else is pretense. And when you are finally gone, I will be done. It is a life to be wished for. He grins, and insists you partake of his rice wine. But I do pity you, he murmurs. To not know what you want, or how to find it … you poor thing … While you seethe, he laughs. Hours or seconds from now you both will face each other down on the path outside, no weapons, no touching of bodies, only his intense need matched against your own, and you may battle, you may flee, but regardless of outcome there will always be another meeting, another challenge. From your perspective, one tempered by epochs and passings, the thought is intolerable. You find a strange joy in sickness. The world slows to a simple dust-coated beam of sunlight that skewers the window, and you lie in a perfumed bed, your throat choked with phlegm, Lin Page 10 content with the thought: So this is what it is to be old. And if fortune truly favors you, you will dream. Of vestments and gowns made of endless fur. Of uncountable expanses, where you will never see everything there is, even as you crack open your scaly wings and soar with a thought across several oceans. Your comrades frolic alongside you, locking fangs at the back of your neck, hiding behind mountains, attacking with shouts that would escape human ears, sounds conveying multivariate meanings: impatience, recklessness, love, rage, overwhelming gladness. At the end of a day's battle in which no one dies and no one bleeds, you seek an island clothed in a latticework of vines, and sleep there, hidden from sun and stars. Perhaps tomorrow you will return to the Great Hall with a cocky clatter of feet and wings, blow out the multitudes of candles flickering in perfect time with each other, and just for show, you would chase down the sun, even