“Are you sure?” Pegasus asked; and the transition was so fast that even Oversoul Seven was startled. He heard time crinkle and Lydia’s pilgrimage suddenly turned into a nightmare. He saw at once (in blessed hindsight, Cyprus said later) exactly what happened: Lydia had returned to one of her last life’s worst, darkest moments.

Nearing death, she sat in a wheelchair in the solarium of the nursing home in which her grown children had placed her. She frowned, looking out the wide windows down to the hills below. She was strapped into the chair; drugged, but she felt drunk, bleary, so dizzy inside that she could have been guzzling liquor at some wild party for days. Yet, she knew, she’d been nowhere. She hadn’t left the old people’s home: That much was clear. It was also clear that, wheelchair or no, she’d been somewhere, involved in some kind of mind-traveling that she couldn’t understand.

“Time for our pills, sweetie,” said the nurse, Mrs. Only.

“I’d like to sweetie her,” Lydia thought, in a rage. The rage itself was vitally strong, though its energy didn’t budge her arms or legs, which once would have reacted.

“Open our mouth now,” Mrs. Only said, with a kind of threatening sweetness.

“Like hell I will,” Lydia said to herself, but in utter surprise she felt her jaws drop open, slackly; felt the pill go sliding down that soft but somehow distant tunnel that didn’t seem to have anything to do with her at all—though again, she knew that once it had.

She stared: The twilight was laid out before the windows. Down the hill, the lights of a gas station glinted. At least, she thought, it always had been a gas station and normal enough. But now she looked with sardonic curiosity—the flying red horse on the neon sign was lifting a foreleg, gently stepping out onto the first shining shelf of air. And he was taking off, wings stirring the early night clouds in ripples; neighing. How was it that no one else seemed to hear? She grinned, at least mentally, because she couldn’t tell if her lips actually moved at all. But there were farms nearby. She imagined the flying horse neighing to all those farm horses below; liberating them, giving them wings too, so that hundreds of horses just flew off in the middle of fields while startled farmers watched aghast.