Suddenly, before my face’s eyes, the five strange bodies begin to move their arms. I wet my eyes again, look, and scream.
The five bodies are removing their heads, their skins.
My soul stiffens in darkest gray—and I continue staring.
When I see what flesh and colors lay under the discarded skins, I scream again, and the five souls hear my scream and begin to quiver, darkening, alerting.
The five bodies are scaly and green-yellow, quivering in the same nervousness that commands their souls.
(No forefather ever looked like these. See it: Deep within your soul, memory of dark scaliness which is older than your forefathers.)
Dark gives birth to more darkness, and I tremble.
The five souls have turned toward me, and from more than one of them images rush all too clearly:
Killing and killing and killing: hairless scaleless upright bodies killing, being killed by smaller green-yellow scaly bodies—
And I recognize—from forefathering times—who the hairless scaleless bodies were.
And I see clearly now with face’s eyes that the five bodies staring back at me have long finless tails.
One of the five souls gives out without will a final darkening image:
All hairless scaleless upright bodies: long-since dead!
The bodies before me are not my kind—and I scream. In the infinite dryness there are no bodies of my land still living. And I scream.
I wet my eyes frantically, but my soul sees something first:
Self and four others: here seeking: any hairless scaleless bodies remaining: if hidden descendants of the long-since dead—
The five bodies begin moving toward me, and my face’s eyes are dry, and brown fear rises bubbling, and lavender adds brownness even greater, and my soul acts in the only way I know.
I pull the lie from its burrow in my soul, mold it with red of remembered rage, and throw it out as a wounded female ioe would throw it out.
The five bodies slow their advance, stopping nervously in soul.
I add brown of motion, and two of the bodies begin to move back—toward the bigshinegray of the greater lie.
Having forgotten to breathe, I suck quickly on the stem—but hold the lie tensely and strongly.
For a moment I imagine I have won the struggle. The five souls are red, brown and solid gray in their fear of my lying image—whatever their understanding of it is.
But suddenly a flashing line of light leaps from one of the five bodies, and my shoulder is struck with the pain of hot talons.
Using my twisted left hand, I cup a breath of water and wet my eyes—only to see that in the webless hands of four of the five bodies lay small gray objects.
Another line of light leaves them, and the dryness around me trembles, but no pain comes.
Then the next light brings with it a pain on the side of my face—not such depth of pain as in my right shoulder, but enough to nearly blind my face’s eyes.
And now I understand how all my forefathers’ forefathers died, how an animal may die without the touch of talons or the slow crawl of sickness. I touch dim distant visions of small hard objects: one used by forefathers’ fathers for killing food; one used by one man to kill another; and finally, leaping from dimness, many hard objects of a million sizes—used by my distant fathers to kill the fathers of these...these scalesouls, in a million struggles in a million places.
And I see the truest truth, and the deepest brown yet:
The consoling light of the future is gone forever: the wrong bigshinegray has come; and there will never be a right bigshinegray. I and my kind are the last of my forefathers’ fathers’ blood, and our deaths will be the end of praying times.
(Then die. You want to die, to join waterjoyup and screamdeep and their fathers and all lines of blood in the darkness of body’s loss. Die.)
But something else bothers my soul. Under my body is lavender, the euyom, and if I die her death will come too. The lavender soul has offered me many good things, moments of brighter comfort, veins of touch against aloneness.
(You wish to bring death on her, when no euyom has ever wanted death as your kind always has?)
My own soul’s sarcasm makes my answer a shout, and sadness becomes the crags of guilt as I realize the euyom has been listening to me, willing to offer her life if I wish to choose death.
My body begins to quiver, and in a moment my rage gathers hate as its current. I hate these killers of finest dreams, killers of forefathers’ fathers and mothers. (Just as you hate the boy named fishsinger, killer of one mother.)
My single soul raises its pounding talons of brown, and I give the five souls my screaming hate.
And something different happens. The souls of the five darken and become...become fewer.
I wet my face’s eyes quickly, to find in seeing that only three scalesouls remain upright. And those that are upright are swaying and stumbling.
The two bodies lying on the dry ground are as still as rocks.
At first I understand none of this. But understanding comes: When first I cried out in dryness, thinking myself blinded, the violence of my soul’s darkness killed millions of the tiny invisible souls around me. Now I have thrown an even greater violence, swollen with hatred, at the five scalesouls....
With pink of confidence I scream again—but pink is not red, and my hatred is weaker this second throw.
So I need more feelings, colors and darkness. I bend my soul to images of death again—mine, my kind’s, and most intensely the death of lavender’s hues. And then I vomit my fear’s hatred a third time, crashing on the three souls remaining.
Two bodies leave their uprightness and fall to motionless silence.
Then I scream, as another light hits my left tail.
The body of the last scalesoul turns and moves quickly in a bouncing manner toward the smooth gray form behind it, just as an ioe would turn tail and flee.
My soul awakes with pinkest joy, and lavender wobbles under me in sharing.
The pinkest joy confuses my sense of proper action, and instead of killing the last scalesoul, I choose a proud image, weave it with further bright pride, and send it babbling to the fleeing soul:
I, yes I, am one of them: pale smooth hairless scaleless upright fellow of the line of my forefathers’ blood!
The soul disappears to eyes and soul by entering the bigshinegray, and in the next moment harsh thoughts rise in my mind: “The wrong bigshinegray shall carry its lone surviving soul back to the big red-yellow object; but then it shall return here with a thousand bigshinegrays, all of them fatally
