(This story takes place the day after “Absolutely Not” and “Time Out of Mind,” but summarizes what the reader needs to know about them.)

Joe Dawson muttered a curse as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of his storeroom. The only illumination, other than the faint light from the stairwell, came from two small air vents near the ceiling. The grates that covered them were half-clogged with dirt; the junior bartender assigned to keep them clean was less than conscientious.

Joe’s hand found the light switch inside the door. He was tempted to turn it on. But that would snap the room’s other occupant out of his trance.

At least I hope it would.

He resisted the temptation. When he could discern the outlines of the stacked crates and boxes, he threaded his way to the corner where Methos sat in a lotus position. For the tenth time in as many hours, he confirmed that the old Immortal was still breathing.

But how important is that, anyway, with THEM?

Mac had been breathing too, on that day, months back, when it had taken Joe a frighteningly long time to rouse him from a meditative trance. Both men believed the Highlander could have been lost forever.

Of course, Mac had encountered Ahriman.

Was there absolutely no chance of the same thing happening to Methos?

Not for the first time, Joe wished his friend had undertaken this marathon meditation somewhere else. Or not at all.

Only the day before, Joe had discovered a gap in Methos’s memory. The ancient one had been so traumatized by Richie Ryan’s death that he’d blocked his recollection, not just of that, but of all Mac’s claims about the demon Ahriman. Joe had straightened him out. And in explaining why he’d been so stricken by the tragedy, Methos had shared two mind-numbing secrets. He was Mac’s father...and Mac, unknowingly, had been Richie’s.

Leaving Joe to absorb that, Methos had gone to the barge to talk to Mac about Ahriman. And while he was there, he’d recovered a different kind of repressed memory. Caught up in their conversation, he had confidently told Mac that Joe and Father Robert Beaufort had been protected from Ahriman because they wore religious symbols at all times. A moment later, both he and Mac were wondering how he could have known that. And they made the same intuitive leap: Methos had been a long-ago Champion!

Now Methos was determined to plumb the depths of his subconscious and dredge up more memories of that experience. Neither Mac nor Joe thought it was a good idea.

He’d rejected the barge, site of that scary trance of Mac’s, as a place to meditate. He, unlike Mac, would have found the moored vessel’s motion distracting. Besides, he’d wanted a spot that was isolated, quiet, and dark. His own rented digs wouldn’t do.

So Joe, against his better judgment, had offered the basement of Le Blues Bar. He’d promised to allow twenty-four hours before interrupting the trance, and to keep the bar closed as long as necessary.

Can’t do much of anything up there. Can’t even play my guitar, for fear he’d hear it through that thin floor. And I’m afraid to go home and leave him!

Suppressing a sigh, he started to turn away.

But at that moment Methos collapsed in a heap, gave a startled gasp, then leapt to his feet. Dark as it was, his head movements told Joe he was looking back and forth, frantically, between the two overhead air vents. “Wh-what? Where--? What happened to the light?”

“Hey, don’t blame me,” Joe groused.

Ten minutes later they were settled at a table in the bar, and Joe had broken out a bottle of Scotch.

This is getting to be a habit.

He watched as Methos took several long swigs. The hand that clutched the glass was shaking.

At last Joe said carefully, “Did you remember anything?”

“Uh, yes. But it was...odd.”

“Want to share?” He tried to keep his voice casual.

Methos twirled the now-empty glass he held, gazing into it abstractedly. Joe cleared his throat, and when the Immortal glanced at him, wordlessly offered a refill.

Methos nodded, and let him fill the glass to the brim. Then he said quietly, “All right. I need a sounding board. But this goes no further, at least for now.”

“Agreed.”

Methos took another sip. “I still don’t remember the fight against Ahriman, or whatever we called him. But I picked up what seems to be a memory from...afterward. Right after I won.

“I don’t know the details. But I think I had defeated him the same way MacLeod did, by renouncing violence. I’d had to figure it out for myself, with no help.

“When it was all over, a former Champion found me. He said he’d been searching for me for years. Apparently, no one is ever able to ‘prepare’ the chosen one.”

Joe grunted in sympathy. But Methos’s mind was on something else.

“This is where it begins to get strange, Joe. I thought of myself as very young. I asked the former Champion if it wasn’t surprising that someone like me had been selected. And he said no, it’s always a young person. ‘Young’ as in, maybe, a few hundred years old.”

Joe frowned. “Well, that fits, with Mac being the Champion now.” Still hard for me to think of him as young, though.

“Yes. But the funny thing is, I knew there were many Immortals older than me. Much older. I was a mere youngster!” Methos leaned forward intently, so close Joe could smell the alcohol on his breath. “And Joe, in my five thousand years of conscious memory, I have never met anyone I knew for a fact was older.”

Joe whistled softly. “Okay. So we’re talking waaay back. And there must be a lot you’ve forgotten in between.”

“Yes, there must be,” Methos said dolefully.

“Do you know what the language was, in this scene you remember?”

Methos made a face. “Nope, haven’t a clue. I just understand what we were saying, somehow. The meaning, not the words.

“My new friend said he wanted to show me something, a good omen. But I couldn’t appreciate it till we got out of town. Away from the lights of the city.”

Joe almost choked. ”The lights of the city?” He tried to hold back a laugh, and it came out as a half-snort. “My God. Are you going to tell me they had streetlights in those days? What were they, a half-dozen torches in wall sconces?”

Methos looked confused. “It was a city,” he said slowly. “A real city. And it was bright. We wanted to get out to the countryside, away from the lights.”

Joe took pity on him and said kindly, “I think you were asleep, Methos, having a dream. The idea of going from a bright area to a darker one was suggested by your having wanted a dark place to meditate.”

Methos shook his head. “No. It was a memory.”

Joe sighed. “A memory, then. You were very young, right? Inexperienced. The ‘city’ impressed you because it was the biggest population center or cluster of buildings you’d ever seen. But it must have had only a few hundred people, a thousand at most.

“If it was bright there, it was still daylight. You probably left just before sundown.”

Methos met his eyes and said steadily, “I know this will sound crazy. But to leave the city, we got into some kind of aircar. My friend, uh, piloted it.”

Joe blinked.

But after a beat he said just as steadily, “You were young. You saw a dozen buildings as a ‘city.’ Then you got into a horse-drawn chariot for the first time in your life. You weren’t mounted on your means of transport, weren’t required to do anything but hold on; yet you were moving faster than you ever had before. Maybe you closed your eyes. And you felt as if you were flying.

“You knew you weren’t, of course. At the time, you understood exactly what was happening. But what you’re recalling now is just the sensation, the way it felt when you were young and impressionable.”

Methos sat back, looking thoughtful, and slowly finished his drink. “You could be right,” he said without conviction.

“But there’s more. As soon as we were away from the city I saw what my friend had been talking about. As he’d guessed, I hadn’t heard it was coming because I’d been wrapped up in my battle with the demon.

“He set the aircar down--or stopped the chariot, if you insist--so we could both get out and look. Really enjoy what we were seeing.”

“What?” Joe’s patience was wearing thin.

“It was perfectly natural, of course,” Methos continued in a dreamy voice. “We’d seen it before, and we’d see it again. But it was rare. And so beautiful!

“I said something like, ‘It’s not visible everywhere.’

“My friend said, ‘You didn’t defeat the Darkness on the other side of the world. You defeated it here.’

“And we agreed it was appropriate, on that magical night.”

He leaned forward again, and his eyes bored into Joe. “You see, I’d taken for granted that it would be much darker outside the city. But it wasn’t! The sky was a shimmering sea of silver.

“Because we were seeing BOTH MOONS AT ONCE.”

Author’s Afterword: Was it a dream suggested by those two overhead air vents, or something else? It will make sense. Eventually. But don’t worry--Methos doesn’t come from the planet Zeist!

I was already drafting this fic in my mind--staying off the computer as long as possible, to save energy during a heat wave--when I saw a wire-service article titled “City Lights Too Bright for Starry, Starry Nights.” It says in part:

“A flood of artificial light has left one in five humans unable to see the bright band of the Milky Way at night, according to a new study of the global effects of light pollution.

“Far from the city lights at night, about 2,000 stars are typically visible. In major cities, that number shrinks to a few dozen at most.

“The study is the first to document the extent to which humans have wrapped the inhabited world in a luminous fog, shutting out much of the heavens from view.”

Synchronicity?