V.

 

Raulm sang off-key during the entire walk to the river:

 

“O mi amor, o paramour,

She shines from sea to sea,

O mi amor, o bearish whore,

Thine breasts are unto me

Mounds of lustful pleas

That scream to me: ‘Touch me.’”

 

“Why do all of your songs have to be so profane, Raulm? There is no abundance of subject matter out there in the world for you to use as inspiration–and yet, you reduce yourself to primes. Revolting primes.” Elise said.

 

“Then I shall ne’er be confused with the squared and rooted.” Raulm retorted with gusto.

 

“We’re almost there.” The Badger interjected. “But I agree with Elise–memorize a couple arias, a few canciónes. Spare us the gravel-mouthed drivel.”

 

The three unlikely travel companions had accessed a narrow band of road that wound through a collection of red clay canyons. While the road was filled with pot-holes and adjunct pebbles and stones, the uncanny aperture of the canyons’ heights endowed this peculiar, traversable interstitial with a penetrating grandiosity, an aptness that so befit the risky spirits of the adventurers. The skies overhead churned in surrealist swirls, as indigos and brilliant whites and smudged wisps of grey melded together to compose what can only be described as sincerely native, trippy patterns; ends fitting into beginnings, and otherwise, and so forth. At an opening in the road, Elise and Raulm and The Badger found themselves standing before a trickling stream, a stream which fed from a sheet of slow-moving water, almost frozen, as though captured by a camera mid-descent; how quietly and unnoticeably it fell over the swollen layers of the red clay it enshrouded. 

 

Elise tracked with her eyes the trickling stream. In the distance, she saw the waterway broaden and squirm like a worm towards the horizon, urging silently the young girl come explore her many rivulets, creeks unseen, to swim in nascent waters resolute in their purity, their very untaintedness. A painter’s brush, she thought, could never capture the tonal quality of this picturesque, for there seemed to be something almost musical about the composition of these lands. A soft, airy, most delightful and delicious, decibel-less resonance swept over the flatlands, scurried about the waters, drew up among the root-mucked banks and diligent grasslands, the tallgrass, a holy sonnet etched in non-verbal, non-melodious sonics which swam into Elise’s inner ear; entering the part of her that recognized the character of certain voices in her dreams; the part of her which encountered lost mutterings in the rainshower when rainshowerwater splashed on the ground below; the part of her which heard the cicadas arriving before their season; the part of her which preternaturally premeditated the rooster’s tinnitus-wrenched whine.   

 

“Pretty.” Raulm spoke, utterly undermining the impossible beauty confronting them then.

 

Elise did not speak. She merely gazed out over the vista. The Badger thought she resembled a princess condemned to witness in solitude the passage of some unfair prophecy.

 

“The river splits that-aways.” The Badger pointed an outstretched claw towards the first of many deltas. “You brought the cork again, right? The cork?”

 

Elise, who still could not bring herself to words, merely nodded in response.

 

“Good. We’ll need to raise the floodwall built by the beavers–the beavers, damn ‘em–and then cork the hole in that sucker.” The Badger scratched his head. “Thing’s a little troublesome still, a little troublesome yet.”

 

Raulm led the way, cartwheeling down the downsloping grounds that pointed to and eventually blended into the foremost delta. At its tattered skirt, The Badger grabbed a thick, oaken walking stick and then scrambled awkwardly onto a massive boulder. He thumped the boulder. The boulder was hollow. Elise noticed its hollowness. Soon, three beavers swam up from the riverbed. Upon seeing The Badger, they dove back down and, circling back around, their slicked, brown bodies moving like blurry torpedoes through the water, they shot up towards the surface and breached it and then issued from their pinched mouths a trio of jetstreams which soaked The Badger from head to toe. The Badger cried out in earnest (and to no avail) and dropped to his knees. The beavers chittered and chuckled, pleased with themselves. The Badger, in order to save face, turned to Raulm and Elise and said:

 

“The practical jokesters of the animal kingdom. I despise ‘em.” He hocked a loogie at the beavers, who dodged the vitriolic spit of their assailant simply by submerging themselves in the river, cloaking themselves in the familiar texture of familiar waters.

 

“An’ wat’n do yer’ wantz, lackey’do?” One of the beavers, emergent and slicked, asked The Badger in a barrage of unexpected illiteracy.

 

“We need to cork’er up again, boys.” The Badger produced the cork. “This time, it’ll be the third option. The third option. Airtight, airtight.”

 

The beavers shouted in delight. Novelty, and not consistency, is the real prize among beavers; the way material possession can be to a human being. At least, that’s what that brute The Badger had come to surmise, anyway.

 

“Alright, alright.” Beaver Two exclaimed, he much more articulate than the first. “We’ve been hoping to build another channel between Sector Seven and Bed Fourteen Ninety Eleventeen, anyways. This will be a help to us, too.”

 

The Badger flipped the cork to Beaver Three, who caught the object between his teeth and transferred it like a squirrel does a nut to a cheeky side pouch. 

 

‘Mhm-gwa-funddtid.” Beaver Three announced. His words, usually most literate of all, were on this occasion obstructed by the parcel he held in his mouth. 

 

The three beavers swam away, revolving around one another like despondent, but nevertheless obedient, moons. 

 

VI.

 

Late afternoon fanned her golden-honeyed glow across the swaying tips of the fescue and pampas, halving the slender, western-facing fingers of common reeds as animals diurnal, of all kind, took their siestas in the hills, chased tails and horns and protostomes through the horizon-scampering savannahs, climbed and descended and abetted, preyed. From the view of the falcon, any novel resplendence wrought of these lands had evaporated seasons ago. Indeed, time had come to transmute that very resplendence into something entirely rather remote and forgettable. In such lies the fate of the place we call home. To Elise however (who, at least so far as her working memory was concerned, had never once encountered such wild extravagance), there could be no denying the sanctity of this earthen corridor. By the light of intuition she immediately revered it. All of it. In the crustiest sessile and even the most hideous spider she interpreted the logic of the divine as only a mortal can, by assigning to it the status of miracle. 

 

Elise and The Badger and Raulm and Beavers One and Three cruised downriver with the graceful ease by which a medieval augurer spies an omen (–and who then–impelled to capture the omen with all else but the written word, sighs; eventually settling for capturing it with the written word).

 

In other words… the going was as easy going as easy going could ever get.  

 

The Badger was laid out, belly up, snoring like a stuffed up house cat. The gently rocking raft which slid across the river the way a marble rolls over glass had put him to sleep. Beavers One and Three meanwhile, mischief makers themselves, seemed either to be plotting to dunk their snoring companion at the next bend or to be arguing over past transgressions or both, or neither. Elise could not tell which. She found no rhyme or reason in the interchange that took place between the two dam-dwellers and thought she may as well have stumbled upon a secret conversation between a northerly wind and a mumbling marsh, for any information transferred between the two parties utterly eluded her.

 

“Say’n a’rt’n y’een ginna serfle on backs to the babies? They’s prolly y’pp’n r’ightaboutnows, eh?” The First (obviously) said to the Third.

 

“Ghastly gourmander. Sidl thy chops, o feral lad of the undermoss. Thou art a beast of beasts–a once caged fowl who complains hither of open pasture. A mutton-glutinous masticator maimed by the short vision of a pygmy. Think: We could be like the great explorers. Like the compass resting in the palm of the cartographer’s hand or the concentrated pull of whatever quanta lies between the stars and the sea captain’s greedy red eye. Become adventure, beauty. For it becomes us!”

 

“I’ff’in ye’s. Listen’ere. One’s’us garta check’n on the sucklin’ projeck. Y’know the Lady Ferlishelsias’s gots the Posts. If’n it ain’t’n youse, it’s me’s. Ya trus’n’me?”

 

“O Brother. Thou hath misappropriated thy conception, for thy perceptions are full of bombast, buggery and the stuff that colors kabash. In The Cabal there dwells a real spirit–forget the djinn, the genie, the bogart. Rely upon it as thou would a fishing line. Relinquish thy terse disposition in favor of–”

 

“I hope Beaver One decides to stay. At least his sentences are short, if nonsensical.” Raulm nudged Elise in the ribs with a wink.

 

“What is all this rabble about boshing balls?” Elise asked innocently. “I heard something about a mouse, too… I think…”

 

“In a way, you’re surprisingly on the nose. They’re discussing which of them oughta head back and check in on their weak, bungling, soon-to-be–”

 

Elise flagged Raulm with a wary, and wearied, eye.

 

“With their soon-to-be… oh, forget it. Their wives back home need to feed the babes, and the wives are Down of Mood, and so these here beavers want to check in and make sure their babes get fed after all.” 

 

“Well, why didn’t they just say so?”

 

“To tongue with a beaver is to waltz with lightning.”

 

Elise stood stone-faced.

 

“Which is to say…” Raulm said, recovering. “Be careful and remember who you’re meddling with.”

 

Elise and Raulm heard a splish! in the riverwater next to the boat. Together, they plaintively peered overboard as Beaver One glided away. No sooner, he was but less than a speck than before either of them could lift a hand to wave goodbye. 

 

The splash also woke The Badger.

 

“Arfy-arf har.” The Badger stretched, clenching his paws together and trembling that weird, ubiquitous, fresh-woken tremble which often follows deep slumber. “We there yet?”

 

Raulm and Elise and The Badger turned towards Beaver Three. Beaver Three paced the deck, yanking on a protractor and grumbling about certain calculations involving angles and time of day and acreage and so on. In parallel, the raft passed under the shade of a utilitarian bridge which Elise noted had been forged out of the twisted underboughs of two separate hemlocks joined together from opposite sides of the river. 

 

“Oh, it’s Hugger’s Bridge!” Beaver Three exclaimed, tossing the protractor into the folds of his loose stomach pouch and ducking under a low branch. “Frivolous without flack, it is reasonable to infer we are but a sixth of an hour out, giveth or taketh a handy’s revolution around the wristwatch, perhaps two.”

 

“Yippee!” Raulm shouted, shoving a fist into the sky before taking the form of a reptilian gnome. 

 

“Chomp skis, you fake flout.” The Badger, naturally the carouser, caroused. 

 

“Quiet, you two. We haven’t discussed where we're going yet. Or why we’re going there. Or what we’re to do once we get there. Isn’t that a problem?” Elise polled her crewmates.

 

“In every problem there lies no less than an infinite number of opportunities.” Beaver One replied unhelpfully. 

 

“Raulm? Badger?”

 

“Don’t look at me.” Raulm said. “I brought you to The Badger. The Badger brought us to the beavers. And now, we’re approaching the end of the only river we’ve never crossed before.”

 

“Raulm’s… I can’t believe I’m saying this… right.” The Badger muttered.

 

“What’s that now, you chubby, make-a-wish warlock?” Raulm piddled with amusement.  

 

“I could out you right here, right now!” The Badger whirled around and shot out in the direction of Raulm, mad as revenge.

 

“Woah, woah, woah. Tubby.” Raulm allayed coolly. “You know the consequences. And I know you. Sit back down, you angry snot.”

 

Elise silently witnessed from her modest corner on the raft the fierce exchange that had taken place between Raulm and The Badger. She felt that whatever subdued tension simultaneously ranged and cinched the psyches of her two crewmates had stumbled suddenly out into the open to where Elise could finally see it for what it was. A sliver of it, anyway. The illusion of Raulm’s innocence, of the cute but brazen star-gourd’s preserved naivety, had been shattered into a thousand shards, like dropped porcelain. It was clear to Elise that Raulm held some unnamed advantage over The Badger. And also, that The Badger was afraid of Raulm using it. Maybe, Elise thought, maybe The Badger appeared to be even a little bit scared of Raulm altogether. And not just of whatever fact or resource Raulm possessed–whether blackmail or something other. 

 

Of Raulm. 

 

“Raulm?” Elise asked hesitantly. “Why are you being so mean to The Badger? I know you’re former lovers and all but…”

 

“But what? Didn’t you know that love is possession, rendered in the fats of loyalty and civil oath?” The Badger decreed, stretching wide his chest. 

 

“How bleak!” An outburst from Beaver Three. “Fealty to a King or Queen does not imply derision, but reverence in those sublimated traditions of soul and heart. Love is neither yearning, as in lust, nor disguised envy, as in material bondage. When the loving of another lover is over and the lovers depart, hurt, wound-licking, swearing against the passage of lost time, resentment oft wreaks havoc, from the gallows of insidious rumination to the curt mood that belies common ogling. This angst is natural, of course. How long has it been?”

 

“Five years, years.” The Badger spluttered.

 

“Five years!” Beaver Three cried aloud, changing his mood. “Why, five years is entirely too long to grieve. Grieving can become a disease, if left untreated. The time is nigh to medicate. Forgive or forget. Reconcile or relieve. Make amends and make-up or let the other float to the watery surface of the mind, belly to sky. But, my, you must both move–”

 

“We are never getting back together.” Raulm, plumping her cheeks, spoke firmly.

 

“Agreed. Agreed.” The Badger growled.

 

“Be nice to each other, can’t you!” Elise, who was struggling to track the conversation, said simply, honoring herself by remitting any further complexity from what she felt ought to have been a hunk of dry dialogue. “You loved each other once!”

 

“I did! But she did not! Did not!” The Badger growled again, twice as growly as before.

 

“You’re a fool.” Raulm, dejected, replied.

 

“You don’t have to be friends. But you can still be friendly. Please? For me?” Elise continued.

 

“Fine.” The Badger said.

 

“Fine.” Raulm said.

 

A port came into view around a bulging, moss-covered plateau, shifting the track of the river as though it were a minor but meaningful pivot in a tired, years-long conversation.

 

VII.

 

“These are The Strange Lands.” The Badger said after pulling in the vessel to its proper mooring, tightening the leather binding affixed to the hitching post.

 

Elise gazed over the great expanse ahead, to the left, to the right. Vast, grey grounds draped in a low mist stretched miles into the distance. Above the crimp in the horizon Elise eyed a chain of vague, blue mountains, too far away as to presume any opinion of definition or character, but close enough as to inspire a lucid march through the swirling fog, which like a crimson runner in a castle seemed to have a curious way of nudging its subjects towards their destiny.

 

Raulm did not sing or yodel or whistle or hum for entertainment’s sake this time. Instead, she transformed into a mouthless drone and set out, unbreakable of gait, at a rigid and brisk pace. The tiny, thumping paws of Beaver Three fell three strides to the one of The Badger’s, of whose soles thundered mercilessly across the hard, dusty film that comprised the plains. At the outset, Elise motored ahead with the promise of hope spurring on the muscles of her legs. As the hours blended into one another however a certain shock overtook the young girl. Agitation. She witnessed the sun in the sky fall ever closer to earth, white with heat, impossible to startle, omnipresent and ignorant of scientific postulates; yes. But the mountains meanwhile never seemed to budge. Perhaps, they were an optical illusion, Elise considered, spinning the thought like a web round her mind. Perhaps, it was all some garish trick of mirror and smoke–for certainly there was enough smoke around them. With every footfall, with each step, the outline of a beckoning, mist-filled finger, the very object of aura, seemed to come within arm’s reach of Elise, only to flicker, dim and then become obsolete before reappearing a millisecond later a pace ahead as Elise shifted her weight from heel to toe.

 

“Ain’t there a shortcut?” The Badger spoke at last, breaking the intense mull of the collective. “This is going to take us forever!”

 

“Forever and then some.” Retorted Raulm.

 

“In every journey dwelleth a second journey.” Said Beaver Three, his diction adorned in scholarly staccato. “The journey of acceptance.”

 

“Accept this!” Cried The Badger, unleashing a gust of methane from his backside.

 

“And that!” Creaked the rusty bucket seat of the mouthless drone, Raulm.   

 

All four laughed.

 

“Ain’t you run on electricity? Electricity?” The Badger forearmed Raulm in jest.

 

“Neigh.” Raulm countered, equal to the joust, summoning equal jest.

 

“Raulm?” Elise piped up, a bit hesitant.

 

“Yes, little one? What’s wrong?”

 

“You can turn into anything, right?”

 

“Within reason.” Raulm puffed with pride.

 

“Can you turn into, say, rubber?” Elise asked, her plan like a juvenile cherry blossom showing a hint of color at its earliest budding. 

 

Raulm went poof! and returned as a rubber tree. 

 

“But, why a rubber tree?!” Cried Beaver Three.

 

“Turn yourself into a giant rubber band and slingshot us to the mountains, Raulm!” Elise erupted, finally. 

 

“What a fantastic idea! A fantastic idea!” Raulm chanted back, turning into a giant slingshot that she then looped round the bellies of a pair of nearby boulders. “Hop on in!”

 

The Badger and Beaver Three jumped in immediately, bracing their backs against the elasticity of the rubber slingshot.

 

“Hold on!” Elise shouted. “Wait a minute.” She rummaged through her pockets and pulled out the second of the Three Presents of Wonders Past, Present, and Future. It was the mason jar which contained the alfalfa sprout and the seed. Elise dumped both the seed and the sprout into her hand and inspected them closely. Then, she kicked up a hole in the dirt with the toe of her boot and knelt down and planted the seed and the sprout side by side. She thought the plains could use a bit of hope, however small. 

 

The soil beneath the dusty surface was, curiously, dark and apparently fertile. Elise was surprised by this.

 

“It rains here at night.” Elise said aloud. “The skies must yank all this mist up to the sky around dusk and then turn ‘em into clouds before the shedding.”

 

“Who says the skies are shedding themselves at night?” Raulm, muffled, yelled out.

 

Elise’s gut gurgled. “Intuition, I guess.” She covered the sprout and the seed with soil, thinking about The Mocking Tree. 

 

“Come on!” The Badger and Beaver Three yelled spiritedly.

 

Elise jumped into the slingshot, settling in between The Badger and Beaver Three. Suddenly, the troupe was launched towards the mountains, flying through the air beyond the mist’s reach.

 

Raulm trailed behind, sounding like whipped sailcloth.

 

The Badger cried for his mother.

 

Beaver Three swore in the dirtiest, most arcane profanities one ever did hear.

 

And Elise worried about the reality of their descent as hideous faces clarified in the mountainsides.

 

VIII.

 

It was an unexpected if not altruistic landing. The four bodies that had been hurtling across the sun-soaked sky crashed into a plush, valley-sized flowerbed bowled out of a circular ridgeline. The petals that filled this massive bowl were giant. The flowers themselves, stemless. The eyes of each, blind, vitalized broaches, vivid of color–yellow, orange, azure, veridian. Elise slunk into the soft, forgiving mesh of the landscape’s great bouquet, her downward-arcing momentum slowed by the perfumed and fibrous membranes of petals and stems and all their conspiring, tiny, leafy arms, which lay deftly everywhere, perspiring broad, curving shadows onto each and every underlayer. 

 

“Is everyone okay?” Shouted The Badger.

 

“Aye aye!” Yelled Raulm.

 

“Indeed!” Cried Beaver Three.

 

“Yes!” Responded Elise.

 

In time, The Badger and Elise and Raulm and Beaver Three swam to a low cliffside upon which were perched many cool, shrunken, cave-spawned garrets. Questions were asked. Arguments were traded. Decisions were made. The unlikely troupe agreed to traverse the steep breast of the mountain that supported the stony mandible they first sought, and eventually found, as refuge. 

 

Elise felt dizzy when she looked up to approximate their ascent. The mountain had to be some two-hundred trees tall. It seemed a fool-hardy endeavor, the climb–for there were no vines to pull themselves up by, no secret ladder to scramble up, no primitive pulley and platform to whisk them towards the sky. 

 

There was only a scattering of andesite outgrowths fused into the grainy gneiss that comprised the body of the mountain.

 

“We can use these as hand- and foot- holds. Holds.” The Badger surmised after testing the strength of one. 

 

Then, after a long stretch of silence, he concluded, “We have no other choice if we want to keep going. Keep going.”

 

Raulm de-particularized and transformed into a cloud, floating a few feet above The Badger and Beaver Three and Elise. From this remote vantage, Raulm advised how best to navigate the rock face. At one trying juncture, clinging desperately from the bottom lip of one of those hideous mouths Elise had seen during her descent into the flowerbed, Raulm coached Elise into contorting her body and leaning with all her weight against the surface of the mount to avoid a terrible fall; urging her to scale smartly. Minutes later, Elise found herself scurrying up the side of a flared, Roman-looking nostril. She practically ran up the bridge of it, broken as it was. Raulm ushered the troupe through a veritable maze of deadly obstacles, her cheery voice and merry countenance and patient attitude eviscerating any doubt that Elise had let seep into her whirling mind.

 

Finally, after shimmying up an arête planted between a crumbling eyelid and a thick, protruding brow in the rock face, and after leaping from one mole to the next mole and so on up the broad of its forehead, The Badger and Beaver Three and Elise at last eclipsed the cliffside. They fell into an exhausted heap, radiant in their victory, pleased with the potency of their exercised will, relieved at having avoided certain death.

 

But their rest didn’t last long.

 

“O, feculent fistula! O, bogus bastard! O, secreted stowaway!” Beaver Three cried out suddenly.

 

“What, what?” The Badger turned over abruptly, eyeing Beaver Three.

 

“A dart sicked from hell! The very spade of Satan hath spayed that dry and scrunched eye burrowed inside that, mine carnal crevice—from that which belays lately the wastes of my days! Pewter the powder! Gum thine muzzles! Gentlepeople, we art under attack!”

 

Beaver Three danced around like a loony bear in a forest, his arms waving wackily around in the air. 

 

“What a baby.” Raulm whispered to Elise, who, agape, giggled. 

 

Finally, after a frenzied moment, Beaver Three relaxed. He took a haughty breath and rubbed his lower back.

 

“I’ve been stabbed.” He snorted.

 

“No, you haven’t.” A smooth voice, seasoned and well-pitched, intoned. Beaver Three leered about, trying to pinpoint from where that dapper voice was projected. A weasel wormed her way out from a snake hole and punched a tongue out at Beaver Three.

 

“You almost ruined my home!” The Weasel declared. “Watch where you’re sitting, you greedy oaf.”

 

“Oaf? Greedy? Who, me? Drither. Thou art a hollow creature, it is clear. Wrenched of gain, willing to hurt others to suit thine own desires, which I suspect too are hollow.”

 

“Why, forget the prick. I’m making good business out of this unused stake here. And why not? It haint been occupied in years.”

 

“Then why didst thou poke me from behind, if thou art so benevolent and kind a creature?”

 

“You covered up the skylight of my home. I couldn’t see! You blinded me!” The Weasel snarked. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. But I had to do something to get you moving.”

 

“Hm.”

 

“Say. While we’re together. You mind using one of your big claws there to de-stone the pantry round back? I could well pay another weasel such as myself to do such a thing… but…” The Weasel then turned on her immense charm, speaking to Beaver Three in his own (pretentious) native tongue. “I am poor. And thou art so strong and so capable. Thine very grandiosity, in figures mathematical and metaphysical, be so startling a sight to behold as that I must avert mine pupils. It wouldst take thou but a moment, less than a moment, to shovel that shale.”

 

Beaver Three, flattered to his core, practically hypnotized, gave in to the will of his perpetrator. Free of charge, he baled stone and pebble for The Weasel, who observed from afar, lazing under a palm frond and munching on a small bushel of juicy berries. When Beaver Three had finished the task of cleaning out the pantry The Weasel slid out from beneath the shade of the tree and clapped Beaver Three on the back.

 

“Thou art my savior! O, hallelujah! My life hath been made some Euclidean-Algebraic derivative all the easier due to thine heartfelt help and bullish grit. But… I have but one more favor to ask. Perhaps of thee, and thine friends as well.” The Weasel nodded to Raulm and The Badger and Elise. She raised her voice, projecting a soothing, confident tone that went swirling like a drowsy draft of wind round the heads of the adventurers. “Please. Could you gentlefolk remodel my home? Please? Why, for I am alone. And I am but poor. But…” The Weasel brightened. “I couldst extend to thee, all of thee, a line of credit! Yes, a line of credit to be used at some later date! That I could do.”

 

The troupe, moved by The Weasel’s pity-eliciting performance, shrugged diffidently and then acquiesced to meet her request. For an hour, Elise and The Badger tended to The Weasel’s garden as Beaver Three dusted the stairwells and corridors and weasel-sized halls within the snake hole. The Badger was later redirected to break ground on a piece of new construction, an addition to the home. Raulm meanwhile had turned herself into a drill and was drilling into the ground through what appeared to be a well. And if not a well, then a brick gullet.

 

“Arghhhh!” Elise heard Raulm cry out suddenly. She footed it towards Raulm, fearing there had been a structural collapse. 

 

Elise arrived to the chamberroom just as Raulm and a great spillage of rainbow-slicked liquid poured over the edge of the well. 

 

“Thou hath done it, m’drilly gal!” The Weasel erupted, elated, bounding round a tight corner. She scooped up Raulm in her arms and took Elise’s hand in her paw and whisked them up to a higher level of the household, allowing the chamberrom to continue flooding.

 

“What… what was that?” Raulm spluttered out, coughing, laid out on the ground.

 

“Snake hole oil. The dandiest in all the…”

 

“Planet.” Raulm coughed again.

 

“What’s a planet?” The Weasel asked.

 

“And what does it do?” Elise asked. The Badger and Beaver Three arrived at her side, cognizant of the commotion, though ignorant of its cause, and curious themselves. 

 

The Weasel withdrew four empty vials from out of her hip pack and ran down the stairs. She returned with four full vials between her arms and proceeded to present one each to The Badger, Raulm, Elise and Beaver Three.”

 

“This stuff… this stuff is going to change everything, my friends. It’s incredible. Brilliant for mental clarity. Encouraging, in the social sense. It is a one-of-a-kind elixir that shall bring utterly amazing beauty onto this… planet. Planet. Is that right? It will create gathering places out of sinkholes. Art houses out of plumbis factories. It will spur innovation. Drive thought leadership to new heights. Connect the disparate. Synthesize and hone the previously unsynthesized and unhone-able. My friends, snake hole oil is a revolution. Better yet–a renaissance, encapsulated. The world needs it, right now.”

 

“But…” The Badger scratched his head.

 

“But nothing.” The Weasel interjected. “A line of credit and a vial of the good stuff. That’s your reward for your labor.” 

 

“Thank you.” Elise curtsied.

 

“No, no.” The Weasel, ever the salesman, replied. She shook a pair of paws and a hand and the brunt end of an exhausted drill. “Thank you.”

 

IX.

 

Traditional desert vistas stuccoed with smooth slabs of cool stone bristled ahead. In these lands Elise observed a notable air of indifference. Sands packed into tidy land-shoals shed their more surface edges and exposures tiredly. The ground smelled faintly of sulfur. The falling sun loomed large in the sky, throwing iridescent oranges and angry reds around the churning bodies of clouds, which resembled floating nebulas dipped in sea foam. Elise plugged her nose with a pair of soft, oblong pebbles and grabbed hold of Raulm and The Badger. The vials of snake hole oil swished and swashed inside paws and pouches and pockets as Beaver Three counted each pace aloud. In the haze ahead, imperceptible to all except The Divine Hatcher of Planet Mog, hunched a plot twist. 

 

A shuffling of tiny paws caught up to the tired entente. Elise felt a demure prick pluck the miniature-ist hair from her bare ankle. 

 

“Tweedly-dee! Flee! It is me, Maurice!” Cried a needly voice, pitched high in the colaratura of a child eunuch. 

 

“Well, hi, Maurice!” Elise shot back, admiring the presence of the little weasel smiling up at her. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be with The Weasel back at the snake hole?”

 

Maurice dug his nails into the dirt and shrugged.

 

“The Weasel’s got plenty of help. And anyway, I’m tired of that scorched hovel.” Maurice replied. “Where are you all going?”

 

Elise shielded her eyes with a flat hand and then pointed towards the horizon with the other.

 

“What’s yonder?” Inquired Maurice.

 

“I’m not sure.” Elise replied. “But it… it feels right… to travel that way.” 

 

“Balderdash! Hallo! News to me, young chicory. The gostam distils the doshes. Blather! We are operating per-under the presumptions of a mortal gut? Why, blind mine eyes with a bandana, spin me round, and on Olympus we all shall bear an even chance at divining our destination!”

 

Elise plucked up.

 

“I have traveled this world many times over, Beaver Three. And even though I cannot recall a single landmark, nor discern West from East, I can tell you this: my gut is all the compass we need. It is in harmony with this planet. As it spins, so do I. As it belches mist and fog, rain or shine, so do I. As it plummets through The Cosmos, with The Cosmos, making squares or ellipsoids or whatsoever, so I too do wander.”

 

Elise grabbed Beaver Three by the shoulders.

 

“Don’t you believe in me?”

 

Beaver Three thought a moment, then gazed from Elise to Maurice and back again.

 

“I do believe in you, darling. For no reason at all, I do.”

 

Elise smiled and knelt down, extending an arm to Maurice. Maurice scrambled up onto her shoulders, forded her collarbone, and then plopped down onto the little girl’s head. He clasped a clump of golden strand in each tiny paw and mushed them like the reigns of a snow sled traversing wild tundra.

 

“Hoodly-hee! Baudily-glee-galee!” Maurcie shouted. 

 

Five silhouetted creatures crept slowly across a fire-lit desert as eight sets of prints, like breadcrumbs, marked their wake. The temperature of the sky fell suddenly leaving pangs of purple and pink, soft hues of blue and light purple, to gobble up the reds and oranges and yellows of the yester-hour. Soon, dusk was swallowed whole.

 

The desert turned her nose upward and apprehended the vaulted foyer of the celestials. A somewhat negligible gradient swept underfoot and ushered the troupe ahead, higher and higher, placing little strain on the calves and quads and hamstrings of the travelers given its slightness. The trilling of toads and the long and sonorous sliding notes pulled from the legs of grasshoppers and crickets led nature’s evening symphony. Elise let her body sway along to the music, relaxing in the mild and comfortable space created by these quiet, soothing melodies. She found herself taken by the miracle of song, which required no rehearsal, since its historical number had been passed down through generational instinct by the progeny of the region’s finest accompanists. Overhead, the stars shivered to life and poured their light into obscured clouds. Some of them lighted up and shone wonderfully like the neon iridescence of certain nocturnal algae while others were reduced to bitter embers, empty like blots of spilt ink and devoid entirely of all color.

 

A crest appeared in front of them. The Badger plugged out ahead of the rest of the group to inspect the mystery which lay beyond that simple adjustment to their route. Out of sight, Elise heard The Badger gasp—which was very much unlike him. She tapped little Maurice on his little head and issued forth an assuring whisper.

 

“It will be okay. I can feel it.”

 

Elise finally eclipsed the mound. As she did so, she sensed a towering shape flood her vision. It was a dark shape, smoothed by darkness and as solid as palladium. She focused her eyes, then unfocused them, encouraging the faint moonlight and the effervescent light-vapors of the stars to fall upon this strange, colossal figure.

 

At last, she saw it for what it was. 

 

A giant stonehead, larger than a meteor, yet distinctly humanoid in appearance, befell the small girl and her companions. Elise gazed into the fixed eyes of the monolith but failed to extract any sort of intelligence from the black stare that cored its sockets. Elise stood rigid beside her friends, who took up defensive positions, frigid themselves. 

 

A fateful wind, bloated with an odorless heaviness, tumbled like a folding tidal wave in the space hung between the two parties. Elise felt Maurice shake like a death rattle atop her head, tugging at her hair as though he were attempting to block with a bedded blanket the cold advances of a night-demon. Elise set the poor critter down on the ground and watched Maurice scamper to a secure spot behind the heel of The Badger. The girl then took a deep breath and, closing her eyes, conjured the courage to step forward. In doing so, she seemed to break a magic spell that had temporarily rendered time timeless.

 

“Hello, you.” Elise said. Despite being afraid, she donned a friendly tone. Her Elisean tone, it might be said.

 

A loud silence ragged the scene, muting the melodies of the wildlife and the colorform-gifting light that rained down from the Cosmos onto the terrestrials.

 

“Youmorous, clumorous. You?” Boomed forth a deep and frightening voice. The words were spoken with seasoned clarity and unordinary calculation and were injected somehow with supernatural resonance.  

 

Elise trembled. For the first time all day she was unsure about things. It had been a long journey, and she was very tired. Before her stood yet another obstacle. Not a solution, but an obstacle. She had expected something else: a gamesmaster, a hoodly-swonk, wisdom carnate, a great, big button. Some device or person or mythical force she might oblige to end the cycle and return her to a life of normalcy. Instead, there was only Old Stonehead. 

 

“Birraticus flinch, gatticus grinch. Walay! Young girl. Who are you and why have you crossed my great shadow?” 

 

“Don’t talk to him, Elise. Old Stonehead is evil.” Whispered Raulm. Raulm had a worried look on her face. 

 

“You know Old Stonehead to be evil?” Elise asked.

 

“Yes. It is said he was a child, such as yourself, once. But with age, and in the arms of aged greed, he razed many lands, and he ensnared animals and plants alike, and he put all of our ancestors to work in the name of feudal enterprise. An enchantress from an isle at the end of the… planet… heard of this horrid chap. She floated the man away from his castle with her wand, raising up the stones of a turret in his stead, and then fused them together to fashion the Old Stonehead you see here today, before you now.”

 

“So, you’re saying Old Stonehead is a prisoner of even older magic?” Elise pondered aloud. She turned to Old Stonehead.

 

“Old Stonehead.”

 

“Flipper-bottoms, scolly-hoggles. Yes?” Replied a great booming voice from behind a mask of night-shaded stone.

 

“Have you repented?” Elise inquired bravely.

 

“Absented? Credent-shed? Repented? What do you mean?” 

 

“Have you thought to yourself, ‘I wish I had not given into my greedy nature and demanded that all the animals and plants work tirelessly for me while I sit back and take my profit?’ Haven’t you ever thought that?”

 

“Clopped fat? Knocked stat? Thought that? Why, there is nothing to apologize for, young lady! I was a mighty tree, once. Long before you were born, I was known as Chief of the ArkWood. Ah, and for centuries, our station as brothers and sisters in the clan of arbor bore many rewards: fruits and flowers and shelter for birds and bumblers. Tumblers. Scrumblers. Halo-thrumbalalalalers!”

 

“Well, then what happened? Happened?” The Badger, perking up his chest, asked. Maurice ran up his hindleg and into his paw. The Badger began to pet the tiny weasel.

 

“Why. Qualay. Nigh, brigh! There was a flash of light in the sky. Not of lightning. A speck of impossible radiance. Sun-bright in its blinding. Grindling. Spine-dindling! It landed nearby without buzz or fanfare. Over the days, I came to spot it out of the corner of my eye, feigning native, tho be’d it foreign. In the dash of dew. Among the underbellies of Purple, Terpischore. Hidden in snow-capped hues. Galoos. Peruse-nuews!”

 

“Well, what was it?” Elise turned to Raulm for reassurance, but saw the star-gourd sneaking away towards a nearby hedgeline.

 

“Crit. Blat! Well, it was… well, it was that!” Old Stonehead practically screamed the last word. He issued forth a stream of breath to indicate to Raulm, rather than point, as he had neither hands nor any semblance of lax countenance to leverage for referential purposes.

 

Raulm paused, and then whirled around.

 

“That’s right, you old bore. It was me!” Raulm turned into a cowboy and withdrew two glowing pistols. He unloaded a barrage of harmless, golden bullets in the direction of Old Stonehead. “I was that shooting star.”

 

“A prolific thief!” Piped Beaver Three. “And a most unlikely spinster. Thou, Raulm, warpeth thy appearance as thou dost thy tongue–to deceive and deceive well. In pretendence of aid, how so many moons and suns hath thou torn from the innocent grip our dear Stonehead? And o, and o from Elise, too! What treachery! Surely there is a special cage in the FireAfter for such foul play, for such an insurgent…” And here, Beaver Three descended into the tongue of the commoner, for once… “no-good, ugly, feckless, pretender like you. Shame on you, Raulm. Shame!”

 

Elise had her mouth covered with her hand, horrified by the heft of Old Stonehead’s accusation.

 

“Raulm. Is it.. Is it true? Was it you who turned the Chief of the ArkWood into this Old Stonehead who greets us now?”

 

Raulm, on the defensive, turned into a brick wall.

 

“Yes, it’s true!” He declared. “It’s all true. But…!”

 

“Then, why did you do it?” Maurice chirped.

 

Raulm suddenly charged Elise. A spindly arm reached from the wall of brick into the fabric of Elise’s cloak and pulled out the last of the Three Presents of Wonders Past, Present and Future: The white lighter. In a flash, Rualm hucked the vial of snake hole oil in the direction of Old Stonehead. The glass broke against the surface of the rockface, causing a schism to form in its foundation. The schism worked its way up, down and across Old Stonehead. Raulm then arced the lit lighter towards the snake hole oil, no doubt in the hopes of igniting it. The Badger and Beaver Three and Elise and Maurice were all too slow to anticipate Raulm’s attempt to set Old Stonehead on fire.

 

Elise screamed.

 

“Old Stonehead!” Her voice, sharp with concern, piqued. She snapped her eyes shut to avoid witnessing the tragedy of this great and ancient being rising up in flames.

 

But a curious thing happened.

 

The spark never did catch.

 

The flickering flame of the tiny, white lighter that was dappled with criss-crossed elephant tusks had made contact with the snake hole oil, but then it fell to the ground with anticlimactic nonchalance. Raulm was incredulous.

 

“What kind of snake hole oil is this?” She demanded.

 

Maurice piped up. “Look! Look and see!”

 

The crack in Old Stonehead’s foundation ruptured entirely, and the monolith buckled and in an instant crumbled into a heap on the ground. A swale of rubble-dust plumed skyward. Elise shielded her eyes. After a few moments, and as the dust settled, Elise chanced another look. There, in the place where Old Stonehead once stood now stood a great oak tree, red of bark, budding at the tips. The oil splotch, clinging to the mountain of fragmented rubble scattered across the ground, suddenly began bubbling up these thin, living roots which, self-generating, carried themselves towards the magnificent oak tree, whose appearance was backed beautifully by the prideful moons of Terpischore and Purple. Roots turned into shoots, and shoots sprayed out wildly in a vast, interconnected array spawning twigs and embryonics and gooseberries and blueberries and all other sorts of berries and leaves of gold and bronze and amber and forest green, and so on. The roots squirmed towards Old Stonehead and embraced his essence, sniffing him, asking him in the shared language of plants for permission to merge. Old Stonehead bowed, for a powerful wind lowered his branches. As he did so, Elise thought she might have even seen a smile form somewhere among the horizontal crease-lines in his sturdy rind. In one fluid motion the elixir-borne roots and shoots and branches and twigs clamored and climbed over and flooded Old Stonehead, spiraling up his trunk in a breathtaking rush of vivified whimsy. In seconds, Old Stonehead was covered in the most wonderful collection of botany one ever did see. 

 

“See!” Maurice squeaked proudly. “Snake hole oil is really an elixir for good. It makes everything it comes into contact with the most beautifulist, nature-iest thing on the whole…”

 

“Planet.” The Badger muttered, awestruck. 

 

Beaver Three, equally taken, was the first to shake free from the divine visage that greeted the five travellers. 

“Raulm!” He cried out. “Thou tried to destroyeth Old Stonehead! Why! Why? Why!”

 

“Fool! Ha! I knew about the potencies of snake hole oil this whole time!” Raulm rebutted slickly.

 

“Did not! Did not!” Yelled Maurice, hopping in place on the ground with his flat feet.

 

“Fine, maybe I didn’t! So what?” Rualm replied.

 

Before The Badger or Beaver Three could interject, Elise held up her hand.

 

“Why did you do it, Raulm?” Elise turned to her friend, donning a look woven of concern and betrayal.

 

“I’m sorry, Elise. It’s a long story.”

 

“This would be a ripe time for a long story, I think.” Sung Old BeautTree.

 

“Fine! Alright. Fine. Well, I did it because… well, how about if I show you rather than tell you?”

 

Raulm smiled faintly at Elise and then jumped into the air before de-particularizing. Multitudinous spinning droplets, golder than gold, brighter than light, lit up the pocket of air they occupied. Slowly, they raised up into the sky. Raulm’s voice pinged around the gathering like a boomeranged echo. 

 

“This was the universe, long ago. And that was me.”

 

One of the spinning gold droplets, no different than the rest, plunked into the ground. 

 

“As the universe aged, so did I. And so did the rest of the stars.”

 

The little mock universe in the sky began to play forward through time at hyperspeed. There were patterns of expansion and contraction, of revolution, of re-orientation across indescribable coordinate planes. 

 

“I lost many friends over the eons. And soon, too, I knew, I would lose myself.”

 

The plunked, ground-sunk droplet that represented Raulm wavered. Its light grew dim, flickered. 

 

“Rather than die, as many of my colleagues had, I shot out across the universe in search of more life. And I found it here, strangely, in the most unlikeliest of places.”

 

The stars of the universe shrunk and formed a whirling ball. 

 

“Planet Mog. The place where plasma can be harvested from the nearly-deceased.”

 

Elise watched a grainy picture of a tree fall to the earth and release a peculiar, dazzling vapor with its last gasp.

 

“I wondered if I might be able to harvest enough plasma vapor here to make myself brilliant again. To become, as I was, a star, and to return to the Void anew in order to create life out of the energy of my light, as the Gods and Goddesses do.”

 

“Gwalth. Qualktehn! Shaernkli! Then why turn me to stone and move me away from my forest?”

 

A stippled version of Raulm’s cherubic face appeared in the air. Raulm spoke out of it.

 

“I knew you would disapprove of my harvesting the plasma from your kin, for I observed from a distance your death rituals, and your life rituals, and I came to understand, in a small way, that both were as interconnected as they were revered. The vapor a tree releases in death is the same vapor that pours into the souls of saplings and stars at the start of their lives.

 

“In order to do my bidding, it was necessary for me to cast you aside. You wielded such influence. I had no choice but to separate you from your clan. I made you unrecognizable to all the animals and plants of the planet by turning you, once a mighty tree, into Old Stonehead, and displacing you.”

 

“Raulm! How could you!” Elise exclaimed.

 

“At first, I thought nothing of it. After moving Old Stonehead to this place in which we stand now, I acquired my plasma slowly. I won over the oak trees of the ArkWood, since those snickering hickories of the southern valleys emit almost nothing in the process of dying, and we bartered over the terms. The trees of the ArkWood, leaderless, agreed to allow me to leech, so long as I entertained them with demonstrations of celestial wonder.”

 

Raulm turned to Elise.

 

“I lived in a sad, hollow state for a long, long time. Trees are pretty stiff critters to hang around with.”

 

“Not true. We–” Old BeautTree interjected, and then mumbled, and then grew quiet.

 

“That is, until you came along. Your parents were the last of your kind to grace this planet. And I watched them suffer to raise you. And then I watched them fall to the cold. And then I watched you struggle for life. And, I swear, seeing you helpless, dying, grasping after life in your innocent and vulnerable state, it pained me so.”

 

The wind stopped blowing and the stars in the sky seemed to converge and create a spotlight effect over Raulm.

 

“You were alone in the world. I understood your loneliness completely. And I wanted to help you. And so, I began to trade a little of my keep for food and I gave it to you to keep you growing. In exchange for your life, I took the only thing worth taking: Your memories. Mostly, so that you would never think to leave me. Every night since, I have reached into your mind, fiddled around with the plasma inside of it, and pulled the day’s memories from out of your head. A pattern soon formed between us. During the day, you and I would search for Purpose and Meaning. I created the idea of the Three Presents of Wonders Past, Present and Future–as well as a few other trinkets and games over the seasons–to keep us occupied in novel ways. You always loved a good challenge. At night, after the day’s adventures were over and you fell asleep, I would wipe your mind and then wander over to The ArkWood and put on a show for them in order to earn more plasma for me, and more food and cotton for you. Every morning, I hid–not very well–in your path before the sun rose. Elise. I know what I did was wrong and I’m very sorry. I hope perhaps one day you can forgive me.”

 

Elise was confused. On the one hand, she owed Raulm her life (if Raulm was telling the truth). On the other hand, she was angry with Raulm over the constraints she had been forced to live within; there were so many deceptions, dupes, and fallacies; stories Raulm had invented and subsequently perpetuated.

 

A ragged silence befell the scene once more. Elise’s friends, sensing Elise’s mind working hard, gave her time and space to reflect. After all, it is not very often such a dramatic, all-encompassing charade is pulled over the eyes of a creature on Planet Mog–or on any planet, for that matter. The Badger and Beaver Three and Maurice and Old BeautTree, and even Raulm, honored this fact. 

 

Finally, Elise spoke.

 

“I would very much like to end the cycle now.” She said with tears in her eyes. “I feel as though I have been robbed of a life.”

 

Raulm melted into a puddle. 

 

“Did you think this was going to be funny?” Elise asked.

 

“No.” Raulm replied. “I did it out of love and kindness.”

 

“How old am I now?”

 

Raulm did not respond.

 

“How old am I, Raulm? For how long have you deceived me? How many times have you watched me struggle to figure out my lot; and to divine the meaning behind the Three Presents of Wonders Past, Present and Future?”

 

Still Raulm did not respond.

 

“Have they always been an alfalfa sprout and a white lighter and a cork?”

 

“No.”

 

“No?”

 

“Sometimes, they are different chicken talons.”

 

“Chicken talons?”

 

“Or ear wax or like, mucus or boogers. One time, I gave you nothing. I told you they were all invisible, and that you had to believe they were real in order for them to exist. Another time, I gave you a turtle and a snail and a dead fish and told you all three of them were named Tony Taps.”

 

Elise stared ahead.

 

“It’s time to set things back to normal.” Elise said with a fighting look in her eye.

 

The voice of the strange celestial force named Raulm rang out in response:

 

“I have a plan, and it will fix everything.”