Ingold spoke again, his words seeming to her to come from some great distance. "What you see is the Void, Gil, the Void between universes-the Void that you crossed to come here. The spheres are worlds-universes-eons of time-each one a limitless cosmos of matter and energy, entropy and life. This is the closest I can come to explaining it to you, and it bears about as much relationship to reality as a child's five-point drawing bears to the wonder and complexity that is an actual star. Do you see the joined spheres that lie closest to us?"
She nodded. "Are they-? They look as if they're moving apart."
"So they are," he murmured. "They are your world and mine, Gil. Last summer they had been drifting together, until they lay so close that the curtain between them thinned. It is possible for one who understands the nature of the Void as I do to travel from this world to any other. But on the night that I first spoke to you, in the courtyards of Gae at the first quarter moon of autumn, they lay so close that a sleeper, a dreamer, could be drawn across unknowingly, as you were. It is this closeness that has prevented me from sending you back, for any rent in the tenuous fabric that divides your world from mine would set off a series of gaps through which the Dark Ones could find their way-as, in fact, one did.
"But our worlds are parting, drifting out of their cosmic conjunction. In six weeks or so, at the time of the Winter Feast, it will be safe for me to open the gate in the Void and return you to your world, without endangering the civilization that gave you birth."