For an endless lonely time, he floated in darkness, aching with tears.

He remembered clearly now everything that had happened in the secret passages of the magic building where the Miyazukis lived. How he longed for Jasmine’s smile, for Hiyako’s embrace, for RJ’s bear hug, for any touch at all.

He had wasted his life. He had let his one love go off to the accident which killed her because he didn’t want to lose his high score. He had yearned after a demon and she had betrayed him. Soon he would dissolve into static and Chaos and never feel anything again…

Something small and nubbled was in his hand.

Somewhere beyond the blackness he had just managed to reach into his pocket. Now he held something. A small dry thing, smooth but with small bumps. He had felt something like this recently. What was it?

But Melanie was driving away and he had a high score and he’d see her in an hour anyway.

No, she was gone where he could never get her back. That story was over, over. Incomplete, trailing, but he would never find out now how it might have ended.

He forced his attention back to the thing in his hand.

It was whatever Tiffany had given to him when he walked off the stage. She had kissed him and pressed something into his hand, whispering, “Don’t look at this until later. And remember my name, love.”

Now was certainly “later.”

It was about the size and shape of a lemon but too small and gnarly. And what was a lemon anyway, just a thing too bitter to eat. You’d have to spit it out. Jasmine was gone and Melanie was dead and Epiphany had betrayed... No, Tiffany had betrayed him.

There were too many mysteries. What had Jerry been about to call Killington that started with “Vah?” Who was the familiar looking stocky man on Cloud Rock? What had Tiffany showed him in the Chaos, with the image of Euclid pulling the line that was the whole history of the universe into a sheet? And now this familiar-feeling gnarled fruit. Too much. He was ready to dissolve into Chaos.

He longed to tell little Jasmine a story, to eat RJ’s amazing corn bread, to hear Hiyako’s deeply meditative shakuhachi. She always held that flute so gently in her slender hands. It gleamed a rich golden brown and the bottom end curved up and out like the ghost of a delicate saxophone.

And she played as still as a sunset, the way her teacher, the great Yamaguchi Goro, had played. Her only movement was the occasional flicker of her fingers and the subtle manipulations of mouth and cheeks.

Giles wept with desire to be in that safe haven of good magic. He had wept just so the last time Hiyako played for him and she had taken his soft sobs into the music about the young cranes who mourned the passing of their parents.

She had reached the long, low ending note of the piece about nesting cranes and passed on to Kogarashi. Why did she play that devastating piece for Giles, who must soon go back into the dangerous world of the Festival?

Hiyako had told him once the story of the piece. When the composer was forty-seven, an earthquake had turned his city of Tokyo into an inferno that burned, among many things, the school he had founded. On a cold, windy November day Nakao Tozan, exhausted and empty in a little park among smoking ruins, looking perhaps with hollow eyes at a cedar tree which had been planted there when he was three by a visiting American president named Ulysses S. Grant, took out his shakuhachi and composed the piece she now played.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

On she played, still as a cedar tree beside a garden pond as the flute sank to a wavering “why?” before lashing again at the cold November winds. Giles wrapped his arms around himself. The man in the park bowed his head to accept the loss but broke out in fresh tears and it was all in the music.

Nakao Tozan, Giles remembered, had composed and taught for thirty-three more years after this. What seems like an end is not the end. The trial he himself would soon face was a small paragraph in the story of humanity. In a long-ago time, at a different pace of life, an artist had taken the desolation of spirit he felt now and shaped it into something immortal.

This, he told himself, is why we go to see Tosca or Romeo and Juliet, why we weep with King Lear when all is lost. This is why I sometimes tell folk tales which are unspeakably sad.

When the last note trailed softly to a silence beyond hope, Giles found, as Hiyako had intended, that he hoped again. His spirit could get up and wander into the corridors. There Jasmine waited and he told her the story as he knew it, up to where Doree fell into stars. Jasmine nodded, her small, intelligent face taking in every word.

Then she led him into his mother’s apartment as she had not done when he last saw her. Silver Mary was still alive, bustling around in the next room and the ghostly smell of bangers and mash made his throat ache with yearning.

A sound swelled, a rushing of water. His mother walked in from the kitchen and stood regarding the wall where hung an unfinished painting of a circle of stones. She reached out and a golden ring with a blue stone glinted in the light.

A hand reached through the wall, silver with a palm of gold. Giles gasped. “I knew ye’d coomb,” his mother’s rich Irish voice crooned, soft as velvet.

The silver hand touched her heart and she fell against the wall without another word, her face radiant with ecstasy.

Heart as low and solemn as Hiyako’s flute, Giles made to walk to her side, to look long at her face. But Jasmine pointed to a yellow writing pad which held funny letters. A slender circle with a line across like Saturn, followed by a small curly capital E, then an o, then an o with a slash through it. Those letters were followed by “a,” “v,”, “i” and “a.” Eoravia? It sounded like the name of a mystical country, the kind that might have a vasty waterfall on a moonlit night.

But no, those were Greek letters!

That barred circle at the start was a theta, which stood for the sound “th.” What looked like a capital E was really a lower-case epsilon which worked like the English lowercase e. “o” was still “o,” but the circle with the slash was “phi” which made the same sound as the letter “f,” and the thing which looked like a “v” was really a “nu” which was the Greek letter “n.”

The word they spelled out was Theophania.

Giles had taken a year of Greek in college. He found that he knew the name Theophania. It meant “epiphany.” And he could easily imagine such a name, after decades or centuries of usage, being shaped and transformed into another.

Tiffany.

She hadn’t abandoned him at all. She had willed all of this, somehow. Allowed him to be captured, allowed him to foil his own rescue, allowed him to be put to the sleeping darkness.

She had told him to look later at whatever she’d given him, and to remember her name.

Well, he’d remembered her name. It translated as “manifestation of God,” which was what an epiphany was.

The afternoon light of his mother’s apartment dissolved into lines of Chaos. He could see his hand just faintly.

The thing he held was a greenish half gnarled lemon-like fruit. At last he placed what it was: the fruit from the story! The fruit Doree had given the traveler to knit him solidly to Cloud Rock.

What had Tiffany meant him to do with it?

He supposed he should peel it and eat it, and so he did.

The juice was sweet as summer gold, like papaya. With each bite he felt more solid. He closed his eyes and swallowed the last bite, dropped the peel.

It was only dark now because his eyes were closed. He felt a solid, uneven, hard surface under his back.

He opened his eyes.

He lay under swirling Chaos on top of a red rock. Beside him, tailor fashion, sat a twelve-year-old girl.

“Who are you?” he said in wonderment.

“I already told you, doof,” she said in answer. “My name’s Doree. But it’s short for Dorothea. Which, for your information, means ‘gift of God.’”

And she tossed her head so that her hair rippled. Hair so black it was nearly blue.