Ever since I returned from the Valley of the Goddesses, you have come to me in dreams to disturb my sleep. I see you pressed against an obsidian slab—lying on it or upright, I’ll never know. Your head is thrown back, your throat exposed in a gesture of religious ecstasy.

I feel you terribly, your presence so vivid and physical as it never was in life. Your wounds hurt me as if your body were mine: your bare torso cut open and flayed, your ribs hanging like curtains over an empty cavity where there is no stomach, no guts, no liver, only the white column of your spine supporting your velvety abdominal wall. Exhausted veins hang like disconnected wires, and, though you have no lungs, you breathe.

In this vision, you radiate the one desire left to you in your state of absolute fulfillment: you want me to tell you what happened. Lately I’ve begun to wonder whether this desire is truly yours, or whether it is the Goddesses’ wish grafted into you. Perhaps they keep you alive so you’ll beg me, compelling me to feed their emptiness.

I write this fearing the latter, but what else can I do? That place, everything that happened there, haunts me. I wake to the undiminishing nightmare of it: I went somewhere impossible and returned, but I returned changed. Perhaps telling this story will weave the magic spell of appeasement. You, or the Goddesses, may be sated, and I may be freed.

*     *     *
I can’t tell you how you came to the Valley of the Goddesses, or why you chose to be inflicted with such horrible delights, because you never told me. Before my journey, I barely knew you. We were just members of the same skybike gang, friends with the same people. My only memories of you were of your presence in the background, sometimes jovial, sometimes brooding. We worked the same corner a couple times, selling twitchix and other stims, but we never took the chance to have a real conversation.

Now I think of you so often your name peppers my thoughts like dove song—Roh, Roh, Roh. I write this long missive in dedication to you, an attempt to save your soul, or mine. And still the first I know of your story is that, on a sunny day in spring, you called me, ostensibly to ask for my help.

The rest of the gang had gone to Hypercity to pick a fight with the Reapers for selling on our turf. As if to spite my eagerness, my skybike kicked a fit when we were supposed to head out, so I stayed back at the mechanic’s to fix her.

Imar kept abandoning his work inside the shop to come out and smoke. Flicking sparks in my direction, he’d say things like, “You sure you don’t want help, Eba? That wiring looks messy,” and “C’mon, I know how to talk to sylphs real nice. Gimme a minute with her and she’ll be running in no time.” You know how he is with women. Solicitous with every sentence, full of insinuation, yet inoffensive enough to be waved away like a fly.

I told him, “I don’t want you messing with my dad’s bike. She’s special. She doesn’t listen to anyone else.” I tried teasing him: “Wow, your father doesn’t give a damn whether you work or not. Maybe that’s why you’re still living with him.” Once, I snapped, “Can you lay off? I have a girlfriend, you know.”

He would laugh out his cigarette smoke and jump his bony shoulders in a shrug, telling me, “The offer always stands,” without clarifying which offer. He’d go inside, come out an hour later with another cigarette. Thus, morning passed into afternoon.

At around one, Imar came out to tell me you’d called the shop phone and asked for me specifically.

I frowned. “Roh wants me? Why?”

“Donno, didn’t say.”

I went in more out of curiosity than anything, put the receiver to my ear and lifted the mouthpiece to say, “Hello?”

“Hey Eba.” The line crackled as if hindered by rebellious electric spirits. “Can I ask you a favour?”

“I mean, sure? If Jecen and Aire can’t help.”

“Deez says they aren’t at the diner yet.”

“I guess they’re still fighting the Reapers. Or coppers got ’em. I hope not.”

“Yeah. Thing is—my bike broke down. Can you pick me up?”

“Maybe you should wait to hear from the others? Mine’s crapped out too.”

“I think it should be you, Eba.”

The gravity in your voice cut through the static. My questions and qualms vanished. Your words sunk into me, heavy as an engine, and that engine drove me onwards.

I know you gave me directions, but I don’t remember them, despite the insomniac hours I’ve spent in strained recollection. A cloud hangs over that part of my memory, the first of many.

As I hung up, Imar sauntered over. “What’d Roh want?”

“He’s stranded, wants me to get him.”

“His bike is broken?”

I shrugged. “So he says.”

“Someone’ll need to fix it. I can come with you.”

I scoffed. “Fuck off, you don’t even ride.”

“Yes, true. They’re more fun to work with than ride, y’see.” I remember that specifically—Imar and his habit of repeating the same lines over and over! He dropped his voice so his father wouldn’t overhear him from his office. “Bikes aren’t the only way to fly. I’ve got something I’ve been meaning to use.”

I asked him what the hell he was talking about, but he winked and said, “We gotta fix your bike first.”

I wouldn’t let him touch my bike, but I fixed her a few minutes later anyways. After I tested the flight switch, Imar sauntered out, casual as ever, holding two little green sardine tins in one hand. I’d never seen any in person before, but I’d heard enough tales to recognize them. My heart leapt into my throat. What was he doing, swinging his hands around carelessly, as if those tins contained nothing dangerous?

Roh, he had Bombini. No fucking joke.

*     *     *
Lasci came over today unannounced. She kissed me hard and pushed me toward the bedroom door—I only got her to stop by complaining about my period. I appreciate her enthusiasm, but she can be so much sometimes.

I haven’t often felt in the mood for it in the two weeks since I returned from the Valley. Maybe next time I’ll convince her to take it to the couch, or to her place. Maybe sex will help me feel more normal. Most importantly, I can’t let her see my letter to you, drafted on messes of paper and painted onto my bedroom walls.

I drank and went to bed early tonight, only to dream of you. I carry a little more detail across the bridge of metempsychosis every time. Tonight—your teeth swimming in bloody saliva as you begged me for understanding, and the peculiar crumpled shape of your ears that made you so distinctive in life. I woke, my heart firing like a machine gun. My bedroom menaced me: the bizarre shapes of the plants in the window cut against the streetlight and my desk hulked like a beast, bristling with pots of paint and brushes in cups.

No more sleep for me. Nothing to do but rise and return to my work. The jovian lamp burns dim—I must take it to the store to have its electric spirits reinvigorated—but it is light enough to write by.

This dream convinced me that you know nothing, that your understanding is blank as a baby’s. You no longer speak in human language, but in some universal communication, the language of dreams. You need everything explained to you, which is painful to imagine. Have you truly forgotten everything—the celebrations when the war ended, how it felt to ride a skybike for the first time?

The war must’ve ended the same for you as it did for me. I was eight years old when Minister Tsveta’s announcement rang through the school’s PA system, interrupting teachers mid-sentence. His tinny voice declared: an armistice had been signed and peace talks would begin soon. We’d won the war.

Impromptu celebration swept through the city. The workday ended early and parents picked up their kids from school. Mother and I joined the dancing in the streets and, like everyone else, tore up our now-defunct ration tickets for confetti.

A week or two later, the troops returned and paraded through the city in a triumphal march. My mother tried to pick out my father from among all those lockstep soldiers, but missed him because his appearance was so changed.

That afternoon, after he’d finished his demobilization paperwork, my father arrived at the apartment. My mother opened the door, saw the mask that represented her husband’s face, and collapsed. A pair of glasses held a sculpted and painted nose, mouth, and chin in place. I cried, not because of his mask but because I didn’t know him. I’d been a baby when he’d gone off on this seven-year war, and at age eight, I didn’t comprehend that this mythical father might some day return.

After some explaining, calming, and hugging (which I resisted), he and mother went into the bedroom, leaving me to myself. Alight with curiosity, I listened at the door, trying to pick out words from an amorphous conversation. By dinnertime, when he removed his mask, I was so ready to have a father I wasn’t shaken by the noseless, lipless wasteland underneath. Despite the confusion of his syllables, his voice was rich and pleasant, like broth.

He won my heart that evening when, winking at my protesting mother, he bundled me outside to his skybike. He placed me in the passenger’s seat, which had carried wounded soldiers during the war, and cuddled me between his firm arms. He spurred the bike into life, rumbled it down the street and, hitting a spot without traffic, flicked the flight switch.

It was the most amazing moment of my life so far. The engine roared in my bones, my stomach fell past my feet as we leapt into the air. The city sprawled dizzily below, jeweled with streetlamps, crawling with tiny people. I laughed at them, all those poor losers still on the ground, trapped by gravity.

I hear it wasn’t so nice for you. A few nights after I returned from the Valley, a bunch of us went to a bar on King’s Street and everyone told stories about you, growing looser with your secrets with every drink. Jecen said your father never came home from the war and wasn’t a skybiker anyways.

If he had, would he have made you happy? Mine did on that first night, but not always. Sometimes all I remember is his anger and dislocation: silverware scattering across the table, incomprehensible yelling, wildness in his eyes when he heard a policeman’s whistle or a backfiring engine.

Though the war had ended, the world remained a hostile place for him. Sometimes he couldn’t tell the difference between me and the enemy. Sometimes he thought mother was the enemy, sometimes a stranger on the street or a clerk in a store. That’s why his greatest love was riding with the Firefeathers and fighting the Reapers—because, in battle, you know your foes by their embroidered jackets and danger is a certainty, not a possibility.

I inherited his love of battle at age fifteen, three years after he killed himself. I don’t believe he meant for this to be my path, but he left me no alternative. Mother couldn’t afford rent and his old leather jacket hung in the closet, embroidered feathers bright as ever. I dropped out of school and sauntered up to the mechanic’s shop with his bike and jacket. The Firefeathers laughed uproariously at my outsized swagger, but Jecen’s dad accepted me on the spot, said it was an honor because of my dad’s legacy.

No one had any stories about your first flight or why you became a Firefeather. You’d always kept mum on the subject. Poverty? Probably. Pure enthusiasm? Potentially. A desire to feel alive? Whatever else, that’s certain.

I know your bike was an Ara-16, one of the bikes that never saw battle because it was manufactured right before the end of the war, when the government and the Kabuto Corporation thought another big push would be necessary to win. Miraculously, it wasn’t. The war ended and Kabuto had to recoup its losses now the government wasn’t paying. Thus the release of surplus to the populace, the appearance of weaponry in civilian hands. Thus the skybike gangs, our livelihood, and thus the tins of Bombini in Imar’s hands the day you called me to the Valley of the Goddesses.

Imar saw the horrified expression on my face but performed nonchalance. “Never seen one of these before?” and so on, chuckling and pretending to toss the tins to me. “I’ve flown with them a couple times. I know it’s not their main use but it’s not hard. Better control than a bike. Imbibing them’s not just for suicide bombers, if you do it right.” I told him he should stay, or ride on my bike, but he was all, “You’ll thank me when you need a mechanic. Or a bodyguard,” and opened the tin.

Inside slept that rarified, half-sylphic, half-salamendric spirit, forged in the northern reaches with the intent of turning the southern front into a blasted wasteland. The sweet little creature didn’t look like it could cause injuries like my father’s. It manifested as a tiny green baby, a living cartoon, with feathered wings furled at its back. Disturbed by the light, it stirred and woke, sat up and stretched pudgy arms in an exaggerated yawn. It blinked its fawn eyes prettily, empty cup-like head swaying on its too small body. Seeing its master, the Bombino floated up from its sardine-tin bed with a smile, the tapered tail of its body reminiscent of a child in a too-long nightgown.

Imar inclined his head toward it. The Bombino required no verbal communication, leaning forward to touch its dainty nose to his. A squeal, a sound like the spray of an atomizer, and the Bombino became a cloud of green mist that flowed into Imar’s nostrils.

Imbued with the spirit, Imar’s skin, hair, even his fingernails, became the colour of drying bamboo. His feet parted with the asphalt and he bobbed weightlessly in the air. He laughed. “Well, you ready to go?”

“You sure you’re not gonna explode?”

“Just don’t touch me.” He winked. I couldn’t tell whether he was joking.

Tenser than I would’ve been otherwise, I jammed my helmet over my curls, swung my leg over my bike’s gleaming flank and kicked her into life. I steered onto the empty street and flipped the flight switch. My Ara-13 soared steeply upwards, borne by the sylph’s power. Imar rose to meet me and we flew together over Peak Avenue.

The street shifted, like the view from one train car into another when the rails straighten out after a curve. The movement revealed not more city, but green hills, rolling away into foggy distance. I had never seen this view before, had never seen anything beyond the endless cityscape, but I never questioned it. I felt like this path had always been there, nestled between the office blocks and tenements and theaters. Imar said nothing, I think because he already wasn’t Imar anymore.

That’s the strangest part, the part no one believed when I told them when I returned from the Valley, stumbling up to Deez’s Diner without knowing how I got there. Everyone asked me where I went, then asked where Imar was. Apparently, when he’d gone to fetch the Bombini, he’d told his father he was heading off with Eba and he’d be back soon. Battered by their pestering, I realized two realities ground together in my mind like misaligned gears: I had set off on the journey with Imar, but I went on the journey with my father.

I vomited all over Deez’s floor, motion sick from the conflicting stories. I told them what I had experienced, but everyone just vented frustration at my confusion. Too much twitchix and spizztabs, they said. Roh, Imar, and Eba obviously went on a bender. They speculated over Imar’s disappearance, lamented Roh’s end by the means they had always feared: accidental death in his dangerous quest for oblivion. The stories they invented explain none of my experience.

During my journey I thought nothing of the fact that my father’s presence had replaced Imar’s. I didn’t question why my father was alive and young rather than dead in a grave with a broken neck. He rode his own bike, twin of mine, but fresher, younger, with haloed bullet holes still shining against the military-issue grey paint. He still had his whole face. I remember seeing his smile behind the glass of his helmet, his teeth as crooked as I’m told they were. He held up his lanky form easily with no threat of collapse—the stance of adventure, rather than the stilted aggression of the bizarre, needy emptiness the war left in him.

He didn’t speak, didn’t need to say anything. Nothing could’ve been more natural than this: my father and I riding side by side, as we never had in real life.

Unfamiliar hills passed below. Broad afternoon became cold sunset as we passed through tattered, low-hanging clouds. We had left the city on a spring afternoon, but snow appeared among the thickening stands of dark pines.

Finally, my father spoke, his voice carrying over the rushing wind. “Oh no.”

“What?” I called.

“Something’s wrong,” he told me. “This place was never meant to exist.”

Ahead lay a valley, a terrible darkness splitting the gentle hills, fine as a surgeon’s incision. The sight curdled my dreamy acceptance into fear. The rift sucked up the light that should’ve illuminated it, cloaking itself in gravitational darkness. I tried to turn my bike away, but it drew me helplessly forward.

I looked over to my companion. His bike had disappeared and his identity was indistinct, straddling the division between Imar and my father. The green fog of the Bombino trailed from his lips and he fell, slowly, unnaturally, in an arc towards the valley that should never have existed. I fell with him, my bike silent and still. I tried to kick her into life, but to no avail. She tumbled away from me, my feet slipping off her foot boards.

I must admit—as I fell, I cursed you, Roh. You had asked me to come where flight was not possible.

*     *     *
Okay, Roh, I get it. I’ve been procrastinating on writing this story. I thought I could avoid you by spending nights at Lasci’s—and I was happy to be right. I would wake in the morning and remember normal dreams about dogs and statues and detectives, and I didn’t have to think about you or that dreadful place or this overwhelming obligation you have placed upon me so unfairly. I could read a book without finding delirious meaning in the page and chapter numbers. I lived without the horror that fills me when the sun arrives at a specific angle in the afternoon. I felt no need for drink or distraction.

So, of course, after a week and a half of pleasant diversion, you returned. Lasci woke me because I cried desperately in my sleep. She looked all crumpled and said I should lay off riding for a while—as if I don’t need the money, as if that were the problem in the first place. I’ve told her as much as I can bear about the Valley, but she still doesn’t understand.

The rest of the day she treated me with excessive gentleness, I think because she loves me and she thinks that, with careful handling, my madness might break. We went to the bars on King Street and, in between subtle suggestions that I drink less, she chided me for looking over my shoulder too often, laying down such delicate words as, “No one’s gonna attack us. You and the Reapers have a truce on Shinedays, right?” She’s either forgotten or ignored what I told her: that when I hear someone walking behind us, I feel viscerally and unshakably that it is you.

I think it’s her fault I’ve been withdrawn from the frontlines of raids and attacks, increasingly relegated to the less dangerous and exciting work of dead drops and re-ups. I can imagine her begging Jecen, “She needs a break, for her nerves.”

Even without her help, they’ve been suspicious of me. I can’t help but brood lately, forget about the time and come late to everything. Goodness knows what they think, and how long I can get away with this before I’m ejected. What would I do then? Either die, honorably submitting to their execution, or run off. To where? To what? I have been a Firefeather for a decade. I know nothing else, desire nothing else but the wind lifting me, the sun shining off the handlebars.

My blood is sluggish without battle. Since I returned, I’ve only been allowed to fight a few times. When my blood thrums with danger, awakening animalic, thoughtless alertness and reactivity—only then do I feel I know who Eba is. It was a mistake to tell Lasci one time, when she was icing a cut on my eyebrow, that I finally understood how my dad felt.

I am back home to write, as you have commanded me. I am back to what I have to confess is now normal. In between battle and brainless drunkenness, I am pursued by a feeling that’s difficult to express. It reminds me of how I felt after the time I took too many spizztabs. I hear you can relate—one of the stories that came up when people were memorializing you was about how you took six of them and were found naked and incoherent in an alleyway, spizzed out.

My experience happened a couple years ago, long before the journey to the Valley, back when I barely knew you. I only took four, which I’d done before, but these ones packed an unexpected punch. I remember we were all at Jecen’s place—you too, I think—and the first signs of it kicking in were the tin ceiling tiles undulating like seaweed. My stomach rose and plummeted as if I were on a roller coaster. I clutched the worn armchair in desperate discomfort, my fingernails tearing at the upholstery.

Lucid turbulence became vomitous delirium. My brain tumbled through images of grass, of sky, of vast bookshelves, rolling in muddy alleyways, in rainy streets reflecting Hypercity’s neon mess. Miraculously, I made it to the toilet. Clutching the porcelain, melting onto the tiles, I felt like characters from books and films, like my plight matched theirs in greatness.

After the vomiting stopped, delirium became shattered emptiness. I lost my location, my context. Fundamentally, I lost my self, unable to identify my body or the limits of my personality.

No one could figure out my problem. Sometimes someone takes too much and becomes a “bummer bro,” but that’s the extent of wisdom on the subject. Someone spoke to me—it may well have been you—but the voice came to me as a booming monstrosity, which flickered like a movie projector. “A-R-E Y-O-U A-L-R-I-G-H-T?”

For the first time, I was confronted with the concept that this voice came from someone other than me, which meant there must be a me. Grasping this filled me with pain. I cried, managing to ask, “w-h-o a-r-e y-o-u?”

Laughter wobbled across our separate realities, transmitted by gelatin seas. “Y-O-U K-N-O-W W-H-O I A-M E-B-A.”

“w-h-o a-m i? i-s t-h-i-s e-x-i-s-t-e-n-c-e, f-o-r-e-v-e-r?”

That’s how things went for a while, until my senses shut down and I ceased to exist in an unconsciousness more profound than sleep. When I came to, I was aware that what had happened, the realization of my utter separateness and aloneness in the world, had been more of a dream than reality. Still, it had happened, and it hurt. That was the feeling I couldn’t shake for months afterwards.

This feeling pursues me now. I have tasted the truth of the world even if only in a hallucination, and that flavor taints everything.

*     *     *
To return to my story—all I remember of our fall is the way the Valley’s shadows drew me into their embrace. I passed out on the way down.

I woke to scents of summer: the exhalations of evergreens and tall grass, dust in the air, water in muddy channels, the rich pungency of hyssop. Dappled sunlight filtered through the trees, undiminished by the magical darkness we had seen outside. Thick heat filled my riding leathers. My neck hurt from lying on my side with my helmet on.

I opened my eyes to see my father nearby, already sitting up with his back to me. He’d taken his helmet off. I sat up and took mine off too. He stood and I followed suit. My bike lay stranded in the grass, shining in the sun. His was nowhere to be seen.

We heard the shriek and chatter of children through the trees. My father and I looked at each other and wordlessly turned to follow the sound. Emerging from the low-hanging boughs, we saw a fenced paddock, where children of all descriptions ran, jumped, shrieked, squatted, prodded, sang, and danced. A tall woman floated through the squabbles of children, red-haired and pale as her dress, touching them gently, looking upon them, smiling minutely, but never speaking a word.

We advanced to the fence. My father called out, “’Scuse me! Miss!” The woman continued her lilting step without looking up. He called out again, louder. “Madam? ’Scuse?”

We waited, but she turned away and wandered off. We exchanged looks of agreement and, in the same motion, hopped the fence. We passed through the children, who only noticed us enough to avoid our step. My father reached out to tap the woman on her shoulder, but she swerved away, apparently to touch a child’s curls. My father cleared his throat and stepped in front of her, saying, “Madam, have you seen a man—” but she already faced a different direction. I tried it too, only to find she wasn’t where I thought she was, but across the paddock already, her fingers trailing over a toddler’s chubby cheek.

Father and I gaped at each other. “What the fuck is—?” “How does she—?”

We sat with our backs against the fence and watched the woman orbit the paddock. The sun, though it cast sunset rays through the trees, never sank any lower.

After some time, he said, “Maybe Roh is one of the children.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Why not? What isn’t possible here?”

We stood and searched through the children, who confused the task because they never stayed still. Finally, I called, “Roh! Roh!”

The crowd of children parted, revealing a boy standing still, staring at us: you, with your curl-covered head, your crumpled ears, your dark, expressive eyes. I called to you, but the woman appeared between us, looking straight at us, her face a mask of anger.

I don’t know if she spoke it, or if she forced us to think it, to say it with our own mouths: “You will not take him.”

I heard the sliding of metal on metal, a jubilant, high-pitched cry—my father opening the second Bombino tin. The little green spirit rose before him, giggling, its eyes shining playfully. “Give us Roh, or else—”

The Bombino saw the Goddess’ livid face and shot forward with an excited squeal. Fire, force, light blowing past my closed eyelids. I tumbled end over end, not knowing where I was flung.

*     *     *
The rest comes in flickers—some short, some long. I can only guess at the order, collecting the fragments of a dream, constructing a vague continuum from impossible beginning to unsettling end.

I know what came first: I was a child again and I crouched with my father in the crater left behind by a Bombino’s fatal eruption. Skybikes and planes roared through the night, jovian rifles splitting the sky with snapping bolts of electricity, tearing through war’s infernal smoke. Explosions battered the air. The repulsed earth shuddered around us.

My father sank into the mud, weeping. “That Bombino was my only way out but I blew it up! I’ll never get back home!”

His helmet fell askew and I patted it back in place with tiny hands. In a peeping voice, I told him not to despair. We would find Roh’s bike, fix it, and he could ride home with me.

A fleet of planes thundered overhead, vomiting fire onto no man’s land. With strength a child shouldn’t possess, I pushed my father into the muddy water and sank down beside him. We held our breaths for as long as we could. When we surfaced, the fire had died out, leaving smoke rising from the blackened earth, which offered nothing to burn.

We spent a long night in that crater, waiting out the continuous sprays of gunfire and shocks from elemental weapons, playing dead when the enemy charged, then retreated. I vaguely remember a muddy scramble back to safety. More strongly, I remember how the trenches and the people inhabiting them felt like home. We forgot we’d ever meant to save you and, with the rest, merely tried to survive the war.

I became a mascot for our legion, instantly recognizable in my miniature helmet and gray uniform, tiny twin of my father. The men patted my head, shared their food with me, oblivious to the incongruity of my presence. We’d play cards by dying lantern-light, smoke cigarettes together, ramble about town singing songs I was too young to understand.

The Goddesses’ vision of the war conflates my father’s beginnings as cannon fodder with his eventual career as a skybiker. Memories of defending the blown out trenches with desperate stabs of my bayonet swim alongside memories of glorious aerial assaults past enemy lines. Those are easier to remember—I would ride between my father’s firm arms, gripping tight with my knees as we twisted through the air to avoid the enemy’s scarlet Bombini or the crackling electrical discharge of a jovian rifle.

We’d land, surprising some supply line or convoy of fresh troops, and swirl around like leaves, making ourselves difficult targets. I’d fell man after man with the impeccable aim of my pistol or I’d leap off the bike, take cover behind a rock or a truck and make a shooting gallery of anyone who came at me. My father would swing back over and I’d leap back on the bike, like he was picking me up from the movies.

We’d often escape these raids without a single casualty, but that wasn’t always the case. I remember deaths, but not names. It’s like when a member of the gang dies: the numb mourning, the way life continues because it has to, because there’s more fighting to do, more money to be made. Then, weeks later, the unpredictable waves of emotion at tiny things, such as a weed straggling out of the concrete or a bent fork tine.

Most deaths happened when the enemy made pushes on us—oh, the horror! The demented shrill and boom of falling Bombini, the bolts of electricity lighting up the night, the bullets impassively penetrating anything in their way. Worst of all were the times they released unprocessed, unfettered elemental spirits on us: earthquakes collapsing the trenches; invisible sylphs cackling as they invaded and burst men’s lungs; marching columns of lightning stretching from soil to sky; the stalking, ever-evolving bodies of salemendric fire, drooling destruction.

*     *     *
Last night, the rest of the gang planned to meet and scheme a raid on one of the Reapers’ dens, but Jecen conveniently needed me to get the re-up, saying Aire’s broken leg didn’t make for a show of strength. Yeah, right. He’s keeping me out of the action. Lasci has gotten what she wanted. She asked me to come over after the re-up, but I declined. I’m too angry at her. I’m not trying to be my father.

Instead, after dropping off the brick of twitchix, I went to see my mother.

She lives in the same apartment I grew up in. Visiting always reminds me how I hated that place and how badly I needed to leave it. The same table stands in the same place, under the same light that illuminated my father’s half-face when he first returned home. The spirits in that lamp are almost as old as I am. They’ve seen some shit: tumblers of gin; lullabies and yelling; the frying pan crashing through the window, eggs and all. Father crossing the apartment, rope in hand.

Mother fed me dinner and described trifling incidents at work. Then she wanted to know how I fared. Already feeling the brandy she put in our after dinner tea, I told her the truth: I never feel quite right, even when I feel nothing. I think of father and the past all the time, but they are either unreal or the only real thing in the world. I told her I’ve been drinking more, and I’ve been eschewing book-reading for long, dark afternoons watching loops of nonsense at the nickelodeon. She doesn’t know I disappeared three months ago, apparently only for two days, but I thought she’d understand the essence of my complaints.

A silly thought—like Lasci, she suggested I lay off the riding and told me to find a new career. She even mentioned these lozenges she takes when she isn’t feeling well, as if indigestion were the same as being haunted. I don’t know what I hoped for, but it wasn’t that.

If I went back to the Valley, and surrendered as you did, Roh, I would be able to summon her as you did me. Then, finally, she would understand. Theoretically, I could bring anyone to the Valley of Goddesses, shuffle off the burden of trying to understand it to someone else while I accept an eternity of physical and mental emptiness. It grows more tempting every day.

Instead of yelling, or pouring more brandy in my tea, I excused myself to the bathroom, but, leaving the fan on, passed through it to my parent’s bedroom. Yeah, it was a ridiculous layout—you’d have to walk through the bathroom to get to their bedroom. Privacy was always an issue, but cheap apartments are cheap for a reason.

My mother still has the same bed, the same full-length mirror, the same chest of drawers that used to be full of his socks and underwear. I don’t know how she can bear to sleep there.

I opened the closet door and peered in. The light from the street didn’t reach inside. The door hung open like the sagging mouth of a corpse.

My father’s familiar presence crept into the room. That had been my problem with the apartment when I was a kid: I always felt him there but I hated him, wanted him to finish the job of being gone. I used to whisper ridicule when I felt him near: “Time to hang myself in the closet so Eba can find my gross corpse after school and she’ll have to join the Firefeathers to afford food! I’m the best dad! I stole Eba’s childhood! My daughter has nightmares because of me!”

I know now why he struggled with a craving for death. I’ve seen why. I was lucky, because when I lived through the war, I inhabited the role of a cartoon character who couldn’t be hurt or killed. I never feared for my body or my life.

Then again, I wasn’t lucky, because I saw my father cowering and shitting himself during bombardments, stealing fresh boots off disembodied legs, shaking a comrade’s corpse and screaming. I comforted him when he had been reduced to languageless, bestial states of fear and need. The Goddesses gave me a prickly gift: now I miss my father and enjoy when I feel his presence, but at the price of knowing what he was under fire.

When I came back from the bathroom, mother asked me, “What took you so long? Is everything alright?”

I looked at her knobbly hands, her lined face, and thought of our shared history. This made me weak enough to say, “I thought I felt father—like he was there.”

My mother is the type to think that if she hasn’t seen something, it isn’t possible. She looked at me with concern and repeated her tired advice. In her world, there’s no ghosts or valleys of impossibility. No wonder she can bear to live in that apartment.

*     *     *
When I was in the Goddess’ illusory war, the smog of battle would sometimes clear and I would see the red-haired Goddess walking through the mud without a stain on her, smiling and laying light hands on soldiers who couldn’t sense her. She wasn’t the only Goddess I saw. A blue-skinned woman hung over the battlefield, a spectre broad as fog, watching the back and forth impassively. A snake-headed woman appeared in searchlights and artillery flashes, wearing robes thin as a beetle’s wing. All were unfamiliar to the beliefs of our country, either the atavistic deities of a lost era or divinities unknown to humanity. I have the sense there were more than I can remember, and that they appeared more towards the end.

Doesn’t this account for the stories we heard when our troops came back? If you still suffered the graces of memory, you’d know which ones, you’d remember the blurry photos of what I saw for myself.

Towards the end, the enemy strung up the corpses of friend and foe, posed them with barbed wire, sewed together the scattered parts to make bloodless chimeras. The soldiers said the enemy was mad with hunger and sickness, but no one else saw the Goddesses standing behind them as they worked, wreathed in fog, beautiful, bright-eyed, smiling with gentle approval.

Who is war for, Roh? Not my father, who writhed on the stretcher, his erupted face streaming with blood, who was discharged back to the front once he could hold a gun again. Not for your father, who never returned; nor for either of us, who, until the journey to the Valley of the Goddesses, have been fatherless. Not for our mothers, or our father’s mothers, nor even for the people who think it’s for them: Emperor Sumebdi, Minister Tsveta, the Kabuto Corporation, the abstracted people of any nation. Everyone who thought the war served them operated under a terrible delusion.

No, the only ones who could appreciate it were the ones who could watch it and not be touched by it, who could float through like mist, bending history to their alien vision of beauty and rightness, who—

I just got a phone call from Jecen. In this world, it’s important. I can finish later.

*     *     *
They say that, though the trenches and craters remain, greenery has grown over these scars and white flowers bloom over them all through spring and summer. Deez rhapsodized about it last night, saying, “See how the past has healed?”

I wanted to say, “No—see how we have adorned it?”

I met you in one of those overgrown craters, perhaps the same one my father and I sheltered in. Nonetheless, I feel we’d advanced further along the Valley, closer to the cliffs of its culmination.

We met like the Mother and Father of our nation’s religion—clothed in trailing water lilies, silver-leaved creepers, tight-lipped buds, tufts of clover—except I have never thought of myself as either motherly or fatherly, and I suspect you never did either. We were just two people, dressed in the ancient clothing of archetype, meeting at the bottom of an old crater, among the trailing moonflowers opening in the night.

I had finally found you, but I felt shy, uncertain. Solemnly, you told me, “The Goddesses gave me the chance to see one more person before I commit to their service.”

So, you never wanted to be saved. “Why did you call me? You never really knew me.”

“I knew you from afar.” The whites of your eyes went red with tears. “I always thought you would understand me. That frightened me. I avoided you. Now is my last chance.”

I’d never had the wisdom to see kinship in you. I felt my embarrassing humanity showing, like a broken bowl right before your mother comes home from work. I scrabbled for words. “But Jecen and Aire—”

“—never got me,” you finished for me. “I liked them for it. They would never understand the Valley, but I felt you would, that you’d know why I came.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“Maybe you will.”

Again your words sank in, as they had on the phone. I had no more questions. We laid down together in our little leafy shelter. Then I don’t know what happened. I know we shared, but goodness knows what or how. For a time I knew everything about you, but I forgot it. I have felt dirty and sick for forgetting, but clarity comes to me tonight, after everything. I know the sharing was for you, not me. What matters is you knew how it feels to be known.

Will I ever know that feeling? I tried tonight, but the blank stares in the face of my distress revealed the truth of how everyone has seen me since I returned. If I am to be known, it won’t be by these people.

I digress too soon. First you should know how my journey ended: collapsed, hopeless, and weak at the feet of the blue-skinned Goddess, the one who hung over the battlefield as a watchful mist. I don’t know how I got there, or how she became solid, a statue of painted stone. She stood at the edge of the cliff that looms over the far end of the Valley of the Goddesses, one foot raised in an unfinished dance. I sank by her side like a sack of spare parts, forced to watch the Goddesses’ unfathomable ritual.

Buds sprouted from her back, and elongated into vast, thick tentacles cased in vermillion flesh, peeled away in parts to reveal the bloody muscle and blue veins beneath. These tentacles undulated across the Valley, while some sloughed off to float away into the distance. The red-haired Goddess rose from the trees like a flare, wreathed in gossamer and floating hair. The sound of drums tattooed across the valley, a twining rhythm rising from every stone and tree. The red-haired Goddess danced, her feet striking sparks against the tentacles. I watched in a trance, unknowing and unquestioning. An immeasurable stretch of time later, the red-haired Goddess jumped up, light as light itself, and darted into the gray clouds above.

The tentacles that had departed across the Valley returned, bearing you in a woven cradle. You were naked and anointed with oil, your head shaved, your eyes downcast. The drums rolled into a crescendo and the basket that held you unraveled and dropped you to the blue Goddess’ tentacles. They snatched you up and spread your compliant limbs wide. One tentacle drew a line down your torso, spilling you open with the sparkling contact of a pointed tip. More came to disassemble you, drawing the bloody contents out, digesting them into nothing. You screamed soundlessly. I watched, helpless, emotionless, as you were disemboweled in a dance that took years.

*     *     *
The phone call last night was a summons to battle. I went in excited, my pulse fluttering deliciously, but when I came face to face with a Reaper in his black helmet, I could no longer raise my baton and fight back. Like a coward, I turned and flew away. Like a coward, I shook and cursed. I knew that when the fight was over, I would have to explain myself.

I went to Deez’s, as we usually do afterwards, and jittered and sweated at the corner table until the Firefeathers filtered in. Jecen looked stormy as hell itself, and silenced everyone to ask me why I had fled.

Suddenly and spastically, I told them the truth. Told them I went to a Valley, I saw Goddesses of no known religion, my father was there, I was in the war, I saw you die, and have seen you living ever since. I told them I have seen the way back opening between the streets, calling me, and that I fled because I’d felt a primal need to save myself for that obliterating destiny, the same fate you sought from the Goddesses.

The gang stared at me in shocked silence. Jecen said, coldly, “Go.”

He showed unusual kindness in giving me time to put my affairs in order. If it hadn’t been for my father’s legacy, they would’ve taken me to the alley and pop!, that’s it! They’d crash my bike and pronounce me dead to the point of never having existed at all.

Morning rose long ago. Now the sun climbs to noon. I haven’t heard a peep from Lasci. No doubt they already told her what I am.

Maybe when they come up here, they’ll understand. My story is written on my bedroom walls for all to see, so they can judge for themselves what they believe. I don’t care. After all, I wrote so large to broadcast it to you, not them.

I expected a change. I planned, for months now, to write my last words to you, to hop on my bike and join you in the service of the Goddesses. Well, now the moment’s come, I’ve decided—fuck what they’re offering, and fuck suicide by Firefeather too. I have long fantasized about either ending—gutless ecstasy, or the simplicity of death. Now, to my surprise, I want neither. I want my memories, I want the chance to learn from them, to be better, to stop drinking, to see somewhere new, to meet new people, to lie in the sun and read a book.

So here I am, saying farewell to my dusty little apartment, a bag packed on my bed. Without my knowing, the desire to save myself had germinated, grown, and sprouted flowers. No more Firefeathers, no more people who disbelieve and misunderstand me, no more of this city and the memories that leap out of every doorway and alley. I would’ve liked to stay here to fix myself, but it’s no longer an option. My skybike is a ticket to a new place, a new life—a better life if I work at it.

I won’t bring much with me, but I’ll ride out in my father’s jacket, resplendent with scents of ash and high winds. I may be seeking a new life, but I’ll bring my past, thorns and roses both. That includes you, my spiny friend, and all you’ve taught me.

The spell has been woven. I feel your attachment waning. I feel you becoming a memory rather than a presence. Now I can actually miss you.

Farewell, Roh, and thank you.