Vansen joined him, and for long moments lost himself in the glory of water running down his skin. He had forgotten he even had a body, and this was a wonderful way to be reminded. Even his father’s phantom, no more substantial than if he were made of spiderwebs, seemed to have come close to something like happiness.

I should have come home, Vansen said. I feared you, Tati. I feared your suffering. And I hated you, at least a little. Because you did not make it easy for me, when you could have.

His father broke off his singing and for a long time did not say anything. He stood up straight and let the water slide off him like rain dripping down a window.

I was a prisoner of my own understanding, Pedar Vansen said at last. At least that is what I imagine. In truth, I cannot remember—it is all gone, drifted away like smoke…

And then, before Vansen could hear any more of these words that came to him like food to a starving man, they were out of the hut again, returned to the twilight and dust. The bearded man stood leaning on his long staff, a length of wood as gnarled and knobbed as the ancient man himself. There, the bearded man said, pointing at a pile of dull, red-orange stones lying in the dust. Crumble them and rub yourself with it so you may cross into the last sunset light and still retain something of yourself. Both of you. There is no difference now between living and dead in this house—all are subject to the same laws.

Vansen rubbed the red rocks together, scraping them into blood-colored powder, rubbing that powder onto his clean skin. Instead of rubbing dirt onto himself, it seemed instead as though he rubbed himself with light. When he finished, he gleamed, and even his father’s phantom shimmered beneath its layer of dust and seemed more substantial.

This ocher gives life to the unloving, said the old, bearded man. And it protects the living from the dead in the place you go to now, who would otherwise cover you like flies on honey. Go.

What waits for us? Vansen called back to the ancient as he and his father walked forward.

What has always waited for you. What always will wait for you and for me, and for everything. The end of all.

And then the bearded man was gone, lost in the dust which had begun to swirl around them once more, billowing, choking. Vansen held in his breath, then a time came when he could not hold it any longer. He breathed and the river of dust entered him. He became the dust. He passed through.

And now they entered the true city, the metropolis beside which the City of Sleepers was no more than a village.

The oracles say that this greatest and most awful of habitations fills the earth from pole to pole, so that everywhere living men walk, beneath their feet lie the streets of the City of the Red Sun. Nobody laughs in that city, the oracles also claim, and nobody cries except in thin, almost silent sobs, or sings above a whisper.