The tale spun on as Giles stared at a slowly swelling Killington from his swivel chair, held down by firm hands, as Giles faced an audience increasingly restless and confused…

Rütiger Benz reveled in his reputation as a madman who produced results.

The contract with the US Government in the footsteps of Werner von Braun suited him to a T. The sad old building in New Mexico was dilapidated even at the height of its powers but his American staff were all afraid of him. Except that slip of a black-haired girl, who looked at him so saucily. He liked that, though he would also enjoy seeing her in pain, if he could find a noble reason.

Circuits and gears and wires and readouts made what was really magic look like science until they day came when that cringing weasel Ed Begley, the perfect dog, sat in the chair with wires attached to his skull. He held out to Ed the mixture of chemicals and powdered mushrooms which would free him to travel to wherever Gerald was now.

He told Ed just before he drank, “This will be quite an experience for you, you lucky dog. You’re likely to find yourself on an island of a world, like, oh let us say like an asteroid in space. Keep your head down and look sharp all around you. I want to know as much as I can about the place you find yourself. And Begley! You will see if you look sharp, very sharp, an edge like this place has been cut from the world.” Knowing already, you see, that he was going to find wherever Gerald had fallen to his death and cut that place out from the world. He just needed to know where it had been so he could go back in time and make that sharp-edge cut.

Ed swallowed the noisome mess and a few moments later, woke up with that perfect tale of a piece of red rock floating free of the world … and a child with golden powers, which was odd. And the vital piece of information: Sedona, Arizona. How Rrrrr had snatched at that clue, that one important key. He knew where, he would now poke around in time until he found when.

Back to the control room with the thick key which only he had. The door closed behind him and he could drop the human façade. He could sit in the dark and reach out a swelling hand through layers. Oh, he had equipment in there so that it might look like he was fiddling with dials and switches but that was just for show, just to focus his human hand.

The other half of the room vanished and he looked at Sedona. He found the big Red Rock easily enough. He found the Steve Diamond conference center with its hot springs. A workshop was going on right now, some blather about Reaching Your Deepest Potential. But none of this was what he wanted. The event he wanted was over and done.

Should he use it now? The gilt edge, the golden claw he’d saved for some special act of delicate torment for this world. He put out his hand and curled it around one pocket of space which was not in this room but which shivered deliciously when he stroked it. Soon.

He began searching through time. His machine purring as smoothly as Seward’s automobile in Carmen’s San Francisco, he sailed through days and nights in that run-down center below the glorious red rock. Soon he would pull from the rift in the walls of the ancient corridors the golden knife he had once forged. How it gleamed! He plowed uncaring through the years, knowing he would use it soon.

There! His hands itched, his fingers curled and twitched as the moment whizzed by: a blooded corpse, a flicker of hysteria from the ephemerals under bright iron rock and searing copper sky. Too far, too far!

Killington, grumpy and splatting wet farts, roared to a halt and left half of the room focused on the conference center while time ran drearily forward. A workshop was gathering and it was the right one, almost surely. He felt the presence of the child Ed had seen do gilt magic. Which one was she?

He turned and walked out of the control room, locking the door behind him.

Why would he leave the control room at that crucial point? Where did he go? Giles felt more deeply the discontent and confusion of the audience as the story floundered. He went to get that golden knife, he told them desperately! The audience settled back down.

Yes, Rrrrr the demon needed to get back into those ancient corridors to get his gilt edge. With a chill, Giles realized that he was heading for the broom closet where at that moment in another part of the story he (as Robby Baker in Ed Begley’s body) and Mary (his own mother and Robby’s wife) were in secret conference.

Killington stopped, Giles begged, realizing… realizing that…

Killington stopped just outside of the broom closet. The golden knife which he had left in the care of a lesser demon had been stolen, given to some slip of a girl who had been sent … back to the very place and time to be the girl with the golden power that Begley had seen! He took his hand off the closet door to go back to the lab, to watch all the workshop participants and identify the girl.

And out popped Begley with that saucy trollop. The good lap dog taking his bone with that slip of a saucy girl. Pleasing in its symmetry. Killington was amused, and walked away, except that Ed called to him. He showed them the lab, curious to see what secret they would reveal. The woman Mary easily identified the girl at the workshop he should focus on.

A horrible splat of breaking flesh and bone! His son fell to the rock and died before his eyes, before he could do anything! And somehow, Ed found the courage to turn like the worm he was and knock him out, him, a demon with infinite power! He should have chased Begley down to the ends of the earth, and he would once he had brought back his son. He would find him and punish him and he would punish that saucy girl, but for now nothing else mattered.

Back once more, focus on the girl who had power she shouldn’t have had. The power of his gilt edge. But how to get it? He searched through the people at the workshop until he found a kindred soul. Tanya Honey, the workshop leader. All her piety and New Age featheriness couldn’t hide from him, the old master, how much she enjoyed dominating others. Reach through her, that woman, at a point when she was most extremely exasperated with the girl Doree … there! Doree, goaded just right, afraid to be sent to sleep, shaped the gold power into exactly what it was: a knife. For a crucial moment he snatched it!

The gilt edge! Bright and hot and splendid it burned in his hands! He stopped to admire its power and his cleverness in making it! And now, what would happen if he just did this…

He plunged the gilt edge and the eons of poisonous hatred spilled out and spat from its leading edge. He meant to cut just the rock, slip it away from beneath his falling boy so that he would never land, never crack his mortal skull.

But the gilt edge never reached the rock. It was the wrong day sometime in the future, and the sky was so thick and blue and delightful to rend! Simple as cutting a heart from a slippery chest, popping an eyeball from its socket, flipping a whale from its ocean womb to gasp its life out on a beach.

The earth slid from its celestial sphere of sky as easily as a boiled beet from its skin.

The demon roared! All the others lifted their shaggy or horned or beautiful heads. The wall was gone, how effing long had it been gone? They poured out, boiled out from caves and tunnels, from rifts in reality for the sky was gone.

Chaos ruled above!

And the Storyteller crouched in a dark place, trying to weave Chaos into a story…