The careful priest had feasted in Indra's hall for what felt like a thousand bright years. He had tasted every joy. He had walked every garden. He had grown so used to the floating golden lamps that he no longer looked up at them.

And then, one day, he noticed something.

The light around him seemed a little less bright. The music, which had never paused, sounded thinner. The fruit on the table, which had always burst with sweetness, tasted faintly of nothing. He looked at his own hands and saw that they had become almost see-through, like morning mist.

Frightened, he ran to the old soul who had once smiled at him so strangely. "What is happening to me?" he cried.

"Your merit is running out," the old soul said gently. "Every good deed you did on earth bought you a day here. You have been spending those days, one after another, all this long while. And now the purse is nearly empty."

"But I did everything right!" the priest said. "Every fire, every hymn, every offering!"

"You did," the old soul agreed. "And you got exactly what you asked for. You asked for heaven. Heaven is what you bought. But you did not ask for the One behind heaven — the One who never runs out. So when the heaven is spent, there is nowhere to stay."

The hall was fading now. The priest felt himself being drawn downward, gently but unstoppably, the way a leaf is pulled by a stream. Below him, far below, the green and brown of the mortal world came slowly into view — rivers, fields, the smoke of cooking fires, children being born.

"Will I come back here?" he called out as he fell.

"If you earn it again," the old soul's voice drifted after him. "And then you will fall again. Up and down, up and down — that is the road of those who want only things that end. Round and round, forever, until one day you grow tired of the wheel and look for what does not turn."

And the careful priest fell back into the world of birth, to begin once more — a little wiser, perhaps, than when he had left it.