His ache is so great he would like to harm it by harming himself. They don’t want that, the old ones, the ancient ones. This requirement is not that of Thomas Witka Just. It may be dark at times but the ancients live in a lightness, lighter than dust in air. They want him to open the pathway into the future, not to fast or starve or harm any part of himself but to be whole and nourished. They are there to take his human hand, its lines, its dark skin with pale scars from a never-won war, not that winning would ever have made a difference. In their world, there is only the hand to take, the human hand, to slide through time along its mysterious pathway sometimes called memory, sometimes called feeling. They travel through ancient knowledge and the movement of mountains, winds familiar and singing, and through the sweet water. He knows they can take him to the shoals on the other side of his life even if he feels lost. Or they can take him seaward, farther than a man can see or know, that’s where the grasp of their hands lead. They can take you to the green mosses, or to places where creatures cling to granite walls above the ocean. Oh listen, the seagulls call, and the sound of washing water comes to earth. In his raw condition, he could break open and a new man filled with beauty would be there as if from a cocoon, soft and new, shining. The dead heart falls away and there is a new one, alive and beating.

He knows the horrors in his body will be there the rest of his life if he doesn’t heal them. Maybe even then they might remain, but he would see them differently. For every inch of skin, there is memory. Devils are so made. Saints, too, if you believe in them. His humanity has been broken as an old walking stick that once held up a crippled man named Thomas. He realizes the stick and the man are one thing and he can fall. He has violated laws beneath the laws of men and countries, something deeper, the earth and the sea, the explosion of trees. He has to care again. He has to be water again, rock, earth with its new spring wildflowers and its beautiful, complex mosses.

The fog has fallen the night before and now its hand covers their world. Ruth watches it lift a finger and a man walks out of the fog, a ghost becoming real, taking on a body. Thomas comes to Aurora’s door. Ruth stands behind the door, feeling him, not answering. She can feel his condition and it is full of voices. She hears them talking. Maybe they mumble, or maybe they are all talking at the same time, but she thinks it is A’atsika they speak and it makes a chill rise up her spine to hear a man’s body speak so. She doesn’t let him in. It is not the right time for them to meet and face one another.