What lived there had lost its name long ago. What lived there changed shape and form and spoke in different voices. Had been created as one thing, brought up as another. What lived there was serious and playful and lonely but not alone. It had known me before. It knew me now, read my mind, my intent, encouraged it.

“It will take time. You will not survive to see the end of it. And one day, Time will bring you back here, in some form. To this place.”

“How do you know this?”

But there was just laughter in reply.

In the end, if you change the enemy enough, if you wear them down, perhaps losing is good enough.

This much I know, among all the other things I know.

Once upon a time, I spoke to three dead astronauts. Past, present, future? All so proud, so determined. All so doomed. They told me their plans. They were so pure. They did not ask me about my past, where I had come from. Not in the right way. They did not imagine I might be similar to them. But I was the one sent where no one else wanted to go. I understood them better than they knew.

I could talk like Grayson now. Or Chen. Or maybe even Moss. I could claim to conjure with leviathans or through great bears and salamanders. I could bark at you. I could be silent and hurt you in the dark by smell alone. By the sounds you careless left behind you.

Perhaps you were right to pin me alive to this wall as trophy and warning both. Even if the magician who did it is just the dying fall, a living ruin. I escaped. But, of course, a human found me eventually. Some human. Didn’t care what I was up to. Didn’t remember what I’d done. Cut off my head. Stuck me up on this observatory wall. Could have been any human.

I couldn’t protect my children. Couldn’t protect my mate. She couldn’t protect me. History didn’t allow for that. History had other plans. Don’t know if the need is part of me or part of them. The pool of water. The stream. The salamanders there. There tasty earthworms. The burrow. All of us together, in the burrow.

They have been dead three hundred years now.

I should be dead with them. A fox lives four years.

I must not be a fox anymore.

They killed me. They brought me back.

One time I escaped. But it was too late.