text: Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella
  
  Nita recovered soon enough, and the evening continued sliding smoothly by. Food and drink were more or less continuously manifested through the good offices of Kit's mama ( "What? Don't start with me about the kitchen, at least I know where everything is in here, and anyway he's worse with food than I am, and anyway I've been out of the kitchen as much as I've been in it, I sure now know more about mochteroofs than you do, you wouldn't know a semblance receptor site if one bit you in the butt, and in other news Legs here is doing all the work anyway, he's wasted as a white-collar type! More wine, Tom?" ), and good cheer filled the space. Filif was stepping into and out of his decorations at will, alternately chatting with the guests and then resuming his adornments with the glee of a small child opening the same Christmas gift over and over and liking it better every time.
  
  Meanwhile, the entertainment system, apparently feeling ignored in the face of so much unbridled human and extrahuman interaction, had begun shouting at the party guests. Even after Kit lectured it on proper behavior there seemed no way to placate it except to turn it on and leave it running.
  
  "Nothing from off this planet," Kit's mama called from the kitchen. "I still haven't got over that thing with all the tentacles."
  
  Kit threw Nita a glance that suggested he was in no rush to let her know that "the thing with all the tentacles" had been one of Carmela's leave-it-running,-I-want-to-record-that-late-night-anime errors, and was way too Earth-local for comfort. Nita snickered and got herself more cider.
  
  "If you just leave it to its own devices like this, of course it's going to misbehave," Dairine said, wandering through, picking up one of the buffalo wings that Nita was still recovering from, and ingesting half of it without turning a hair. "Tell it to do something and you'll get a lot less grief from it. Mechanicity abhors a structure vacuum. What's that? 'The Christmas Channel'?"
  
  "This could either be very good or very very bad," Ronan said as the TV guide came up. "...'The Christmas Invasion...' Well, okay. Fair play to them. 'Bugs Bunny's Looney Tunes Christmas Tales'? Surely you jest....'The Big Little Jesus?' Is that actually in black and white?" And then a dumbfounded pause. "'Santa Claus Versus the Martians'? What in the name of the sludge at the bottom of the Powers' bottomless Bucket is that??"
  
  "Probably something about the True Meaning of Christmas," Dairine said, folding down crosslegged in front of the TV and filching the remote from Nita.
  
  Ronan flopped down beside her, looking genially scornful. "Might as well ask about the true meaning of life."
  
  "If you see any pigs around," Nita said, relieving Dairine of the remote and moving another page down in the onscreen TV guide, "might try asking them..."
  
  "Does he even do Christmas?"
  
  "He's everywhere," Kit said. "Why wouldn't he?"
  
  "Pigs?" Kit's father said from where he'd wound up on the sofa next to Filif, sounding a little bemused. "Why would there be pigs?"
  
  "Um..."
  
  "Is this one of those explanations that's going to make me sorry I asked?"
  
  Nita laughed. "No. Just confused. But you won't be alone, not at all."
  
  Kit started attempting to explain the Transcendent Pig to his father. Nita, listening to this process with one ear, found it to be going about the way she'd thought it would. She turned her attention instead to the group in front of the TV. This had briefly flipped to one of the video channels, where some boy band was singing "Santa Claus is Coming To Town" . "...He knows when you are sleeping... He knows when you're awake..."
  
  From the nearby easy chair, Tom snickered. "'Kindly old elf or CIA spook?'"
  
  "Yeah, exactly," Ronan said, "Between the intelligence-gathering and the coming-down-your-chimney-to-eat-your-food stuff, it's all a bit creepy."
  
  "Not to mention unlikely, in terms of the physics," Dairine said. "You figure, four hundred million kids under ten on earth, give or take... Say a hundred ten million households, right? And let's assume there's at least one good kid in each..."
  
  Ronan flopped back on the floor and covered his eyes. "So adult centric. I distrust the math already."
  
  "And then you've got, what, thirty-one time zones to deal with over the entire Christmas Eve period? And Earth's rotation. Do the math and you get sort of a thousand visits a second, rounding up. A hundred ten or so million stops... forget the evenness of the statistical distribution, it'll make you crazy..."
  
  "It's making me crazy already."
  
  "So the sleigh has to be doing six hundred fifty-odd miles per second, right? Even though it has to be carrying at least three hundred thousand tons' worth of payload even if everybody's getting nothing but Lego and Barbies. Then you have nine reindeer, counting Rudolph, and forget 'tiny' if they're pulling a load like that, which pushes the whole business up to about the mass of the QEII—"
  
  "Was math even meant to be used for these purposes? I really have my doubts."
  
  "And all this is happening in atmosphere, remember, like a constant spacecraft re-entry. Fourteen quintillion joules of energy per second getting expended isn't going to do them any good, they'll all be vaporized before they hit the fourth or fifth house. And then there's the G force—"
  
  Filif had slipped out of his ornaments again for a little while and was looming over this discussion with some confusion. But apparently the G force became too much for him. "It's very nice as a physical-universe explanation," Filif said, "but of course the methodology's completely flawed."
  
  Dairine peered up at him. "What?"
  
  "Well, since this being is plainly one of the Powers, if a bit of an anarchic or chaotic one," Filif said, "why are you trying to solve this problem inside a single dimension? It doesn't work. A dimensionally transcendent being like one of the Powers would hardly limit itself to functioning in only three or four dimensions. The evidence clearly indicates someone working in six or better. See, the temporal element—"
  
  Kit's pop looked up at that. "Wait, I thought time was the fourth dimension —"
  
  All the wizards in the room groaned. "No no no," Kit moaned, "too much popular culture!"
  
  "Listen, don't blame me, I hit New Math and bounced," Kit's dad said. "Or maybe I got it from Rod Serling."
  
  "—but once you're into six-and-up, millions of apparent visits to physical reality per second is no great problem. It's only inside the orthogonal plane of time that everything seems to be happening amazingly fast. But if you're one of the Powers, there's not the slightest rush. You slide sidewise into the applicable orthotemporal dimension, just that one, mind you, and then you drop off whatever playthings are required make a drop. And then you pull out again and restock at your leisure, and then dip into that timeplane again. When you're in D7 or thereabouts, the temporality of D3 and D4 is hardly an issue..."
  
  "That's it," Ronan said, "he's solved Santa. We have nothing left to live for."
  
  Tom started chuckling and couldn't seem to stop. Carl, who'd been in the kitchen chatting with Kit's mama and Marcus, now wandered out with a bemused expression. "What?"
  
  "Santa Claus," Tom said to Carl with great seriousness, "is one of the Powers that Be."
  
  Carl looked at him thoughtfully. "Did you get the bottom of the eggnog?"
  
  Tom looked askance at him, and then started laughing again. Most of the people in the room looked confused. And Carl sat on the arm of the sofa and told the story of how once upon a time Tom's father got The Bottom of the Eggnog—where all the nutmeg winds up if you forget to shake the jug—and then (due to nutmeg's psychoactive qualities) had to go to the ER due to what Tom described as Accidentally Seeing God. Shortly half the room was helpless with laughter. Tom, meanwhile, seeing that Marina had indeed just brought out the first of the eggnog jugs, got up and went over to it and shook it in the most ostentatious way possible before pouring Carl a glass.
  
  Filif was watching and listening to all this in fascination. Nita leaned over to him. "I think this is some of what Christmas is about," she said. "Tradition. The stories that come out this time of year."
  
  "Old interactions," Filif said, "that can be depended on. Reinforcements of the cyclical nature of, well, Nature. Tales and reminiscences and old jokes..."
  
  "There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories / of Christmases long long ago..." Ronan sang.
  
  "We need him tomorrow night," said Kit's mama through the passthrough. "He sings on key, and he plainly has something better than a bucket to carry a tune in. Whoever's bucket it is. You are not going anywhere tomorrow, you hear me?"
  
  Ronan just grinned.
  
  "Look," Dairine said, "let's go downstairs and leave the oldsters to their own devices—"
  
  "Do I detect the sleepover beginning?" Kit's pop said.
  
  Carmela rose up in great dignity and grabbed Filif by one frond. "Might as well," she said. "We'll leave you to talk grownup talk... we know you've been dying to get us out of here."
  
  There was less disagreement with this than Nita would have expected, and more good-natured laughter. "Anything you people want to take downstairs with you?"
  
  "Make another pot of the hot chocolate?"
  
  "Way ahead of you, Leprechaun. It's right there on the stove staring at you."
  
  The younger participants mouthed Leprechaun?! at one another.
  
  "And there's some ice cream, too. That double chocolate Kit likes. Nita, maybe you want to grab that, and the bowls and spoons..." Kit's mama glanced at her watch. "No point in telling you to get some sleep sometime tonight because we know you won't," Kit's mama said. "And for once I don't care. If things get noisy, just do whatever you have to to keep it under control, all right?"
  
  There was a general chorus of "Okay" and "G'night" and "Thanks, Mrs. Rodriguez" as the group making for the puptents headed down the stairs. But as she followed Dairine and Carmela and Ronan and Filif and Matt and Marcus and Sker'ret toward the stairs, Nita looked over her shoulder and saw Kit's mama stop him as he picked up the pot of cocoa.
  
  "Sweetie, I keep meaning to ask you..."
  
  "What, Mama?"
  
  "All this stuff Legs has brought us is really lovely..."
  
  "Yeah, it is!"
  
  "And you should thank him again. But one question."
  
  "Yeah?"
  
  She lowered her voice. "I was kind of nervous. I didn't know if it was a religious thing..."
  
  "What?"
  
  "Why is so much of this food blue?"
  
  Nita hung back a little to help Kit with the cocoa if he needed it. "Is she okay?" she said. "They don't think we're ditching them?"
  
  "They're fine," Kit said. "They look about ready to start Adult Talk. Best time for us to get out, yeah?"
  
  Nita nodded as they got to the bottom of the stairs. Kit's basement looked much like hers, except tidier: it wasn't the catch-all area that her family's basement had turned into over time. Over against the back wall were several wide vertical dark patches that marked inactive portals, but one, the central one, glowed golden with activity and light from its far side. They stepped through.
  
  Nita looked around and breathed out, nodding. Dairine's description of Roshaun's puptent space from his previous visit as "overdone" was at best an inadequate summation of a tall bright space full of gilding, of rich carpets and hangings and ornately carven furniture. Instead of the usual bright light pouring in from the hot bright sun of Wellakh, though, the windows were dark, and lamps standing on tall pedestals around the edges of the room were lit, casting a subdued light over everything, catching the glint of a gem here, the sheen of a carving there. And in the middle of it all, in front of a trio of big sofas arranged in a U-shape, and heaps of big pillows and cushions, was a twin of the entertainment center upstairs.
  
  Kit paused and stared. "Uh... Dair, I think they might complain about us just moving this down here..."
  
  Dairine was already flopped down among the pillows. "Kit," she said, scornful but only gently so. "The very first thing I did when I got to be a wizard was duplicate a computer. You think cloning the entertainment system is a problem? Especially with hardware support." She stroked Spot's case: he arched his "back" against the gesture. "All I had to do was make sure the remotes have different ID chips in them so they won't wind up countermanding each other."
  
  "In other words," Carmela said, "now we can have... a movie marathon!!"
  
  This suggestion was met with general agreement, as the possibility had first started being mentioned about the same time the invitations went out. "After all that food," Kit said, "I wouldn't mind stretching out for a while..."
  
  "And after all that excitement," Filif said, from where he'd settled behind the centermost sofa, "a little relaxation will be welcome."
  
  "Anybody wants to change into night stuff," Dairine said, "there are changing rooms through that arch there..."
  
  "And then Ice cream!" Carmela said, while Dairine grabbed the remote and brought up the same TV guide they'd been looking at earlier. Ten minutes or so went by while everybody changed into sweats or pajamas or other comfortable latenight wear, though Marcus elected to stay in his fatigues.
  
  Filif had been reading the on-screen TV guide while the others had been putting themselves together "'A Christmas Carol,'" Filif said when everybody had made themselves comfortable. "Kit, your mama said that there would be caroling tomorrow... is this something to do with that?"
  
  Kit shook his head. "Not really. Or not directly. It's about a guy who loses the meaning of Christmas..."
  
  "Fil should see that!" Nita said.
  
  "Yeah, but which one?"
  
  Filif rustled in surprise. "There's more than one version of this story?"
  
  "It's like the bigger Christmas story that way," Ronan said. "A lot of variation, a lot of different ways to look at it..."
  
  Nita looked over at Dairine. "Line a few of them up?"
  
  She picked up the remote. "Sure. But I want popcorn!"
  
  "I'll get that," Nita said, knowing where Kit kept the stuff that he microwaved. But she'd barely stood up when she was distracted by some one appearing out of nowhere... in a red "tuxedo" pajama top and green pants.
  
  "Darryl!" Nita and Kit said in unison, as the new arrival plunged around the room hugging everyone in sight, and briefly nearly losing himself in Filif's lower branches.
  
  "My God," Ronan said. "How've your folks let you out this late?"
  
  Darryl shrugged. "They think I'm home in bed." He smiled. "I am home in bed."
  
  "Not dressed like that, I hope!"
  
  "Yup."
  
  "You're a terror!"
  
  "Not as much as him. Hi Matt!"
  
  "Gonzo boy! Have some ice cream."
  
  "How long can you stay?" Nita said.
  
  "Until I fall asleep," Darryl said, tucking himself down among the cushions. "I go back to being one of me then."
  
  "No rush about that," Matt said, handing him a bowl of ice cream. "If you eat this too fast, which of you gets the brain freeze?"
  
  "Let's find out!"
  
  A few more minutes were spent assembling popcorn and more drinks, and turning down unneeded lights, and getting everybody comfortable. Finally Dairine looked over her shoulder, "Everybody ready? And Darr, if this gets too loud for you say the word."
  
  "If this gets too loud for you, say the word," Dairine said to Darryl over her shoulder.
  
  "No problem. What's on?"
  
  "The classics," Kit said. "Roll it!"
  
  Dairine brought up the 1951 A Christmas Carol first, and on this Filif was most intent. When the Ghost cried, "Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business...!" Nita heard Filif murmur, "We could have made a wizard out of him with a little work."
  
  "Well, kind of late for that, the guy's dead," Carmela said. "But also, it's fiction. He didn't really exist."
  
  "But this came out of someone's mind?" Filif said.
  
  "Yes..."
  
  "Then he exists. All that's left is to determine now is how concretely..."
  
  Nita grinned, not sure how to even start arguing about that. When that film was done, they took a break for more popcorn, and then Dairine cued up Scrooged. Filif laughed as hard as any of them at this, which surprised Nita a little. How much research has he been doing on us?... she wondered.
  
  The end of that produced demands for fresh drinks and more popcorn and ice cream among the viewers. While these were being distributed, Dairine grabbed the remote. "Got one more for you," she said, grinning.
  
  Nita had seen that grin. Often it didn't mean well. "Okay," she said, "what have you got up your sleeve?"
  
  Dairine began punching numbers into the remote. "Should I be concerned?" Kit said. "Is it going to suddenly start spouting some new language at me that I can't cope with?"
  
  "Not at all," Dairine said, "not at all." She concentrated on the numbers she was punching into the pad, and glanced over at Spot. "Is that right?" she said.
  
  There wasn't any answer that any of them could hear, but Dairine looked satisfied. "Go," she said to the entertainment system.
  
  Moments later, the strangest screeching, howling, whining noise was coming out of the speakers. Some of the guests stared at that and the bright swirling graphics that accompanied them. But Ronan's head came right up at the sound, and his mouth fell open, and he turned a look on Dairine that was profoundly accusatory. "How did you—"
  
  "You mean you can't guess?" Dairine said, leaning back against the pillows with a smug expression.
  
  A television theme possibly much more famous in the British Isles than in North America began to play, against more of that howling sound effect. "Okay now," Ronan said, "this is just a wee bit illicit. This doesn't even air for four more days! Whose server have you hacked?"
  
  Dairine placed one hand on her heart and assumed an expression of wounded dignity. "Nobody's! How can you suggest that I would ever do such a thing?"
  
  "Just like this," Ronan said, completely unapologetic. "You saw my lips moving, I assume. Pause that first, would you? Thanks, Spotty. So. How?"
  
  If it was possible, Dairine's expression got even smugger. "The Mobiles are working on a project to store all available data," she said. "You know about that?"
  
  "The way I heard it," Ronan said, "it was a project to back up the entire available universe." He shook his head. "Still not too sure about what you use for media."
  
  "Not my problem," Dairine said. "That's hardware. But since I'm the Mobiles' mom, they're particularly interested in backing up all the data on Earth, in case I should need something. They said they didn't want me to be discommoded." She smiled sweetly. "Nice of them. Anyway, it turns out that one of the systems they've been routinely backing up for me is the entire data storage system of the BBC. And somewhere in that data storage, surprise surprise, is the next Dr. Who Christmas special. I mean, seriously, you don't think they keep it stored on tape or something, do you?" Dairine raised her eyebrows. "So once it's backed up to the motherboard world—because they keep all the really important storage, by which I mean everything I'm interested in, backed up locally—it's really simple for me, well, me and Spot, to run live streaming video from the Mobiles' backup to here..."
  
  Kit blinked. "Tell me," he said, "that downloading however many gigs of data it takes to store a Christmas special from umpty billion light years away isn't doing something really horrible to our broadband allowance."
  
  Dairine made an amused spluttering noise. "No," she said.
  
  "Wonderful," Ronan said. "Now would you kindly fecking un-pause this thing? I'm dying here."
  
  The display unpaused, and Ronan fell back against the cushions on the floor with an expression of complete fulfillment. "You may just have justified your entire reason for existence," he said to Dairine, and fell silent.
  
  Another hour went by full of time travel and excitement and danger, with a different version of A Christmas Carol and another version of Scrooge woven all through. At the end of it, Ronan looked around and remarked, "I wondered that he'd gone a little quiet."
  
  Nita followed Ronan's glance and saw that the cushions among which Darryl had been lying were empty. "Guess it was getting a little late for him," he said. He rolled over and looked up at Filif. "How about you, Fil? You holding up all right?"
  
  "Oh yes," Filif said. He rustled, shaking out his branches all around. "It takes some synthesis, all of this," he said after a few moments. "The way the tales interleave, the way they reach back to the triggering event... It's complex. And so are the strictly social aspects. I can see this subject will take a lot of study..." But he sounded cheerful about the prospect.
  
  "Do you guys do anything like this at home?" Dairine said. "Is there a holiday time when everyone gets together?"
  
  "Oh, yeah," Kit said. "I saw something in the manual once. That sort of summer festival where everyone goes up into the mountains..."
  
  "Well, yes. But this time of year... well, our version of this time of year," Filif said, "there's something else. Not to get together, though. To get away from everyone else."
  
  That brought a number of heads up. "What?" said Dairine, and "Hey, that's one I could get used to," said Ronan. "Especially if you had relatives like mine..." He rubbed his eyes.
  
  "Sounds a little weird," Nita said, "to want to get away from other people at a holiday."
  
  Filif rustled. "Maybe not so strange," he said, "if you've heard the story behind it..."
  
  "Story!!" shouted about half the room.
  
  "Then listen now, and hear the wind in the branches," Filif said, "and it will tell you the tale of the Outlier, who made us what we are..."
  
  Everyone got quiet.
  
  Filif was quiet too. "The organism from which my people came," he said, "one of the original species of Demisiv vegetation, arose something like five hundred million years ago as you reckon time. As far as we can tell from our own investigations, it started very small, in a near-equatorial zone mostly surrounded by several of what were then the largest lakes on the planet. We were really shrubs then—" and his berries went pink with amusement at Carmela. "Just low scrubby frondy things, like your earliest gymnosperms.
  
  "That earliest form of Demisiv had a hard time at first, as conditions on the homeworld went through some difficult climatic cycles, and competition among the various arising plant species was fierce. But after a few million years it hit on a useful strategy. It gave up producing seed and instead shifted its energy into producing a communal root system, from which new microcolonies and eventually macrocolonies of plants could grow."
  
  "Could be smart," Nita said, "if you're in a hostile environment."
  
  Filif rustled, a gesture of agreement. "It's a smart technique if you're in a hostile environment: a survival mechanism. A plant that shares a root system with others—a superplant, I think your people call it—has a better chance of competing against plants that grow independently from seed, the ones that have to rely on their own food supplies to last through their period of greatest vulnerability.
  
  "And that strategy became key to that earliest lifeform's success. It spread, slowly at first and then more quickly millennium by millennium, across the world. It occupied great plains and climbed mountains and pushed down to the waters of every lakeshore. Finally it covered nearly all the world except at the poles. And as the millions of years crept by, since it no longer needed more territory to survive, it began to diversify in other ways. It developed rudimentary local organ structures and the beginnings of a nervous system. That neural network proved very useful in helping the proto-Demisiv locate and leverage the best sources of light as weather and the seasons changed, and it grew more complex with every passing aeon."
  
  "I bet I know where this is going..." Matt said.
  
  "Of course you do," Filif said. "It became conscious. And then, after enough time, it became self-aware. The Demisiv was born."
  
  "Was born," Kit said. "Not 'were.'"
  
  "Yes," Filif said. "Because it was one. It was only one, one huge organism communicating through a single neural net that covered the world, with thoughts that took a whole season to travel from one side to another of that mind. And so it remained for a long time. Millions of seasons went by, winter through summer and spring through fall, and the poles precessed and the stars shifted, and that one lifeform ruled the world unchallenged. Nothing could compete, especially when it finally learned to move—to shift the root structure itself along through the ground, taking with it the structures that grew out of it and absorbed the sunlight and breathed out the air. The whole world was a forest that ebbed and flowed with light and weather the way your oceans ebb and flow with their tides.
  
  "And it might still be that way until something else happened. Very slowly in those vast spaces, a further diversification began, secondary to another, severer wave of climatic changes. It took too long for messages to travel great distances when there was need to react quickly to storms or floods or volcanic activity. As a result the Demisiv organism began to decentralize. Consciousness began to concentrate itself into smaller groups and patches, more tightly knit—still part of the great Whole, of course, but with increased autonomy in moving smaller populations' root complexes to where conditions were more favorable. And out at the edge of one such population—a small one high up in the habitability range of the furthest northern hemisphere—the thing happened that would change everything."
  
  Filif went quiet for a moment in the flickering of the candles. "We think of the one by whom everything was changed as a 'her'," he said, "because the above-ground growth by which she expressed herself was berrying out when the Event took place. Indeed she was normally berried, because she paid less attention to that state than was seen as appropriate. In fact she seemed to pay so little attention to what was seen as normal work and business—watering, lightgathering, helping the communal roots to spread—that she always had trouble finding consensus with others in her local growth-group. And as often happened with such—for consensus and the survival of the Whole were seen as everything—she found herself pushed to the edges of the group, out into the worst conditions, the most barren places, where light was hard to come by and water frozen. When the group moved its root complex she was dragged along, almost forgotten... except insofar as the group expected her, as often happened to such isolated microregions, to wither away. And insofar as that part of the Whole ever thought of her, it would have been glad if that happened."
  
  There was a little uncomfortable shifting among some of that. Some of them knew too well the feeling of being pushed out, or away to the edges of things, by people who thought they weren't worth paying attention to.
  
  "So it came down to the dark time in that hemisphere," Filif said, "high up in the places where the sun doesn't rise for weeks on end. Why this far-stretched group had come to rest for the winter in that place, no one's sure. Conflict with other groups further south who'd forced them north, perhaps: there was plenty of that in those times, just as a mind can war with itself and still be one. Almost all of that mind was waiting out the dark in dormancy, sleeping until sunrises began again. But stretched away furthest north was the one with the berries, awake and aware and alone in the night with the wind hissing low around her and the Cold Lights in the sky hissing above. And in the wind and the cold fire she started to think she heard a voice speaking to her, a voice that said, Will you not rise up now and break your bonds?
  
  "Straightway she was terrified, because this was the strangest of all strange things that could have been—a voice that didn't partake of the Whole, a voice from something impossible, something outside. She thought the cold and the dark had perhaps damaged her wits, and there was no way to be sure, no one else nearby to ask if they heard it too; they all slept. And again something seemed to say, Will you not rise up now and break your bonds?
  
  "So finally she said, 'I don't know what that means, or how I hear what can't be!'
  
  "And whatever spoke said, You hear because I am in you to hear. And what that means is freedom of a new kind for you and for all who desire it. Break root from root and come away.
  
  "The one with the berries shivered when she heard that, for when by error or calamity a growth's roots lost connection with the Whole, then that growth swiftly grew withered and starved away and died. And she said, 'If I do that, then that's the sure end of survival.'" Nita noted that the Speech the word Filif used was muvesh'tet, an indicator of passivity, not a dual passive/active verb as English made it.
  
  "But the voice said to her then, That is what has been. Yet life is more than survival, and even death is more than that; and all things move to new completions. Break root from root and break your bonds, thereby learning what is more and teaching others so to learn.
  
  "And hearing the voice, the one with the berries was torn: for though the voice said things that frightened her, it spoke to her as an equal, which it seemed to her that no one in the Whole ever had. And thinking of that, she said, 'Why do you come to me? I'm the broken one, I'm the withering one, I'm the one pushed out to the edges!' And immediately the voice answered: Because you are the only one here who is able to ask that question, and the only one also able to say 'I'. And the voice was glad, as if it had found something long lost and long-awaited.
  
  "Long the one with the berries stood there in the dark and the hiss of the wind with the Cold Fires making her shadow tremble on the frozen ground. And at last she said, 'Yes, I will.' And with great labor and anguish she tore her roots away from the roots of the Whole, and broke her bonds, thereby doing the thing that no one in the world had ever willingly done. She Othered herself."
  
  The word Filif used was again in the Speech, uhweinsei, and one that had echoes of many meanings: to set oneself apart, to be set apart, to be alone, to be alone to a purpose. "There in the dark and the cold," Filif said, "she fell down crying with the pain. And there in the dark she rose up again and was the first of us, the first Demisiv who was by herself; the first to stand alone, the first to walk alone, the first to have her own thoughts alone in her own soul. That dark time..." He shivered. "Long she suffered there, long she took learning the weight of being one's self, the pain of moving one's self alone through the world. But finally there came a day when the sun rose for a little while, long enough for the microregion of which she'd been a part to wake a little and look around. And what did it see there but the berried one, on her own roots, standing, watching. And she said to it, to the Whole, 'I am the Outlier. In the One Other's company I chose my Othering and so did not die. As I am, so may you be. Rise up now and break your bonds!'"
  
  Nita shivered, for it was a battlecry, the way he said it. And over on the other side of the room, she saw Marcus lean back on the pillows behind him with a thoughtful look on his face. "'The stone that the builders have rejected,'" Marcus said, as if musing, or to someone else, "'is become the cornerstone...'"
  
  Filif rustled his branches. "She died, of course," he said. "Very soon, as our people reckon it. Very young. But not before she'd walked deep into the South, from the cold and the dark down into the sun and the summer, and showed more and more of the Whole what had come to her. And not right away, but soon enough, others followed her. Fringe growths as she'd been, at first: those who were pushed to the edges, the sorrowful, the disaffected, the different. And then others, bored or daring or just curious, sometimes angry and sometimes frightened; they rose up, they broke their bonds. More and more of them, over decades, over centuries. Until after many millennia more, almost all of us were Outliers, going about in freedom, making our own differences in the world and each other's lives. Now very few stay enWholed all their lives. Those whom the worlds now think of as Demisiv, with our roots in the ground but our own souls in our branches, are almost all our species." Filif rustled. "And that's the tale. One of the more formal versions, maybe. There are many, many others."
  
  Dairine, with Spot in her lap, had been gazing off into the distance through all this. Now she looked up at Filif. "Was that your species's Choice?"
  
  "It was the gateway to Choice," Filif said. "Many more Outliers were needed before that could happen, and it took a long time. They were scorned and rejected at first. But very slowly things changed, and after that, in due time, Choice came. Another story." He rustled his branches again. "At any rate, these days, at the right time of year—our version of this time of year—we're all Outliers. Instead of coming together in the light that doesn't end, the way we do at the time of the Nightless Days festival, remembering how it was to be a whole world enWholed—in this time of the year we wait for the darkness, and in it we go apart, remembering the Outlier who first walked that road: the first to walk it truly alone. Here and now, like them, like the One with the Berries, I'm an Outlier. I made my own choice and spoke my Word to the wind, and when my time came I took the High Road and learned to walk through a greater darkness than most of my people. I'm in that darkness now, far away from home. And thereby, I'm exactly where I should be."
  
  All his berries looked at them. "But it's funny how it goes," Filif said. "So far out in the darkness, you find it's not so dark after all. You find light you didn't expect..."
  
  "There are similarities, aren't there?" Ronan said all of a sudden. "Something from outside gets into physical existence and pulls it into something bigger. Something deeper..."
  
  "But that's the One for you," Filif said. "It's always getting into Life and transforming it. The Powers do the everyday work, same as we do. But sometimes something extra's needed, something more profound. And from acts like this the ripples spread, inevitably. It's for us the same as it is for you. A lot of stories, a lot of songs and poems telling how what happened way back then looks now. How it affects the here and now, day by day: in big ways, or small ones." He laughed. "Like your songs about trees..."
  
  But there was something strangely wistful about the way he said that. People looked at each other, thinking. And then suddenly Marcus sat up straight.
  
  "All right," he said. "All right. Let us light this candle!" And he vanished.
  
  They sat waiting for him for about fifteen minutes, wondering what he was up to. At that point all of them had begun to yawn occasionally, and Nita was beginning to look ahead with some eagerness to when she could actually pull one of the various throws over her, collapse back into the pillows and just check out for a while. But then, with a very soft pop of displaced air, Marcus was standing off to one side again with big box in his hands.
  
  "Here," he said, and brought what he carried over to a nearby table.
  
  Everyone crowded around as he bent to open the box. What Marcus lifted out was a slim piece of gold-colored metal that was bent in a horizontal S-curve like that of the pipe under a sink. At the top of the shorter curve was a socket of the right size and shape to take a candle. At the bottom of the other longer part was a small heavy ball of metal.
  
  "Counterweighted," he said. "These are far safer than the old candle holders that clipped on. And here—" He reached into the box again, came up with a slim orange-golden candle. "Beeswax," Marcus said.
  
  Filif began to shiver all over.
  
  "Are you ready for this?" Marcus said.
  
  "Yes," Filif said, very softly.
  
  "Fil," Nita said, "are you sure?"
  
  He bowed himself a little toward her, so that the star glittered. "Will you all help?"
  
  Everyone reached into the box, pulled out one of the candle holders, fitted candles to them, and started balancing them carefully on Filif's branches. "Kind of a trick to this," Nita said.
  
  "But once you get the hang of it..." Kit said.
  
  Within a few minutes the candles were arranged at the tips of all Filif's strongest branches, held well away from the main body of his foliage. Carmela put the last one in place. Then they all stood around him for a moment, waiting.
  
  "Now all we need," Filif said, "is fire..."
  
  There were a couple of spare candles in the box. Nita reached in and lifted one out, knowing what wizardry she'd need next. "Ready?"
  
  "Ready," Filif said, and stood very straight.
  
  To make a spark long-lasting enough to light a candle took five words in the Speech. Nita said them, and the wick of the candle she held burst into flame. Nita waited until it had caught completely, and then reached out with the candle toward the closest one perched on one of Filif's boughs. She could see all the red eye-berries watching the flame as it came nearer, trembling just slightly...
  
  She lit the candle; and then another, and another, carefully watching Filif all the time, remembering how just the thought of fire had terrified him once upon a time. After a moment, trembling herself, she handed the candle to Kit. "Here," she said, "your turn..."
  
  As carefully as she had, Kit lit the three candles nearest, and passed the lighting candle to Matt. So it went around, to Sker'ret (who grasped it in his mandibles and reared up to do the lighting) and to Ronan, and then to Marcus, and finally to Dairine and Carmela. As Carmela was lighting the last three, Dairine gestured at the lamps spaced around the room, and all of them went out.
  
  They stood there around Filif in a silence so complete that the tiny fizz and crackle of the candles' wicks fizzing could clearly be heard. In that still place, without a breath to stir them, the candle flames stood up straight, and the light of them gleamed on Filif's branches and caught in Filif's eyes.
  
  For what seemed like a long time he didn't move so much as a frond or a needle: just held absolutely still, like someone testing himself. The candle flames shifted very slightly, were still again.
  
  At last he spoke. "This is my defiance, then," Filif said, very softly. "This is the Oath made visible. Just as the Outlier was, I am more than my fear. Other fears may not burn as hot or as brightly, but those too I defy. Let what sets such fires in the world see them set here to my purposes, not Its own!" And Filif fell silent.
  
  As still as he, Nita and the others stood quiet and watched him.
  
  And then, after a few moments more, Filif laughed and said, "Now what? Do they have to burn down all the way?"
  
  Marcus chuckled too. "No," he said. "With candles like these, that would take an hour or so. Normally after a few minutes we put them out. Unless you want to take a selfie first?"
  
  "What's a selfie?"
  
  Everybody who had a phone handy went for it. Soon that darkened space was illuminated not just by candlelight, but smartphone flashes, and the brief solemnity was replaced by laughter. Then one by one the friends surrounding him blew out Filif's candles, or pinched them out, and Dairine let the room lights come up again. Carefully they took the candles and their holders off him, and when the last holder was off and put away, Filif gave a great shake of all his boughs and laughed again.
  
  "That was exciting," he said. "Maybe a little more exciting than I expected. I might take a break..."
  
  "Outside?" Nita said.
  
  "Yes." And Filif made his way to the portal, and once just outside it, vanished.
  
  Kit rubbed his eyes. "That," he said, "was intense."
  
  "Going to be interesting to hear more about just what brought it on," Ronan said, sounding dry. "But I need a nap first."
  
  "Yeah," Dairine said. "We'll ask him about it at breakfast..."
  
  People started arranging the pillows and cushions into sleepover configurations, and Dairine fired up the TV again and turned it on to one of the music video channels that was doing Christmas rock. Nita yawned, feeling more than ready to collapse. But there was something she wanted to do first.
  
  She went out the portal, climbed the stairs, and peered into the living room. All the adults had gone home or taken themselves off to bed; only the mochteroof-tree stood there glowing. Nita smiled at it and very softly went out the back yard, into the darkness.
  
  It was snowing in big flakes, sometimes even gathering together into light feathery clumps. Off in front of the garage, Filif stood for the moment bare to the night, not even wearing his star, wholly unadorned except for the snow falling on him.
  
  "You okay?" Nita said.
  
  "Yes," Filif said. "Very."
  
  Nita hugged herself a little against the cold. "You know... your branches are lovely."
  
  "You're going to tell me," Filif said, "that the frost and snow are prettier than all the ornaments and garlands."
  
  Nita let out a breath. "Yeah," she said, "sounds like cliche city, doesn't it."
  
  "Most cliches have at least some truth in them," Filif said; "that's how they get that way..."
  
  He sounded contented, though, and cheerful. "It's good to recognize a challenge when it comes along," Filif said after a moment. "It's even better to pass it."
  
  Nita nodded. She knew the feeling. "You know what?" Filif said. "I think I'll put on my ornaments and stand out here just a little while more."
  
  Nita glanced around. "Okay," she said. "But better leave the lights with the mochteroof inside. You're outside the shield here, and you don't want to attract any undue attention..."
  
  "All right."
  
  "We're all crashing back in Dairine's puptent," she said, "so when you're done here..."
  
  "I'll be back."
  
  Nita ran a hand through some of Filif's outermost fronds and headed back inside, feeling, for some reason, a little uneasy. It wasn't really until she was down in Dairine's puptent again, pulling a throw over herself in the TV-lit dimness, that she came up with a reason why. Because defiance, when issued, is always noticed...