“…before the time comes, Manqui… for us to leave again…
I’ll show you what I was doing while you were doing what I was writing when you were writing!
…a brief stop to replenish water…
we are in the Great Hall of Small Meals!
…do you see the washbasins?
…eh… that there is the hieroglyphic chronicle of the Greek Astramigration Group…
…and… that continuation there—I added it myself…
Common hierographicals!”

“My sweet Cho Kyon!
I began stitching together the hierochronical sources inside the work of Reese Cerussites, Delusions of Youth and Age. I wrapped myself in the scattered letters of my witch-mother, in the old photographs of our ancestors, and I found the path again, inside my own work, Cho of the Commons.

Now I see that with the astonishing art you placed into your hieroglyphic additions, you carry us to the highest culmination! Together we will unite all the works into a single embroidery!
This will become the fifth book!

All that remains is for us to return to where everything first began to be woven, to Anima Key sometime in the coming days, when I will have gracefully completed my ninety-eighth year.

There and then I will find completion, in the place where I first opened my eyes and saw so much beauty gathered into a single point of the universe. There I will seek the old and the new people—have they transformed into Whomans? I will learn the outcome of the war, who placed the homeostatic dome, who the pirates are now.

Together with you, faithful and equal companion of mine, Cho Kyon, it is certain we will find many adventures and deadly dangers ahead—but also friends who will help us integrate into Anima Key and build upon it new stories, wondrous ones, founded upon the foundations of the old.”

Now, in Choky’s mind, there returns once more the final image of the only being in the world he would wish to have beside him in his new adventure.

What might Eri be doing, he wonders—she who persists no matter how much time passes? Did she manage to escape her hunters, or did she fall into their hands?

It is possible, he supposes, across space and time, that Eri of the Commons may have found the hieroglyphic washbasins and arrived before his departure for her own return. Perhaps she completed the missing pieces of the story with depictions of her rape by Ker, Ver, and Rous, while she was pregnant with Choky’s child.

Even after that extreme act, they would never have stopped hunting her—had Rous not, because of the mutilation of his tongue, learned to value the essence of things.

Last of all, he would have seen the sequence of hieroglyphs on the washbasins of the Great Hall of Small Meals and been enchanted by the immense beauty of these artifacts. He decided to halt the merciless pursuit and devote himself as well to the art of filling the gaps.

Repentant, yet also purified by all the pain he had caused, in the end he thanks those who entered his life by force of will—and vanished by force of necessity.

They lived a past.
They glimpsed a future.