My voice trails off because I don’t know where I’m going. Questions fill my head, but they fall silent before they leave my lips. I can almost understand what he’s saying. Once, there was a Raven who made the world. Once, it might have been the man sitting in the chair beside me. But that was in the long ago. There might be a piece of that Raven still hidden somewhere deep inside him, somewhere in his blood, in the deep of his bones, but it wasn’t something the man he’d become now could readily access.

Because we diminish, we spirits.

I remember a conversation I had a long time ago with an old woman by the coals of a campfire, in a place that’s no longer a part of this world. That’s what she told me: We diminish. Not because we’re dependent on people’s belief, the way it’s said the Eadar are, but because time moves on and nothing stays the same. Mountains are ground down, continents change their shape, glaciers withdraw. Time moves and everything changes.

We diminish because it’s simply the way of the world.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Chloë says, her thoughts obviously travelling a similar road as mine. “No one ever wonders why the Raven who made the world would be living in an old house on Stanton Street. Why Cody, the Great Trickster, wanders the world like a hobo, when he’s not spending his time in pool halls or playing poker. Why even Nokomis can be met and spoken with, for all that she is the spirit of all these worlds, made manifest.”

“It’s because we’re more than the stories,” Lucius says. “And less than them. Reduced only, perhaps, because there isn’t room in the world for beings of such mythic proportions. So the stories stay big, but the subjects of those stories . . . we become cousins and dreams and old men living forgotten in old houses.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?” I ask.

“Not even a little. Perhaps I did bring the world into being, but so what? I don’t see it as my having done anything more marvelous than someone opening a box to see what’s inside. The world goes on the way it will. It doesn’t follow my wishes and I wouldn’t want it to. That, it would seem to me, is a responsibility that would break anyone.”

I don’t mention the stories I’ve heard about his withdrawals from the world—breakdowns, some might say.

“So there’s nothing you can do?” I ask instead.