The earth is in a constant state of reincarnation. Everything but me is changing. The bud becomes the flower becomes the leaf. I am the same width, the same weight, the same density as I was eight-hundred and twenty-eight years ago. Even an English Oak would have grown, would have changed in all that time.

     You are feeling her... aren't you... her memories, the things she felt and saw. He looks to the plaque, to his words there. To the woman who is truly only memory now. He expects only the jewelry he buried with her remains. Perhaps, even those diamonds have let go of this earth...

     "When the time has come for me to empty myself of all of my tales, I swear to you, good gentlemen, that your stories shall not remain untold."

     "I fought my demons literally. My selfishness, my fear, the nine-headed beast of Chaos. I even burned in the sun once. Unpleasant, but you know... I needed it. I needed to just be... reborn. So... I was. Again... and again...and again...sacrificing myself over and over, only to rise again the next evening and assess my state." Dark eyes lift to you. "It was my bridge, I guess."

     "Oh oes, about the king. He was belched on shore, entangled in the lettuce of the sea and pushed up by the waves onto the sand. Well, he was lucky he came in with the evening tide, or he would have burned up for certain."

     And apple trees would come and go. When the first ones died, their children took over. It's a copse within the garden now. Covered with blossoms in the spring, apples in the autumn, pink leaves turned to brown in the winter. No stone to mark her spot but a plaque engraved with a Welsh poem. The title? To Penelope...

     The dreams of places, do they not also dream? Each universe is a multitude of parallels and What Ifs. What if -- two magic words to me. What if I had looked within myself just once instead of foisting all my cares on those around me?

     I coughed my way onshore like an asthmatic seal, gorging up sand and gagging on sea water. The sun baked the liquid off my shoulders. I could feel it igniting each strand of my hair. I have become the roman candle I always seemed.

     "Do you think we've thrown a wheel?", Helen peers out the window at the blackness nervously, then looks back to her sisters. "What could be the matter?"