I should have been wary. There is nothing you cannot hear if the world is quiet enough. And if the world will not be silent, you will have to make yourself silent. So silent. That all the sound everywhere means nothing. But still I did not hear, not on that day. Fell into the trap. Fell into the floor in the bottom of the world, tumbling into the dark, out on the other side in someone else’s warren.

There came the piercing thread of agony in the shoulder. There came the dizziness, the stagger, the fall into leaves and moss, amid the snails and earthworms. Down close where the earth smells like heaven.

My mate watched from the bushes. She knew she couldn’t save me, and I didn’t want her to try. Still I saw her. As I faded. As I faded into becoming something else, not new or old. As they took me away. Still looking into her eyes.

The sentimental tale. The tale you always need to care. Which shows you don’t care. Why we don’t care if you care.

Once, I went to the farthest extreme, to the very edge of the realities, pushed up against the impossible. I was sick with my power, besotted with it. I thought no place had a fence I could not dig under or jump over. Or that no place defended by a fence might be dangerous. My mind was a feral place and strange creatures darted through it in the night. And I welcomed them.

Beyond where the Company had ever wanted me to go. More than they had wanted me to see. Perhaps it was the past, not the future. Perhaps all the answers lay in the past, or maybe time did not move as we thought it did. That our movement was a kind of reality or world all by itself. Ever the numbers that bound it and made it so: the three, the countdown from ten, the seven, with their dozens of fragments.

Limitless, I came to a world where the moon lay so huge and ivory and cratered that it blotted out the sun above a mirror-twin to Earth. Except, there in that strange land everything was alive and nothing was dead, even the dead, and I could find no familiar scent to guide me through. Where the rocks spoke to me and so did the water and so did the sand and so did the plants.

There, ultimately, I found my purpose. There, I was transformed once more and truly became the blue fox. Out where all the smells run together and you cannot trust your senses.