There exist walls beyond whose gates no art or reason can serve, and questions which cannot be answered. Of these, some exist only by our own failures—such as my ignorance of machines—but others, others only are. I know what Valka did was not truly magic, though it seemed as such to me. But next to the things that followed, mysteries in the truest sense, her display of power strikes me as a perfect thing: the image of human authority ordering the chaos of Creation.
