Valentina’s breath was a strained wheezing in his ear. Up close, he could smell the poultice, a mixed scent of old fish and clay.
“Any idea why it looks like that?” he asked.
Her tired eyes looked distant.
“I knew that sky. It is the sky of a different time. Before electric lights blanketed so much of this country and world.”
“Why would the rift show us that?”
Valentina shook her head.
“I don’t know. Time distortion, perhaps.”
Green gave his mind over to the storybook stars.
Behind teacher and apprentice, the friends at the fire found their voices again.
The wind flowed down the mountainside.
Leaves spun and slid across the forest floor with a rattle and hiss.
Jerome played on. Alf had a loud one-sided conversation with Casper. Valentina studied the ghost of a sky from another lifetime.
Green stood in the midst of them all feeling a deep longing, a childhood longing, an aching certainty that if he only knew more, he could protect himself from his mistakes, he could be useful and meaningful and correct. He had already stepped through an improbable gate and found himself in a new kind of life. He was just beginning to understand his own new place in the world. Now, he just wished he could preserve it. He was tired of strange thresholds and new worlds.
Catskill’s thoughts were there in the dark beyond the firelight and the dark behind his own nascent instincts.
He saw the fawn through the wolf’s eyes, moonlight in the shape of a deer, slipping between the trees of a distant ridge. It had once carried with it a spell of eerie beauty. That spell was thin and powerless now that Green had witnessed the alien creature’s innate wrongness up close, had witnessed the consequences of its presence.
One way or another, this has to end.
This is Clara Rodriguez broadcastingon CryptoNaturalist frequency 11-58-1.
I’m speaking on behalf of Valentina Blackwood.
Perhaps she is listening now, but I doubt it. I expect that she is on her way to do something possibly kind and certainly dangerous.
Many of you listening to this know Valentina well. Hell, many of us have lived and studied with that menacing old creature.
“Here’s your toast. We might be eaten alive today. Grab your galoshes.”
If she gets you when you’re young, she lives in your head forever.
I know she lives in mine.
Well, I’m not young anymore and I’ve been thinking about old Val.
I was trying to recall a single time I’ve heard her ask for real help and I came up empty. Now, we’ve all heard her share opportunity, calls to study, or announcements about singular events, but that’s not asking for help. Not really. She shares the crop, but not the sowing or the harvest work.
We spoke earlier today, and again this evening. She asked me to do this broadcast.
Alright, not this broadcast exactly.
She asked me to share warnings.
Firstly, observing the decay of a rag moth’s body should not be considered safe. Details are foggy, but Val’s new apprentice is not a vanilla human and his observations can’t be fully trusted as evidence of safety.
She knows how to pick ’em, doesn’t she?
