bridge.

And then they were facing each other on the curving span, the boy and the girl, shifting and vague as objects seen through murky water. Neither of them were really children, but neither were they grown or anywhere close to it. They were raw, frightened, excited, and still new enough to the world that a thing like this made as much sense as anything else.

Her eyes were what held him, although he could not keep his stare fixed on them for more than a moment—everything here was inconstant, shifting and blurring as though he had exhausted his sight with hours of reading instead of just regaining it.

It wasn’t the eyes themselves that fascinated him, although they were large and kind, brown like the eyes of some creature watching with caution from the forest depths. Rather it was the way her eyes looked at him and saw him. Even in this fit of madness (or whatever had swallowed him) the brown-eyed girl saw him, not what he said or what he seemed or what others imagined him to be. Perhaps it was only because they were in this place without names—perhaps she could have seen him here in no other way—but the way she looked at him felt like a welcoming campfire summoning a freezing, exhausted traveler. It felt like something that could save him.

Who are you? he asked again.

I told you, I don’t know. Then she smiled, a surprising flash of amusement that transformed her solemn little face into something astounding. I’m a dreamer, I suppose, or maybe I’m a dream. One of us is dreaming this, aren’t we? But that was a jest, he knew. She was no idle wisp of either his fancy or her own—she was strong and practical. He could feel it. And who are you?

A prisoner, he told her, and knew it was true. An exile. A victim.

Now for the first time he felt something other than kindness from her, a sour taste in her reply. A victim? Who isn’t? That isn’t who you are, that’s just what’s happening to you.

He was torn between his desire to feel her sweetness again and the need to explain just how badly life and the gods had treated him. The gods? They were trying to kill him!

You don’t understand, he said. It’s different with me. But he found that here on this bridge over Unbeing, this span that led away in either direction to unseen and unknowable ends, he couldn’t explain why that was. I’m…wrong. Crippled. Mad in the head.

If you expect me to feel sorry for you because you dream of impossible places and people without names, she said, some of her sly humor creeping back, then you’ll have to try something else instead.

He wanted to let himself enjoy her, but he could not. If he did—if he belittled his own miseries—how could he even exist? The only thing that made his suffering bearable was the knowledge that it also made him different—that he had been elected somehow for this pain. But I didn’t ask to be like this! His despair rose up in a howl of fury. I didn’t want things to be this way! I don’t have the strength for any more!