3rd Interval

He woke on the sand with the taste of the rock pool still bitter on his tongue, and the crab nowhere to be seen.

Something small and mean rose in him at once. He had been given a vision of the whole world burning and saved, and what he felt was not awe but irritation -- that the crab had gone without explaining, that his legs ached, that he was cold and no closer to an answer than he had been at the river.

The old machinery began its work. It offered him a complaint, ready made, and invited him to speak it aloud to the empty beach.

He did not speak it. He stood in it instead, and let it burn where it stood, and did not add a single word to it.

He observed the irritation in him and watched it try to trigger him. Watching without reacting to it was harder than the battle with the crab, for there was nothing to wrestle against except himself. He couldn't fight the rising anger within him. He could only watch it. Observe his compulsion to become it.

And as he did, something strange happened.

The irritation thinned, the way smoke thins, and something else came through it. The air in his lungs felt -- finer.

And for the space of a breath he was not on the sand at all. He was in a small stone room below something very heavy, with a door in it that did not open, and there was a man in there who had stopped counting the days and did not mind. The picture went as quickly as it had come and he could make nothing of it whatsoever.

But he found that he had stopped counting too.