But, in the end, joy cannot fend off evil. Joy can only remind you why you fight.

It was not always you, here, in this room, with me half dead hanging from the wall. Once, it was them, and far away. The ones who took me. Where did they take me from? The usual places. The ones you don’t understand because you don’t really see them. You live there, but you could live anywhere.

My life wasn’t much. Before. Not to you. To you it would be strange and over-silent and made of blank spaces and space too long. The wrong gait and the wrong gate. A fence where I see none. Or none not defeated by a leap.

I was the tree fox, the water fox, never meant for the desert. When happiest I lived on an island within swimming distance of the mainland. A copse. A sullen stream, weary of summer people tossing garbage in it. A stream clogged with rocks, the kind where you pry up the moss and find delicious crayfish. I liked to jump onto a river rock. Sit there as the sun washed through the trees and through the water. The sudden regard of it. How it spread out to cover us and I could sense the growth and decay of all around me.

The sun was a star. I knew that, even then. I knew we live on a planet. I can sense magnetic fields. I can feel the weight of the Earth turning. I can listen to the networks between trees and view their own map of constellations. So I knew better than you. Better than books.

I had a mate and we had children and we raised them well and then they left to strike out on their own and would raise more. We would live in caves and dens and abandoned buildings overgrown with vines. Always near a river. Always near the basking stones.

There was no moment like any other moment and yet each moment was the same.

We slept in trees, on branches thick with moss and ferns. That was our bed. We would sleep in the heat, and rise to play and sit in the sun and hunt rabbits and mice. We would explore the heart of abandoned towns fallen again to weeds and bramble. We would paw past the ashes of cold campgrounds. We were bold and loud often and did not care, especially at night.