Sixth and final passage (All regrets – suspicious vegetation – a blessing of chestnuts – sleep – midpoint ossuary – necks all wrung – a madman’s holiday – confession – dividends of blood – the song – strange kin – Nothingness – waiting)

These are long days. There will be more long days to come.

Where to begin? I write this from I do not know where. It is, I hazard, a place on no map. Our homeland’s hidden belly, beset with fuming, igneous scars; hell’s egress.

I look about us in the reeking, smoke-swollen dark. Gaunt as ghosts, all. Wounded, bloodied, many. Not all here. Not all returned. Will they find their way out? We cannot wait here long but to leave would be the act of cowards and when I clasp eyes with my comrades, draggled and unseamed as they are, I see there is none in our number. No cowards among us. Simply creatures far past their limit, far past what should be asked on any, at the outer

We must stay a while longer. Keep our sight about us, hone our ears to the dark. Huddle up to the fire which breathes back and forth in the wind. It is out there.

I would like to forget what I have seen. What I have endured these last few weeks. What I have done. Had I known what awaited us as I waited at Kapatagan’s edge, surveying the foreboding steppeland, I could not have in good conscience driven onward. Even after all we had survived, after all we had sacrificed, I would not have in earnest counsel advocated for the path forward. Yes, we would have died in ignorance, in blindness and our children, if we survived long enough, would have been born into the same peerless darkness we emerged in. Yet there is some dignity in that, in the circumscriptions of a happy, inferior bloodclan. None in the horror of knowledge in which we now live and cannot lose, which can only be called illumination in the sense that the sun, stared at by an unblinking imbecile until his retinas burn and scar, is still light.

We made slow progress across the Kapatagan. If we lived in another age, an age of careful learning, I would recommend a study of its grasses. They operate like no plantlife I have witnessed. For what other vegetation holds a motive? What shrub that you have seen has motive and means?

Moving through it is closer to swimming than walking. It is thick and amorphous and prone to changes in sentiment. At times, it propelled us forward, carrying us on great swells that would rise beneath us like surf so that we could spy the miles undulating ahead. In these moments, it seemed sympathetic and I remembered that we are no less a part of Terra Volpa than the ground beneath us and Hannibal’s once-waters and the expired association of river creatures we have eaten.

It quickly turned. On what grounds, we could not tell but, on a whim, some unspoken, subterranean caprice, sympathy became enmity. The grasses pushed against footfall with a strength that nearly knocked us supine and sometimes did. I can tell you, it is possible to walk in that grassland for days and not move an inch. It is possible to be swept off course, turned in circles, sent like shivering driftwood to shore and back and back again. We had started at the plain’s midpoint, aiming as we were for Absentia Pass and yet there were many times we saw the uncannily round outlines of Telescope Hills and others where some of our number swore, as we stacked on top of each other to gather our bearings, the ripping silver of an unfamiliar water source. More than once, we strode in great purpose for hours on end, in the grassland’s dark garden, only to spy, in a patch of quiet wind, the Corpus Colossi looming before us. Backwards, forwards, side to side. The marrow seeped out of those words until they had no flavor and all we knew was this: onwards.

The grass made for fine sleeping. We are not a picky species and we have slept on freezing, snow-sluiced stone, thorny woodland floors, and grub-invaded sands that offer the amenity of an incessant alarm clock, delivered via an importunate ant probing one’s ear canal. Kapatagan’s bedding is incomparable by such standards, and indeed, any. The grass ceded to our exhaustion, flattening itself into a plush mattress, curling over us in a conch-shelled shelter.

The truth is the sleeping was too fine. We slept long, for what I measure to be days at a time. I do not have a good way of marking the hours. The further we crossed, the longer our slumber seemed to last and the emptier it became until one evening we shut our eyes and when we awoke we, each of us noticed we had grown thinner and when we checked upon our scarce supplies noted a thin layer of mold furring a satchel of summer chestnuts we had stumbled upon. (In time, we would learn that the presence of such bounties was calculated rather than serendipitous – a lure designed to dazzle and please us, unsuspecting prey.)

How long had it been? A week? Longer? Suddenly, we sensed a great danger around us, beneath us, inside us. If we slept again, would we wake up? Not even the hardiest of us could survive a prolonged slumber, devoid of sustenance. In dreamless sleep, we would starve.

We walked as long as we could through a full night of darkness and through another still until our eyes burned with exhaustion. On the third day of moving without rest, three days in which the grasses had rippled and whispered but stayed calm, we came across what can only be called an ossuary, open to the sky. More than a dozen foxes, eaten down to clean, white bones.

We could see no marker of them besides their skeletons and so we could not know from where they came or in what age they had traveled. And we could not know what had killed them, though the angle of their repose suggested great happiness, utter leisure.

I will be honest, I considered lying among the dead and joining them. It would have been a relief. And I believe others did the same.

We walked until noon and at last we decided we could walk no longer. It was decided that one of us must remain on watch as the others slept and to wake them when the sun rose again the next day. That we had not considered this solution spoke to something unmoored in our minds and the tendency of all creatures under extreme duress to prefer blunt force to simple intelligence.

We owe a great thanks to Laguna who took the watch. If she had failed, had she fallen asleep as she surely greatly wanted, a hundred years hence the next band of foolhardy travelers would find a second immaculate assemblage of sun-bleached bones. Among them, the subtle half-fused skeleton of a babe.

Laguna did not fail. She woke us in the morning and her face told of exhaustion and fear. And her mouth told of a ravenous grassland that wished to devour us. At night, Laguna said, the grass did not merely cover our bodies, it coiled around them and it infected our nostrils and crawled in the pink corner of our eyes and left a dark milk over our eyelids and across our wet lips and it stole the fat from our flesh and strength from our blood and, Laguna believes, insists, it eats the cloth of our dreams because as she staved off slumber, Laguna says the grasses whispered its black plans and abhorrent predilections.

A previous version of myself would scoff at such suggestions. I know better now.

Like this, we crossed. Taking turns at the watch, each willing ourselves to hold our eyes for each other, and finding ourselves equal to it. As the grasses muttered its nightly vulgarities, we plucked it clear of our kins’ orifices (oh, yes; oh, dear), ceasing its feasting. Then one morning we rose and walked and we were, all at once, across it and in a gentle, sparse woodland. From the safety of an aspen field, we reviewed Kapatagan, conniving grassland.

Past the aspen and a huddle of white mushrooms we chanced came another open space that allowed for a view of the great mountain range abutting it. This was what we had voyaged for. Through comely forests, across derelicted riverbeds, past a forgotten city, over freezing sierras, and against carnivorous shrubbery we had arrived at the brink of The Unknowing.

Had we been in better health, perhaps we might have continued to Absentia Pass immediately. Despite our travails there remained an itchiness in us that lived in our feet and drove us on and was the difference between death and life many times over. We were shrewd enough to curb that urge, helped by the weakness that showed itself in our graying sclera, patchy fur, vivid rib cages.

For a week, we settled at the base of Perdita’s mouth and ate. We expected nothing from this land and yet every day or so we would stumble upon neat collections of delectables that kept us alive. A clutch of berries sitting on a boulder. A quartet of eggs leaning in long grass. Ten beetles on their back, bellies opened as if abandoned by a sadistic surgeon. A dozen starlings fanned in a circle, necks wrung.

We should have wondered about these bounties, queried their neatness, so uncommon in nature. In a land devoid of life, where did they come from? Who would provide us such gifts and to what end? Had I known then what I do know, I would say that we were being kept alive, drawn inwards, not as salvation but to afford a more delicious destruction.

Hunger is a great mollifier. We did not question these donations, nor think of them as such, because we scarcely thought of nothing beyond survival. Do not question the order of things; nature makes its own patterns. Here is food; be grateful.

I can sense myself delaying as I write. Delaying, delaying. I do not want to. Do not want to say what and and and. I think that each age has enough to worry about. Why should we enumerate evil for historians? Some chronicles should not be told.

A compromise: I will tell you the worst of what we did and the worst of what we saw and then you shall be able to judge us reasonably, whomever reads this, and to know what we faced and what, you may face, still. There are monsters without organic termini and that which we viewed, that thing, does not abide by the laws we know.

Absentia Pass, a review:

If you’re a future fox in search of a gelid, jagged, abominable wasteland, look no further than this ferociously hostile mountain pass! From slick, perilous stone landings enjoy vistas of barren rockface, sulphuric smokestacks, and distant fires! It is the ideal place to freeze, starve, and contemplate one’s mortal

I am losing my mind.

Do not make me say what we saw please. Please.

fine fine fine I will say it let it out we saw a Fox the likes of which I have not seen with no language and his brain soft and curdled and ruined by hell and he sang in the night and spoke in riddles and I was among those that privately wished for us to slay him where he stood chained to take him from misery and to eat him entire until he too could lie among the peaceful dead in the plains of Kapatagan

I worry I am becoming like him. What left him that way is the same thing that has brought us here.

For days, we watched over the Retrogradi from the confines of a dark, narrow cave along the Pass. We debated whether we should close his mouth and its ramblings for good and pray his flesh was not so diseased as his mind. It would have been a mercy to kill him. We know that now. For as we pondered and argued and fought within our own bodies to survive, another came to feast upon him and it was that beast of which our wild kin had spoken and of which we had known in some deep part of ourselves existed and that seems to haunt each atom of my being and fill my very cells with fear.

We could not see the UnFox in its fullness from the recesses of the cave but we heard its jawing and cannot forget the raw screams of the Retrogradi made carrion in its mouth. We burrowed. We dug into the earth, into stone as if our lives depended upon it which it did. We dug until our paws grew pink and naked with blood and we dug far past that. We dug until the world gave way and the bottom fell out and we found ourselves suddenly in a darkness and silence we could not fathom and will never find. And we knew in that moment that we were in The Unknowing.

For what felt like several minutes, we did not speak and did not move. We waited, wondering if we were to be hunted down this burrow as we all have dogged so many rabbits into their homes and killed them and their children.

Way of Human broke the silence. Look, she said. Our feet. I lifted my paws and felt those on either side of me do the same. In the same space my paw had occupied stood a perfect, luminescent print. Our blood, Orpheus Turns said. It shines down here. I watched as a dribble of color appeared on the ground as they squeezed drops from their skinned paw.

I took the blood from my paw and drew a line across the roof that stood low overhead and it hurt to rub stone and grit into that wound. A pale blue glow rose from that contour and we could make out each other’s faces just and then, all at once, someone began to laugh. It was a laugh borne from exhaustion, from fear and the weight of it, lifting for even a second. Here we were, improbably alive, lit by the viscera of our pain and my friends, they daubed the walls until we stood in a cocoon of glimmering color.

As our laughter faded, new sound rose to fill its vacancy. It was hard to measure at first, beginning weakly from a deeper cavern. Without better direction, we moved toward it and as we did it clarified before us. It was music. And not only music but voices, singing in words we could not quite make out.

By the light of our blood, we moved through the caves. It seemed to grow brighter the deeper we scrabbled through whatever network of tunnels we had found ourselves in, whatever vast illegible pattern of darkness composed Perdita’s fringes. Many times we found ourselves walked into a dead stop and had to turn back. Often, the music guided us, providing better direction than the limited glow of our paws which we sometimes held in front of us like lamps for a moment, trying to cast broader radiance.

We began to hear the words and though I cannot remember them perfect or entire I shall try to write those that I do for some day it may be that they say something of our world and its history. What I will never be able to describe is the texture of the song, it’s movements and melody. It held a beauty, a richness and sadness, I cannot capture. It was a ballad of immaculate pain, of pain beyond measure and past understanding, and of loss. And yet it spoke of many practical matters, possessing an officious formality and many oddities that do not usually fit well with such luster. What I recall of its declamation, in verse, as I believe it should be recorded:

Arrived
Brothers, sisters,
How aching it is
We are
To find you near
We have prayed for you
For epochs to arrive as you
Do now.

To begin we say
Our sorrow cannot
Be misstated.
Or perhaps we mean
Understated
We have not spoken In a long while.
We are not too
Uncouth however
That we cannot see we have
Forced a convocation
At the world’s end
At life’s end which is
Indeed
Verily Where we are.

You may ask yourselves
As would we
As you approach do you
Meet friend or foe and we
Can say only that those
Lexemes
Or perhaps better to say
Words
Have no meaning for us
Any longer. Once
We too roamed Terra and
Drank from cool streams
Ate pink-striped fish
Chased our little ones
Through bracken and bushflowers.
We were once of your Blood and Matter
Though this was
Long ago.

As point of fact
We did many things
Among our number you
Will find many great and
Esteemed foxes who
Accomplished fine works
Of art, penned tales
That by any right should
Have been remembered
Broke ground with
Many-tethered contraptions
Or perhaps we mean simply Intricate.
And we built monuments
To our kind.

We would tell you about
These things if we could
Remember but age has
A way of revoking all the
Mind has lived and we are
Ageless.

The matter of nomenclature
Is nevertheless
Important as it is nevertheless
Superfluous as it is
Nevertheless inferable or
We should better say
Reductive.
Call us this
For it is what we are:
We are the lost foxes
Fools of different eras
Captured and caged
And feasted upon.

You shall wonder
If we are a dramatic
A sensationalist skulk
And we can assure you we
Are not.

A point of order
When we say we have
Been captured
We were.
That Great Ellipsis, that
Godless creature you have found
Or felt, no doubt
Siphoned
Us all from life and penned us
Here.

When we say we are caged
We are.
You shall find us soon enough
Soon
And though you will find no fetter
The best prison is not one with the thickest bars
But one that cannot escaped.
We have each wandered
The tunnels of this realm for years entire
Years that to you
Above land
Beneath the Sun
Would have felt like eras in which
Great tyrants rise and inflict
Cruelty and
Fall with statues
Disgraced and rise
Again with new faces and fresh names.
There is no way out.
Even if there must have been a
Way in.

When we say that we are feasted upon
It is because we were once many
More and our numbers have
Fallen. Dwindled. Tapered.
We have
You could say
Experienced a great recession Of life.

When you look upon this
Place what is it
That you see?
It may
At first glance
At first blush
At first smell
At first ear
Appear to be a cave
And or hell
And this is factual.
To us it is
However
Nevertheless
A farm.
And us the fattened
Calves kept for slaughter.
If it is simpler
If it is a better metaphor
You may also say
We are like fattened
Sows.

The Ellipsis arrives with
Hunger in its heart and it will
Reach into our number and
Pluck or
Grab or
Plunk one of our
Kind and commit its culling.
It does not always eat us
Outright.
At the beginning
It gobbled us with greed but
Time has refined its tastes
And our smaller integer
Or Numerator
Has encouraged it to eat us
Without killing.

To describe this to those
Whom have never been
Eaten without
Being killed is unsimple
And indeed without delay
Hard.
It is made more so by
The matter and firm
Sound evidence that
The Ellipsis
That Satan-dripped UnFox
Does not eat in the
Way we understand.
It starts with The soul first.

To be eaten without
Being killed is to have
One’s essence mauled
And chewed like a stick
Of gum
A snack
Which we speak of
Often and miss
Very much.

We believe our
Message has hitherto
Or heresofar made clear
That time in this realm Is normative and is
As the Saying goes
Relevant.
So when we say we spent many
Afternoons and many
Days and many decades
Seeking our salvation
You understand our
Meaning.

It was by pure chance
That one afternoon
We realized we could
Sever thought from
Body. We believe
It is the habit of
Being chewed so
Often that makes it so.
For a time we floated
Our thoughts across
To one another so
We could convocate and
Chatter and
Badinage and
Rib and
Persiflage without awaking
Or Invoking the ire of the
Ellipsis. Soon we realized that
Our thoughts had legs much faster
Than our own which you will see
Have grown withered with disuse
And disappointed by their failure
To happen upon a simple
Exit.

In earnest we began to float
Our thoughts for distances
Further and further and to ask
For them to stay for stretches
That were at times
At many junctures
By turn
Very long.
They were to us flares
Great swollen pneumatics
That we prayed would be noticed
And pondered upon and
Followed and they were
They were because
You are here and you have
At last Arrived.

There are verses I have lost but it was with that final word that we realized the singing had reached crescendo and we had stopped our passage. From the chill in the ear and the manner in which sound bounced toward us, I had the sense that we stood at the precipice of an enormous hall, scooped like a senate. And as I stared into the darkness, toward the singing, lights flickered to life.

First, two. Then four. And quickly six, eight, twenty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred lambent eyes stared from the chasm beneath us, and we saw the true figures of these Lost Foxes. Though they bore some resemblance to our kind, the persuasiveness of their environment had altered them significantly. Their fur lay thin and smooth upon them and their ears had grown large to mark the tiny shifts in sound held in Perdita’s darkness. Most profound was, of course, the brightness of their gaze which held an effulgence far beyond the organic. I was staring into the radiance of them set around the vast colosseum beneath us when their mouths opened once more.

We must
Move quickly for
It senses when
We are ripe
Which is to say
When we have life
In us to gnaw and
It has been at least
Five thousand
Years or
Five thousand
Minutes –
We apologize for we
No longer grasp Magnitude – since
We have felt so vibrant
And since our eyes
A trait we find to be
Our most favorable
Have shone with Such ferocity.

We must –

And at that moment a terrible scream tore through the chasm. Manifest before us, delivered through a seam in the rock or partition in reality stood the UnFox. It stood legions tall and though it reeked of death and though its form was ringed with a feral luminescence when it looked upon us we saw nothing. Blankness. A profound and essential absence that not only absorbed our attention but seemed to sap the marrow from us. As I looked into its emptiness, I felt terror alight in my gut and wrap itself serpentine across my spine and in that moment I understood the nature of agony.

Run, Redemption said.

We did. Our lost brethren raced alongside us, emaciated legs pumping in tandem. Our combined skulk turned on its heels and raced through Perdita’s maze, bloodied footprints our guide. We heard behind us, that unholy nothingness scream and screech and look for us and begin to give chase. As it moved through the smallness of the stone and galloped without care and feeling, without pain, it tore the earth around it and the ground beneath us shook and rock began to rattle from the walls as we ran and our bright-eyed brothers ran with us length for length for as long as they could and their light helped.

We ran as our lungs burned, as our legs tightened, as blood dripped generous from our paws to mingle with the prints beneath. We ran as hell screamed and the cave crumbled behind us. We ran even after the screaming had stopped, when we could hear nothing but the sound of our footsteps and breathing and we had passed even the hole through which we had opened The Unknowing. We ran for what felt like days and perhaps was. We ran until we arrived here.

I am not sure where here is. And I am not sure who I mean when I say we. Tonight, I sit before another fire, a few hundred paces from the sliver through which we crawled. Around me are many of our skulk – our new skulk. Besides those faces I have come to know as well as my own, those that journey from Shadowoods, sit our new kin. They sit with bodies blessed with a strange and eerie gleam and even aboveground their eyes shine like terrible beacons. We are an odd and ragged family, all.

Still, many are missing. Many of the lost, yet to be found.

It has been two days now since we made camp here. At first, every few hours another of us crawled from the earth. It has slowed. I do not wish to say it has stopped. Not yet. And so, I wait in front of the fire, fixing my eyes into the dark. I must know: who else will step into the light?