Down, down and down… The ground again, wrinkled and leathery as a mummy’s neck… Soundless, our throbbing passage… Softer the thunder, falling the wind… Dad’s last gasp? Speed now and away…

A narrowing of lines, to the fineness of an etching, fading then in the three suns’ heat… And faster yet…

A rider, approaching… Hand to hilt in time to my own… Me. Myself coming back? Simultaneous, our salutes… Through one another, somehow, the air like a sheet of water that one dry instant… What Carroll mirror, what Rebma, Tir-na Nog’th effect… Yet far, far to my left, a black thing writhing… We pace the road… It leads me on…

White sky, white ground and no horizon… Sunless and cloudless the prospect… Only that thread of black, far off, and gleaming pyramids everywhere, massive, disconcerting…

We tire. I do not like this place… But we have outrun whatever process pursues. Draw rein.

I was tired, but I felt a strange vitality within me. It seemed as though it arose from within my breast… The Jewel. Of course. I made an effort to draw upon this power again. I felt it flow outward through my limbs, barely halting at my extremities. It was almost as if — Yes. I readied out and lay my will upon my blank and geometrical surroundings. They began to alter.

It was a movement. The pyramids shuffled by, darkening as they passed. They shrank, they merged, they passed to gravel. The world turned upside down and I stood as on the underside of a cloud, watching landscapes flash by beneath/above.

Light streamed upward past me, from a golden sun beneath my feet. This, too, passed, and the fleecy ground darkened, firing waters upward to erode the passing land. Lightnings jumped up to strike the world overhead, to break it apart. In places it shattered and its pieces fell about me. They began to swirl as a wave of darkness passed.

When the light came again, bluish this time, it held no point source and described no land.