“Life just changes. Like a stormy headwind, Camille thought. First blowing the sails in one direction and then, without warning at all, shifting course.”

“She was brave, wasn’t she? Look what she’d done. She hadn’t run back to the safety of San Francisco, but toward something dangerous and unknown. And Oscar had gone with her. He was it, the man she wanted to be with, and not just in sporadic or imagined trysts, Camille slowed her crawling as it dawned on her. She loved him. She loved Oscar Kildare. She loved him enough to give up everything she’d ever known.”

“She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.”

“We have no choice. You need to go one direction and I need to go another. But we'll take the love with us. No one can ever take that away.”

“Why?” breathed Boy 412. “Why me?”“You have astonishing Magykal power. I told you before. Maybe now you’ll believe me.” She smiled.“I—I thought the power came from the ring.”“No. It comes from you. Don’t forget, the Dragon Boat recognized you even without the ring. She knew. Remember, it was last worn by Hotep-Ra, the first ExtraOrdinary Wizard. It’s been waiting a long time to find someone like him.”“But that’s because it’s been stuck in a secret tunnel for hundreds of years.”“Not necessarily,” said Marcia mysteriously. “Things have a habit of working out, you know. Eventually.”

“Maybe if i just lie under the sun long enough I will melt like an ice cube and all my sadness will evaporate into the air so i can start again.”

“Yeah, I said the universe. Call it Fate or The Force or whatever you want. Everything is everything. It's all part of one big system. I like to think of it as the universe.”