At last the dust storms subsided. They were still in the empty land, the gray expanses, but for the first time he saw something on the horizon other than more nothingness. It was a house—a hut, really, a crude thing made of sticks and unworked stones, its crevices mortared with what looked like centuries of dust, so it seemed the mound of some tremendous and slovenly insect. A man stood in front of it, leaning on his long staff like one of the Kertish herders who had sometimes come to live in Ferras Vansen’s dales when driven out by a tribal feud back home.

There! It was a triumphant moment, overshadowing even the sight of another being in this endless, dust-choked void. He had remembered something new: I am Ferras Vansen—a man of the dales.

The stranger wore the kind of ragged cloth around his belly that the ancients had worn, but was otherwise without ornament. His long beard was gray as cobweb beside his mouth, but dust had turned the rest of it yellow. He did not move but only watched them approach, and Vansen and his father’s ghost had almost reached him before Ferras Vansen realized this bearded apparition was the first being he had seen in these lands for as long as he could remember whose eyes were open—the first who was not asleep.

Who are you? Vansen said to him. Or is it forbidden to ask?

The man’s eyes seemed bright as stars beneath his bristling brows. He smiled, but there was no kindness in it, or malice either. You stand before the last river, but the place you wish to go does not exist in this Age of Sleep. You must cross instead to another side, one in which those great ones you wish to see are still in their houses to be seen.

I don’t understand, Vansen told the bearded man. As they spoke, his father sat down in the dust and began singing to himself.

You do not need to understand. You need only do what you must. Whether you come through again afterward is in the hands of greater powers than mine. The dusty old man shifted his bare feet, the spread, leathery toes of someone who had never worn shoes. Unlike Vansen’s father, he was as real as could be—Ferras Vansen could see every inch of his coppery skin with great clarity, every scar, every hair.

You will not tell me who you are, Master?

The bearded man shook his head. Not a master—certainly not yours. A shape, an idea, perhaps even a word. That is all. Now step through the door. You will find water there. Both of you must wash yourselves.

And without knowing how it happened, Ferras Vansen found himself on the inside of the small wooden hut, but here for the first time they had left the twilight behind: what he could see through the cracks in the walls was velvet black sky and the gleam of stars. He stepped closer to the walls and peered through one of the openings. The entire hut was surrounded by stars, innumerable white sparks flickering like the candles of all the gods in heaven—stars above, beside, and even below them, as though the hut floated untethered through the night sky. Dizzied by the enthralling, terrifying view, he turned to see his father already washing himself with the water from a simple wooden tub as crude as the hut itself.