He hung quivering and lost in that lightless emptiness. His triumph, for the moment, was tasteless. For was it triumph? Had that succession of events which resulted in Dark Fire's death been inevitable--part of the pattern after all?
He shrank into himself so that even the mother universe and its searching brilliance seemed not to exist. Now he was as alone as mortality could be, feeding on his inner resources, a circuitous being independent of the flux and strain of conflicting energies. He was master of himself for this naked, two dimensional instant of time!
... No. There was the past, whipping his every thought and action into submission with infinitely reaching arms of cause and result. He had not escaped....
In that moment of realization, a new fury entered the life of Devil Star. It came like the roar of a monster full-born in the sub-swirls of his mind ... a monster clawing, rearing, fighting for emergence into the searching light of his conscious mind--and unable to emerge!
He was shaken to the depths by that beast--that depthless, unuttered longing which he could not give a name. Entombed in his self-imposed darkness, away from the entropic surge and sway of the universe, he felt that longing engulf him.
"It is something I want," he gasped. "Something I must have. Must!"
... Then, slipping unbidden from another corner of his mind, came the feeling of solution. And that new thought held him rigid. He did not dare to believe that the monster was out of his prison. And yet, what else could it be? Hope surged through him.
"I was in another universe," his thoughts rioted. "In that moment before <i>she</i> would have had me fling out my central purple core and die, I was transported to another band of space, a band I never saw before. And when I returned to the band of life, my will to die was gone."
He hung laxly, surfeited with emotion. It was that he longed for. And if it were not--he thrust the clangorous thought away.
Like a cocoon unfolding, he pushed aside the darkness enclosing him. And as he beheld the resplendent lens of the vast universe, the prime conviction of his life returned. Surely that universe and its myriad avenues was not mirrored into being by the counterplay of energies at the beginning of time. Destiny could be turned aside. Had he not so turned it? And the answer to its turning lay in that hidden band of space.