Chapter 2

Outside his cottage our white-haired young man found a world quite like that which he had seen through the window. It was indeed the same world, pleasant, but very much ordinary. He didn’t expect anything else. Flat, green, grassy fields divided by a dusty brown path leading out from his door. That’s all it was.

The brook he saw through the window ran parallel to this path. The path itself headed north, right in between two distant mountains. Before heading down this path he meandered over to the brook, right beneath the oak tree. He crouched down and dipped his hands into the water, feeling the current pass through and around his fingers. He stared into the brook, into his own white-haired reflection. The face that stared back was instantly familiar to him, but new at the same time. Like it had not existed until he saw it personally, and now it did and it made perfect sense. He couldn’t explain it any other way.

Certainly a storm was brewing inside that skull at the sight of himself. His attempts to explain any of what he had been experiencing were failing miserably. Nothing was holding, nothing was catching. He splashed water in his face a few times.

By chance he happened to look downstream. The sight he saw made him jump back in alarm, in horror. Right next to him, half submerged in clay, was a human skeleton.

But as longer he stared at the chilling sight, not moving a muscle, it seemed to him not made of actual bone, but of dust, the same brown dust that paved the path behind him. He continued to gape, transfixed, for another four minutes before doing anything. Then he crept tentatively closer, finally coming to kneel at its side. It looked so fragile, so ancient. His quivering fingers reached out to touch it...

And it dissolved, right before his eyes, crumbling into formless dust as if nothing had been there at all. He hurriedly backed away and set foot to the path, keeping his gaze forward. As he walked and left the cottage behind, the repeating Sentence came back to his mind’s forefront. After a while, he heard the song of the little blue bird, and realized that it was following him. Its simple melodies cheered his stricken heart.

The path curved, and then came to a fork. To the right it led further north, toward the mountains. To the left were just more fields. He chose right. And after a mere three long, buoyant steps forward, he was promptly pounced upon.

The thing that pounced turned out to be a cat, but he did not realize immediately. Totally overcome by surprise, our young man simply fell over. The cat, an autumn-colored calico, managed to hold onto his shoulder, where it had landed, by inserting its claws deep into the skin. In his pain and confusion, the young man wrenched the cat, and subsequently some of his own flesh, away from him.

He sat there absurdly in the dust, staring at the arrogant cat as it licked dust and human oil from its fur coat. Eventually it stopped its elitist bathing and stared back at him, calm and straight. It had green, unblinking eyes. The young man wondered what color his own eyes were. To the cat he said his first spoken words.

“So, what’s your explanation for all this?”

As to the reason he decided now was the best time to speak up? Perhaps it was because this was the first creature he had come across with which he could speak eye to eye, and he had formerly been so alone, and in such a vacuum of activity, that now all his thoughts and pent-up emotions came tumbling out without any restraint.

“Why did you jump on me? Why is this bird,” — he looked up at the bird gliding through the air, and motioned at it, frustrated — “why is this bird following me? Who am I? Where am I, where am I supposed to go? What am I doing? Why am I talking to you? Why am I anything at all? There’s just no reason for all this. I don’t know why I exist. Why do you exist? Is there any reason for anything? What is going on and why can’t I figure anything out? Why — ”

He cut himself short. His wandering eyes had found something strange in the sky. He squinted into the sunlight. Way high up in the middle of the blue was a lone black cloud. It did not bear the exact appearance of a cloud — it seemed to be stationary, solid, and solitary, no other clouds around it, completely out of place. Not quite a cloud, but some dark mass hanging there in the clear blue sky, watching over the world below.

The cat rubbed against his legs. Its purring quelled his anger.

“Don’t attack the bird, okay?” he said to the cat as his breathing calmed. “You can come along if you promise that.”

His journey continued, the cat at his feet, the bird overhead. The grassy fields grew thicker with foliage and shrubbery. He walked, then walked, and then continued to walk.

And soon a town entered his sights, nestled right between the mountains. This, as he would come to find out, was Middleton, northernmost town on the central island of the five-island city-state Pentasma. Cobblestone streets, quaint wooden homes, smoke pillowing out of forges, steam sighing from vents, a market based on shipping and minerals unearthed from nearby Mt. Oniz, all accented by the crisp salty air of the sea.

The town breathed, it laughed, it sang. Children gamboled about, chasing each other, playing games, getting in the way of their parents, who in turn went about casually doing their daily chores and discussing the latest gossip or news with friends and neighbors. Smiles greeted smiles and happy voices filled the air, creating a relaxed, carefree atmosphere for everybody. It almost made the young man want to smile, too. He had entered on a festival day.

Then a child bumped into him, and he heard words that made his ghost of a smile vanish:

“Sorry, Gregor!” and the little girl ran off, giggling.

Gregor Townsend. That was his name. The one who existed for a wise and glorious purpose. As he had suspected. As he feared. But at least now he had something. And he found that, just like when he had seen his reflection, he had always known his name, though it had not existed in his mind until this very moment.

Gregor continued passing through the homes and then finally into the commercial heart of the town, where the dusty road turned to cobblestones, where he found even more busy, bustling crowds. Some of the townspeople dragged carts around, others children; many, including Gregor, traveled to and fro with no particular goal in mind. Conversations of differing tones and volumes between seller and buyer or betwixt customers gave the town a happy, buzzing murmur. Most of the stores around him stood strong as relatively permanent structures. But today, being a festival day, shops and stalls of a more temporary nature sprang up, capitalizing on the crowds.

“Hey!” cried a young boy, pointing at Gregor. “You didn’t have him yesterday.”

It took Gregor a moment to realize that the boy wasn’t pointing to him exactly, but to the cat who had been perched on his shoulder this whole time.

“Didn’t I?” Gregor mumbled, confused.

This meant something important to Gregor Townsend. He had existed before this morning. He was a real person. But the cat had not been with him.

“One of Caroline’s?” asked the boy.

“Just a new addition,” Gregor said with a shrug and a helpless smile, unsure what the boy meant, and also unsure what he himself meant.

But the boy seemed satisfied with the answer and ran off with his friends. Gregor stared after him, wondering if he had friends, too.

Then something happened to make him realize the answer was Yes, he did indeed. The cat, out of nowhere, suddenly dug in its claws deep into his shoulder. He turned to face the cat to ask an irritated why? — but then he saw what the cat had been warning him of: about five feet away from his face, and covering ground fast, was some sort of giant reptile pulling a heavy, awkward cart behind it. One does not ordinarily stop in the way of a swiftly-trotting dragon, and the cat had reminded Gregor of this fact in case he had forgotten it along with everything else, because that’s what friends do.

Gregor jumped twice; the first in fright and the second to get the dickens out of its way. No driver directed the beast; it seemed to know its way around town. And, in fact, the rest of the townspeople stepped casually out of its way as if this were a normal occurrence. It was.

Now safely in the wake of the uncaring animal, Gregor had time to examine it more carefully, albeit from a rapidly-increasing distance. It was a dragon if he’d ever seen one. But compared to the dragons he knew (but could not remember ever seeing), it was like a lapdog to a wolf. The only remnants of wings were flaps of green skin hanging from its arms; the head was crowned by small, red, webbed fins and its claws looked filed off. Perhaps this dragon, if such it could be called, had had all its potentially dangerous qualities, both in disposition and in physicality, bred out.

As the “dragon” disappeared into the crowds Gregor gave the cat a pat on the head and a word of gratitude.

“Thanks,” he said. The cat purred graciously and nudged its head further into Gregor’s scratching fingers. Gregor turned to the sky to see if his other companion had remained with him. It certainly had. The little blue songbird landed on a rooftop corner and let out a tweet only Gregor could hear. It was then Gregor decided to name his animals.

“Macata,” he whispered, looking at his cat. And “Buzby” while looking at the bird.

Just then a loud, hearty voice rang out, and a hand gripped his shoulder.

“Gregor Townsend! Your head is in the stars, young man. We certainly have a job ahead of us today.”