She dreamed.

Borne by trails of magenta gold, she traversed the cosmos, drifting at impossible yet languid speeds between the flashing stars. Some days, her mind drifted down among the clouds of other worlds. Rarely, she found life. Once, she had swept down through the canopy of alien trees, finding creatures foreign to her scurrying through undergrowth. And once, she had found a people: gathered, speaking, with faces she'd never known.

She had learned a little, from them, of medicine and politics, though she could not understand their words. And she had learned another lesson, a terrible and lonely one.

Almost every place to which she had gone had been empty. Though the worlds with life drew her, beacons in the vast dark between stars, it did not mean she had not gone to others. And while some were beautiful in their own way--vast expanses of brilliant color, hundreds of miles of clouds in a hundred different hues--others were... barren.

Empty rock. Lifeless, not even a stir of bacteria upon their surface. Water churned on very few, likewise dead. No--not dead.

Worse than dead.

They had never been. An empty womb, potential never fulfilled, a dead seed floating through the blackness. It filled her with a sort of horror she'd never felt, a realization of the vastness of the universe and the precious value of the little specks of life so exceedingly rare throughout.

This journey, at least, was better: a sweeping tour through a world full of towering cities. Buildings--something she'd rarely seen a hint of here in the caves--ranged from roughly chiseled stone to something pristine and shining, reflecting the light of this world's sun in blinding brilliance. She marveled at it, and the way its crowds moved from place to place, organized and cooperative.

Lumut believed the visions of her astral travels to be very real, though whether they were, she had no proof; either way, it brought her a vast perspective she never could have guessed at before the Wish had come.

This one--this world, so full of life--now faded as she woke, the glimpses of its strange flower-bearing trees (clustered between the pathways of the buildings) and cascading waters giving way to a swift flight back to her own body.

She stirred. A long, hairy orange arm slowly slid out from her leafy nest high in Cetus's branches, hanging lazily over the edge. Her eyes opened, gazing gently up into the dark mists here. That was a journey, she thought, content, and reached for a leaf. This she pushed into her mouth, chewing. I am hungry, she realized, as this prompted a rumbling in her belly.

A moment later the orangutan was slowly decending the rough-barked trunk, then swinging lazily and gradually between the branches a dozen or so feet from the marshy earth. She was on the lookout for soft leaves--a delicacy among Cetus's pines--or other plant-like food, though her mind remained half a universe away, dwelling on all she'd seen.