He proceeded to exchange their clothing and to wrap the baby from the crib in the blanket which had covered the other. Then he placed the last Lord of Rondoval within the crib and stared at him. His finger moved forward to touch the dragonmark....

Abruptly, he turned away, retrieved his staff and lifted young Daniel Chain from the floor.

As he passed along the hallway he called into the living room, "I am going now. Fix the door as it was after me--and forget."

Outside, he heard the chain fall into place as he walked away. Stars shone down through jagged openings among the clouds and a cold wind came out of the east at his back. A vehicle turned the corner, raking him with its lights, but it passed without slowing.

Tiny gleams began to play within the sidewalk, and the buildings at either hand lost something of their substantiality, became two-dimensional, began to flicker.

The sparkling of his path increased and it soon ceased to be a sidewalk, becoming a great bright way stretching illimitably before and behind him, with numerous sideways visible. The prospect to his right and left became a mosaic of tiny still-shots of innumerable times and places, flashing, brightening and shrinking, coming at last to resemble the shimmering scales of some exotic fish in passage by him. Overhead, a band of dark sky remained, but cloudless and pouring starlight in negative celestial image of the road below. Occasionally, Mor glimpsed other figures upon the sideways--not all of them of human form--bent on tasks as inscrutable as his own.

His staff came to blaze as he picked his way homeward, lightning-dew dripping from his heels, his toes.

III

In lands mythical to one another, the days passed.

When the boy was six years old, it was noted that he not only attempted to repair anything that was broken about the place, but that he quite often succeeded. Mel showed her husband the kitchen tongs he had mended.