The Sun lifted His foot as if He were climbing a staircase, and the world shifted around us. I did not feel it, like I had when Ristriel brought me to my daughter. There was no dizzying sensation, no falling, no wind in my hair. I simply was one place and then I was another, a tunnel of light like a tilting hallway, never ending.
“Tell me of your dream,” Sun asked.
I flushed, my lie spinning webs around me. I could not remember my dreams from the night before, so I grasped the first segments of one I could remember. “I was a cat, but then I was not.”
He glanced down at me, confusion wrinkling the golden skin between His eyebrows.
“That is, I started the dream as a cat, but then I was someone else, watching the cat,” I explained. “And there was a ball of string I could not unwind, and it was increasingly frustrating, until I realized it was cheese carved to look like a ball of string.” I laughed; it seemed so much stranger said out loud. Remembering my earlier excuse, however, I made up the rest. “And then there was a great wolf chasing me, and my owner was trying to fight him off, and . . . I woke up.”
The Sun seemed content with my explanation. “Strange, indeed. I would love to hear more of your dreams.”
“I do not think we have the time to cover them all. Besides, the longer you live away from a dream, the harder it becomes to remember.”
He waited a breath before speaking. “If you were to be with Me, Ceris, you could tell Me of your dreams every morning.”
I shrunk into myself, feeling guilt of all things. Like I was being dishonest with Him—technically I had been—even though I had promised Him nothing.
“Sun, I don’t know if—”
“Saiyon,” He urged gently. “You may call Me Saiyon.”
My earlier thought dropped into the tunnel of light, forgotten. “Not ‘Satto’？” That was what many in His palace had called Him.
“I have many names.” He lifted His other hand and placed it atop mine, where I held the crook of His arm. “Saiyon was my first.”
A mix of cold and heat swirled in my belly. I felt like I had been entrusted with something sacred, and that made me feel loved, special. There were very, very few who knew this name, as I would later learn. I was . . . touched.
“Would you like to see the heavens?” He spoke more quietly now, His voice reverent. “I will show them to you, if you wish.”
I gaped at Him, His broad and powerful features. “I-I thought it was too dangerous.”
“The danger is held off, for now, but it won’t be long before it resurfaces. I would show you the kingdom. And our daughter, if you wish.”
Surril! Her name sang in my very bones, but the glee of reuniting with her flashed to fear. Would she tell her father that I had already been to see her? Would I have to falsify my reaction and make it seem like my first?
Would Saiyon accept that I had found another celestial creature to take me, and leave it at that? Would He be angry, thinking I’d endangered myself?
If He truly cared about me, would any of it matter?
Squeezing Saiyon’s arm, I nodded my consent.
The light tunnel brightened and spiraled away, and I saw the stars—so many stars. It awed me no less than when Ristriel had taken me into the night sky. I wanted to see Surril first—she was my greatest treasure—but fear for Ristriel kept my mouth still. Instead, I let Saiyon take me where He willed.
I was not disappointed.
He took me deeper into the stars, to wild clouds of every color and shade imaginable, so vivid and bizarre I could never re-create them in stitchwork or watercolor or anything else. They were beautiful and beastly, and we passed through them, clouds of green and crimson and turquoise passing under my hand. I saw planets. Enormous planets made of swirling smoke, with demigod moons spinning around them, gold, silver, copper, topaz. I saw rings as Ristriel had described, great circles of worlds light and stone. We passed over charcoal-encrusted ruins, covered in rolling rocks with jagged edges lined with ice. When I asked about it, Saiyon told me it was an ancient battlefield from long ago, and by the distant look in His eyes, I knew it was a battle He had fought in.
I saw enormous moving necklaces of stars, which Saiyon called galaxies, twirling and beaming, so grand that even Saiyon seemed small in comparison.
And then He took me to Surril, and I was so glad to see her I laughed and wept and hugged her. She greeted me with eager arms and her father with a reverent bow. Again, I could not stay long, and I hated it, but I took in what I could. Her lovely face, her tinkling laugh, her stories of the siblings around her and the great storm she had seen on the Earth Mother, on the other side of the world from where I traveled.