“It seems to me… the dancers of the sky… were revolutionary judges… the nocturnal undead surgeons… were expendable yet irreplaceable… all my life experience… islets in the ocean… dugouts that missed the leap into the void… fear of failure… and since then… they search for springboards… constant change… nothing remained stable… in a world that changed so much… the human body… the dog’s head… I could cling to nothing… my exile… temples of freedom… Ro… war… Eris… love-dances… the law of change makes no exceptions… Manqui is not… Ker… Ver… Rous… robbery… stormbringer… aquaponics!”
Choky closes the hierographic narration with a medium gulp of water and now knows well the path by which to view the servile phase of his life from another olfactory angle.
He accepts that the greater part of his skills are products of earlier lessons Manqui forced him to attend. From then until now, through individual revelatory experiences and the overall image they form, however perversely arranged, he realizes that the definition of supreme freedom becomes possible only through voluntary acceptance of the necessity for activities beyond nature, the arts.
As he begins to carve his own story, continuing the decoration in a paradoxical way, he sees by a different measure, beyond Earthly dimensions, that everything is alien yet identical.
He migrated to distant lands for survival, resisted barbarian invaders, tamed Chaos and imposed Order, analyzed the natural world, sought the cause behind everything, and reached individual achievements inspired by those of his ancestors. He experienced and continues to experience genuine freedom, one that shatters conceptual chains, proving the sense of its loss to be apparent rather than essential.
Ultimately, he will conquer the quintessence of godless entheism, both cause and consequence of an effective defense against oblivion.
He is incapable of forgetting, but he has long since stopped waiting for Eris. In this chaos of ancient Earth fragments it is impossible to see far; she may well have come and gone without him noticing. And her dominant mnemonic scent? Lost in the surrounding stench of a collapsing world.
“Today we are the upright bipedal Kynanthros, traveling back and forth through bridges and tunnels, doing all the things men and women once used to—but mostly avoided—in their deep past, and now regretfully recall as the old good four-legged days on Earth.”
In his final sip, the only question tormenting him is whether he can bring change and lead his Manqui out of the mire of decay and annihilation. With striking clarity, he traces the non-negotiable, overpowering structure of the dominant initial condition and decides to return to the homeostatic dwelling A.TH.A.H.E., because he is very hungry.
At the third Third, of the second Second, in the first First of the second Hour of the third Day of the sixty-seventh Year Post-Dissections, conscious that any change in one part of the system alters the system as a whole, he arrives home, to help his Manqui remember what he forgot, and to lose himself in whatever he remembers.
Manqui looks at Choky with emotion, and shortly after presents him with a return gift:
his new, improved survival belt, upgraded with additions, reinforced and refined with high-resilience materials, fully equipped with supplementary tools for shadow-warfare, evasion, and interception, secured with a nasal imprint code.
A survival belt with pockets.
A proper paracord vest, this time.
“How perfectly timed your return is, Choky!
Here, take this as a reward: the improved survival belt!
We can begin the briefing for our first complete journey.
If you could read Greek, I would show you our book titled The Hound of Hounds, which I began writing while you shone through your absence. You would understand everything that changed within me, if you do not already know it.
There is now a destination for us to move toward.
We will head for an astonishing place whose existence I discovered while you were gone. The instructions were drawn on a map, inside a hundred-year-old chest I unearthed beneath the tanks of active microorganisms.
Only that map can reveal the correct path to Anima Key.
The incredible part is that I also found several other books explaining everything about its history. Along with the letters dedicated to me by my mother, Dushanka, I have already read most of the material—except for the fifth and final book, which appears to be missing.
And now, with your return, I am fully convinced that we are the ones destined to fill the gap and complete the embroidery.
In our survival belts we will also carry needles, because only we—and they—can stitch everything into the one desired pentadic weave.
Nothing prevents us from preparing and setting out!”
“For which place? Ah—look… while you were waiting for me to return from my wanderings… I crossed so many Earth fragments… I scented many, but none resemble what you describe…
I can lead you there, if you wish, through what I have learned…
you can read it to me along the way…
the road may be long…
I believe you will have time to finish it for me.”