A ray of sunlight crept along the floor and slowly rose to shine in the old wizard’s face. First, his bottom lip trembled, sending a gentle wave through his beard. Then, the ray stole across his long nose and his bushy eyebrows twitched. For an instant, he frowned, and then the light fell upon his eyes. Ringing them were deep wrinkles, countless years and worries echoed across his face like ripples in a pond. As the dawn crossed his face, Charlot dreamed of light.

The dream had begun in the dead of the night, after the mask had fled. It was the deepest sleep of his life. He sank lower and lower until he was cheek to cheek with the Void. Charlot did not shrink from her unfathomable depths.

All within him was expended, if she had come to claim him, he would not plead. The slightest touch of her emptiness brushed against him. She sought to seduce him with the slow, cool decline of eternity, the perfect nothing that was hers alone. He neither accepted her offer nor refused her, he only let the moment echo on and on. The Void was content to wait.

It was the intimacy with emptiness that let him ascend, for there was nothing to hold him down. In the dream, he lifted through the basest Demiplanes, where eternally unfulfilled potential echoed out in hollow outlines lapping at infinity.

He rose past cavernous dimensions of whispering purple-black flame, through realms of shuddering black thoughts that spiraled downward into maelstroms of despair. How inviting they looked! Even as he rose, he suffered from a vertiginous desire to plunge into one of those gyres of suffering and ride them all the way to oblivion. But they could not tempt him, for he was free.

In the other direction, rising on high were the lands of light. The brilliant fiery seas of the Everflame, the howling lightning in the Aether, realms where the air forever sings and every breath is pregnant with crackling potential. High above them all stood the limitless light, the Godplane, as far from mortal men as the stars themselves. The dream brought him to the Great Divide, the grand and silent gate to the realm of legends.

Only the greatest mortals would ever glimpse the Godplane, most for only a single instant of their finest hours. A priest in the throes of religious ecstasy might have a vision mere heartbeats long and spend the rest of his life preaching of it. A virtuoso might dwell there for a single song, a performance so powerful the gods themselves bent an ear. A supremely daring magician might dare to glance through some extradimensional peephole, trying to resolve the structure of paradise before its grandeur burnt up his mind like a leaf held to a flame.

Of course, as with all things, it was different for the archmagi. The truer the Art they worked, the closer they drew to godhood, closer to the all-consuming light. The greatest mages of history, The Primarch, Arath the Unraveller, Merriweather the Master, all had skirted the edge between the boundless thrill of creation and the adulation of annihilation that the True Art promised.

At the apex of his power, Charlot might have been mentioned in the same breath with those legends. But that was long, long ago, and he had never shaken the Arc as they had. He had never cared for fame. He secluded himself and did his greatest deeds under aliases.

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The bards sang of great battles, of boiling seas and legions burnt to ashes. They had no songs for years of research, no ballads for the exacting and unforgiving work it took create wondrous artifacts. No one sang of the restraint it took to live in peace for so long.

Yet, though he never rode the wave of legends like the great ones, in the realm of the Art, Charlot was their equal. He had stepped beyond this Great Divide, he had wielded the True Art. In his mastery, he was content to wait where a lesser man would have rushed headlong for the prize and shattered the dream.

Above the silent sea, a single star shone, calling him forth. The gates of paradise were open to him now, and he was prepared as the infinite vista unfolded before him.

“Who calls me?” Charlot asked, against the unending song that seemed to climb higher and higher all around him. He could behold the shimmering land perfectly. Blindness was no impairment here. The limitless light inscribed itself directly onto his mind.

The question was needless, for she was already all around him. As a compliment to his understanding, she did not bother with an avatar, appearing instead as vast and indescribable radiance. She was a hail of diamonds shattering against a sea of mirrors, a chorus of a thousand nightingales. She was the first and last note of every song, the length of every road. She was adulation, she was epiphany. She was Audera, the Laughing Star, and even Charlot could barely behold her without shattering. For a long time, they were locked in this dance, the goddess slowly revealing more and more of herself, testing the limits of his endurance.

Between god and man, there could be no dialogue. Her ideas bloomed explosively in his mind, like vines that threatened to choke out everything that was Charlot. He had to fight to remain intact, to empty himself enough to understand.

Her desires propagated through him like lighting, earthquakes of want that threatened to shear him apart. When she finished, she paused, waiting to see if she had broken him. Charlot remained, shaken to his core but still himself.

What she’d spoken could fill a hundred volumes, but all he could retain was a vision of a mountain cracked in half, great pillars of black smoke rising from the ruins of a shattered city at its feet.

Urth’Wyrth.

“Restore my sight!” he cried into the limitless light, for her desires for him alone were too much to ask from an entire nation. She could not possibly expect him to do this half-blind! Another vision was her reply, this one far simpler.

A branch, drooping beneath the weight of a golden pear.

Within the cabin of the Widow Giselle, the errant sunbeam slid from the deep wells of his eyes to cross his wild eyebrows and rise to the top of his high widow’s peak. His eyes blinked open, at once terrified to behold the goddess again and desperate to do so.

There were no gods here, no oceans of light or seas of emptiness. There were only the cedar slats of the roof, the long straight lines of the rafters.

He could hear the skillet crackling. The cabin was filled with the smell of biscuits baking. He sat up, blinking, trying to capture the feeling, willing it to remain always. Yet, the harder he tried to cling to her splendor, the swifter the vision fled. It was the way of all dreams.

Had she really come to him? Did she really expect a used-up old man to take on a task that had broken a dozen empires? In the daylight streaming into the cabin, it seemed utter folly, perhaps his wits had grown as soft as his vision.

“Show me the bow,” Charlot said, startling the Widow Giselle.