Evening light suffused the golden rolling hills and the sleepy little town as Giles drove the last mile back to the festival. The sky was wild Chaos which made him nearly blind to look at.

Tiffany had slept her enchanted sleep all day during the endless boring drive up I5. Occasionally she had shifted and once she had reached out a sleepy hand, touched him like apple blossom wine, and settled back with a contented sigh. Giles felt his heart pledge a lifetime of devotion to her for that and he sat up straighter at the wheel, though his shoulders and back ached.

Now on the 4-lane street which would soon end at the town square where the festival was held, Giles for the first time wondered if he would have trouble getting back in.

Unobtrusive guards walked the festival perimeter. As far as the public knew, you just walked in and out and the fence was only there to make sure people entered and left in an orderly way. But when he’d gone to visit Hiyako and RJ on the day his mother died, he’d had to show his pass to the guards to get out and again to get back in.

He had no pass today. In fact … his blood chilled as he realized that if this was the last day of the festival, then it was just “last night” that Killington had injected him and forced him to tell a story which had no end, forced him into the sleepy dark. What had happened to his body? Was it still lying in the city hall building in a deep coma? Had it been “disposed of” in some horrible way, thrown into a dumpster or driven off in an unmarked car and flung into a ditch?

What would happen if he drove up now and said, “I’m back?”

He pulled over, still several blocks away, and parked in front of a liquor store. Tiffany’s face bloomed magenta in the glare of the curling neon letters, and her blue-black hair gleamed.

Giles swallowed. It was time to wake her up, if he could. She could glamour the guards, like she’d done before. (Or could she? Now that she’d been recognized, thanks to his stupid mistake, did she have any power there?)

Hesitantly, not sure whether he’d see joy or be killed by a lightning bolt, he put his hand on Tiffany’s shoulder and shook lightly. “Wake up, honey, we’re here.” He’d called her honey, just like he’d called Melanie, and his heart ached even as he trembled.

She moaned and a cloud seemed to pass over her face. Still half asleep, she pulled him to her, murmuring, “Darling, darling, oh my darling, how long it has been, how I’ve….”

But just before Giles could dissolve in hope and joy, her fingers halted as they stroked his face and feeling like he’d once again failed some test, Giles sat up while Tiffany’s eyes opened fully.

She still looked at him with that mixture of hope and self-restraint she’d shown before but she had control of herself. She smiled at him and it was a warm smile that calmed his dread, but she did no more.

Giles suddenly felt his exhaustion. He’d just driven hundreds of miles and before that he’d taken a “side reality” where he fought demons and before that he met his mother as a young woman and faced down a fanatical tyrant and before that he’d sat on a rock lost in chaos and watched a planet come up and smash against his sky. In fact, when had he last slept? Before his experiences on Cloud Rock he’d floated in lonely aching darkness; did that count? But he had not rested then, he had fretted and cried and nearly dissolved in lonely misery. Before that he’d been put on trial for his life and that had been at the end of a day which he’d spent dreading the evening telling. He felt now the weight of all those buzzing, dense hours, all those experiences any one of which would have held enough trauma for a year of therapy.

He took a breath to ask her straight out if she loved him and if so, what they should do about it. Amazingly, nothing happened to stop him. If this had been a story, something would have intervened before something could spoil plot surprises.

“Tiffany, do you love me? I’m out of my head with love for you but I don’t know what you want. Tell me, please?”

The words, the plain words were out. They hung quivering in the air. He should have asked how they could get into the festival, how he could get to the main stage where he was supposed to tell, how he could tell whatever vital secret he had learned (and what had he even learned?) so that RJ and Hiyako could hear but Killington could not? But like a heartsick young swain (in a story after all), he had just asked for the love of the beautiful heroine.

He watched her struggle and his heart fell. If she loved him, she would say so. If she had to think this hard about how to answer, it meant she did not.

She stroked his face but his heart did not leap like it would have a moment before. “You are so like her,” she murmured. “But you are not her.”

“My mother, I know she’s the one you love.”

Tiffany acknowledged that simple truth. “Since we were girls together, my dear.”

“When you touch me, you feel her through me.” After all the angst and pain, saying it out loud felt only like letting go of a full bladder, feeling the liquid gush out and leave him empty but relieved.

“It isn’t quite so heartless as that,” the husky voice said, with an emotion that pulled his eyes to hers. She squeezed his hand with her gloved ones. “I sat in the dark at the bottom of the stairs with you, ages ago in another lifetime, and loved you as the warm older brother I wished I had. When you vanished, I reached after you and fell out into a warm summer night in the land where your mother was still a child. She was my you, but soft and sisterly where you had been old and brotherly. And then over the years that … changed.”

She let him see all that she had told Jasmine in the dark corridors and he was sharply aware that beneath the gloves her hands were silver with golden palms and that she had once been about to take off her gloves and touch him with them. What would have happened?

“What are you, Tiffany? What do you really want?”

When Giles asked that question, he found it hard to focus on the answer. It was like a thin but blinding white line divided his thoughts in two, and that line stretched into a sheet, through which he seemed to see multiple possibilities. Tiffany is a young woman who fell in love with me and still wants me. Tiffany is a demon who has joined with the spirit of Doree, Tiffany wants to reach my mother through me and that’s all she cares about.

She spoke. She answered his question. But he couldn’t hear her words.

Is this what Killington hears when I’m telling a part of the story which is hidden from him?

He felt like he floated in the Chaos, and once more the image of Euclid with point, line and plane came to him. But this time, at long last, he understood what it meant.

The “point” he already knew represented the entire universe to the most distant quasars. The point was stretched into a razor-thin line which he already understood was the universe through all of time back to the Big Bang and forward to some unimaginable end.

The line which was the universe through all of time was stretched into a plane, a sheet with width as well as length, a sheet which stretched up and down in his vision and represented…

The creation of stories. The infinite set of universe lines into which the universe recreated itself by the telling of stories.

Multiple storylines, any one of which could be true. An infinite number of parallel realities, all joined by characters traveling from storyline to storyline.

Within any one storyline, everything had to make sense. But storylines were not universe lines. To us, in our one universe line, they were the achingly complex patterns of the Chaos.

Within this one universe line, nothing had to tie together. A Native American woman could be 70 now and a young woman only ten years ago. Tiffany could be here now and on that red hilltop back in the mid-1970s, throwing him into a sky which wouldn’t open into Chaos for another 50 years. And that one other thing, that key that he had understood in the control center in the 1970s and fit into place yesterday, could also be true across many times and spaces.

Because follow any one storyline and everything flowed from one event to the next. Doree fell into 1950’s Ireland and was magicked into being his mother’s dream girlfriend before wandering into the between-the-worlds corridors. Dear Jasmine from his own time also wandered those corridors freely and perhaps a powerful curandera from a hundred years ago had made them her own as well. Doree became Tiffany, living only a few years while his mother grew into a woman and finally into a silver-haired lady. Tiffany came back into the real world when the demon world broke through…

But there he foundered. If she’d longed for Silver Mary all these years, why had she not gone to her at that moment and said, my treasure, I have loved you always, through all the years?

He sat in this one, “real” universe line and tried to get everything to make sense. He had asked Tiffany, without room for inconsistencies, “What are you? What do you want?” She had answered him.

And he could not hear what she had said.

“It were best,” he heard her say instead, “to retell that last small bit.”