When he woke again, his skin was all sunlight. He held his limbs out to see them—smooth and hairless and warm as sky. The delicate creature was mumbling again. He watched its mouth moving, and the sounds became clearer—the shapings of teeth and tongue and lip—and arms and hands followed the sounds.

Again, they padded over the land, the creature beside him stepping quicker. He could feel the eagerness of its footfalls. The murmurings kept pace—brisk and light—the flurrying of clouds over a field. He, too, now finding the scent of humid forest, of mica-sharp mountains, feeling now the softness of meadow-damp grass and pine-dry earth beneath his tender feet, hurried on. They passed through swaying tall fields, seed heads tickling his skin. They passed under towering oaks, shadows, too, tickling his skin. They lay beside streams and drank from cold rushing water that tickled his tongue.

Wrrr, the delicate creature murmured and splashed. Wrrr.

He stopped drinking. He watched the creature’s mouth. Wrrr. The sound of coldness and thirst.

His eyes grew big. His ears were all ears. The creature let the stream rush through its fingers. “Water,” it said.

Water. He held the sound in his mind.

It was a sound apart from him, apart from the forest that surrounded him. Water. The sound hovered in the air, and yet was not air. He felt the world around him grow suddenly large and round and dazzlingly bright: Shadows lifted. His mind thrilled with the sound that was also the stream tumbling in front of him, that all the stream held—the sensation of cold, of wet, of thirst, the feel of its pulling rapids and calm pools, the noise of its endless rushing, bubbling, splashing, the smell of its mossy banks and clean rocks, the patches of light and dark, reflecting trees and clouds and shade—could be held in this sound water.

He felt the sound in his mouth push against his teeth and tongue and lips. He held it there quietly, considering it, feeling its potential. Looking up, he saw the delicate creature watching him with unblinking eyes. “Water,” it said, softly, as though it understood that he understood.

A strange beating in his chest—as full as the tumbling rush of the stream.

“Tree.” The delicate creature touched its fingers to a dark trunk, and the sound, encompassing green leaf and rough bark and swaying bough, opened his heart more.

“Rae,” the creature said now, hand fluttering over its own chest. “Rae.”

Rae. The sound of gray eyes and quiet murmuring and bright singing and soft padding, the feeling of follow, follow, follow and the warmth of the den, the tumbling fullness of the air and all of his heart—the sense of himself as part of another.

LXII

INTERLUDE—FRAGMENTS AND EPHEMERA

From the Letters of Limple the Formerly Sprightly:

Though my journey here was largely pleasant with temperate weather and an easygoing mount, my servants have been much affrighted. Tell me, I am extremely desirous to learn whether you have seen the creature that so startled my cook and servant who traveled perhaps a quarter day before me. A wild, brutish thing they describe, all teeth and fangs and with body so strange and misaligned they could not judge it of any animal form. Its vicious snarling, unexpected and sudden behind them, did send their horses bolting, and my fine cook has taken to bed, being ill with the shock. From further inquiry I have learned that this creature is not unknown by men who tend these lands, and I wonder whether you, more inclined to clearheaded natural observations, have included it in your catalog of local fauna? Farewell.