The Rings of Salammis

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     The woman looked up, beaming with surprise and delight.

     Around her, the tiny humanoid figures, each less than an inch tall, went about their normal businesses, unaware of her towering presence or that of the new arrival. They were all true sapient beings, living real lives, unaware that they had been created solely for the amusement of the invisible giants who moved among them. Watching the rise and fall of empires, placing bets on the outcome of wars, occasionally focusing on the activities of individuals with all the rapt attention of soap opera addicts.

     They were forgotten now, though, as the woman sprang up from her crouching position and ran to the newcomer, throwing herself into his arms and crushing her body to his. "Tak, my beloved!" she cried into his shoulder, her head swimming with the fresh sweat smell of him while he stroked her silky soft hair. "I've missed you! So much time without you!" With an act of will she evaporated their clothes, leaving them naked together, and she pressed her breasts hard against his hairy chest. "Now! Quickly! Right here on the grass!"

     Tak almost yielded. His desire for her was almost overwhelming in its intensity. It would be good, so good, but... But it could be better! "Not here," he said therefore. "Come see my new Realm. I made it just for you, as a gift. Almost as good as your country of dreams made true."

     She pulled back just enough to look into his face, her eyes glowing. She loved gifts. "For me?" she breathed in delight. "Show it to me! Oh show it to me! Right now!"

     Tak grinned, ignoring the miniature landscape all around him with its miniature inhabitants with the casual disregard of someone who'd seen it a thousand times before. "Okay," he chuckled and, with a thought, he summoned a doorway, standing alone in the middle of the miniature rolling meadows. "After you," he offered, gesturing her towards it with one hand.

     With a girlish shriek of delight she ran towards it, unmindful of the tiny people inhabiting the land below her, her bare feet crushing one of their little conical huts. The inhabitants themselves were pretty tough and could easily survive being trodden on, but they were sorely puzzled by the havoc caused by something they had been conditioned not to see.

     She grasped the doorhandle and flung the door open, gasping in wonder at what she saw. Stepping through, she found herself standing on the surface of a sphere maybe a hundred yards across. The surface was a jungle of twisting vines bearing large, rhubarb like leaves and heavily ribbed fruit the size of marrows. In the sky above, other spheres sporting similar growths drifted slowly, orbiting around one another and around a central glowing mass; the sun of this strange solar system.

     Staring around in wonder, she counted over a hundred 'worlds. Some larger than the one she was standing on, some smaller. Some spinning close to the 'sun', others drifting lazily far from it. Some in almost perfectly circular orbits, taking perhaps five minutes for one complete revolution, others diving in and soaring back out in highly elliptical paths. As she watched, two globes passed close to each other, almost close enough for their vegetable growths to become entangled. They sped up as they approached, then whipped past each other in wildly curving paths, one dropping down closer to the sun, the other hurled at great speed far out into space. As she watched, it shrank into the distance, eventually disappearing into the cloud of sooty dust that surrounded the system at a distance of several miles.

     A few minutes later, she suspected, it would reappear, zooming in from the other direction. Many of the Realms they created for their amusement were contained in spaces that wrapped around, making them finite in size but unbounded. The dust was to prevent them from seeing the backs of their heads everywhere they looked.