Tiffany’s mysterious presence lay beside Giles. Her electric hand was still in his.

“Look at the sky, my dear,” she breathed into his ear. “Really look.”

Were her lips as close to his ear as they seemed? The wet green smell of freshly cut grass made his head spin. He wanted to turn his head to her.

How do you behave when you’re in love with a demon? He looked at the Chaos above.

As always, he wanted to shrink away from the complex lunacy. His head knocked with sharp pain.

Unless you looked at the sky you saw only a warm night which sang of peace. The gray blades of grass, the dim bulk of trees seen with peripheral vision, the very air which held night pressed to the bosom of the earth: all spoke of a sky glad with stars.

The sky was not star-studded black, nor was it packed with woolen clouds.

The sky was bright enough that you expected your eyes to ache. It was laced and threaded with bright lines, three-dimensional shapes and a hint of dimensions beyond that.

But the brightness did not painfully contract the pupils of the unhappy, confused eye. The Chaos which had replaced the universe around innocent Earth didn’t reach physically through the atmosphere. Your head ached because the Chaos up there was always on the edge of meaning. Your mind chewed and labored and battered itself until it was exhausted, or until you gave up and shut it out.

Giles’s remembered feeling like that in his high school chemistry class. Mr. Zabratto really wanted to teach college and since he understood all the material from college, he loaded his class with advanced material. But Giles and all the others who had not taken first a genuine introductory class, then honors, then beginning college chem and then advanced college chem, were simply swamped with new information and no framework for understanding it. Most of them gave up and sat glassy-eyed through lectures (for which Zabratto was always late).

The Chaos was like Mr. Zabratto’s chemistry class. But for the first time in two years, Giles looked into it and tried to understand.

How could he think with Tiffany waiting, pointedly patient, beside him, her soft breath like liquid fire rushing toward his groin?

But there were words in her breath; the wave of passion slapped his heart into a drumming throb but did nothing else.

Her words were senseless, a hissing reflection of the meaningless Chaos above, as achingly frustrating as she herself in that moment, close but untouchable.

But the words slowly graced the Chaos into a richly complex dream laced with meaning, impossible to remember or describe. With a word, a phrase or a subtle sound, she helped him see…

He sped away from Earth, from the solar system in its bed of stars, from the Milky Way with its soft companion Magellanic Clouds and its neighbors in the local group of galaxies, from the local group until it was a fuzz in the midst of swarm of other galactic clusters, from the whole of the universe until it was a blurry dot infinitely far away. The geometric point of a bearded, thoughtful Euclid, without length or width or depth.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Now Euclid, wise but weary, stretched that point into a one-dimensional line stretching to infinity left and right. Somewhere off to the left was the beginning of the universe and somewhere to the right was its end. Yes, Giles understood: the line was the universe through all of time.

Then Euclid stretched that line like an unrolling scroll into a flat sheet stretching infinitely far upward and downward. But Giles could not comprehend what that might mean.

Then he was back on Earth, seeing from the edges of vision. The web of protective illusion RJ and Hiyako had woven around him slid away and he saw mystic Jasmine wondering through the corridors of the half world. She came to a place where the wall to her left dropped away and she dared not look…

He saw a mysterious woman from a hundred years ago and felt her power, saw her half-lidded eyes that seemed to dream while awake. She too wondered the corridors until she stopped at one little brown door…

He saw his mother as a young woman in Ireland. Silver Mary Jasmine had called her but she’d been Black Mary then because of her jet-black hair. She climbed the hills to a waterfall on a moonlit night…

He heard again the pre-teen girl from the mineral spring. “The Chaos parted for a nano and know what I saw? You came through from the sky and we all got squished. Maybe I’m … dead.” Earth floated in its cocoon with the Chaos high above but in her world the Chaos was hissingly close, like if you stepped off a hill you’d fall into it…

The whispering stopped.

Shaking, Giles held slippery pieces of what he had seen and understood. Then, not caring what she might do to him, he turned on his side to face Tiffany.

She took him in her arms and pressed with electric intensity against him. His arms wrapped around her, left hand cupping her sacrum, right hand on the swell of her spine behind her beating heart.

She was not human. She might become a snake or a panther, she might dissolve into an ice storm.

It didn’t matter.

Terrified, he tried to meet the mocking smile he would see in her eyes. It took ages; he fought through lines of force to lift his eyes to hers.

Her eyes blazed like blue fire but held no mockery. They held love.

“You see me, don’t you dear?” she whispered. He nodded, wondering desperately why she asked something like that.

“I knew it,” she breathed. She stroked his face with elegant black opera gloves. Her eyes drank him in.

Him! She looked at him like he was the dearly beloved that she had lost long ago. He would have walked to the moon on hard nails for her.

“Dearest,” she said strongly but dreamily. “How I have missed this. How long the time has seemed since she –”

She caught herself. What had she been about to say? Who was she?

But he couldn’t hold back. Cupping her shining hair, he made a move to kiss her.

She hesitated an instant. Then she seemed to allow herself a pleasure that she’d thought she would deny. “Yes, yes, oh dear one, yes!” she affirmed through passionate kisses. “I want you. I’ve always wanted you.”

Could she really be speaking to him? He would have died before he stopped kissing her but she pulled back and gazed in rapture at his face, drinking it in. Did she know him from a past life?! He searched for some answering memory from another time.

She started, slowly and deliberately, as though she had made an irrevocable decision, to pull off her black gloves.

His blood kindled. Whatever she was about to do, he would love it. Would she burn him to ashes with her touch?

But she stopped, a sparkle of tears in those magnificent eyes as she pulled her gloves back on.

She stroked his face again and again, and Giles was sure she saw him now just as he was. “I can’t let go of you just yet, dear one,” she said. She kissed him again, but this time the kiss was soft, the kind his mother had planted on numerous scraped elbows.

Almost for the first time, he felt the pain of loss. His crazy, wonderful mother was no more.

Tiffany patted him on the cheek, eyes full of sympathy. Then she stood.

“Back to the salt mines, then,” she said sadly, and disappeared into the night.

Giles lay still for a long time before he walked dazedly back to the festival grounds. It seemed his sparkling black-haired mother walked beside him.