“Aguila” by Abraxas (05-03-02)

 

“And the will therein lieth, which dieth not.  Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor?  For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness.  Man doth not yield himself … unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”  -- Joseph Glanvill

 

Midnight – the skies were dull, lifeless.  Hazy vapors obscured the ethereal stars and in that dying, fading light it was almost impossible to see the sharp downgrade of the tree-covered hillside.  So it was by the quick and random footholds, the sudden turns, the unexpected slides and the churning, knotting at the pit of Jackalman’s stomach that revealed the slopes of the Zephyia, those ancient, smoky peaks that surrounded Castle Plundarr.  Descending, succumbing – faster and faster – filled the canine’s spirit with an ominous doom, a threatening fear for it was that it seemed destruction lay waiting at every false turn:  from the cantankerous, leaf-trodden ‘trail’, carved more by the forces of Nature than Mutant ingenuity to the gnarled, knotted roots, woven across the dirt like web-work and between them one mistake, one slip would be enough to send him tumbling down the whole slanted slope, breaking his neck.

A shock arrested his motion when he became aware of the unexpected, the sudden feel of the egg braced against his chest.  It was disturbing, even disquieting – the onset of weight and dimension as if it grew out of nothing into his arms – and then, as one stun faded another alarmed:  its fragility.  He shuddered as the thought, the image, formed in his mind across oblivion and he squeezed the large, melon-shaped egg, kissed its smooth, milky crust.  Recalling the ghastly fate of its twin, he promised it would not be destroyed, not by Slythe and not by his own, inbred foolishness.  Now there was reason to live, escape and be free, for here there was one, last thing remaining, connecting him with Aguila.

Jackalman looked back:  if he could have turned into a pillar of rock he would have.  At the uppermost vista the mountain crest shimmered with the eerie, dreamy red aura of Castle Plundarr – the battlement awoken by a rabid Slythe determined to hunt him and destroy him for what he dared to do.  Only the very tips of the towers could be discerned through the interplay of shadow and darkness – gray, foggy clouds prevailed causing that jagged, crown-like silhouette to waver like a mirage.  Beneath it evolved the façade of trees that carpeted the steep landscape.  River-like channels of rock and dirt carved amid the forestry snaked from the upper peaks to the lower portions of the hill where the wilderness thickened and the paths melted into obscurity – and it was then and there that a new fear materialized:  the sight of Mutant guards crawling, clamoring through the trails as if ants, small and distant, with tiny, red lamps to guide them.

Out of breath but not out of determination, the Plunderian turned back to face the void ahead.  If only there might be light at the end of the path but it was all dark.  All dark.  Again he tightened the hold of the egg wanting to force the fear away.  All of his life he had been overcome by unwholesome paranoia, but now he had to act, he had to put it aside and act for it was not just himself he needed to save.

Fighting against every instinct in his being, he switched from the trails to the wilderness.  The land thereabout was flatter and easier to tread through, although thoughts of tripping, falling did not waver.  The tight, cramped panorama before him was the absolute black of space, almost like a wall of onyx silk perpetually ahead of him.  He felt more than he saw the rocky soil and fallen leaves at his feet and the branches and tree bark, dry and brittle, at his shoulders.

What else lurked within?  Often, in his dreams, in his earlier, unhunted days, he obsessed about those red-eyed demons that populated the night.  Creatures that, unlike the doe-eyed denizens of the day, were not helpless against Mutant hordes.  Creatures he himself battled hand-to-hand and now that he was in danger, what would they do?  What might they do?

If there had been as much as a single star out in the sky its light would have been obliterated by the vast forestry that now enveloped him at the midpoint of his frantic journey.  But all of the trees of Third Earth would not have been enough to blot his steps which way they went.  If only he were faster, he cursed, envious of a certain Thundercat but now not even speed was enough.  Now the only way to survive was through ingenuity.  And if he could survive, there might be hope….

Suddenly the ground beneath his feet resumed its natural, steep downgrade and just as unexpectedly he struck a patch of mud.  He slipped and skidded – someway, somehow he maneuvered his body about extending his head up forward and pressing his arms down deep against his abdomen to protect the oval, leathery case.  After an eternity of desperate, breathless moments, he came to rest along the reedy, marshy banks of a creek.  Standing and without thinking, he ran along with the currents of the stream – the water never rising above his ankles – but the stillness of the night was strong and oppressive and a silence never before heard shrouded the land.  And that aural void caused the splashing of his feet to echo with a resounding furry sharper, crisper than any voice he could have uttered, any shriek that could have passed his lips.

After a series of sharp right, left turns the brook ceased at the rocky, craggy edge of a cliff – more of a water spray than a waterfall – the wall of stone was several hundred feet high from precipice to foot. 

Panting for air, he eased from running to scrambling, inspecting the stonework of the mountainside’s ominous edge.  It was rough but the jetting slate masses seemed as if it might afford stable footholds here and there.  But he knew if he scaled it, it would be one-handed.  Kneeling, the water passing between his legs, he held the egg by its length and looked into it as though it were a mirror – a mirror whose only reflection was a smooth, milk-white face.  A face he had seen before, many, many times before.  Should it slip he would fall:  if it was their destiny to die, they died together.  Loosening his jacket, he tucked the egg into it, letting it rub against his fur and holding it there with the slight, gentle pressure of his hand, his arm.

Jackalman dug his claws into the rock.  He dangled his body as his feet read the unknown features of the waterfall.  When his toes met a ledge wide enough and sturdy enough to let him stand, he switched arms, one to clutch to the egg, one to cling to the wall and lowered himself onto the next level.  And so he descended one treacherous, aching step at a time, scaling the face of the cliff slowly, cautiously.  It must have been hours before he summoned the courage to peer up and gauge how far he went – he dared not look down and face the abyss – it appeared to be only twenty feet and he wondered, almost aloud, how many hundred more awaited….

The Mutant inched from the outskirts closer and closer to the water spray itself – the trickle once steady was no a mist – the rocks were slick and the dirt was muddy and he feared doom at every moment.  But it was amid all of that danger that he discovered the niche cut through slabs of spate.  The vertical crack was wide enough to admit him with the egg.  It opened into a round, inner chamber carved by the elements out of the body of the mountainside.  Damp and cold, it was built like that kind of aerie used by large birds of prey to rear their young – and how appropriate, he thought, as he let his mind returned to thoughts of Aguila.  The shelter, for all of its wants and imperfections, provided a welcomed and needed chance to rest.

He sat at the center of the room.  He nested – the floor concave, collapsed as it were – laying the egg in his lap, enveloping it with his jacket.  Settled and collected, he took a deep, deep breath and sighed low and long, letting the world outside clamor itself into oblivion.

“They’ll never find us here,” he whispered lovingly, almost mischievously, to the smooth, silky container.  “Slythe – if he can’t find me on the mountainside, he’s got too many other problems – he’s got – he won’t find me.  Oh,” he stopped, closing his eyes, “if only –”

It was Aguila, her face soft and warm pressed against his as they hugged.  The only light in that tower keep, bright and white, evolved like smoke from the fabric of the bed at their knees.  The bird-like woman, neither human nor Plunderian, turned as if to kiss him – but a loud crack snapped and only her dying breath passed out of her lungs into his lips and without a cry, without a whimper, she slipped through his arms, her white feathers ruffling his brown fur.

He awoke with a start – a scream – stifled as soon as he remembered where he was and what he was doing.  And when his eyes adjusted to the light he stared aghast for through the egg, vague and fleeting, he thought there lingered the image of those eyes – Aguila’s eyes – lifeless and black, staring back into his….

At dawn sunlight filtered into the chamber but the omnipresent silence of the night did not relent.  The crack overlooked a vast portion of Third Earth’s untamed jungle; even from where he sat, on the inverted dome of the floor, he saw to the forest canopy that waited, languished in all sides, in all direction.  But it was too early and too dangerous to leave.  Indeed, the cliff side alcove was not a place to be left anytime soon.  He was stuck:  forced to keep low until the Mutants left and the egg hatched.  Only then, with the way clear and the baby cradled, might he escape.

Time lagged, inching, crawling one second to the next in a kind of long, drawn-out wail.  All the while he kept his mind busy and alert by thinking up plans.  A plan to escape and ask the Thundercats for help?  No, they would be too suspicious to help.  The Amazonians?  No, they would be too eager to revenge.  Better:  a plan to trek eastward, to lands where neither Thunderian nor Plunderian yet set foot on.  A place where he would be a stranger but untainted with the stigma of his past.

He did not want to think of the things Slythe promised to do if he were to be captured.  Let alone what he intended to do to the egg.  In the name of all the gods at once, he wretched at the memory, raw and intrusive, of that lizard’s tongue tasting the air about the pillar upon which he shattered Aguila’s other egg.  He was thankful for the darkness of the tower’s keep that it prevented him from seeing fully what was squirming alive amid the unnamable, unimaginable.  At last he understood why the reptilian did not sell Aguila to him:  he wanted her not for other, base reasons but for her eggs, her children.  Did he crave the taste of it so much that he wanted nothing more of her than to devour her offspring?  He shuddered – the terror and horror fresh anew – but he saved one egg, his egg.

In the evening he poked his head out of the crack and caught a glimpse of his environmental bearings, details obscured and hidden by the night’s veil of shadow and darkness.  He saw that he misgauged the situation:  the Zephyia were just much taller than he imagined them to be, so while the precipice of the cliff was further up than he realized at the same time it was still a long, long way to go to reach the foot of the mountainside. 

Several feet to either side of the opening were pockets of soil and groupings of plants.  Now with the sun setting he ventured into those regions, above and below, filling his jacket with leaves both fresh and dead.  He brought the mixture back into the chamber and at the center, where he left the egg upright, he formed a mound with the litter.  He placed the jacket over it and snuggled against it.

Jackalman neither saw nor heard the presence of other Mutants.  Perhaps they had quit their searching and combing of the area; perhaps not.  Never before on their stay on Third Earth was one of their own so expelled as he was expelled – there was no precedent for it, there was no way to know how far Slythe wanted to take it.  He would have to be careful, even more so than usual.

Vultureman.  Was it possible that the avian might cover for him?  The bird-man had no love for the reptilian but then he had no love for Mutant-kind in general.  No, no, he shook his head with a loud sigh, a deep sigh, crossing out that and Monkian’s name from his list of friends.  From the beginning it was always every Mutant for himself and that ancient, Plunderian custom was both a strength and a curse.  A curse for it meant he lacked friends and their cooperation; a strength for it meant Slythe lacked loyalty.  If he was not easily found, there was no reason for the other Mutants – self-centered and lazy – to persist looking for him.  Yes, he smiled and kissed the egg:  if he could wait he could survive the predicament.

For the next few days the canine alternated between fetching for soil and leaf litter and scavenging for water and food.  Water was aplenty but he needed to climb several feet to get a decent-sized spray from the creek.  Food, at that wintry time of the year, was the real problem.  But being a jackal his sense of opportunism was sharp and acute and it led him to the dens of dozens of creatures.

After a month the cavern took on an air of homeliness he thought he never would feel for it – it became so permanent, so final that he feared he never would escape.  His plans, once so closely constructed, now seemed so remotely ambiguous.  And his misadventure in Castle Plundarr was like another world, another lifetime ago.

Was he ever a Mutant general, commanding troops into battle?  Capturing enemy lands, looting spoils of war?  Or was he really an incompetent leader, succumbing to and retreating from defeats at the hands of the Thundercats?  The tide of triumph was always against him.  Victories were scarce as their opponents – aided by the obnoxious, meddling Thunderian do-gooders – got better and better at defending themselves.  Worse were the incursions into their hard-earned territory that threatened to chip away what foothold they held on Third Earth.

One loss after another, compounded by his squandering a fortune, reduced his rank and standing.  It came to be that the only people who spoke to him were Vultureman and Monkian – Slythe uttered a word here and there from time to time but as he took more and more wealth and power he kept looking at his friends through those steely, reptile eyes of his.

And Aguila was the tool – the source of all of that influence – for the reptilian used her to hoard the plunder of his troops.  Such was the price to pay for a touch, for a moment with the avian goddess.  But there were rules and he broke them; now it was over and he would never be forgiven….

All the better – it was another lifetime.

Though he could erase the memories of that past existence, he could not forget her.  From the first to the last, every fragment, every detail was etched into his soul.  In all of the universe never did he see anything as beautiful as Aguila.  Her head was not too large, not too small, it was just the right size to fit snuggly against his shoulder – and he still felt her mane brush against the sides of his face.  The feathers were thick enough to run his hands through.  It – like the rest of her coat – was well-kept, fine and shiny.  Their texture was that of fluid silk, warm and inviting, their color was that of snowy white, streaked and lined with traces of onyx.  Her ears were buried in that hair that tapered to a point at the back of her head – he smiled as he recalled finding them that first time, teasing them, kissing them.  Her eyes, almond-shaped, stared wetly as they looked into his, their ebony gaze communicated in that softest, most silent of ways an enigma of autumnal loneliness that all, truly beautiful things invoked.  Her nose, her lips, thin and delicate – too fragile to kiss without permission.  Her slim, almost massless body, so easy to lift and carry.  Her arms that always wrapped about him, tenderly, lovingly, as they spent the night in the bed, in the nest she only shared with him.

It was against the law – Slythe’s law – to lie in her bed, in the day, in the night, indeed she was scarcely to be touched, but she let him, every time, every night he snuck into the tower through the window.

He did not care what she was forced to do – she was a prisoner, a prisoner that could be freed.  But the reptile would not let her go and that last night she would not go.  Why?  Why was she so afraid?  Why?

Jackalman cried thinking about it – and as he clutched the egg, feeling its leathery texture playing with his fur, he was taken aback to that fatal, dreadful image.

That breath, that last, hot breath, passing from her lips to his lungs.  That face brushing against his chest and that stare stabbing into his eyes as she fell through his arms on the bed in the tower-top chamber.

How that round, inner sanctum so resembled what became of Aguila’s world – even the bed was replaced by a different sort of nest.

“Aguila!” he shouted, unable to hold back.  “You’re free – you’re not dead – you watch from yonder heights, living through all of time.”

Leaning into the egg he whispered and with that he felt it:  for the first time he felt movement within.

His heart skipped a beat as the egg moved, shook, as it was ready to hatch.

 

It was sunup; the morning fog was lifting and the wilderness, too, was rising from a spring-like slumber to a vibrant stir.  Above thick, leafy branches interlocked and formed the impression of a roof, tall and domed, covering the world.  While below tender, green moss sparkled and glittered with a light, airy dew, spotting the topography:  the rises and falls of the ground and the stony, marshy banks of the stream whose color was a virginal, reflective onyx.

By the creek, by the wet, glossy pebbles, Jackalman stooped.  Sipping the water through his hands he looked up to see a pair of Quetzalcoatl birds hovering, circling above a tree that stood amid a lonely, grassy clearing.  If he were armed he could have shot them – but it had been so long since he had touched meat that the very thought of it, raw and bloody, was abhorrent.  And, of course, he fled Castle Plundarr weaponless.

So what, he rationalized, within the backwoods a spear was just as good, if not better, than a blast gun.

Ambling about the undergrowth, he found a bush with yellow, green fruit growing through its sharp and brittle foliage.  He encountered the very like once before and was weary as he explored it with his fingers for it was adorned with thorns.  He learned by watching the birds what was edible and what was to be avoided.  Inspecting the vegetation, he was dismayed at the sight of the food – it was not ripe enough to eat.

Sighing a yelp of disappointment, the canine stood, shaking his head.  He looked about the scene:  to his left the stream, to his right the singular, lonesome tree and before him a pile of flattened rocks stacked as if it were pylon and an orchard of well-spaced trees extended so deep into the woodlands that the world beyond its first, few rows seemed a smoky, inky void.

Jackalman sniffed the air:  the smell of smoke was getting sharper and keener by the day.  It was not the smoke of a forest fire, rather, it was the smoke of a village – a settlement – nearby.  Traveling incognito across the country, he learned to spot the signs of civilization.  So far the territory was largely known but soon he would be venturing into the vast, unexplored regions of Third Earth and it was imperative to be prepared at every turn, at every contingency.

One day the ordeal would be ended; one day it would be alright to settle –

A sound – it was the pair of Quetzalcoatl.  The iridescent green birds no longer circled the tree and he could not see them only hear them, their piercing, frantic cries.

Another sound, just as sudden and unexpected and it was he who shrieked as he fell to his knees as he saw that shape – something, something up above was coming down on him.

“Argh!  Argh!” the Plunderian shouted, trying to get up, but something was holding onto him by the neck, something small, light weight.

It let go and tumbled from his back to the ground – he spun around, still shocked, still scared, a habit that too true proved hard to break.

He scanned the creature from bottom to top.  The feet were bare, arched with short, pointed claws.  The legs were thin, strong as were the arms.  And the hands, too, were clawed, dexterous and agile.  The body was clothed by tattered liniments that one time served as a sort of jacket.  But the head, the mane of tawny, brown fur, the ears pointed and erect, the eyes of yellow scattered, marbleized ebony, the nose short, the lips thin with two, small canines poking through.

It was a picture of an earlier, more innocent Jackalman.  But it was not just a reflection, transfigured and distorted across time, it was Koha’, his son.  His image, so complete, it seemed little trace of Aguila showed in the mixture – except at the base of the fur where the roots were growing streaked, parallel lines.

Looking at the boy, the Mutant could not help but recall the events that surrounded its birth.  Those little, clawed fingers now twiddling before him were once poking through the crust of that egg.  What emerged was form, uncoordinated and blind, furless and featherless as much as birds were upon hatching.  When he saw the infant he took it, dried it – he held it firmly unto his breast to warm him with the fur of his body.  He worried – without knowledge of Aguila’s genetic nature and compatibility, he did not know if a cross of avian and Mutant would live or die past its first, few breaths – but in a matter of days it opened its eyes and a thin coat of fur emerged that soon thickened.

Although in appearance Koha’ was like his father’s twin, in temperament he was utterly opposite.  It was a matter of quiet pride – almost envy – to Jackalman that his son was truly unafraid.  And it was in the boy’s instincts that caused him to wonder, to contemplate the child’s avian heritage:  for even at that young age, it had been only four years since that night, the boy exploited the instincts not of a scavenger but of an unadulterated, rapturous predator.

“Koha’,” Jackalman groaned as he sat back on the ground.  “Don’t do that.”

The boy, approaching the reclining figure, sat by him identically.

“Look what I got, daddy,” he said, presenting what he held in his hands.

“Kohaku!  What did I tell you about climbing trees?”  The canine growled, shaking his head.  He feared for his son and for his safety.  Even though in all of those years Koha’ never injured himself going up and down trees – a feat he could not easily reproduce – he did not like the idea of him doing it while he was not watching.  Just incase –

“You’re such a scaredy-cat, daddy,” the boy chimed, his voice light and airy and in its own way pleasant.  “You want one?”

Jackalman looked at the eggs – the two, round eggs – recalling the vibrant green birds and recalling another set of eggs.  The fertilized offspring Aguila separated and concealed from the ravenous Slythe.  And watching Koha’ crack them with his front teeth – catching a glimpse of what looked like water and blood – he was filled, almost overcome, by the terror of a thought, a realization that whatever power designed every fiber of those Quetzalcoatl’s beauty designed the instrument of its destruction, the teeth and claws that tore the divine secrets asunder.

He shook his head ‘no’ and turned his eyes to the river.

“You’re a good boy,” he said, at last, rubbing his son’s head.

The boy left the other egg by a pile of rocks then fell onto his father’s lap, laughing as he played with the elder canine’s fingers.

“I love you, Koha’.”  He looked at his young hatchling, tracing the outline of his ear through his mane, wild and unkempt.  Little by little, its resemblance to his mother’s mane was sinking in on him.

The two sat idly, not really speaking, not really brooding and then Koha’ sat up and tugged down Jackalman’s ear and whispered.

 

The trail uncoiled about the jagged crest of the gentle upslope.  To the south was the forest that surrounded a settlement – whose inhabitants resembled a mixture of Lunatac and Amazonian – to the north were the ruins that overlooked a cliff.  Beyond the zigzag crown of the precipice was a large, deep basin and the tall, snowcapped mountains of the Tharsis Thulus.

Around the path, untravelled by the town’s denizens, were the broken stonework and other elements of a long-ago extinct era shrouded by the undergrowth, reclaimed by its shrubs, its brushes.

“What’s the matter, daddy?” Koha’ asked, tugging his father’s arm.  “It doesn’t scare you, does it?”  The boy was young but his instincts were those of one much, much older, experienced and aged.  He knew, for example, that his father was easily scared by mundane things.  Stupid things.

“No, no, it’s just –” Jackalman stuttered, rubbing his chin.  Along their travels throughout the vast wilderness they stumbled upon all sorts of ruins here and there:  of towers, of bridges and of other things incomprehensible.  Each time, every time, they all looked the same, as if built by the same civilization.  It did not make sense unless Third Earth was a planet much, much older than they imagined.  But then, the Mutants did not erect Castle Plundarr and who knew who built MummRa’s Pyramid.  “It’s just like a place I knew –”

“You lived in a castle?” the boy asked, approaching the cyclopean walls, the arched gates.

To be sure it was more like a temple than a castle, but aspects of its architecture – the masonry, the details – was utterly, totally nameable.

“That was a long, long time ago, boy,” he said, rubbing his hands against a window – rather – the wooden frame of a window.  It rested half-on and half-off the wall several feet beneath the yawning, murky aperture it once adorned now abandoned.  “It wasn’t like this, it was bigger.”

“Bigger?  Bigger than this?”  He looked on in wonder – the building was the largest thing he ever saw.

The trail snaked into the body of the temple – into a courtyard, square-shaped and encircled by old, gray walls.  Within, the vegetation was wild and thick, rich with nuts and berries, bountiful with birds and animals, feeding upon one another like a microcosm of the world-at-large.  At the end of the garden stood the remainder of the ruins – rising low as if built into the ground – a soft, flat dome roofed the vast, interior room visible outside through tall, arched doorways.

Inside the air was stale and damp, awash by shadow and darkness broken only by the daylight washing through wide, open windows at the rear of the chamber.  At the very top the dome of the vault was unbroken and through the void there seemed to be revealed a series of structures, long and thin, dangling from the ceiling.

“Vultureman would have known,” Jackalman uttered, looking at the weird, metallic structures that more and more were coming into view.  “They almost look like light bulbs.”

“What are light bulbs?” Koha’ asked, his ears picking up even the softest of whispers.

The canine Plunderian smiled – there was so much to be said, so much to be explained.

The boy, growing bolder by the moment, explored the chamber while his father followed at a slower, leisurely pace.  Around the outer perimeter the floor was littered with broken statues and shattered carvings.  About the walls were doors most of which led to smaller, cramped rooms.  One led to a room, very large and bright, full of shelves and furniture.  It seemed to be made of two floors, one partly atop the other.  Another led to a hallway with windows smaller and closer to the floor – still, they were too high for him to see through – and walls not of rock but of plaster, decorated with pictures.

“Look, daddy,” he said, pointing to the strange, eerie paintings.

“Kohaku, don’t wander too far!”  Jackalman growled.

“I’m safe,” he said, walking up and down the length of the passage, looking at everything – his father walked in and he sauntered out.

Ordinarily, the Mutant did not care for art – that weak, frail handiwork – and he failed to appreciate the value of a lot of man-made things.  But ever since Koha’ entered his life he was beginning to see the world in a different light.

The images along the coarse, brittle wall had been scorched by the sun, disfigured by the elements.  Their beauty destroyed by time.  Yet there was a fragment that caught his eye – a bird-like figure of white, snowy feathers.

If only the quality was not degraded – he stroked the face of the image – if only there could be a connection.

“Daddy, daddy!” the boy shouted – and with those words Jackalman fled the antechamber.

“Kohaku!” he shouted, his voice echoing through the vast, rotund chamber.  “Kohaku!”  He followed the boy’s cry through another set of doors – doors slowly, creakily shutting – into stairs of gravel and clay winding into the substance of the earth.  It got darker and darker with every spiral as there were no windows and only the thinnest, flimsiest slants of light made it through the depths.

At last he arrived at the entrance of a vast, underground chamber.

The vault below was as monstrous and cavernous as the room above.  It, too, was domed by a concrete roof supported by a ring of twelve, convex pillars eroded at both ends to reveal slivers of metallic endoskeletons.  The cyclopean masonry of the walls was formed of an organic mixture of rocks bleached by sunlight.  The floor was flat – smooth and featureless – with moments of shiny luster here and there and littered by debris accumulated through centuries.  There were windows:  some like slits, wide and thin, close to the roof, some like eyes, narrow and long, close to the floor – it was there that the sunlight was brightest and it was there that Koha’ stood.

Looking out into the world with his son, he was struck by the view straight along the side of the cliff.  The canine sighed, clutching the boy tightly, almost drawing him away from the window.

“Last time I saw a view like that, you fit right into that jacket – I used to wear it – you almost tumbled out of it.  And I carried you over my belly.”  He was taken back to the morning when he and the boy – then a baby – fled that cavern.  “Last time that cavern was dark, this time it’s bright.”

“I remember seeing this – something like this –” Koha’ said, stroking the bottom edge of the window.

“You do?” he asked, still holding his son’s shoulders.  “Weren’t you afraid?”

“No,” he said, smiling, looking up at his father – and his father looking down at him.

The canine was reminded of something else – someone else – he once held in his arms like that.

“Dad!”  he protested as his father’s clutch tightened –

“What?”  He looked – fighting back a feeling, sudden and unexpected, that his son was slipping, falling through his arms.  “It’s nothing, nothing,” he said, letting go, remembering.

What was it about Koha’s eyes?  Once it was just the ears – cloaked and buried by their mane -- but now it seemed even the eyes – the way they stared – were familiar.

Jackalman inspected the window:  all along its edges, up and down, were scars and gashes carved into the stone as if by claws.  Turning aside, he explored the chamber, noting and inspecting it with his eyes.  The debris that littered the floor were not scattered but collected into piles.  If – as the villagers stated – people did not venture into the ruins, could it be that animals lived there?  But the rooms above were spotless and the garden outside was untouched – if animals were living there, it did not make sense that they would leave one part tidy and another part littered.  Unless there was another door, another passage –as of yet hidden from view – that led directly into and out of the underground chamber.  Unless – it was not a den but an aviary.  Turning back, running his hands through the impressions along the rock, placing his fingers into the dents – were they claws or were they talons?

“You like this place?” he asked, walking by the pillars clockwise.

The boy shrugged his shoulders – he was pacing by the columns counterclockwise.

“Are you thinking – about what they said?” Koha’ asked, always, it seemed, knowing what was going on inside his father’s head though not always knowing what it meant.

Yes, the Plunderian’s thoughts lingered about the stories – the weird, local legends – the villagers told of what was heard through the ruins at night.  Sometimes they were just the cries of animals.  Sometimes they were the muffled and indistinct yet perceptible voices of people. 

Birds – albeit very large birds – taking their prey, eating them.

“It’s good enough play to hide – for a while,” he said.  “You like this room?”  The boy nodded.  “Hmmm.”

“What is it, daddy?”

“Nothing.”

“Do me a favor,” he said, getting on his knees before his son.

“What sort of favor,” Koha’ asked, tilting his head.

“Don’t ever be down here alone, ok?”

“I’m never alone, daddy.”

 

Midnight – Jackalman walked about the upper chamber, his footsteps muffled and dull.  Moonlight seeped through the windows:  the heavenly orb large and electric.  An icy zephyr – howling sporadically through tight, narrow cracks – agitated the atmosphere, mixing together the acrid smells of rain and dust.  And as he paced the scents called him back to the start of one of the many, little moments etched into memory.  It was curious how something so simple, something so ordinary held the power to transport him co completely.

He recalled a night – could it be six years ago? – when he sulked into Castle Plundarr, tired and sore.  He was in a foul mood and not in a frame of mind to be with friends as he just escaped an embarrassing defeat at the hands of Tygra and the Thunder Twins.  He was a Captain-of-Attacks but as soon as Slythe learned about his latest calamity that rank would be demoted soon enough.

He was not in the mood for pleasantries – but – he did not know how, maybe it was Vultureman, maybe it was Monkian but someway, somehow, he was lured into the mess hall to share at least the latter-half of that night’s dinner among friends.  The dining hall of that fortress was justly named:  large, grand and utterly, fulsomely noisy.  Even at that hour the torch-lit, red-draped room was only half-empty and drunk, boisterous Mutants were constantly coming in and out, goading and badgering themselves into fights for this and that.

Monkian annoyed him – the simian was want to join in on those mindless ‘games.’  Vultureman, however, was his best friend and great company; he was used to failure and could not careless about the ‘normal,’ Plunderian customs.  And he was always quiet – except for that night –

What was he talking about?  Jackalman was drunk, opting to drown out his sorrows in the bottle.  He could not decipher Vultureman – entirely – but every so often he heard ‘Amazonian’, ‘Warrior Maiden’ and he seemed to connect it with the prisoners of war he used to possess.  But he only caught a world here and there and could not tell where the birdman was going with it –

So the vulture followed the canine out of the mess hall into the dungeons of Castle Plundarr.  It was quieter – the air echoed with the disembodied wails of a society’s carnal decadence – and he remembered his friend was asking about what happened to his trophies, his prisoners, if he sold or freed them.  Prisoners, among the rank and file, were the standard currency of trade.

It seemed Vultureman wanted Jackalman to buy something – but what?  And what, he asked – his friend opted instead to show rather than to describe.

Into the fortress keep the two approached the base of a tower – one of many not too tall, not too short – where a pair of Slythe’s elite reptilian guard stood watch by a small, round door.  It was a part of Castle Plundarr he was very much familiar with but he could not remember there ever being guards by that tower.

“Slythe must be hiding something important,” he said, turning to the avian Mutant.

“It’s something, alright, like you’ve got no idea.  Are you sure you don’t have prisoners?  What about that woman, what’s her name, that Willa’s sister?”

The rest of the conversation was a blur and what followed of the scene were fragmented, formless impressions – the only coherent images were that of the vulture paying the reptiles with gold coins and the guards looking at him funny as he entered into the tower.

Steps of stone – or metal? – running up – or down? – it was difficult to remember but despite the confusion he continued.  On and on he walked until at the end of the journey he was met by a single, wooden door.  He did not know how – and he certainly did not know why – but, if just out of instinct he reached for the knob.  It groaned and the shock of it jolted him – he turned but where was Vultureman?

Alone, he opened the door and entered the room.  The chamber was tall and wide, deceptively large for a tower room.  At the far side its windows were open, letting in the chilly night air and the view of the eerie starry skies.  At the near side, under a domed roof, were a series of pillars and at the center, where the light seemed to be the brightest, was a nest.

And then, there, right before him leaning against a pillar was a figure looking at him with the deepest, most onyx eyes that ever adorned a living creature.  Could it see with such eyes?  He blinked:  the sight of it was almost angelic.  Could it truly, really exist?  White, feathery plumage with streaks of thin, black lines here and there coated the figure that was, nevertheless, clothed by the outfit of a Plunderian prisoner, complete with a tight, form-fitting chain wrapped about its neck that tethered it to the nest.  Could it live so savagely, so monstrously caged?

The figure – that studied him just as he studied it – without a word approached as far as the chain allowed.  And it was then that he noticed the way it moved, so alien and yet so subtly erotic, just its very, slightest motion took his breath away.  But when it brushed his face with the back of its hand at once the grogginess of that liquefied stupor lifted – he felt so awake, so alive –

It was her, it was Aguila.

Jackalman gasped – the warm feel of her hand on his face was as real now as it was then.  If touch could reach across time it did so at that moment.  And the illusion – total and convincing – was so perfect even her scent came to him anew.  As he looked he could not help but wonder if he were caught amid a time warp but little by little reality returned.

It was not the tower, it was not Castle Plundarr and Vultureman was not there.  He was in the ruins of the temple, in the lower chamber that his son took as his own nest.  There, at the center of the ring of pillars, were two beds of straw, side by side, one large, one small.  The boy nestled into the smaller, his arm, his hand, resting along the edge of the larger.

“Those instincts,” he whispered, amazed at the incomprehensible symmetry.

Aguila was not a subject he discussed with Koha’ – at least not often – how could he?  How could he tell his son about that first time he met his mother without explaining that place Slythe imprisoned her?  What that reptile forced her –

And, yet, as if by genetic memory, the boy transformed that chamber into something familiar.  It was true that his memories were deep if murky but how much might one remember through the pores of an egg?

A bolt of lightning and a pang of thunder – but he did not react with a start, he was too lost in the realm of memory to notice.

“If only you were here,” he sighed, trying to relive that encounter.  But so much of what was said between them was blurred by time.  Just how their relationship evolved he could not tell, even fathom, but at the end he was sneaking into that tower, spending long, forbidden nights there with her, living the life of disjointed lovers.

He looked at his hands – he shut his eyes – that collar.

Aguila slipped through his grasp and for the first time since that dreadful night he felt the sting of that collar tear through the fur of his arms – and that look on her face, in her eyes, black and lifeless, that stare that did not fade even as Slythe –

He looked at his hands – shaking, clutching – the thought made his heart skip a beat.

“Why – it would’ve worked -- if we could’ve shared just another moment, it would’ve worked!”

But could it be, he wondered, that such beauty just was not meant for this world?

He looked at Koha’ and whispered into the boy’s ear – then fell back asleep.

 

Days, weeks and months – time passed and their lives settled into a routine.

Jackalman worked in the courtyard and in the lawn that surrounded the temple.  Amid the wild mix of overgrown, mutated vegetation, he pulled the weeds, cultivated the ripe legumes, the juicy fruits and in so doing became a makeshift farmer.  He became a gatherer which was surprising for it was the history of Plunderian canines to be hunters by nature.  And although from time to time he allowed himself the luxury of venison and boar, for the most part his diet consisted of nuts and berries.  For money – what the natives used for money – he worked odd-jobs in the village.  Often, though, he and the villagers kept their distance – like all of the villagers in that, backward portion of Third Earth the locals were very uneasy about strangers.

Unlike his father, Koha’ did not seem to be bothered by the ostracism.  Perhaps it was something about the exotic nature of his mixed heritage – that every day was showing more and more – or, perhaps, it was something about the respectful, quiet passivity of his personality that just did not arouse even a modicum of the attention that the full-blooded Mutant stirred.  In either case the boy adjusted – yet not with children.  It was the adults he watched and studied with almost infinite patience as if he was not a boy but a man far wiser and older than his years.

Koha’s domestic habits were also quite opposite.  He worked inside the temple – the small rooms, the winding passages – and, of course, the large, domed vault underground that he took to be his nest.  Indeed, it seemed that he spent all of his time there – except when he followed his father into the village, when he tracked his prey through the forests, vanishing and returning with fresh, bloody meat.

He cooked the food in a pit carved out of the floor of the subterranean chamber – over time the bones of the various animals added to the piles of debris that despite everything were not cleaned only shuffled about.

One day Jackalman explored the litter.  He noticed elements of elk and boar bones – that he himself hunted – and traces of other creatures smaller, more familiar though nothing obviously ghastly.  So he dismissed the fragments of skulls and jaws – a boy, even of his extreme, acute instincts, could not capture food as large as a man, a boy, an infant – no, he rationalized, those were the after-dinner leftovers of the temple’s original inhabitants.

In the day he could be at ease within the chamber, but in the night he was not comfortable.  Still, he and Koha’ slept together under the dome, over the straw beds his son kept at the center of the ring of pillars.  A few times – more than a few times – he tried to lure the boy to sleep in one of the smaller, cozier dens above, where he made his home, but the child would be beset by nightmares.  Tense and nervous, he just did not rest well anywhere else but that – that room.

Jackalman loved his son and could not bear to leave him alone in that place.  As much as he enjoyed his new life, his new home he could not help but wonder if it would have been better if the temple was free of that aerie.  While his son was tormented upstairs, he was haunted downstairs.  Not by ghastly, eerie images but by a sense of unjust and cruel reality for there was something about Koha’s beds and something about the ring of pillars and something, too, about the windows that called up images of Aguila –

Aguila dying in his arms, her eggs smashed, devoured by Slythe –

All the while during the long, hot summer he was free – tied up with his work, busy with his job – he was free to forget the past.  But at the midnight hour, his mind stagnant and idle, in that room it was impossible to overlook the fearful symmetry.

And – he wondered – why did Koha’ choose that room?  Was it coincidence?  Just what did the boy know – what could he know – what did he remember?

When he was younger he never, really asked about Aguila.  Every now and then he asked ‘who that lady was’ and he just assumed it was an uncertain, timid reference about his mother.  It was only lately – in that temperate and stormy season – that Koha’ voiced those innate, childish curiosities.

“How did you meet Aguila?” he asked, turning to his father – it was a humid, damp evening and they were sprawled over their beds.

Jackalman faced his son – and paused, shocked for a passing, fleeting moment.  It was not Koha’s way to call her ‘mommy’ but to call her by name – it shocked him, disturbed him to hear ‘Aguila’ pass the boy’s lips.

“It was night,” he started.

“Night – like this?” the boy interrupted.

The canine scratched his chin, shook his head – to be honest, he did not remember.  Indeed, he did not remember it anymore than he remembered telling his son his mother’s name.  It was as if the boy was born knowing.

“I don’t remember – I really, really don’t remember,” he explained.  “But it was night.  A friend of mine introduced us.”

“One of your Mutant friends?”

“Yes, Vultureman.”

Jackalman squawked – whenever he talked about his former life, friends and enemies alike, he copied their voices and mannerisms.

Koha’ laughed – the vulture was his favorite.

The Mutant continued:  “He saw that I was lonely and thought she might cheer me up.”

The boy inquired:  “And did she cheer you up, daddy?”

“Oh, yes,” he smiled, almost blushing.  “The moment I saw her – just the moment I saw her – I was not the same.  I loved her, Kohaku, I loved her.”

For the moment that fiction was as far as he wanted to go – the boy was just too young to understand the truth.  And, more and more, he wondered if he wanted to go further – ever – did he really need to know what kind of prisoner his mother was, did he really need to learn what sort of ways she was exploited?  It would be better to let some things die but some things would not die….

But he knew his mother was not there and he knew how often he stopped from time to time to think about her – and that must have been how, surely that must have been how he knew.

“Why did Aguila die?” Koha’ asked.  It was morning; he and his father were tending the garden, cleaning the mess a nocturnal storm wreaked within the courtyard.

But Jackalman could not answer with the boy looking up at him with those eyes, those ever blackening eyes.

“What was it like?” he asked, holding his father’s wrists playfully.

“What, boy?”

He brought his father’s hands onto his neck and shoulders.

“Nothing, daddy,” he said, slipping from his father’s grasp, falling as it were away from his body.

It was after that weird, strange interlude that Koha’ stopped asking about his mother altogether.  Maybe because he realized it saddened his father.  Maybe because he learned what he wanted to know.  But either way Jackalman could not shake the feeling of ominous fear and dread, the sense that his son did not need to ask, that he was born with memories – as if knowledge itself stretched across time and space from one generation to the next for here and there, in the most unnoticeable, subtlest of ways, it seemed he did know more, much more than he unfolded.

 

“Aguila,” Jackalman sighed, again and again as he kissed the creature’s mane just under the earlobe, over the neck.

Aguila cooed, her lips teasing, brushing his cheek, her voice so sweet, so soft it evolved like a melody.  Even the stops of her breath seemed timed to an ethereal music.  She clasped his head onto her shoulder and stroked his mane, his ear.

“I can get you out of here,” he said, wrapping his arms about her waist.  He leaned back and she snuggled against his body – together they reclined at the edge of the nest.  The only light in the tower room was it coming out of the forbidden nest or was it coming out of the alien Aguila?

“It’s so simple,” he continued.  “I know the guard’s routines, I know what passages are safe – and I’ve been scouting places up north.  It’ll only take a little snap to break this,” he said, stroking that tight, iron collar that did not seem able to restrain its prisoner.  “They won’t notice until it’s too late – and they won’t find us!  Slythe’s too busy fighting the Thundercats; he wouldn’t be stupid enough to waste the time and manpower to get us.”

Aguila smiled and dug herself into him, her light, feathery form fit deep.  Why could it be?  How could it be?  That the congruency could be so symmetric and flawless?  Were they meant to be together?

The canine was about to speak but the avian stopped his lips with a kiss – she was such an enigma, in a thousand lifetimes he would never understand her infinite variety.

“I love you.”

Her eyes gleamed with a starry wetness and almost crying she clasped him tighter and tighter –

“I’ll buy you from Slythe – if it costs me my soul you’ll be free, Aguila!”

 

“Free,” Jackalman gasped, his voice neither a-whisper nor aloud.  Shocked – unexpectedly, suddenly – wide-awake as if shaken out of a dream of unmitigated dread.  Adrenaline surged through his body, his heart raced, his breath quickened, but why?  What was it about that recollection that made his blood run cold?  No – it was not the dream, it was the reality he awoke to.  For as he lay there, there in that bed, there in that room, it was as if he were transported into the tower room that caged Aguila.

A scent – a feeling, eerie and spooky – an atmosphere of the past clung onto the environs.  He looked around the chamber:  he saw little more than shadows and darkness punctuated by vistas through the wide, open windows of a star-filled, moonlit night.  And he heard nothing – nothing at all – as an unsettling, shattering silence languished about the room.

The Plunderian calmed himself, lying back in his bed, wiping off his sweat, he calmed his nerves and soon he was asleep again.

Yet that was not the first, not the last incident.  It used to be rare, happening every now and then when he recalled his encounters with Aguila too intensely, too deeply.  And as long as the lapses were confined to the after-effects of memory it was little more than like a waking nightmare, suggested and amplified by the weird coincidences of his son’s nesting room.  As time passed, though, it became regular.  But even that was not all there was to the change for as it increased in frequency so, too, its atmosphere became more and more a perfect recreation of Castle Plundarr’s tower room.

And then he heard it.

As he laid back, his hands over his heart, feeling its wild, frantic palpitations, he was still and quiet so much so that at last he heard it.  By the gods, how long was it there – there in the background – there without notice?  Even then, when he was not as afflicted by the lapses as he was now, was it happening then?  It took him to be still and quiet for it to become clear – indeed, the very sounds of his breathing in his head muted out the sensations that a voice echoed about the chamber.  A voice – a whisper to be sure – light and airy but not distant.

It was a voice and it was speaking.  Uttering, chanting.  But he could not recognize the words.  If they were words, they were like disconnected tones piecing themselves together into melodies of nonsensical words.

Shivering, frozen by the fear, his skin scrawled, his hair stood at the pauses – the knowing pauses – that punctuated the scream of whispered, songlike conversation.  Mustering every ounce of courage, he raised himself out of the bed and, sitting up, he looked about, his head, his body trembling and shaking, his very vision unsteady and unfocused as he inspected the scene around the bed, around the room, trying to locate the source.

And at last his eyes rested atop the image of Koha’ resting peacefully upon the straw mattress beside him.  He lowered his body – his head, his ear – closer and closer to the sleeping figure.  Inch by inch he reached the boy after what seemed like an eternity, his heavy breath roaring loudly in his head, muffling completely the sound of the whole, entire world.  But when he stopped, when e froze, he heard the voice coming out of his son.

The boy sat up suddenly, quickly – he shot up, facing his father, eyes opened wide and focused laser-like upon him.

Jackalman tumbled aback, shrieking and falling out of the bed.  He struggled through the columns – he arched his back against the length of a pillar, he got back to his feet and looked:  back on the bed the boy was sleeping on his side.

Had Koha’ moved?

The queasy atmosphere lifted and the universe returned to its senses.

But it was only the start – now it was such that whenever the nightmarish terror resurfaced the Mutant was acutely aware of that voice.  And each and every time it seemed the language evolving like smoke out of the cacophony was taking shape, becoming louder and more familiar.  Until, at the end, a new kind of horror was revealed:  muffled and hushed yet even distorted once it settled into his brain it was undeniable for he knew that whisper better than his own and someway, somehow – the voice of Aguila – was coming through Koha’s lips.

Jackalman as he worked the garden, as he toiled the fields – eyes sore and blood-shot – searched through every corner of his mind to find a logical explanation until a plausible excuse materialized.  Thinking about it, he convinced himself of it surety, of its soundness – it was a theory worthy of a Vultureman.  What he mistook for a voice was not a voice.  It was the weird and eerie atmosphere combined with his fears – always keying onto the anxiety of the situation – that fooled him into experiencing it as a voice.  But, in fact, it was just the way his son respired.  The boy’s voice box – a mixture of his Mutant and Aguila’s avian species – was changing as his body was changing and in so going from one genetic heritage to another his nocturnal breathing attained that tonal and melodious whisper.

It was so obvious, so clear – it could not be that another voice was talking through Koha’ – it was the easiest version of reality to believe and it was easy, too, to ignore the voice, what it was saying and what he was hearing night after night.

 

“Koha’,” Jackalman said as he and his son ambled about the upper chamber the canine turned into a den.  It was cramped, cozy; shadowed, dark.  “The villagers keep a school for children – for children your age.”

“School, what’s that?” the boy asked, stopping by a window, looking up at his father.  The room was littered with loose scrolls and crumpled papers as if it used to be a library.

“Hmmm,” Jackalman scratched his ear, rubbed his chin.  He never imagined he would be explaining school to anyone, let alone to his son.  Kneeling, he answered:  “Back on Plundarr, school was a place where children were sent to learn.”

Smiling, he replied:  “But I already know everything I need to know, daddy.”

He shook his head with a half-smile, a half-smirk.  The Plunderian should have known this was not going to be easy.

“You’d be around children you’re age,” he added.  “Wouldn’t you like that?  Hmmm?”

“I don’t need other children,” he said, looking at his father inquisitively.  “What would I do with other children?”

Sometimes – sometimes Jackalman wondered if Koha’ even knew he was a child.

“You won’t be alone.”

“I’m not alone.”

The boy stopped; he was about to say something but stopped, looked around, looked up – at the hole in the roof where once a glass skylight had been installed.

“You’re not alone, too, daddy,” he said at last in an almost shameful whisper.

Looking at his boy he blinked and asked:  “What do you mean?”

Koha’ shrugged and retreated – staring at the ground he scratched one foot with the claws of another.

“What do you mean, Kohaku?” the Mutant pressed.

“I have – a friend – we talk,” he relented, again in whisper.

The jackal smiled, chuckled.

“A friend you met in the woods?”

“No – it’s not like that.”

“A friend you et in the house?”

Koha’ nodded and Jackalman sighed – the moment of levity faded.

“I know – you get scared,” he looked up at his father.  “I know – daddy – so I didn’t say.  I didn’t think you’d want to live here if you know.  I like it here, I like my friend –“

“And does your friend have a name?” he asked, rubbing his son’s mane.

A sort of pause followed – hesitant, expectant – the boy seemed to stare not at his father but at the space beyond his father.  At the door to the chamber, the door that was little more than ajar, yet to his eyes it could have been as gaped as a canyon.

“You can tell me, can’t you, boy?” he asked, oblivious to the boy’s glazed stare.

“She, he doesn’t say,” he answered.

Jackalman’s eyes widened, thinned.  “Come on, Koha’.”

His son shrugged, falling utterly, totally silent.

He sighed – it just was not like the boy to keep secrets – and asked:  “Can you describe this friend?”

Playing with his hands, his fingers, Koha’ sat below the window while his father hovered above.  “I don’t know what it is.  It’s tall, like you, but very, very thin.  Sometimes it looks like a bird, sometimes.  It’s got these white feathers and black eyes.”

Gasping for breath, Jackalman stood.

“I didn’t want to tell you, I knew – I knew – you’d be afraid,” he stammered through tears.  “The stories about this place, what the villagers say about this place being haunted.  But it’s not evil – I swear – it’s not evil, daddy, it’s just lonely.”

He sighed and hugged his son.  What was it about the boy that he was so strong when others many times his age would be so weak?

The canine was afraid for a moment – just for a moment – but he convinced himself it was innocent, child-like behavior.  It could not have been a description of Aguila – it could not have been – he did not describe his mother to his son.  And, of course, the description the boy gave was too vague, too generic – indeed, it was more like those faded, broken images that lingered about the hallways.  The paintings and murals no doubt affected Koha’.

“Koha’,” he exhaled.

He invented an imaginary friend, a bird-like friend.

“You’re not mad at me, daddy, are you?”

It made sense it would be like that.  It was a phase.

“No, son, no.  I’m not mad,” he said, kissing the top of the boy’s head.  The mane was thick but its substance was feeling less like hair and more like feather everyday.

“You hear it?” he asked, reassured.  “You hear it, don’t you?”

“Hear it?”

“Speaking.”

“Your friend?”  The boy nodded.  “And what does it say?”

“Things – things I don’t always understand –”

“What does it say, Koha’?”

He stood on tip-toes, grabbing his father’s ear and pressing it to his lips – he whispered.

 

Jackalman did not question it, he accepted it:  it was the way the room was constructed, it was the way the nest was built – but whatever it seemed to be it was all in his head.  All in his head.  As a child he was a daydreamer and not very good at school.  As an adult he was beset by fear and paralyzed by the dread conjured up by an overactive imagination.  Thinking led to worrying led to agonizing and it was that paranoia that retarded his progress throughout life.

He could have been a great general – or so he told himself – if only his inner drive was not so damped by his outer doubt.  But to be honest with himself he knew he was destined to be at the tail-end of Plunderian hierarchy.  And that was why he chose to go to Third Earth:  in that unexplored, uncharted region of the galaxy everyone was ‘equal,’ more or less, giving him the ability to rise through the ranks.

Elsewhere, anywhere the smarter, more fearless examples of Mutant-kind would have overtaken him.  But on Third Earth the low-end versions would have allowed him to climb as high as possible.  And though the situation was promising, the safety-net formed by that collective of society’s dropouts led inescapably to the process of personal destruction.  Failure became expected even accepted.  So it was that he rose as far as general but his incompetent management of men – of himself – doomed him and at the end the man who was second only to Slythe was not wealthy enough to save his lover from her fate.

Outside the gloomy half-world was warm; inside the domed chamber was cool.

Stroking his son’s head, in the moonlight wilting across the stars, in the soft, gentle breeze sighing through the windows the eight-year-old’s mane seemed to attain an aura heretofore alien to the boy but familiar to the man.

It was Aguila’s feathery crest – and why should it not be?  Vultureman used to chide Plunderian elitists, reminding the fools that scales, feathers and hair were all the same.  But why should it not be that he inherited a mixture of his mother’s and his father’s characteristics?

Still, touching it, feeling it, it took him back – back – back to that night.  He saw it again, looking at his hands, at his fingers, the child’s mane falling back, away.  He saw it – the way Aguila’s man ruffled about his arms as she fell through, her head arching back, her neck, ringed by the chain, bending unnaturally as she stumbled backward onto the bed, whose light was dimming as the creature was dying.

The hideous beating of his heart alarmed him.  Free of the vision, he found himself back in the chamber, sitting up on the straw mattress, looking down on his son.  He stood and quietly walked out of the room, into his own, crowded den.  It was just too difficult to sleep in there, in that aerie anymore.

Was Koha’ making it up? Jackalman wondered, thinking about that imaginary friend – nameless but not formless and able to exert itself through the boy’s imagination.  By the pits, he knew all about it – growing up, he invented most of his friends, his real friends.  And the child, no doubt, inherited that, too.  But how could that friend be so much like Aguila?  How did he inherit that?  There were those infernal pictures yet he wondered if perhaps, just perhaps, he described her to him.  And he just forgot.  The youth was able to remember things, all sorts of things, things he ought not to remember.

So it if it was not imaginary, if it was real, how could it be real?

Standing by the window, overlooking the canyon that spread wide and far on the other side of the cliff, he shuddered to think about the onyx abyss and what terrifying horror lay dormant down beneath the cover of the night.  It was unpleasant submitting and relenting into that childish rampage; it was easier to do that than to contemplate or acknowledge or accept the other fears racing through his mind, fears all too adult in nature.

“It’s not the boy,” Jackalman whispered, as if in prayer.  “It’s me, it’s got to be me.  I’m the one reading too much into this.  Seeing things, hearing things.”

Turning away, he was confronted by the murky outlines of his den, the uncertain, hazy shapes coming into and out of sight.

He sighed:  could it be that he wanted to experience those things, like a part of him was not finished with the events of that night?  Maybe he needed to relive it.  Maybe he needed to finish what started.

But Aguila was dead.  All of her eggs – save one – were smashed by Slythe.  She was gone – gone! – leaving only Koha’ –

A gale, stiff and bitter, brushed his cheek and he looked at the window – wide and open – but he saw nothing, nothing amiss in that world.

Even at that – at that brush of air searing and scorching his face – he felt anew Aguila’s last breath:  her dying breath that passed out of her into him.

He inhaled it and in so doing could it be, would it be that her soul was part of his?

“It’s crazy!  What am I thinking bout?”  He wrapped his hands about himself, acutely aware he lacked a jacket though in that season there was not a need for one.  “It’s got to be MummRa – or another red-eyed demon – playing tricks.  No doubt with Slythe pulling a string or two.  It’s not what I think it is, it’s not real!”

Yet as he spoke he knew it could not be so easily dismissed.  Koha’s friend, the voices, the feelings, all of it was part of the same, exact it.  How long was it there, laying in wait perhaps, evolving unnoticed perhaps, but there, always forever there, tireless and persistent and until that moment lingering under the surface of things, threatening to destroy his world and his sanity.  All the while, throughout all of those years, were they ever alone?  Was it not indeed always there – physically, mentally – always there trying to emerge into view?

 

“Aguila!” Jackalman shouted, grasping her shoulders, pushed her face toward his face, her body toward his body.

He shouted – gasped – as words failed as Slythe appeared.

The reptilian commander was enraged, snarling and cursing:  why was he so angered, he wondered in those fleeting moments of calm before the storm.  He made mistakes, worse mistakes, why was the lizard so bothered by that one?

It was against the rules to be with Aguila without paying – he snuck into the tower room in the middle of the night.  It was against the rules to be with Aguila naked in bed – anything was allowed, anything was allowed but that –

You were not allowed to fall in love with Aguila and she was not allowed to fall in love with you –

And it was certainly against the rules to escape with Aguila – Slythe’s ultimate, top prize.

He looked down at the avian goddess – already limp and lifeless – as the reptile, unable to destroy her spirit in life, attempted to eradicate her persistence in death, stomping and destroying everything throughout that chamber.  He turned to her body, grabbed it spitefully, flung it hatefully and tore apart the nest to discover the two eggs hidden beneath.  Incensed as if betrayed --

He looked down at the body lying across the floor between the pillars – like a fallen bird, its wings broken – Aguila’s eyes were open.  Would that they would ever shut.  Her eyes were open and stared like daggers into his –

Enraged, Jackalman broke through the guards and lunged at Slythe –

“Aguila!” Jackalman shouted to drown out the sounds that only existed in his mind – the sounds that he himself invented to accompany the terror unfolding within that room after he escaped it.  He shivered at the horror of it:  at Slythe slobbering over the eggs and at Aguila looking from beyond.  It was all the worse that her eyes did not shut, as if she saw it all and that, more than anything, haunted his memories.

And in another moment pangs of horror snaked up and down his spine:  he thought he was in his den but he realized he was in Koha’s dreaded aerie chamber.  He had fallen asleep, he had forgotten and fearing the worst he paused, he held his breath.  But it was not like the night terrors of old – that did not cease even in his den – it was a new level of fear in which he found himself.

Was the illusion really, only just in his mind?  Did he see her because he wanted to see her – did she live because she wanted to live?  Was it insatiable – the desire, the need to defy the ultimate fate and complete the final scene the way it should have been completed – was it so much so that through the powers of Nature Aguila returned?  There it was – and he could not deny the evidence of his senses – there it was, revealed by the silence, by the lightlessness, looking at Koha’ he saw that the boy – his boy – was transfigured into the specter of Aguila, he turned into her, not in soul but in body.

The hair, the feathers, the brown, earth tones, the white, spectral aura.

Caught in the grips of the horror, surrounded by the terror embodied by the windows, the pillars, the beds the full weight of the realization climaxed with the awareness of the fact that the tower room and the underground chamber fused across time and space into a conglomeration of every fear that made his hair stand on-end and his blood run cold.  The temple was a charnel house, a tomb for the living and the dead.  And he understood that he, too, was caught in a paradox:  he lived in the real-world yet trapped in that moment – trapped and unable to escape, ever, until Aguila was appeased.

“But, she’s dead, Aguila’s dead!  She knows she’s dead, doesn’t she?  Is it something I have to do, something I haven’t done?”  He shut his eyes and pressed his hands onto his face.  “Tell me, tell me!  Why didn’t you come with me?  Why?” he cried, venting out a frustration seething in the turmoil.

And then Koha’ turned to face his father.  The small hands took the large hands away with unnatural strength.  He whispered into the Plunderian’s ear words only the Mutant understood.

“And I love you, too, daddy,” he said – aloud – kissing his father’s warm, moist cheek.

 

It was the start of the fall season when the story reached the village that groups of invading Mutant hordes were ravaging the far countryside.  Jackalman did not waste time; almost as soon as he heard the tale and recognized it to be true he and his son readied and equipped themselves for the inevitable retreat into the wilderness.  The time and day was chosen for the escape and when it arrived it came long and blustery with the tempest of a storm.  The morning was spent packing supplies into makeshift sacks all the while the skies were cloudy gray – roaring with thunder, flashing with lightning – and the temple was unutterably blue – trickling with rain seeping through the cracks.  They ate together in the afternoon – nuts and fruits for the canine, carrion for the boy.  The evening was uneasy but rapt, calm but anxious – the last few hours of life within the ruins were passed in utter and total silence.  From the first to the last, there was scarcely a word spoken between the two, so total was their absolute mastery of each other’s moods.

As the sun was setting in the western sky, Jackalman and Koha’ stood before the windows of the vast, underground chamber – it was unusually dark, almost as dark as the rest of the temple.  For long, agonizing moments they stared down the void – at the cliff’s side and its white, pallid rocks, its pockets of shrubs and brushes.  They gazed across the forest – at the jungle’s massive, imposing form that lay beyond, canopied by mists and fogs.

And just when it seemed the day would not end, it did.  The fading glimmer of daylight yielded to the glowing sparkle of midnight skies; the final memory of happiness they shared together in that home ebbed and died away.

“It’s like a reflection from another world, another time,” Jackalman uttered – almost without thought – as he scanned the visage:  the electric stars, the ebonic sky.

“Was it real or was it imagined?” Koha’ asked though his tone was more solemn, less inquisitive.  He did not cry; he rubbed his face into his father’s arm and sighed.

The Plunderian let the boy sleep on his mat while he himself took a light, airy nap snuggled between two pillars.  He did not cuddle with his son as he usually did, as he normally did every night.  It was uncanny the mystery of the child; it was shocking, disturbing the way he always knew what was going on in his mind and it bothered him so much so that he could not bare to sleep nearby out of the fear he might invade his dreams.

Just what did Koha’ know and when did he know it?  There were volumes of history about the past – their pasts – that were left unspoken between them.  Yet, thinking about it, he realized that he did not tell the boy why they were leaving.  He told him the Mutants were dangerous; he did not tell him the reasons – someway, somehow the child possessed the ability to understand by tacit intuition, not just without words, without explanation.

Jackalman wondered if it could be another aspect of that predatory urge inherited from Aguila.  Wild, the instincts to nest, to migrate, to hunt by watching, studying, the behavior was well-defined and clear – caged, who knew what those natural, inbred drives would be twisted and perverted into?  By the pits, who knew how long those traits were brewing throughout the course of Third Earth’s billion-year history?  Growing and evolving, refining itself for generations.

Just how sharp and keen were Koha’s senses?

Indeed it was a light and airy nap that ended almost as soon as it began – although it felt as if it could have been an hour.  Refreshed, the Mutant awoke his son and as wordlessly as they worked that day that night they trekked out of the ruins and away from the village that was their home for what could have been six years.

 

For the next several weeks the two trekked about the wilderness, their silence punctuated every now and then by a few words, a few fragments.  What was going on in Koha’s head, Jackalman did not know:  he only watched for into his son’s world he could not penetrate.  He watched him stalk, he watched him kill; against his protest he watched him climb trees for its eggs, scale rises for its views.

But unlike the four-year-old’s uncontainable zeal then, the ten-year-old’s disciplined calm now was not want to worry his father, jump in his face, on his back, tug him here and there to show him what he just discovered about the world.  And, for his own part, the canine missed the fun he and the boy used to share yet he, too, was different:  he did not feel uneasy or anxious, instead he was beginning to feel alright, for the first time in a long time he was beginning to feel at peace with himself and his world.

Jackalman and Koha’ spent years together, hiking across the wilderness, foraging through the jungle just to survive from day to day.  The time they passed living in that village – in that temple – was much longer in duration and more taxing on the Plunderian’s spirit:  its monotony, its yawning periods of domestic tranquility were simply exhausting.  Free, again, at last, he kept his mind busy and suppressed the feelings, ill and depressing, working just under the surface.

But if he thought even for a moment he would be totally free, then by ever-gradual degrees he realized he was very much mistaken.

The nightmares stopped.  The voice could not be heard from his son, from elsewhere, anywhere.  And the images of that night faded as the work of time and memory obscured their power, their intensity.  Yes, he was relieved by one set of horror but those maladies were simply replaced by other terrors infinitely worse.

It was not just Koha’s mind that perplexed Jackalman; it was his body, too, with its ever-changing form and feature.  When he was born he was like his father, resembling his physical shape more or less.  Even up close he would have passed for total Mutant.  The only traits that would have alerted the careful eye of non-Plunderian heritage were the weird, odd parallel bands, the stripes that formed along the base of his fur.  But as the boy grew he noticed a metamorphoses that could not be explained by the onset of adolescence.  It started with his mane:  once it was like his own, now in its shabby haggardness it took on a suggestion, an air of Aguila.  It was matted, two inches thick more or less and tapered off with a soft, gently crest that pointed out of the back of his head where the hair was the thickest.  It continued with the rest of his fur becoming more and more featherlike, its color faded from brown to cream while at the same time those onyx bands emboldened.  It finished with his eyes:  their electric irises, shimmering with an eerie, black patina, were evermore dominated by the wholesomely ebonic character akin to his mother’s.

Before him, day by day, the child was mutating into an avian-like creature.

Yet it was not that unnatural transformation that took his breath away, it was that uneasy development that like the metamorphosis was subtle and indistinct at first.  For as they wandered the Mutant only possessed a vague idea of where to go – the rumors that sent them into exile placed the invading hordes advancing out of the east, his general idea was to go west.  But from one day to the next he did not have any particular course in mind:  all of the maps of Third Earth the Plunderian army obtained were very poor and inaccurate and, besides, he could not refer to them at that moment.  Rivers, mountains and other, landmark features were his guides and that was how he noticed.  It came as a shock out of the blue when it dawned on him, when he realized it was the boy who was leading them.  The trips up the trees, the stalking, the roaming, it seemed there was an ulterior motive for in the most tactful and effective way possible he was suggesting the path to take and it was no ordinary path –

Sitting by the campfire, as Koha’ slept across his lap, as the boy dreamt Jackalman stroked his mane.  Examining his profile, he studied the nascent symmetries, the emerging lapses breaking through the familiar terrain that was his son’s profile.

“What’s going on in there?” the canine asked, half-whisper, half-aloud as he fondled the boy’s ear.  “What do you remember, Kohaku?  What do you remember?”

It was his son, his own son, who was leading him –

“What is it, daddy” the child asked, blinking his deep-black eyes – was he awake, was he always awake, did he really, ever sleep?

“Just wondering aloud, boy,” Jackalman said, arching his head up to face the sky.  Framed by the jagged crowns of trees swaying in the autumnal air were clusters of stars as distant as they were unnumbered.  The orbs all looked the same – he was not an astronomer only an avid sky-watcher – but he knew among the eternity of stars one of them was home.  One of them.  He smiled, wondering, thinking about how to speak of his origins to his son.  And how utterly unfair it was that the boy would never know – never see – where a part of him came from.  All of the legends and epics of Plundarr, the knowledge, the history, they would just be tales that in time would be forgotten.

“What it might have been if your mother were here?” he paused and exhaled:  “Aguila, Aguila,” and the name merely passed his lips – for the first time in ages – and like a magician’s incantation he saw that mirage, as fleeting as it was tantalizing, that image of her limp, lifeless body falling through his arms, her face unnaturally white, her eyes agape and painted by a stunned expression as if she had been killed not by a blow but by a shock.  He saw her fall and fade into oblivion – then a sort of unnatural quiet befell the world and he looked again but it was only his son in his lap.  And, catching his breath, he wondered indeed if she ever left.  “It’s just – this isn’t the way it should have been.  We loved each other, boy and when she died I should have died right then and there.  I should have joined her – but if I had you wouldn’t be here right now,” smiled at the child.  “You’d have followed your sibling.”

He never wanted to tell Koha’ the sad, awful truth that there had been another egg – another one of him – but as the boy was wont to raid nests, did he not notice that birds laid more than one egg?  Did he not just know as he just knew so much already?

And then Koha’, with a smile across his face set aglow by the firelight, reached up and rubbed the jackal’s chin – the action so fluid, so exotic, only one other person’s movements in the universe, dead or alive, equaled it.

“I forgive you, daddy, I love you,” he said, letting his arm down, over his chest.

“I love you, too,” he replied, more exhausted by the conversation than by the hike through the woods.

Pulling his father’s ear to his lips, he added:  “And she loves you, too –”

But the child’s words were obscured by the bristle of the trees, the roar of the fire pit as the wind teased its flames.

 

Through flowered valleys, through barren ranges; across endless forests, into arid deserts – little by little Jackalman found himself venturing onto familiar grounds he thought he would not see again.  At first he was simply uneasy but at the end – as the path’s true course became undeniable – he was beset by shock, perpetual and mushrooming.  Behind the veil of trees must lurk the Thundercats.  Beyond the shroud of wilderness ought to be the Amazonians.  And everywhere throughout waited that power never-living, never-dying.  But was it only the memories of his foes that haunted his steps?

For where there should have been activity – even scant traces of activity – there was nothing.  No winding tracks of the Thunder Tank’s treads.  No smoldering fires of the Warrior Maiden’s villages.  Neither crashed nor broken specimens of Sky Cutters littering the jungle.  It seemed they were gone, all of them were gone and by their vacancy – in the twelve years since he last roamed about that territory – Nature reclaimed those parts of Third Earth carved up by the actors of the great, Mutant struggle.

Out of a grove, into a lake whose rocky coast was carpeted by muddy stems of cat’s tails interrupted here and there by gnawed skeletons of fallen logs.  There the two were met face to face with a glossy, black cliff wet with the spray of falling water – the cliff was tall, narrow, its crest was obscured by a wispy, airy fog.  It would be a simple climb:  simple for the boy – who was already an experienced, adept climber – simple for the man – what was now able to use all of his hands.  Together they scaled the precipice, its loosened slabs, its coarse rocks and its leafy, green foliage growing between the cracks – one of which was larger, deeper than the others but aside from a pause to look they did not explore it.

At the top, at the crown of the stonework they were met by a wide, gentle mound of pebbles that appeared to form a makeshift dam – a few steps into the fog and the pebbles gave way to the gravel of the banks of a creek – the creek –

The canine did not speak about it – it just seemed too unreal to be believable.  His son looked at him for a moment almost sheepishly, almost defiantly; holding his father’s hand he led the way, blazing a path into which they walked the length of the creek going against its currents, the stream dragging against their feet.  The water was icy cold but it did not rise above their shins and it did not bother them in any way other than to curb their speed.  All around them the view of the world within the fog’s misty haze twisted, swirled, suggesting wild, disconnected motions, eerie interplays between shadows and darkness and bizarre gradations of colors gray and dull.

The two reached a log, withered and thin, that slanted into the river – there they sat to lunch on the nuts and berries they picked along the way.  It was the last of the fresh food and they ate it slowly.  As they rested Koha’ kept his eyes always looking forward, toward a spot along the Zephyia whose interest he understood.  Jackalman avoided that area out of fear, terrified of what the boy might be seeing there, horrified by the knowledge that as soon as the last bite was taken the child wanted to take them there.

“Why do you want me to go there, boy?” the Plunderian wondered.  “What do you want me to see there, Kohaku?  Do you think you know it better than I?”

And then, without another word, the boy stood and pointed into the fog, thrusting his finger in and out excited at the prospect of the hike.  And the man, without a second thought, looked at where his son was indicating and saw the misty haze lifting and the ground rising – literally rising – as an old, makeshift trail cutting through the wilderness was ever so gradually, ever so deliberately coming into view.

Jackalman’s heart skipped a beat as the boy took his hand – never before was such a simple, innocent act the source of such an inscrutable, foreboding dread, it was as if he were being led into his own execution.

Just how many hours passed as they trekked up the mountainside, he did not want to know.  It seemed like an eternity – and that was enough – although, paradoxically, the hours passed like minutes, the minutes passed like seconds.  But no, no – it was only illusion, only agony prolonging the quickening tempo of time.  All throughout he kept his eyes low to the ground as if he were ashamed as his son led him like a child all of the way, all of the way from one end to the other.  And as he hiked he sunk into a weird, out of body state and for a while he wondered if there were no hand, no fingers clutching his for there was no real warmth within his warmth.  Indeed, it felt as if air passed through his grip though his fist was merely semi-clutched.  Yet with a shake of the head, a flutter of eyelids the effect vanished – he saw, again, Koha’s hand, ever-whitening, fitting perfectly into his fist.

With another blink, another illusion lifted for it was at that moment, at that very moment that the fog vanished – not only from the land but from his eyes as well.  Jackalman looked skyward – the Mutant almost fell, almost fainted – at the sight arising, stone by stone, out of the whirlpool of time and space.  How could it be, how did he know?  But, then, did he not suspect it, did he not realize it?  He almost named it days, weeks, months, years ago.  And was it not Koha’s aim all along to bring him home?  Yes, yes – his boy brought him home for there beyond the jagged crest of the hill were the ramparts and battlements of Castle Plundarr.

 

Reaching the summit, the two discovered a scene they did not expect.  Koha’ was puzzled, disoriented – it was as if he knew all about the castle’s history but was dumbfounded as to the rot and decay of its current state.  Jackalman, too, was disturbed but for an altogether different reason:  it was the immediate realization that the castle had been defeated and abandoned.  Its moat was drained, its gates were smashed; its stony, brick masonry was cracked and burnt, its towers either collapsed into massive piles of rock and mortar or stood by the slight tether, swaying to and fro in the wind.  Wrecked Sky Cutters were strewn throughout the vast portion of the visible wasteland, monuments of a final battle that took place right then and there and did not go in the Mutants’ favor.

The shock the canine felt before abated and as he wondered about the nature of the marauding hordes invading the northern country he smiled, he laughed – for a dozen years he was running in fear of nothing.  And then he sighed:  running in fear of nothing, a perfect metaphor for his life.  Slythe’s command must have broken down; the Mutants’ collective decadence must have ensured their destruction.  But what other truths lay within, yet to be discovered?

“What is it, daddy?” the boy asked as he played by the remains of a transport.  Maybe it was just the way it was destroyed in battle, but its looks appeared so out of the ordinary, so new that he could not help but wonder if it was not among one of Vultureman’s last inventions.

“Nothing,” the man said, crouching by the mangled debris.  “Let’s go.”

Now it was Jackalman who took the lead, guiding his son through an impromptu tour of the fortress.

Into the front gates; the wooden panels lay limp on their sides, scorched by a thick, heavy substance that had been sprayed molten upon their surfaces.  Into the body of the keep – a smell of moist, acrid dust clung to the air while the ground was a cesspool of sandy, rusty-brown soil unable to support even a blade of grass – the fallen structures within formed piles of rubble many feet tall.  But every now and then something was left still standing, still coherent enough to be recognized and one by one he pointed the sites out to the boy.

There – the dungeons, their shackles that once held troves of slaves were now free and dangling.  There – the mess hall, its red carpet torn and burnt, its tables and chairs gone, used to reinforce other, less secure portions of the fortress.  There – Vultureman’s lab, ransacked by who or what unknown.  And there – Slythe’s command center, the most well-protected, most secret corner of keep, a ruined hovel of twisted steel and shattered concrete.  It was like a sandcastle after the tides; its imposing weight and stature from before existed only in memory and seeing it again, for the first time, even the memories, scattered and blurred in his mind, did not match up to the reality exposed all around him.

But there – he held his breath – there was something like a nightmare let loose upon the world.  There were the steps.  There was the door.  There was Aguila’s tower – by forces beyond imagination it survived.  It was doomed to collapse – shaky, rickety, a crack, wide and deep, coiled about its shaft – but for the moment it existed.

As Koha’ explored the fallen ruins nearby, Jackalman walked across the would-be lawn of wind-swept debris.  He approached the door – the wooden door – was it just a lifetime ago that two reptilian guards kept watch by that door?  The guards Vultureman paid off that night he met Aguila?  The guards he bribed to let him see her?  The guards who ratted him out to Slythe as soon as his funds were spent and dry?  How the passage of time erased the foreboding, dreading feelings he felt every time he approached those guards; those steely-eyed lizards haunted only the past now.

He had done more than outmaneuver Slythe, he had outlived him and at last he returned, not the exile but the master of Castle Plundarr.

He touched the door; its rough, charred texture stung and pricked his fingertips.  It was thick and though it was damaged it was tough.  He smashed his body against it, again and again, ramming it with his shoulders, grabbing onto the edges of its frame and pushing his feet into those spaces where neither lock nor hinge would have been to weaken the planks.  He worked at the door, frantic even desperate – unafraid that his force might spurn the tower’s collapse – until at last, at long last the planks broke and the door fell to pieces.

Beyond, though it was still daylight, it was as black as pitch, as if a cavern waited on the other side of the threshold.

“Come with me,” the Plunderian implored, turning back to his son, his hand outstretched.  “Come.”

“Do you want to do this?” Koha’ asked, looking unsure, almost saddened by the prospect.

“Come, for once in my life, boy, I’m not afraid.”

“I love you,” he said, hugging his father tightly, a tear streaming down his eye.  “Remember that, daddy.  Just remember that.”

“Don’t be afraid, don’t cry.”

“It’s not for me,” he insisted, straightening up.  Yet a defeated look seemed to burden the youth’s shoulders.  “I guess – I guess it had to be this way, didn’t it?”

“I don’t understand this – not all of this – but I know you’re a good boy, Kohaku,” Jackalman said, tearing up, too, “and I’ve always been so proud of you.”  He hugged tightly, endlessly.  “You’ve never been afraid and even now –”

Within, the body of the tower reeked with a musk akin to the odor of rain mixed with dust.  The atmosphere was dense but it was not complete shadow and darkness because of the crack that twisted along the sides of the shaft there was always a slant of white, bright light at just about every turn.  But the rift was wide enough to slip through and unstable enough to be shaky – even the steps attached to the edges of the fissure appeared to be on the very verge of collapse.  And then, as the sun was setting and the ambiance was dimming, the Mutant feared that if they did not act fast a disaster of one sort of another might befall them.  It did not help that the passage was cramped, making the encounters with the rent a little too close and more than a bit terrifying.

One, two, three, four turns – was the tower really, ever that tall? – and they found themselves nearing the zenith of their trek.  The boy was ahead and the man was behind though never more than a few steps apart.  And there, a few feet above the two stood the last door – the door to Aguila –

Jackalman froze, paralyzed not by fear but by memory.  Caught in the grip of that apoplexy – as the last rays of sun washed over his face, his eyes – he watched helplessly as Koha’ touched the door.  With but a brush of his fingertips it creaked outward into the keep.  It revealed shadowy traces and dark glimpses of the interior behind it, the chamber aglow in the reddening, dying embers of the daylight.  The boy crossed the threshold and paused to look back at his father – his expression was obscured by the swelling of the night yet it appeared that his features were painted by a grimace of sadness and happiness beyond the power of language to describe – and, without another word, he turned back and jolted into the void.

“Koha’!  Wait for me!  Wait!  Kohaku, it could be dangerous!”

 

Jackalman shouted; standing just two steps away from the doorway, in the semi-darkness the visage took on an air of horror the like of which he could not have expected.  The door seemed to grow infinitely large as if it were built for a giant – even the spiral corridor in which he stood appeared to expand.  Or was it, he thought as he struggled to catch his breath, or was it he who shrunk?  The uneasy, unsettled effect was compounded by the creaking of the door opening – opening – opening revealing what amounted to be a façade of oblivion.

“Koha’!” he shouted again into the void – in a moment the hazy, murky vision took shape but within he saw no shadows moving across the walls, he heard no sounds echoing about the chamber – indeed, to his call there was no answer, not even a whisper.

He crawled, he labored, he stepped into the tower room.  It was as if traversing a force field, every moment aggravating his strength, zapping his energy.  And when he was inside, he was sprawled on all-fours as if beaten, breathless and tired.

Was it the lifeless darkness, the stale air?  Was it the unkempt dust, the encrusted spider webs?  What was he so afraid of?  What was it?

“Koha’, be careful,” he yelped, exhausted.  Though he tried to shout only a whisper passed out of his lips.  “Kohaku, where are you?”

He looked about the keep, crazily, haggardly, taking in the fragments vistas emerging into view.

“Can it be?”  Somehow, someway, as the veil of terror lifted, a normalcy settled and a strength returned – and he arose, shakily, uneasily, but he arose.  Yet, the terror of it remained.  It was not something within the chamber – not anymore – not then, not there.  it was not the space of it, but the time of it that terrified him for all the while it was the past that haunted him.  It was that night, that dreadful, terrible night.

“Can it be?” he asked himself, aloud, as he walked over the flooring – the planks burnt, loose and in a few parts here and there even missing.  “Am I back?”

He inspected the surroundings, his head lanky atop his neck.  Drooping from the ceiling – that arched and domed – scattered about the floor – that sagged dangerously as he treaded from place to place – were wispy bunches of cobwebs torn by the unfettered wind, withered by the collected dust.  The windows were unblocked, their shutters crumpled and shattered; the central ring of pillars were molded and rotted, vermin scrambled upon their weathered faces as he walked by them.

“Koha’!”  Over what buttress, in what nook, under what rubble lurked his boy?

He approached the focal object in the room – the bed.  The nest, broken and scattered, amid the evening view attained a slight and subtle radiance.  Walking into the space between two pillars he shrieked at the feel of something cold and sharp stab his feet.  He staggered aback, the floor ever creaky, ever saggy, its planks sliding freely.  He looked and saw the collar, Aguila’s collar.

He reached down and picked up the restraint, its links, corroded and rusted, chimed dully as they unfurled.  He brought it to his eyes, noticing how its disintegrating, rough surface pricked his fur, how it left a brackish, reddish residue along his flesh.

Again he inspected the chamber – and gasped at what the new vantage point in which he found himself revealed, for against the substance of the pillars were the remains of the eggs Slythe smashed in his fit of jealous rage.

“No!  No!  It can’t be, how can it be?  She laid two eggs in the nest – and I saved one!”

But there were two sets of broken eggs scattered about the pillars.

“Kohaku!  It wasn’t like that –”

The shock triggered the flash – instantly his mind was transported and he saw, as if in third person, the events of that night unfold.

“We can escape together – be with me, Aguila, be near me,” he implored – but the words did not come from him, they came from the image of him, the memory of him long suppressed.  He saw himself clutch Aguila’s arm – they were facing the door, sounds loud and violent were coming from behind it – shocked, he saw himself clutch Aguila’s arm and spun her –

“I didn’t mean it!  You know I didn’t mean it!” he cried as he remembered – he remembered what he did not ever even suspect.

Watching her fall through his arms, he wanted to kiss her, to hold her and whisper into her ear – but how could he bear it, seeing the ultimate truth revealed before his mind’s eye.

“Aguila, forgive me!  I forgot the slack –”

But was it the Jackalman of the past, the Jackalman of the future those words – he could not tell as the linearity of time crumbled under the weight of the realization.

He let the chain and collar drop and tumble about the sliding planks of the floor –

“No!” he held her body, one moment warm, one moment cold, lifeless and limp – he held her so gently, so lightly in his arms as she slipped away.  “No!  I’ll follow you – wait for me!”

He remembered – he wanted to kill himself but he lost his nerve.  And Slythe – informed by the treacherous guards – bolted into the room.  Enraged, the reptile tore up the nest all the while the lizards held him down.  Ripping apart the straw mattress he exposed the eggs – the eggs Aguila was hiding from his ravenous lips – and in a fit destroyed both.  Mortified beyond description at the carnage that ensued, Jackalman freed himself from the grips of the two guards and lunged into Slythe.  They scuffled, ripping and tearing into each other but realizing there was no hope of revenge, he jumped out of the window, calling for Aguila to take him away.

“I wanted to die, but I didn’t die.  I didn’t fall to my death, I landed on a roof.  I scrambled onto the battlements and I tried to jump again but I – I – I got away.  How – I couldn’t understand how – I got away but I shouldn’t have.  I lived but I shouldn’t have.  Why did I live, Aguila?  Without you, without a purpose, why?”

Suddenly the scattered fragments of the nest were aglow.

“Kohaku,” he stammered, falling to his knees, looking at his hands.  “Was it real or imagined?  Where did one world end and another begin?  But I know I spent twelve years away from this place – I know – but, could it have been, all of that time, could it have been just illusion?  Did I never leave?  Was I always here?”

“Kohaku!” he sobbed.  Rubbing his eyes he imagined he saw his son.  He reached for it but as he wiped his eyes the figure that may or may not have been there evaporated as did the glow from the nest.  The wind from the windows scattered its straw as it died its last death and with that the power that transformed the tower room expired with a final breath.

 

Starlight shone through the windows while currents of air rose through the gaps along the floor.

Jackalman sat between two of the twelve pillars, his hands around his neck as he looked won, always forever down.  He wanted to believe it was real – because he wanted to end it.  If it was a universe without Koha’ – and without even the possibility of Aguila – he did not have a reason to live and did not want to go on.

But how did it come to this?  It was not supposed to be this way –

“I guess – I guess it had to be this way, didn’t it?”

The world was crashing down all around him into the yawning blackness of the void.  Even the tower shook, its floor boards sliding, tumbling off of their supports.  Everything, everywhere was succumbing to the decay – rotting and withering – falling headlong through oblivion.  And as he sat there, he wondered if he could not imagine it all away – or – conjure up another existence with Aguila and Kohaku in it.  Maybe it too would not be real, but did it matter as long as it simply felt real?  And even if it only lasted a microsecond as he plunged into doom, as long as it seemed like a lifetime, was that not a proper substitute for reality?  In a world where there were universes within universes, even in a nutshell could he not count himself a king of infinite space?

While the chamber trembled and the ceiling caved and the columns tumbled and the floor shook, Jackalman stood and stepped forward onto a plank that gave way and snapped.  Falling into the abyss, he did not fear – how could a world end if it never existed, who could die having never been lived? – it was not a death that awaited but a rebirth, a new kind of life….