I've tried to imagine what it must be like to awaken fully formed, possessing certain skills but without a past to remember, lost in a world of amnesiacs.

It seems terrifying to me, even more terrifying than what I've experienced these last few weeks and months.

But here and now, mercy will destroy us.

We thought nothing could live in this inhospitable mountain pass.

I’ve lost count of the days we’ve huddled in this cave against the raging winter storm outside, deep in what we hope was still Absentia Pass.

Truth is, we aren’t sure about much anymore.

Manic ravings in a foreign tongue echo against the cavern’s high ceilings. The insane Retrogradi fox is still restrained at the cave’s opening, but he rages against his bindings with the might of five foxes.

He hasn’t slept at all since being captured.

The foxes closest to him aren’t sleeping well either.

The mad fox had attacked ANOMIC in the middle of the night just a few feet outside the mouth of the cave.  If the savagery had happened any further away, the howling winds may have drowned out Anomic’s shrieks and it all would have ended very differently.

It took nearly two dozen of us to restrain the intruder.  We were gaunt and exhausted and not the fighting force we were when we started the journey to Perdita.

Are we close to the end of our trek? It feels that way.

One way or another.

Either we find the entrance to the underworld or we die trying.

Or…we die here, after giving up.

Anomic sidles up alongside me, pulling me from my macabre reverie.

“We should eat him,” Anomic says, a jagged chunk of his ear missing.

“Do you seek to end his suffering or prolong ours?” I ask.

“Just hungry,” Anomic retorts. “We’re all hungry.

I remain silent.

“What options do we have?” Anomic asked rhetorically before returning to a warm pile of slumbering foxes.

This trip had changed all of us.  Anomic was a recluse, avoiding other foxes whenever possible.

Now, he snuggles deeply in between six foxes he previously despised.

His parting thought disturbs me.

Not because he is wrong.

What options do we have?

---------------

Those who haven’t sunk into apathy debate late into the night about our next move.

Not just about the Retrogradi, but about the trip.

All our lives hang in the balance.

"There is an entire world," PICNIC, LIGHTNING says, "of which our minds skim but the surface. A world of deep, profound thought. A world created by deep, profound thoughts. When you see Perdita, you enter those depths."

“We’ve all heard the stories,” QUARKS sneers.  “I’d trade 1,000 stories -- one million stories! -- for a map.  Or a meal. Or --”

“Or to be back home again,” EUPHEMISM interrupts.

The following silence sat heavily until COMMEDIA sighs: “Do we even know where the entrance to the Unknowing is?”

“It’s a pretty major detail to have forgotten until now,” GARDEN OF ED3N murmurs.

“The other side of Absentia Pass,” Picnic, Lighting responds. “It shouldn’t be--”

“Aren’t we there now?” PROBLEM? interrupts.  “That’s what we believed 10 days ago. Will we be there soon? Will we know when we have arrived? What will we even be looking for?”

“We’ll know it when we see it,” MORAL HAZARD says, attempting and failing to be reassuring.

I don’t care for the direction of the conversation.

“What about the prisoner?” I pivot.

“We should eat him,” SALVATION THEORY echoes Anomic.

No one shouts him down.

A few murmur their assent.

If the prisoner was less gibbering mad, less full of fury, less sure of will -- maybe someone would have stepped forward to lead the cannibalism.

Or the defense.

Instead we sit in another moment of “silence” while the lunatic gibbers behind us.

We are desperate enough. Even the most stoic among us is afraid.  Even the most optimistic sees only bleakness ahead.

The raging prisoner suddenly falls quiet. At some point, we had grown acclimated to his demonic sounds and deep rasping voice.

Now, their absence puts us even more on edge.  We turn to peer at him.

He looks back at us, eyes glowing out of the shadows with the reflected flames of our fire.

And he begins to sing.  It is the first time we can understand him:

“When the child was a child, it was the time for these questions:

Why am I me, and why not you?

Why am I here, and why not there?

When did time begin, and where does space end?

Is life under the sun not just a dream?

Is what I see and hear and smell not just an illusion of a world before the world?

Given the facts of evil and foxes.

Does evil really exist?

How can it be that I,

who I am,

didn't exist before I came to be,

and that,

someday, I,

who I am,

will no longer be who I am?”

With that, the insane fox goes calmly to sleep.  The rest of us turn on each other.

This moment will define our existence.

Do we meet our end stained with blood and devoid of principle?

-----------------------

“Nobody chooses insanity,” BELIEF NETWORK presses her point home with gusto. She’s been building to this point her whole speech, her whole life.  “It happens because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet...How can you resent someone's illness? The only appropriate response is compassion. Keep the Retrogradi with us and treat him with respect and caution until he has earned his freedom.”

A third of the gathered foxes roar their approval, while another third hiss their disdain.

It is the third of us with no strong response who will decide the Retrogradi’s fate.

And likely our own fates as well.

The chattering comes to an end.

“We should eat him,” Anomic says again, stepping to the fore. “If we don’t, we die and he dies.”

“We are not just meaningless fragments in an alien universe, briefly suspended between birth and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation,” PHOTIC SNEEZER is more emotional than I’d ever seen him.  “Underneath our outer forms, we are connected to one another with something so vast, so immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be conceived or spoken of. We dishonor ourselves by even discussing this.”

HOLORIME takes center stage. “It is our resistance to our circumstances that causes our suffering, not the circumstances themselves. Sacrificing the Retrogradi and consuming his flesh will do nothing for us. We must accept our fates, whatever they may be.  Only then will the true possibilities arise.”

“So we should sit and meditate and have faith that it will all work out?” ART OF NOISES sneers so loudly that his rejoinder echoes off the cavernous ceilings and walls.  “How about some of us eat him and the others can sit and pray for salvation?”

“The future can't be predicted,” LAGUNA LACUNA breaks the silence once the echoes subside, cradling her newborn REPL at her side.

She makes sure she has every fox’s attention before she continues.

“But the future can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. What if everything that led us here is but the beginning of a beginning? What if this moment here and now is the aperture through which the future of our species will be pulled?  Do we seek to birth a world of blood, fear, and cannibalism? Or can we build something better? A world we’d wish for our children.”

A few of the would-be cannibals have the decency to avert Laguna’s gaze as another silence falls.

This time, we hadn’t noticed the Retrogradi’s noises subsiding.  He had been hurling invectives even in his sleep.

When had that stopped?

The fox without a name didn’t open his eyes as he begins to sing again:

“A long time ago, all living creatures had perished.

The world was no more than a sea - a misty gray swamp.

One old fox remained, all alone, spared from the devastation.

He walked and walked in the stale water, finding no shelter, no trace of life.

He was in despair, his throat taut with inexpressible sorrow.

Suddenly, he turned and saw behind him a tree rising out of the marsh and at the foot of the tree a very beautiful, smiling kit.

He stopped, breathless, reeling, unable to understand.

And the kit said to him: ‘I see you need to rest. Come into my body.’

The old fox suddenly experienced utter disdain for long life.

The kit opened his mouth, a great wind rose up, an irresistible gust swept the old fox towards his mouth.

Despite himself he went in, just as he was, and dropped down into the child's belly.

There, looking round, he saw a stream, trees, herds of animals. He saw a city, streets, crowds, rivers.

Yes, in the belly of the kit he saw the entire earth, calm, beautiful, he saw the ocean, he saw the limitless sky.

He walked for a long while, for more than a hundred years, without reaching the end of the body.

Then the wind rose up again, he felt himself drawn upward; he came out through the same mouth and found the kit under the fig tree.

The kit looked at him with a smile and said, "I hope you have had a good rest.”

We postpone our vote on the Retrogradi’s fate.

----

Our internal clocks tell us dawn is near but the clouds and thick snowfall have darkened the sun for over a week.

The Retrogradi is back to how we had found him.  Saliva, curses, and nonsense pour from his mouth as he rants and raves.

HANNIBAL and the Wild Fox AS LONG AS THERE’S LIGHT call us to order.

We hold onto our civility, but we can feel it teetering.

Savagery is just a heartbeat away.

As Hannibal and Light open their mouths to speak, the rasping invective of the Retrogradi is suddenly replaced by an impossibly loud, high-pitched, cave-rattling whine.

The noise is fear and it is pain.

More visceral and infectious than we had ever experienced.

Our hearts and minds and bodies ring with the same frequency, vibrating to the raw emotion that suddenly fill our ears and eyes, our paws and our tails, and everything in between.

Whatever it was that had held us together until this point -- we lose it. A scene from our darkest collective nightmares has come to life before our eyes.

Underneath our thoughts, virtues, and ideals we are beasts, driven by instinctive forces we’ll never understand.

Fight-or-flight reflexes hijack our minds and our paws.  No one chooses to fight.

For the UnFox was real.

There, in the mouth of the cave, the hulking shadowy spirit-monster is devouring the Retrogradi’s soul.

In that moment we foxes have one mind, all perfectly aligned on one thought: survive.

And so we flee.  Deeper into the cave.

Intellectually, I know we are doomed.

We had explored the cave when we first arrived.  There was one way in and one way out. And at this moment, that one exit is blocked by our worst nightmare feasting on our greatest shame.

But while my mind gibbers with a mixture of fear and acceptance, our bodies push harder than ever.

We arrive at the back end of the cave out of breath and out of our minds.

We scrabble at the walls and rocks in the hopes of there being something, anything to burrow into or through.

We no longer talk, the seconds pass like hours as blood begins to spatter our surroundings. Dozens of foxes simultaneously try with all their might to dig through stone.

We form a rough semi-circle of diggers, flinging specks of stone and skin and fur in the center of the formation behind us.

Picnic, Lightning notices it first.

Our specks of blood are pooling together on the floor. The deep crimson droplets are being drawn to one another like magnets to iron.

One by one, we halt our frenzy to watch.

As the unholy pool expands and starts to churn, the color darkens from crimson to black and then it all starts to boil.

The bubbling pool stops and shimmers until what was briefly black as night becomes nothing at all.  There’s no longer a color to describe it.

LATTE ART, who had never stopped digging, throws a stone behind himself.  It bounces and slowly dribbles its way over the rocks and fur, eventually trickling its way into what was, until very recently, a pool of spinning hot blood.

The stone vanishes.

Those who had kept digging now stop.

The sounds of the UnFox’s feast echo off the cave walls.

I throw another stone at the pool of nothing.

It too disappears.

The cave falls completely quiet as the UnFox finishes its meal.

It roars with satisfaction.

The sound of massive footfalls rings off the walls like the clattering of a horse’s hooves.

As one, we jump into the nothingness.