Ki looked at the thing he had made.  From his vantage point three rungs up the ladder of phase space, he could see it spread-eagled in nineteen dimensions.  It had spheres and lines, energetic colours, delicate curves that were beautiful in their endless inevitability.  It was pretty.
“Well, it’s not bad,” allowed Ola, grudgingly.  “I still prefer mine, though.”
The two pan-dimensional entities were comparing their attempts at substrates with which to fill lower Universes.  It passed eternity.
Ki regarded Ola’s most recent creation, and frowned. 
It was true: hers was certainly more elegant.
“I like the lights,” he muttered.  “Lights are a nice touch.”
“You think that’s good?” Ola replied, complacent in her victory.  “See what happens when I do this...”
Ola leaned into the little Universe, Phase Space telescoping around her as she gave it a flick, sending it rocketing along one further dimension: time.
The substrate flared brightly, much to Ki’s surprise, exploding in a kaleidoscopic panorama of colours, before dissipating gently into a barely perceptible hum of thin-spread background radiation.
“Well, good game,” sniffed Ola.  “We must play again.”
She stared at him, waiting for a response.  But Ki was too flabbergasted by what he had seen.  Time - in one of the lower realities!  Imagine that!   And the way her substrate had behaved, flaring then dissipating.  Why had it done that?  And what if it could be made to do something else?  The possibilities were...
And when he realised she had spoken to him, Ola was already gone, off to strut some higher rung of phase space, looking to win more contests.
Ki didn’t mind.  She had given him an idea...

Yule
Caleb came back to the city.  He was sixty, but he looked older.  He had been broken, cursed by a medical man who snagged him with the malediction of “neuralgia”, and thereafter all hope of painless nights left him.
On the train, he couldn’t feel the way the carriage moved under him, and he stumbled if he did not watch the scenery through the window.  During the days, he felt nothing; it were as if his legs and the tips of his fingers were made of cotton wool.  At night, the pain came.
His wife was dead and his brother was dead and his mother and father were long dead and dust in the wind.  His son was alive, but they hadn’t seen one another for years.  But the best years of his life had been in that city; now that every day, every breath, his life seemed to close in tighter, he found that there was no-where else he wanted to go.
The old building still stood where he had left it, all those years ago when he had left her, when he had left their son.  She hadn’t changed the locks.  There was dust everywhere and tired sunlight slanted through the still air.  He walked through dark rooms, unsteady, peering.  There were holes in the walls, but even the rats had deserted this dead place.
Caleb opened the door to the courtyard.  The glass had been broken and the window was boarded up with thin chip-wood.  The courtyard was small.  The winter sun was already dipping behind the brick walls, and Caleb felt an anticipatory tingling in his toes.  This was the one hour of the day when his flesh felt alive again, perfectly balanced between oblivion and agony.  As the light faded, that tingling would kindle to something awful and clawing, fingernails shrieking their sharp pain down the inside of his skull.
The garden was bleak and dead.  The boughs of a few tress, scraps of twigs and old, old leaves, and no wind to stir them.  He closed his eyes and tried to remember them, tried to picture his wife and his son.  But all there was behind his eyes was blackness and the red swelling of pain.
The sun sank and Caleb was alone in the darkness.

"Dig for the bones!" shouts Commander Cross, and the men do as they are bid.
Before long the air is full of dust, and not a hand there that is clean.  Sweat sticks, hearts hammer, and the sun beats down, heavy and uncaring.
It is Bants who strikes the hard white, pulling back at once like he has been bitten, and giving a cry like a babe.  Commander Cross comes a-running, pushing forward while those around draw back.
He reaches down and heaves up the find in one weather-beaten paw.  It is a thigh bone.
"Here we have it, lads," says he, waving the thing aloft.  "We've found him!"
He turns and starts scraping in the dirt with his own two hands, which is just as well because no one else would go near, for gold or a clean death.
Commander Cross piles them high, one bone on the next, and soon the sorry fellow is out of the earth, skull and scapula, wrist and ankle, a rain of little finger bones, all gnawed white and shining.  Not a scrap of flesh is to be seen.
Only when all is found does Commander Cross stop.  The air is very still, and the men make not a sound.  They are standing there, hands on shovels, tense and full of fear.
"Time for the music," Cross tells them.
The Commander looks around, and not a man of them will meet his eye.  Jennings is the first.  Slowly, reluctantly, he steps forward and reaches into a deep pocket.  He pulls out the bells and starts them to sing.
"That's the way," says the Commander, and all there follow, until the air is full of tinkle and ring, and all the little bells sing their song.  It is a music of far away, a music from across the ocean on the other side of the world.
The bones remember the music, as the Commander knew they would.  They were bound to those bells under different stars, and the old magic is strong in them.  First a shift, then a scrape; the bones twitch and wriggle, moving one to the next, lining up and kissing close.
Commander Cross smiles. He whips his hands about, and the men know what he wants.  They ring the bells harder.  The music swells in the air, and the sun seems to dim.
Commander Cross watches the bones rise, and remembers the day he was robbed.
​ * * *