…but it’s the only game in town.

“Once he was dressed, he looked more normal. Grave, though. She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it had cost him to return. He was not the first whose return she had initiated; and she knew that, soon enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went.”

“It’s like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they just kind of slip out of your head.”

”Yeah.” Said Mr. Nancy. And then he said, grudgingly, “You’re not so dumb.”

”maybe not,” said Shadow. “But I wish I could have kept more of what passed through my hands…”

“And, in the moonlight, the second sight posessed her for a final time, and she saw her brother Agasu. He was not the twelve year old boy she had last seen in the Bridgeport market, but a huge man, bald and grinning with broken teeth, his back lined with deep scars. His right arm was barely a stump.

She reached out her own good left hand.

“Stay, stay awhile,” she whispered. “I will be there. I will be with you soon.”

Neil Gaiman – American Gods