I tell this story for I know not what. No chance it will be read, I am sure of that. Ah, but Picnic, you may say, perhaps someday our ancestors will find these journals and perhaps they will read them and perhaps perhaps perhaps

History is a story of forgetting. What we remember is a withering fragment of what we forget. How could it not be? We have all felt the fullness of our own lives and it is beyond translation, past conservation. We cannot know our ancestors any more than they know us.

I am confessing this to you, the blank page, only because I know you cannot respond and because (I shall be literal), you have no ears. In that case, I may make another: I can scarcely meet the skulk’s eyes. Hope is the last to die, some fool once wrote and how foolish, how still-minded, when the better question is who shall be the first? Tomorrow, we voyage - good night.

First passage (Out – sympathetic earth - a butterfly - arrival at Hannibal)

I had hoped to write every day and I hoped that would be easy and I can say that it is not. It has been three days since we departed Shadowoods and it has been a hard walk and I write this by the firelight across from the few who share my insomnia.

It took us the better part of two days to leave Rostrum. Long. Much longer than expected. At times, it felt as if the earth of our homeground wrapped itself around our feet, requesting, politely, that we stay. We walked through oak and aspen and at the distant edges, fringes of blue and yellow wildflowers around which a few flies dizzied themselves and a single monarch presided. I was not sure the last time any of us had seen a butterfly and for a few moments we marveled at it and allowed it to beknight our noses and then it took to the air and died flailing downwards like a sycamore pod. It is frightening to see something die like that and I do not know what caused it. It is not usual. We waited for a moment and then it was decided that of all of us it should be Laguna as she is bearing perhaps many kits and so she ate it as a dusty snack and we continued on.

Ah, Hannibal has stoked the fire. Good. Little dance of embers.

We headed mostly north, north-east so that we might meet the river at a good point and the first river was the Grand Hannibal as we knew it would be. We have settled by the bank now and I think we shall stay a day or two. We have found it better than I expected and there seem to be small buffets of grubs laid out on damp riverwood and it is too dark to tell but when I took my evening drink and allowed my front paws into the water, I sensed the swish of guppies.

Second passage (Deadriver - omens - four crabs)

I do not want to talk about it. A bad omen wants to be spoken (it eats worry as a bacteria absorbs sugar) and so I will not give it the pleasure. Furious. Afraid.

We have made camp in sight of the Feral Mountains. We took from the deadriver:

• 16 lengths of lakeweed which affect my breath

• 8 guppies, hammering the life out of their tiny, muscled bodies – dying commas along the sand

• 4 crabs who are still living and I have found very annoying

• 4 sea-louts who I would consider friends were they not so delicious

• 8 limpets which shall make a fine broth

• 16 roundels which, when popped and boiled, are edible and sweet

A symmetric, palindromic bounty which I have decided is a good omen and shall repeat it to all around this evening’s fire when we eat our crabs and I shall enjoy it

Third passage (Ruins of Orarium - a hospital I do not like - shipwise strangers - Crementon)

A roof above us tonight. Huzzah! We have been in low spirits ever since what happened that I will not say, the meaning of which I will not countenance, and so it is no little succor to be surrounded by walls. And not just any walls, the walls of a palace no less!

That we did not see it the night before was a topological trompe d’oeil (oh, forgive my purple prose, journal, but when one finds a felicitous alliteration, one should take it and if anyone were by some absurd chance – as you know, I doubt it, I very much doubt it – to find and read this then I would say please judge me on my deeds of which I have some good ones and know that I write this on little sleep amidst mortal stress encircled by trusting eyes (which have a mortifying weight) on the back of a good strange day that has left me slightly woozy and minddrunk). For in daylight, a few dozen paces from our camp, one could see the outlines of a city.

It is a ruin. Through long saffron grass and bursts of brambles we walked to it and met first the curious blocks of stone that had rolled past the city’s perimeter. Then concentric circles of conurbations, little leaning shacks and townhouses with their heads caved in. At the center, a great big dome with many doors and steps leading up to it and it was we learned a palace and while it also has had no little damage done to it by time (vacancies in the walls, an absent patch of floor that bottoms out where I am not sure – a dropped limpet shell earns no echo) it is in fine enough shape and like the rest of the city, stuffed with oddities, trinkets too many to number.

I shall give a brief account of what we have found through our exploring and I am sorry for what I shall miss out but I will simply remind you, journal, that history is a story of forgetting:

1. A museum of glass objects much treasured it seems by the culture that flourished here and one of our number broke some (clumsy ____, you are lucky I shall not snitch you to my book).

2. A pair of fox skeletons embracing, grown into the bed.

3. More than one library.

4. A store of grain. (Entirely rotted.)

5. A bashed up fountain, somehow still burbling an inch of water.

6. A great statue, tipped onto its side, its snout knocked clean. Unrecognizable were it not for the inscription on the pedestal: King Belua. There is something in the eyes I do not like.

7. A ransacked hospital. Folded, molded beds, derelict offices. A basement level that we exited quickly when we found manacles on white, cushioned walls and claw-carvings.

8. A tradesman’s log book. Very interesting. Large enough that it required two foxes to open, which indeed seems to have been the custom given the divergent writing on each page. I have not had enough time to decipher its workings but from what I gather our ancestors engaged in a thriving sea trade with another civilization in which we traded two goods; noted: Somni/Mora-Mora. The extraneous delegation is written as a tribe of fossa – a species none in our number have seen nor heard of. Led by a Captain Telfair.

9. A journal! Kindred spirit, this Hummm. If I slice the covers off it will not be too heavy. May bring with me.

10. A poem, “Vulpes Amorem.”

It was Red who found the last of these, simply by looking upwards. Painted inside the palace dome which I have transcribed below:

Oh, for ten more lives, each a hundred years long.

Oh, for Time to climb to midday, grow yellow, and get stuck.

Oh, for evening to bargain Night and nod on the way out.

Oh, for it all to happen again and again.

The first of the gods ate the sun in segments, like an orange,

Juice fell down their faces, slicked their furred chins;

Yes, it ran across their stomachs and grew leaves.

The taste was bitter and a surprise,

So they sat together and then lay

On their backs to snatch stars down from the hard purple of the sky,

Just to drop them in a glass and let them chink the sides.

They had eaten all of the sun before they saw what was behind it.

There was a trick to knocking down the moon: you had to try and try.

Only when their legs were tired from jumping

Did it swing down in an arc.

When it crumbled to pieces the size of rice,

They bolted the blue, freezing crumbs.

How many years are kept in a laugh?

How do decades taste on the teeth?

Twelve hours on the tongue like a penny of butter,

They thought it could not have been so little; had they not watched forty winters pass?

One of them can still remember the scent of morning,

He will tell you about it if you ask.

The grassy smell that hung to the curtains, in their creases,

And the light

That drew the shape of an egg on the carpet.

The other was asleep and dreaming of sky,

No, water. Water as wide as sky and bluer still.

To fall into it was to drink to forget and when she was beneath it

She could not remember the names of the animals

She watched wriggle in the sand, and leap

Sparkling, casting penumbra, like half moons.

Can a mind bear the sight of itself?

They woke up and fell asleep

And woke again

And soon there was nothing

Between dreaming and waking, and in that space

The size of a cloakroom,

They locked eyes for the first time and the world opened.

Oh, for minutes to get caught in the corner of my eye.

Oh, for a rider to get thrown into a stack of darkness that sings.

Oh, for stars to gleam in the pit of a tiny hand.

Oh, for it all to happen again and again.

– Crementon Glovius

I do not know what it means, but I sleep under it now. Perhaps I will ponder while dreaming.

Fourth passage (Laguna – mountains - no fish - no water)

I do not have much to say, journal. Too tired. Cold. Weeks at least. But we are there. Across. One more in our number.

Fifth passage (oceanic - Kapatagan - bad days)

I woke early this morning and stared out at the Kapatagan Plains. What I did not expect is how foreboding, how hostile its openness would feel. Fear tends to live in dark, small places – in the barely-seen and much-constrained – but I have discovered a different kind of fear. It is vast and oceanic. I look out at the miles of grassland, swaying and talking in the wind, and I feel as if I am about to become overrun, swept away. Perhaps that is what I want. So long is the grass in places I am not sure we will be able to see over it without climbing on top of each other and none of us have energy to spare after the past days and weeks.

I will not pretend we are doing well. There is a reason our kind stays clear of mountains and it is because there is no life and scarce water and our fur, though heavy in winter, is not built for such total, eviscerating cold. We are losing it in patches. I can say now that there were times (many times) I did not expect us to survive and other times I hoped we wouldn’t. How thin I have become. How skeletal are we all.

There is young Repl crying. The camp will soon be awake. First, a plan. Then, the long march across an open plain.