Or, more precisely, something wasn't there. If the crystal-fire air were a cloud deck, I'd say the clouds had parted to show the black sky beyond, dotted with stars. Except that the lights I could see, there in the center of the crystal-fire air, weren't stars—stars don't shift and blink like that. And the darkness—it had the infinite sense of depth that you see in the night sky, but I knew, knew, it was bounded with the crystal-fire. Maybe I was looking into the infinite depths of a sky, I thought suddenly.