Dances with Bears limped down the side of Interstate 15, marveling at the accuracy with which his nose could separate and distinguish the scent tapestry staining the night's air. Burnt gasoline fumes; the soft, musty scent of wet cornfield soil drifting along on the dry desert winds; the scent of stale alcohol drifting up from his shirt; the harsher, higher scents of cacti and tumbleweed territory from beyond the green oasis of the Sage River valley farming fields; and the soft, quiet scent of world-fabric decay.

His arm, half dangling out from the left side of his body, kept a jaunty thumb propped up in askance to the passing minivans and the truck drivers.

He had passed a small alcove of humanity carved out on the riverside some ten minutes ago, an island of forty or fifty silent, dark houses perched in a tight huddle together beneath the boughs of an ancient drought starved forest slowly dying above their eves. The main road had only had a gas station, one with a closed signed hanging in its window, and cardboard signs over its gas pumps, reading 'No Self-Serve. Call for Service...'

Its hours had read 6-am - 6-pm.

Bear had called the number. No one had answered, and so he had walked on.

The rusty, bullet hole filled sign at the end of the five lane settlement had read ‘Lima, Idaho, 8 miles.'

He prayed agonizingly for Lima to have a diner or a café open past 10. Every bone in his body ached with need for caffeine. It was one of the few needs his body felt, these days, but he had never shaken the need for a semi-constant injection of coffee just to keep going, especially after days of constant walking with little time for unnecessary sleep.

He needed to reach the origin of the Signal.

His Identity demanded he Look, Explore.

He had to go South.

He had felt it three weeks ago, a pulse breaking out from somewhere to the south, a low, dull wave creeping slowly out through the atmosphere as it disturbed the normally-stable surface of the strings of the world.

The rough rings he had drawn out on the worn plastic of his weathered topo-graphic map, trying to mark the pattern of the disruption, had pointed to a center somewhere down around Flagstaff.

Or maybe a little more south.

He had to go look. He couldn't not.

He hoped that it wasn’t another Disaster brewing; a repeat of the devastating explosions that had utterly destroyed Tokyo and Dhaka some ten and twenty-five years ago. A small part of him would be excited he couldn't deny - the chance to study the first stages of one of the unnatural Disasters would be foundational to further advancements in his research - but the death toll such a disaster would cause made the results to horrible for Dances with Bears to actually hope for that.

It was unlikely that another Disaster could happen so soon after the last one.

He predicted the Disasters shattering the chords of the world were selectively choosing where they impacted (he expected the most important factor was population, the complexity of human existence in dense concentration destabilizing local reality) but he couldn't be sure.

He, and the whole world actually, knew almost nothing about the actual rules and laws that governed the events that had begun happening on the surface of the substrate of the New World’s magics.

Maybe the next Disaster would come in some way as a complete surprise, completely throwing off even his most basic understandings and rational models of what had begun happening all those years ago.

As far as he knew, anything was possible in this New World.

If this was a new Disaster nucleus his Being had sensed and was Drawing him towards even now, it spelled terrible things for a potential rapid decrease in the interval between Disasters. With an interval of fifteen years between the first and second event, the best that could be hoped for was another fifteen years between the second and third. Two data points had not been enough to determine an equation to calculate the progression of disaster events, but He Who Dances with Bears still held out high hopes for a linear, or even constant interval pattern. That might be the only hope humanity had of finding a defense from the rapid destabilization, before everything collapsed into anarchy.

Results on his research had been extremely slow coming. Too many times he had almost given up hope, resigning himself to the impossibility of solving the impending world collapse.

The only thing that kept him going, through the day-to-day panic, anxiety, and uncertainty, was the knowledge that he was the only one, as far as he knew, that even understood the most foundation specifics of the terrible disasters that bad grown to engulf the entire horizon of humanity's future over these last 25 years. Only he had SIGHT. As the Great Chords of the World, as he called them, - those dense, fractal pattern of reality he had taught himself to see, - slowly filled with a rising tide of noise, the world had begun to Change.

The world was unraveling, and he was the only one who could SEE it, as far as he knew.

The Disasters were only the tip of the iceberg of the change that humanity would have to adapt to.

After a while he shook off the thoughts, pulling himself from his mental funk and refocused on the singular impulse pulling him forward through the storms of uncertainty.

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Find the signal. The disturbance of the world fabric that he had sensed from so far away.

He didn't actually expect it to be the formation of a new disaster nucleus. No, he rather thought the signal might have come from the birth of another of what he was starting to call ‘natural treasures.’

Or, fingers crossed, maybe another human or animal who had accidentally broken through into ascension.

He desperately wanted someone to talk to.

The last one had rather quickly gone mad and killed himself, but Dances with Bears was fairly sure he had worked out a formula for future success.

He considered himself the world’s foremost expert on the magical energies that had become so easy to harvest and access after the first of the Disasters - maybe the world’s only expert. He wasn’t too sure of what exactly the governments of the world knew, but they at least realized that something unnatural was happening. The fact that the various presidents and dictators and such weren’t nuking each other implied some amount of real knowledge, but he had yet to see any evidence of governmental access to the Strings of the World and the magic of the New World. He imagined that that type of advancement in science might make the headlines.

Then again, he was hiding his knowledge, what was to say that all the world's governments were doing the same as him? Hiding their advancements. Desperately researching, trying to advance their own understandings, gathering power for the day of the New World finally falling into perfect focus, completely obscuring the Old World's mundanity.

The first to master the music of the world would wield great power.

He Who Dances with Bears had only mastered the very basics of observation and connection, and even with that he was almost a super-being already.

That was the core of what he feared, above all else. Someone else finding the pivotal understanding of truly mastering the strange energies before him. Someone locking away the knowledge, some small group growing and pressing their superiority out to stifle and suppress the advancement of all of humanity.

A world where leaders and the wealthy and the powerful hid and restricted the knowledge of this new magic, killing widespread integration.

A world where the magic was restricted from the masses.

The power must never fall to Censure.

He didn't understand the sentence, but he knew it was foundational to his own beliefs.

The way he saw it, the only way to stop or even slow the steady advance of the Disasters was to spread the knowledge far and wide. To bring the whole world in on the secret. Then, hopefully, someone, or everyone together, might stumble onto some way to stabilize the waves of destruction plaguing the world.

He knew it wasn’t his fault, or at least wasn’t all his fault, but the self-recriminations and regret still ate at him.

The only problem was he had no clue how to disseminate what little he did know. He still struggled to get individual people to believe him, even while he was there, right before them, showing them to their own eyes the magic he wielded.

The fact that the only other sentient, sane, and human User he had encountered so far was the accidentally dead apprentice, his hope of a new user Awakening was only enticed further.

Another chance, another opportunity to practice teaching and to study the strangely personalized effects the Fairy Magics could have. Another chance to share his knowledge, his Sight.

He had worked out a semi-chanted elevator-pitch in his head, and kept repeating it over-and-over again, nervously, as he scuffed through the early evening winds, kicking up the gravel below his boots.

‘First, you have to believe me.

I know I sound insane.

You have to try to trust me.

Reach inward, silence your mind.

Reach outwards, hear the world.

Reach inward…

Reach outward…’

On and on, his internal voice running hour-after-hour as he walked, trying to make his own words sound believable.

Onward he limped, his thumb kept cocked out in proposition to the passing motorists.

A flash of grey-white fur and a dart of motion ghosting through the dried out weeds and underbrush of the gutter beside the road betrayed his companion, the forest fox he had taken to calling Ash.

He watched the playful little beast for a while as he walked, idly contemplating memories for a while. Just letting his mind wander.

He reached back, re-adjusting the satchel and guitar case hanging from his back.

He had to get South.

His whole Being seemed to depend on it.

On through the night he walked, and into the morning, trudging along through the growing light and into day's blazing heat.

He stopped now and then, climbing up into an air conditioned or heated cab for a few miles, or stopping at a café for another coffee refill, or fell, exhausted, to just sit for a while on a park bench or bus stop.

The strange energies, the vibrations he was always slowly gathered up from the surface of the world strings around him, what he called the Fairy Magic or the Chords of the World, could serve to keep him from growing tired or hungry, keeping him moving and energetic, healing and empowering his muscles, and even allowing greater esoteric, strange, and awesome feats...

But it could only do so much at a time to get rid of the strains and pains growing in his legs and plaguing his whole body.

Still, he kept on; rising again to walk, or jumping down from a passenger seat, - back to gravel roadsides; dropping Ash’s warm body from his lap, swinging his bag and case up, and walking on

He had to get South. Quickly.

His Identity, his Being, demanded it.