nothing to her: at the end of the world, who counts bruises? Tyr scrambled to
her feet, in a pile of trash, limping, not noticing the limp. She fled down the
dirty street, shied past the flaming barricade, ran past even the crushed meat
that had been the tall thing. She ran, howling her terror and loss, for a long
time. Eventually she found at least one familiar smell-a midden. Desperate for
the familiar, she half buried herself in the garbage, but it was no relief.
Footsore, too miserable even to nose through the promising bones and rinds she
lay in, Tyr cowered and whimpered in restless anguish for hours. Finally
weariness forced her, still crying, into a wretched sleep. Soon enough the sun
would be up. But it would rise black, as far as Tyr was concerned. Joy was over
forever. The tall thing was meat, and the Presence was gone.
As sleep took her, Tyr came her closest ever to having a genuine thought.
Moaning, she wished she were meat too.
Sanctuary’s gods, like most others, resided by choice in the timelessness which
both contains all mortal time and space, and lies within them. That timelessness
is impossible to understand-even the patron gods of the sciences shake their
heads at its physics-and difficult to describe, especially to mortals, whose
descriptions necessarily involve time, in the telling if nowhere else.
Light, overwhelming, is what most mortals remember who pass through those realms
in dream or vision. The fortunate dead who come there, having given up time, see
things differently. So do the gods. In that place where the absence of time