"Nor can I," Numair replied. Hawk leaned forward and kissed him one more time, on the cheek. He stepped back then, folding his wings, and watched Numair walk away. He waited until Numair had climbed the stairs to the building's entrance, and then walked away himself with an air of giddy happiness.

Numair proceeded quietly through first a spacious atrium, to a wood-paneled room where a blindingly-white portal sat in one wall. The canine-shaped person seated beside the portal waved him through without a word; the coldly-lit room on the other side of the portal had a desk and a podium on either side of it, but they were empty, so Numair walked past them without pausing.

He went out into a different, deep pink dawn, on a plaza with a huge statue that features skulls arranged around a seated figure. Water poured from the jaws of the skulls, into a pool around the statue. There were a few people out and about already, but not many.

By the time he was crossing the bridge, the pink dawn had lifted, and the sky had gone greenish. And by the time he was walking down an empty, dimly lit hallway towards a closed door at its end, the light had changed again, into a regular pale sunlight that shafted in through the windows at one side. His footsteps echoed.

He'd woken up lying in a bed of golden-brown grass, opening only one eye.