It lolled in the sky a while longer. When it had been alone for a time, its antennae twitched and it curled away and began to make its slow way south. It was exhausted. Its sexual organs and orifices had closed away beneath its iridescent shell, to keep hold of all that had been spent.

The slake-moth matriarch flew towards Riverskin and the cactus dome, ready to prepare the nest.

Part 6

My talons flex, trying to open. They are constrained by the ridiculous and vile bandages wound around them, that flap like ragged skin.

I walk bent double along the sides of the railways, the trains screaming at me in irate warning as they blast by. I sneak now across the rail bridge, watching the Tar coil beneath me. I stop and look around. Way ahead of me and way behind the river slithers and throws rubbish in rhythmic little bursts against the bank.

Looking over to the west I can see over the water and the swell of Riverskin houses to the tip of the Glasshouse. It is illuminated from inside, a blister of light on the city’s skin.

I am changing. There is something within me which was not there before, or perhaps it is that something has gone. I smell the air and it is the same air it was yesterday, and yet it is different. There can be no doubt. Something is welling up under my own skin. I am not sure who I am.

I have trailed these humans as if I am dumb. A worthless, mindless presence, without opinion or intellect. Without knowing who I am, how can I know what to say?

I am not Respected Yagharek any longer, and I have not been for many months. I am not the raging thing that stalked the Shankell pits, that slaughtered man and trow, ratjinn and shardmouth, a menagerie of pugnacious beasts and warriors of races I had not dreamed could exist. That savage fighter is gone.

I am not the tiring one who stalked the lush grasslands and cold, hard hills. I am not the lost thing that wandered the concrete walkways of the city introspective and lost, seeking to become again something I never was.

I am none of those. I am changing, and I do not know what I will be.

I am afraid of the Glasshouse. Like Shankell, it has many names. The Glasshouse, the Greenhouse, the Planthouse, the Hothouse. It is nothing but a ghetto, dealt with sleight of hand. A ghetto in which the cactacae try to replicate the edge of the desert. Am I returning home?

To ask the question is to answer it. The Glasshouse is not the veldt, or the desert. It is a sad illusion, nothing but a mirage. It is not my home.