"But my arm? And my eye?" Eldon asked.
"You forgot you had lost them. Here you are as you think you are. And I—"
"Exactly as I have dreamed." The thought left Eldon's mind before it could be altered by his loyalty to Margaret and his desire to return to Earth.
Krasna glanced at him sharply, but she seemed not displeased. And there was gratitude in her thoughts. Gratitude and surprised admiration for the way he had come to her rescue without thought of his own safety.
"We must stay away from our actual bodies long enough but not too long," she told him. "Otherwise we could not return at all."
She read his questioning thoughts. "No. A Vardan mind can not take knowledge of the Thin World back. I can remember almost nothing of the time I was here after escaping the Faith.
"But you, with your Closed World brain, can perhaps do what I can not."
With his new knowledge Eldon understood also that those crystalline capsules in the gross grey carcasses were the real essence of the Luvans. The bodies in which they had clothed themselves to live in Varda had been purely artificial.
"I learned the secret of the Luvans in the slave pits of the Faith." Krasna's thoughts grew grim and bleak as she remembered the things to which she had been subjected there. Vardan memories could be carried into the Thin World, though not back again.
Eldon's thought-body drew hers close as they floated side by side in limbo, drew her to him comfortingly and protectingly to thrust those memories aside. He thought she should be soft and warm to touch—and she was.