A bright flash of insight, to match that peculiar sun…

There it was… Displayed within that light, a thing I had only seen self-illuminated in darkness up until then: the Pattern, the great Pattern of Amber cast upon an oval shelf beneath/above a strange sky-sea.

…And I knew, perhaps by that within me which bound us, that this had to be the real one. Which meant that the Pattern in Amber was but its first shadow. Which meant —

Which meant that Amber itself was not carried over into places beyond the realm of Amber, Rebma, and Tir-na Nog’th. Meaning, then, that this place to which we had come was, by the law of precedence and configuration, the real Amber.

I turned to a smiling Ganelon, his beard and wild hair molten in the merciless light.

“How did you know?” I asked him.

“You know I am a very good guesser, Corwin,” he replied, “and I recall everything you ever told me about how things work in Amber: how its shadow and those of your struggles are cast across the worlds. I often wondered, in thinking of the black road, whether anything could have cast such a shadow into Amber itself. And I imagined that such a something would have to be extremely basic, powerful, and secret.” He gestured at the scene before us. “Like that.”

“Continue,” I said.

His expression changed and he shrugged.

“So there had to be a layer of reality deeper than your Amber,” he explained, “where the dirty work was done. Your patron beast led us to what seems to be such a place, and that blot on the Pattern looks to be the dirty work. You agreed.”

I nodded.

“It was your perceptiveness rather than the conclusion itself which stunned me so,” I said.

“You beat me to it,” admitted Random, off to my right, “but the feeling has found its way into my intestines — to put it delicately. I do believe that somehow that is the basis of our world down there.”