I didn’t know who I was anymore. Days earlier I hadn’t been sure of myself, but I had rewritten my character, and now I expressed myself with a self-confident demeanor. I didn’t know what reality was, either. Was the life I now lived reality? Or was the life I left behind the truth? Perhaps my life as a mundane journalist had been nothing but a story, too. Perhaps the original story had been rewritten long before I became a part of the story.

My mundane life had become fantastic, and the surreal was now reality. Bathed in the conical blue light from Destiny’s Price, I closed my eyes and surrendered with arms spread wide, palms up.

“Take me,” I said. “Teach me.”

Nothing happened. I stood for an hour with anticipation, but it was futile.

“Maybe you’re trying too hard,” Simon suggested. I heard his voice behind me in the distance. “Maybe you should just let it be, let things flow.”

“And maybe I’m not trying hard enough,” I said when I remembered Gran-ma-maw’s listening technique.

I used Trolldom magic to listen to Destiny’s Price. I pushed my mind into the blue light that engulfed me. I felt my impressions flow into the tingling sensation that danced along my skin. A vibration came from nowhere yet everywhere; it’s as though the vibration had always existed, but I noticed it for the first time. The blue light intensified, and I felt it suck my mind and soul into it.

I flew for what felt an eternity, but I knew my mind traveled but a short distance from my body to the orb before me. After eternities wrapped in countless forever-dreams, I appeared inside Destiny’s Price, and that was when I saw her.

“You came,” she said. “I didn’t think you would.”

She was five feet tall, but she didn’t stand. Instead she floated in the middle of the blue sphere, and I hovered before her within Destiny’s Price. She was naked yet sexless with the features and shape of a beautiful woman, yet she had no nipples or body hair. Her amber hair contrasted in a most wondrous way against her light-blue skin. In her presence passion burned and roiled like some invisible force, and a vibration flowed from her body that made my soul shudder with excitement.

It wasn’t sensual passion; it was the passion of inspiration. I felt like I had just completed the perfect news article for my newspaper, or had just written the next Lord of the Rings, a classic. I felt the power—her power—and I knew it was the power of Story: inspiration and creativity and excitement bled together into one fathomless and incomprehensible Story of the human tale.

“What are you?” I asked.