Herophile, Prophet of Sybaris, stopped breathing. There was no noise, no cough, no rattle. Her breath had been so soft its absence hardly made a difference. At first the two girls who'd sat for so many hours on the floor before the altar of Hera's temple, watching Herophile's wax-pale lips in the tallow-lit dimness, barely stirred. But the younger daughter knew it instantly: little Io, so gangly and prim in her bone-colored clothes, with her blonde hair held in a bun by the stem of a damask rose. Mother was dead. From Io came only the narrowest intake of breath, an attempt to hold on to what little her mother had lost. The stylus with which she had worked at her lessons she lay down across the soft clay, but it left no mark. The marble face of Hera's statue showed more emotion.

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Story read by Mike Boris

The map came to me from my uncle, the Great Ormond (they named the children’s hospital after him). At the time I was studying in a monastery in Tibet, under the tutelage of a wise lama who once had the ear of all the great Houses of Europe. I had also learned something less desirable from him, which was the taking of medicinal derivatives of the poppy flower, at first to ease a pain I had sustained from a broken leg in the execution of a Flying Monkey manoeuvre, and later because I had wanted—needed—to sustain the feeling of calm and euphoria it offered me.

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Story read by Ray Sizemore

At the time there was nothing but darkness and warmth. It felt soft, and moist, the clamor of the outside world could not reach her shelter, and so did not exist. At least, not yet. From the start, from the first moments, consciousness had arisen, strong enough to acknowledge its own existence and the well-being that enclosed her, a perpetual well-being that nothing could possibly shatter. The name had come, slowly, gently, had filled her up as if she were sorely meant to offer a receptacle, anchor point for the wanderer in the midst of infinite obscurity. The name had curled up inside her, she had curled up inside it, each one made for the other, until there was neither one nor other, but a single being nestled in warmth, nestled in darkness, forever.

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Story read by Amy H. Sturgis