Robbed of the ground, deprived of light, sleep, water, and food, and bound on a path leading down into the bowels of the earth, Tye began to consider the possibility that his mind was playing tricks on him. The notion was an uneasy one, yet the clues were too many to be ignored. Something wasn’t right about this place. Was he dreaming?

Tye slipped on a rock and suffered a deceptively realistic blow to his shoulder. He instantly started sliding downward, his chafed hands grabbing for anything to hold on to, and only came to a standstill after smashing into the rough stone wall making up the left side of the slope. Hoisting himself up, he listened to the noise of rocks and debris loosened by his fall as it faded down below.

He had woken up already on the slope, mid-slide, thinking a spirit was dragging him down to the underworld. Even after abandoning that thought, he could feel in his ears what masses lay above him—if there were actual hells, he wasn’t too far from them. A new kind of rock was soon introduced to him when he reached out to halt his descent:

3a. Super-smooth rock.

Thus, for a long time, Tye had no choice but to accept this ever-moving fate. Both his pouch and spear had gone missing. Sliding through darkness, doubts had started to blossom in his heart; the slope itself was the first thing to be called into question.

It did not ever change, and was angled just so that once in motion, you would slide at a steady clip without any way of slowing down. Furthermore, it was eerily straight but for the one turn he had yet encountered. There, he had come to an abrupt halt upon encountering the left wall, whose jagged surface allowed him to find his bearings and stand, or rather hunch, up.

He found that walking up was impossible, so he walked down, a challenge in and of itself. He could not venture far from the wall for fear of entering a second slides. Every now and then, he felt holes in the jagged stone, giant ones, sometimes an ell deep. Whether they were real or not, he hoped that one would turn up large enough to give him shelter from the slope.

His stance was hunched not only because of the uneven terrain. His injuries had mounted, and listed as such in order of most painful to least:

1. Four cracked ribs

2. A dislocated, if not broken shoulder (left)

3. A broken wrist (left)

4. Two broken teeth (second molar / canine on the upper right)

5. A sprained ankle (right)

6. A burnt foot (left)

7. Chafed hands

8. A rather persistent nosebleed that occasionally spread to his ears

Yet in terms of how much they bothered him, (8) turned out to be (1). Every few frags, he would feel the warm blood streaming down his upper lip and chin, and taste the metal on his tongue. The possibility of succumbing to bleeding nostrils after having slain the beast seemed ludicrous to him, so he had ripped wool threads out of the tears in his jacket and stuffed them up both holes. Before long, they too started dripping profusely.

A rock made him stagger, and clacked down the dark descent. Tye clutched the wall dearly and waited until his balance returned. No echo ever sounded from the other side of the slope. He didn’t care much to try and find out what laid there.

Thinking back to his visit to Aishi’s, Tye remembered the smell of smoke and ink; if his surroundings were up for debate, perhaps it hadn’t just been an illusion. Perhaps he had actually been there, for an instant, just as long as he could suspend the certainty that it was impossible.

He realized what that would mean. Most of all, it would make him a fool. For all of his twenty-seven years, Tye had sat back and accepted that what he saw, what he felt, what he heard, it was all unchangeable. Even his breakthrough to Arama had not made him understand what he now was daring to entertain for the first time in his life: Perhaps, just perhaps, he was not merely the author of his fate, but of reality itself.

But he had to be careful. Such notions did not beg fantasizing, but hard empirical evidence. What you need is a test. Yes, that was it. Brooding, inching down the slope, he missed Rocky more than ever. The foot had been a sublime judge of what was real, and what was not. Death hadn’t claimed him, Tye knew deep down inside, but apparently, their channel of communication was no more. Still, he had no intention of checking whether the same was true for Scout, who remained shackled in his shoe. A woolen plug popped out his nose, blood streaming onto the jacket’s lapel. Which gave Tye an idea.

The next hole he found allowed him to if not sleep, then at least sit cautiously and rest his legs, and prepare his mind for the challenge lying ahead. A distant yawn made the ground shiver, sounds of the tunnel above collapsing further. Not once since he’d woken up had Tye felt any concrete around him, and his theory about the Liberation having hollowed out the mountain mining their own product seemed weaker the farther he descended. He touched the edges of the shallow hole around him. A fool, that’s what he was. Fool to think there was any sense to be found in this endless downward maze.

What he needed to do was nothing less than a complete mental overhaul. No assumption, no law that kept him trapped in the slanted dark could survive if reality was to be overwritten. But before the outside could bow to his conviction, Tye had to discipline his mind. He breathed slowly and evenly. And concentrated on his nose.

Losing blood wasn’t good, that much he knew, and his was spilling plenty. Apart from his nose and ears, the open burn wounds on Rocky left footprints on the slope that felt wet to the touch. Internal bleedings weren’t out of the question on account of his ribs seething at every breath.

Yet what said that a hole had to leak out? Nothing but his mind, he reckoned. Tye closed his eyes and exhaled, and let go of all assumptions. Noses could heal. Bones could unbreak. Singed skin could form anew at his will. His brows furrowed as he convinced himself, but the blood seemed only to flow faster. His focus needed tightening. Tye imagined the branching sinuses beneath his skin, the tear somewhere in there losing precious blood. He spoke to it. heal. cease bleeding. close up. regenerate. do it. godsdammit, do it!

"Stop," Tye said aloud.

His nose obeyed the order. Tye gasped, and squealed, and marveled at the cooling sensation on his lips as the stream ceased flowing. He took a breath through his nose, finding one nostril clogged, but the other permissive. A laugh escaped him that moment.

But then his lips ran hot with blood again. Fool, he thought himself for reacting with anything but mild content at his newfound powers. They drew on his conviction, the conviction that nothing about them was the least bit surprising. Of course, he could tell his nose to "Stop," and of course, it obeyed once more. This time, he paid no mind to the cooling, but focused on conceiving a second test.

It proved hard but distracting. He thought back to Plan E, a less-than-perfect plan, but his most effective so far nonetheless. There was no way the monster had survived the blast; if it had, he reckoned it deserved to live. What a foe it had been. Tye couldn’t but smile, and contently note that the blood was still—

And the nose bled again. An anger welled up inside him. "Seriously, now?" Tye yelled out. "I was only noticing it, you stupid…" He paused. "Sorry. Can’t we just talk about it? Please?" He waited in vain for a nasal voice to respond. How he longed for the instructions of Plan E, the clearness of it. A clearness that wasn’t his, he realized. Of course, it kind of was—all depending on one’s definition of a body.

"Speak," Tye said concentrating on his left foot. Reviving Rocky should have been his first test. His advice was needed, and should he make any attempt to bring up his horrendous common agenda with Scout, Tye’s powers would easily make him shut up again.

Sitting, nose still bleeding, Tye waited for a long time fending off not just sleep, but doubt, his newest and perhaps most relentless foe. He formed the word once more, this time speaking with a booming voice that could sway the most arrogant skeptic and hopefully, even himself. "Speak!"

"Behind you," Rocky’s voice said. But it wasn’t the foot himself speaking; no vibrations soothed his leg, and it called out from somewhere in the distance. The dark swallowed the words almost instantly.

He ignored the shiver in his shoulders and neck, courtesy of the disem-parted ghostly voice, and began grabbing at the hole in the wall he was sitting in. The stone had splintered long ago, yet its edges were still sharp enough to cut into his palm at only the slightest pressure. "Anything more specific that that?" he asked. But the dark stayed quiet. "Speak!" he cried, and realized it sounded like the whining of an insolent child. No wonder the foot stayed silent. He concentrated, convinced, but for naught. His composure gone for good, Tye grunted and punched the wall.

He pulled back his hand immediately, remembering the edges. But it hadn’t been cut. Cautiously, he reached back where his knuckles had touched down unharmed, and found edges much smoother, shallower than the others around it, placed right at the center of the hole. His fingers ran up and down a shape imprinted in the stone: a round center with five narrow creeks pointing up away from the slope.

A hand.

Tye vaulted to his feet, almost slipping, and regained his balance with swift, painful wiggles of his pelvis. Piercing aches befell his ribcage for some time after, but they couldn’t dampen his triumph. Rocky had spoken to him, from afar, from the afterworld, gods may care, and what Tye had learned proved all this a deception. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t the first. After waiting for the pain to subside, he stepped back and took another feel at the imprint.

Indeed. His own hand fit inside it quite nicely except for half a knuckle’s length missing at the tips. A dozen wild ideas sprang from his mind about its origin, but he bade himself to stop. Another trick. His surroundings weren’t the issue—leaving them behind was. Suddenly, he knew what the third test had to be.

Tye took a step back from the hole and planted his feet beside each other facing the downward slope. He exhaled, closed his eyes, and said goodbye to all the illusions that had kept him prisoner. Focusing on the ground, the rocks, the endless slope, Tye breathed in and spoke: "Straighten." Then, he leaned forward in one jolt knowing that the ground would no more be skewed and that gravity would keep his feet planted solid from now on.

His slide came to a painful stop when Tye encountered the second curve. After starting out tumbling, he had gradually stabilized himself until assuming a supine position that spared his naked legs from contact with the rock below. Sliding on his back with his posterior coming first, protected by the jacket, and clutching his knees against his chest, he had used the time to reflect on what was real.

The realest thing he could come up with was Aishi. No fake man could ever obsess about reality that much, Tye reckoned.  School had taught him not an inkling of the knowledge passed on during their late nights out when the wines had loosened his friend’s tongue enough to spill his worst suspicions about the pacification, the Liberation, Tahor’s own politicians and the mayor in particular. Empty conspiracies, his peers called it; but Tye knew a truly daring mind when he came across it. Unlike his friend, he had always taken for granted that there was far more fun in doing stuff than knowing stuff, and in that way, they were as far from each other as could be; too far for Aishi to have been invented by his own mind.

He waited until his battered body had come to a complete standstill before sitting up. Holding the wall, he checked his wounds for signs of increased spillage. A singeing pain shot up when he touched his tailbone, but it faded as quickly as it came on. His nose bled. He composed himself. "Stop." His nose stopped bleeding, and of course it did.

A smile played around the corners of his mouth. Differing philosophies aside, Aishi and him now shared an objective; for as he had slid on his back, Tye had realized that his quest had become one for words. ’Straighten’—he didn’t need a washed-up journo’s advice to know what a poor choice he’d made. Once more, experience labeled him a fool. Aishi was right: the right words at the right time could change history, more, reality.

"Speak," Tye said assertively. Nothing happened for a while, but he knew, made himself know that the foot would respond.

"Below you," Rocky said with the same distant hollow voice.

Below was nothing, so Tye moved down the slope holding the wall tight. He found a hole, reached inside, and found another hand at the heart of it. More holes waited ahead, and he checked them all. Hands, in every single one. But there was more than one kind of hand; the one that fit his own, and another that didn’t since it missed a digit, the ring finger, cut off at the very root. He remained determined not to waste too much time thinking about his deceptive environment, but it did make him wonder where in the gods’ names he was.

His nose resumed bleeding. "Stop," Tye said, and once more the stream died out. He had to start looking for other words. His ass-first slide had let him think about what criteria he should employ, and what rules there were for rewriting reality. Did it matter what language you used? Did you have to know the definition by heart, or would an intuitive understanding—Tye’s favorite kind—suffice? And, most pressingly of all: was he discovering the wondrous ways of magic?

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

It hadn’t taken long for him to think back to Aishi’s slurred lectures on foreign politics and the many chapters on Spor. Their struggle against the Empire was known throughout the colonies despite not being treated as more than a footnote in the Empire’s schools. What Tye did remember from school was a very different Spor, one undertaking invasions of its own long before God’s Navy ever arrived.

Particularly, they seemed determined to once again capture the Kolkonin, islands whose pictures looked like nothing Tye could imagine ever wanting to revisit, let alone retake. Cliffs of perilous rock, jungles made of trees that were nothing but gray sticks, arm-long worms and insects that wouldn’t bite, but crawl under your skin and lay eggs… It came as no surprise when Aishi told him that the inhabitants of such lands dabbled in the forbidden arts.

Though it was technically difficult to forbid something one did not acknowledge as real, the Empire’s persecution of the mages of Ultis had been very real, reducing their community to a few hundred magic-abstinent men that Aishi had described as ’platonic wizards’. While they were now more concerned with gardening and meditation, however, his friend’s accounts of what their order had once been had stayed with Tye. Human sacrifices, drug-fueled frenzies of supernatural apparitions, the reviving of corpses—it made the Sporin tenacity to invade again and again sound all the more impressive, albeit misguided.

But whether it were his teachers or Aishi talking about that magic, they all referred to the same thing: scrolls that contained the words used to call for the forces of beyond. Somewhere on those scrolls, in one language or another, he suspected one could find ’stop’, ’speak’, and definitely not ’straighten’.

"Even!" Tye bellowed. He squeezed ten breaths of utter confidence out of himself to be sure. Moving on. He would stick to commands as before. "Level!" was a command, but again, it yielded no result. He had to stay calm; even if he had a scroll, there was no light to read. With his ring of keys, words, but without knowing which one fit into the hole, he had to resort to brute force. "Become level." A compromise. Eight, nine, ten, nothing. Aishi would be crying laughing if he heard this, skeptic that he was. But what did he know about being a mage? Tye’s nose bled. "Make this down," he suggested, pointing his finger straight against the slope. He stomped at the ground and nearly slipped, catching himself by the edge of a hole. His breath had become hectic. "… Please?"

The dark had no mercy on him. Tye considered that perhaps, he had chosen too big of a task; shifting gravity was impossible even to the Cursed of the First Order. What were things that mages did? Past loves of his had read books on end starring mages of all kind, most often obsessed with the female protagonists. But he couldn’t for the life of him remember what powers they possessed. He thought even harder, making blood gush out his nose. Small stuff, something to start with. Something that could be of use to him.

"Light," he said. Hardly a proper command. "Shine. Light up!" How specific could he be? "Illuminize!" Eight, nine, ten—nothing. He couldn’t take it anymore. Tye screamed until his lungs gave out. As silence returned to the unbroken dark, he found himself thinking of only one word that could help.

"Speak." His confidence was so low, he rued having wasted the air. Rocky would never—

"Above you," Rocky said. His voice carried over from even farther away this time, quiet as a dying breath.

Tye looked up to the heavens, but soon corrected his mistake. If down meant down the slope, up meant the other way. But what laid there that could help him? Only tunnels made unsafe by the explosion, and empty flasks buried in the rubble, and the dead beast, and burnt pants and matches…

Matches. Of course. Tye’s upper body rejoiced while his feet remained steady. He was being too lofty, too abstract; at their core, the spells had to keep it simple. He stared at his index finger aiming to spawn the flame just above the nail. He pictured matches, the striking surface, the noise of them scratching each other. Elemental stuff, that’s what would work. Water. Wind.

"Fire," Tye said.

Something did happen in that moment, but it didn’t shed any light on his situation. Rumbling came from afar and through the ground, almost shaking him off his feet. An edge of the rock cut his fingers he reached for support. He wavered fighting for his balance until the noise faded, and finally stood secure again.

Yet his ears picked up on something else lingering in the air. Buzzing. Whizzing. Growing louder. He jerked and almost slipped when a crash sounded somewhere above on the slope. It was much closer that he appreciated. "Speak," Tye said, unsurely. Eight, nine, nothing. "Speak!" Nothing. "SPEAK!!!"

Almost imperceptibly, the dark carried a cry to his ears so harrowing that it made all hairs on his body stand, made his bones tremble, and ran warmly down his bare scratched thighs. The beast had returned. He came upon the explanation instantly, and with absolute certainty. His powers were real. And he had made a terrible mistake.

When the second crash sounded, Tye had already slipped purposefully and resumed sliding down the slope led by his tailbone, even pushing himself on the rock to increase his speed. His heart was beating like an umum. He had fallen for the allure of words, forgetting that one’s mind must be just as sharp as one’s tongue to make a spell succeed. Fire had sparked at his command, but his thoughts hadn’t been focused that moment. Only for a breath, they had been with the matchbox sitting far above in a bed of rubble mixed with product. He’d lit the fuse. Only how the monster had survived, he couldn’t say.

Something shot past Tye on the ground. It sounded close. More crashes followed behind him, where he assumed the wall to be, some shaking the ground. The monster wasn’t the worst of his worries. The impacts behind him left him no doubt about the life-ending size of the avalanche knocked loose by his magical explosion. More things whizzed by as he was scraping his hands bloody on the stone. He still wasn’t fast enough.

He remembered. You’re a mage, act like it. Yet what would a mage do in this kind of situation? Tye turned around, lifted his hand in an imposing fashion, and spoke: "Stop." His nose stopped flowing only for a breath before spurting out more blood. "Stop!" The sounds whizzing all around told him nothing was likely to stop anytime soon. Tye breathed in to make his last stand, abolish fear even though it had already burrowed to his core. But the wall was faster.

A bone-cracking force slammed into him from behind and ripped his body with, making him see lights at last. All sound vanished. He felt his left arm being crushed trying to protect his head, the skin of his legs being shredded by the stone ground rushing by. Winds and debris battering against his chest, he reached up his right hand grasping for something to hold on to, an edge, a girder, anything. Tye recognized the feel of the surface; it was concrete, a piece of tunnel brought down in the beast’s last surge. He found a fissure and pulled up as hard as he could.

Broken, gasping for air, he hoisted himself onto the wall with the use of only half his limbs, and rolled to his back. It wasn’t just his arm that had been crushed. Although there was no pain to be felt, Rocky scraped across the vibrating concrete hanging loose off his ankle. He would never speak again, Tye knew, and only then noticed his own lips saying something. Bereft of sound, he had to read them by feel. They were screaming ’Stop’.

The slide did not stop, nor did it slow down, and instead continued to pick up speed. The scourging cold air stung the stumps of his broken teeth making him shut up. There was no one to listen, least of all reality. Tye sat up and faced where the wind came from. Whatever laid next, he wouldn’t cower away from it.

Slowly, like from afar at first, the noise returned to him. He sat up surrounded by sounds of stone grinding on stone, high-pitched whizzing, and a deep rumble that shook his wounded legs. Tye realized there was no reason to shed tears. If this was his undoing, it was more glorious than he could have hoped for, pushing down into the earth’s core atop an avalanche of his own making. If only he could see it.

And then, he saw. First, Tye took it for another flashing light from his collision with the wall. When it failed to move around or disappear, he squinted, still wary of illusions. The light shone from far away, growing almost imperceptibly towards him. Tye’s mouth hung open as he gazed at the distant spot and watched it grow into a circle. The chunks of concrete and bent girders around him softly took shape, their edges shining with a purple hue. A veil of warmth descended on his skin soothing all pain. And Tye knew he had failed.

His life shouldn’t have turned out this way. How could he leave his mom and Aishi behind without even a proper goodbye? How could he die like this, a nobody, a fool with unlimited potential that had never been realized? How could he have not tried more, more food, more drugs, more sex, more everything? How could he have been so blind?

‘Cause you’re a fool. Tye wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. His body seemed at ease stepping up to the purple doors to the beyond, growing ever larger below him, but his spirit was far from easy. He did not want to die. A fear deeper than any monster’s cry could inflict on him revealed a truth never confronted before: He was afraid of death. "STOOOP!!!" Nothing stopped, not even his nose. This wasn’t right, it couldn’t be, it shouldn’t.

The slope switched angles so abruptly that his forehead smashed into the concrete. Before he could begin to wonder why, the rumbling cut out. His forehead, hands, and feet lost touch with the ground, and he suddenly found himself soaring across an ocean of purple spreading to the farthest edges of the dark. As Tye felt all weight leave his body, his lips kept refusing the sweet release. Stop, they whispered for the last time, breathlessly.

The weight returned, quickly, and drew him towards the ethereal ocean. Tye closed his eyes knowing this fall would be his last. An eternity seemed to pass of nothing but the wind in his ears. But then, the warm beyond took in his body and made him breathless, washing away all thoughts but one.

The beyond felt suspiciously like water.

All in all, his chances weren’t that bad, Tye reckoned.

Granted, his injuries were too many to list, and his mind had suffered punishment he’d thought would kill any man. Were his channels to Arama still open, he was sure every part of his body would be screaming at him like Scout. ’Release me’, they’d demand. Any rational approach to his situation would see their wish come true soon enough. With every beat of his heart, more blood branched out from his wounds into the glowing water. The only parts he could move were his head and right arm lying ashore, though three of the fingers had been broken by falling debris. Furthermore, he sensed his old foe sleep at the gates again, ready to take what was his. And lastly, there was the beast. If he had survived, surely it would have, too, and would be lurking, swimming around somewhere in the vast pool.

Yet there was hope. He had escaped the worst of the rubble avalanche, and where his red aura in the water kept spreading out, his nose had ceased bleeding for good. The water was warm, the reason for which lay beyond his comprehension, but it was pleasant, and made his wounds tingle in a way that soothed his senses, inviting his mind to rest in unison with the body. And perhaps, sleep could be a friend. A healer. A good night’s sleep cures the worst of afflictions. Mom had said that.

Besides, there was magic to discover. With his mind still this side of wakefulness and filled with a spirit of wonder infused by the strange pool, Tye was steadfast in his conviction that the right spell to cure his ills was out there waiting to be found. Could spells wait to be found, he wondered. Something told him that they sure could.

"Heal," he said. It would take a while. Advice was hard to come by underground, so he pondered about what Aishi would say were he in this situation. "Hogwash," or something. That was no help. "Regenerate." Better. More precision? "Stop bleedin’. Be all healthy. Close up your rips and tears and resume your usual duties."

Maybe his friend wasn’t the right one to tackle this particular challenge. "Speak," Tye said. But no response came from the broken, floating foot. His brother was perhaps the only part of Tye’s that had been spared any injury—though if he could speak, Tye suspected, he’d advise him no different than before.

It occurred to him that he might have gone about learning magic the wrong way. For one, he didn’t know a thing about how bones mended. Closing a tear in his sinuses was one thing, but how could he expect to mend his bones if the process seemed to him an utter mystery? He was no master of reality, for he’d never become a student of it. So what could he do? What about reality did he really understand?

"Food," Tye said, voicing an urge that still burned strong among his many aches. Food he knew. There wasn’t anything exquisite to be expected from the cave that held the pool; it’s craggy walls reached up not far behind the narrow shore, and disappeared in darkness high above where the water’s glow couldn’t reach. In the cracks, he spied a blueish moss growing in patches that looked just like the colorful wads of spun sugar sold at Jaemeni’s fairs. He’d heard of mosses rich with nutrients that one could eat. Aerani had told him about them; what were they called? Larrymoss? Dairymoss? Either way, they were supposed to leave a ghastly taste, but he wasn’t too concerned about his pallet. "Food."

Also, there was fish. He’d spotted them only at the edge of his sight when he was floundering underwater trying to escape the onslaught of rubble. He could still hear the muffled crashes behind him, still feel the rocks softly sinking onto his back attempting to pull him down. But the fish had been there, no doubt, swarms of them. Tiny bastards. They would be hard to catch; his only scheme so far was suboptimal as it involved using Scout’s shoe as a trap.

Looking about the purple pool, he saw tranquility return to its surface. "Food." Here and there, sole pieces of debris still fell from the opening hidden in the distant dark above, but their ripples died before they even reached him. There was not a trace left of the avalanche, Tye realized. The pool must be quite deep. He hoped it had swallowed the beast, then. He had enough things to worry about. "Food."

A noise preempted his fifth command. Like the kywees in the city, only not the scraping of their claws—a noise of flight. There it sounded again, above him, gaining on him. He looked to where the strokes came from, and watched in awe as a bird touched down on the shore only two steps from where he laid.

"Hello there, buddy," Tye said, his voice high like he was speaking to a rattled child. Pure magic it seemed, though only for a breath. The bird was dressed in feathers patterned with blots of green on a fiery bed, and carried an unseemly lump under its beak. It was an atrocious design, but more importantly, recognizable. Although he’d never seen one before, their likeness had been described to him by the other inmates: fortune yellers, living tools of the old Tahori ways of mining. "Don’t worry, I won’t harm ya." Prison legend had it that the workers of the mining village still kept their kind somewhere down in the deepest parts of mine three, just in case they were trapped and had to find a way out through unstable tunnels. Mining legend had it that their call warned not about fragile tunnels, but about the owner’s misfortune itself. "Jus’ let me… ugh… roll over one moment." Neither legend mattered to Tye. They may have been of use up in the tunnels, but down here, he had more urgent needs to tend to. "Just wanna pet ya, that’s all!" He slowly reached out with his right, fingers closing in on the bird’s neck. The animal looked more curious than frightened. "That’s right…" His arm shot forward.

The fortune yeller slipped back and then to the side, parrying his advance with a hearty peck at the back of his hand. Tye yelled out and drew back the hand, skin aching from the counterstrike; but there was no wound. When he looked up, the bird was staring at him, its beak moving open and close, open and close, as if it couldn’t decide whether it should speak.

It didn’t speak. Instead, the fortune yeller built itself up to its full, knee-high size, spread the feathers along his back and tail, and cried a cry too well known to him, one that made his hairs stand up and his bones tremble.