4th Interval

Heryshaf walked on, and the jellyfish's words needled him. Many had gone down into the deep and not come back, the creature had said. But I am not like them, he thought at once, and then thought it again, and then again, and it took him a good while to notice that he was.

For he was pleased with himself. He had out-bargained the jellyfish, and stood his ground, and now his mind was replaying the meeting for him -- improving it slightly with each telling, adding a sharper question, adding an audience that gasped at his discernment.

This is the sweetest of the sleeps, and the hardest to wake from, because nothing in it hurts.

Heryshaf stopped walking. He watched the little story assemble itself once more, admired it honestly, and then declined to finish it. He let the applause go unheard. He did not tell it to himself again.

And as he declined it, there came to him, for no reason he could name, the cold shoulder of Ordok. He stood on it again in memory --- the day he had climbed that mountain to ask the meaning of life and it had given back only its enormous silence, which had answered nothing and had been the truest answer he was ever given. The cold climbed up through his hooves and the little audience in his head --- the gasping crowd, the sharper question --- went quiet at last, as though a great stone had been laid over them. Then it passed, and he was only standing on a road again.

There was a small pang, like a hunger refused. Then it passed.

'Vanity feeds on being watched,' he thought, 'even when the only one watching is me.'

And the air, once more, was finer.