“But you can’t change anything, you can only watch. I watched the Chatwins come to Fillory. I watched people be born and die. I saw Jane Chatwin have sex with a faun!” She snorted with laughter. “I think she was a very lonely person. Sometimes I just watched people read or sleep. It didn’t matter, it was all funny. It never stopped being funny.

“Once I let myself go all the way back, all the way to the beginning of Fillory. The beginning of everything, or this everything anyway. It was as far as you could go. You bumped up against it, like you’d reached the end of your string.

“You couldn’t call it a pretty sight, the dawn of creation. It was more like the corpse of whatever had come before. Just a big desert and a shallow, dead-looking sea. No weather, no wind, just cold. The sun didn’t move. The sunlight was . . . unpleasant. Like an old fluorescent light that a bunch of flies had died in. Looking back now I think the sun and moon must have collided and melted together into one single deformed heavenly body.

“I watched the sea for a long time. You wouldn’t think a body of water that big could be so still. Finally a big old tigress came loping down to the water. Her ears were notched, and she’d lost an eye and it had healed shut. You could see her padding along from a mile away. I thought she must be a goddess.

“She came down to the edge of the water. She looked at her reflection for a bit, then she went trotting into the water, up to her shoulders. She stopped then, and shuddered, and sneezed once.

“Obviously it was distasteful to her, but she did it anyway. She seemed very brave to me. She kept on going until she was totally submerged. And then nothing. She had drowned herself. I saw her body float up to the surface, on its side, slowly turning in place in the slack tide, and then it sank again for good.

“For a long time after that nothing happened. Then the water kind of gathered itself into a wave, and the wave threw up two big curly shells on the shore. They lay next to each other for a while, and then another wave came and left behind it a sheet of foam. The sand underneath them kind of stirred and shook itself and it sat up, and that was Ember. The foam was His wool. The shells were His horns.