The wind brought with it something metallic. Pressed itself against the grass, countless blades readily bending as if under the weight of a great scythe. The scythe would have had to be immense, its spectral wielder even larger. But no such elephantine reaper blocked the dim skyline. It was only a wolf, Irineu.

His shuttered face suggested an absence of intention, but there was deliberation in his tread. He looked like a soldier unaware that his theatre of operations had long been destroyed—a soldier left behind from an alternate history, bereft of his comrades, all the same advancing towards the heart of enemy territory, out of a sense of honor, duty, shame, or what?

He crested a hill. The muscles near his stomach heaved with exertion, and he sat on his feet for a moment's respite. His face screwed up, as if in pain, but he only spat a thick glob of saliva to the side, splayed out like an amoeba in the dirt.

A few minutes, or many, passed. He continued his aimless campaign across the moors.

❖

Between either woman from east and west, growing their power with every name given to the earth, Modea finds the middle passage where he must choose:

Turn towards the sea, away from the heart of the inner continent; or press in.

The man on the hill is choosing, too. Lumbering, irreverent. He eclipses the rising sun, and Modea recognizes that cloying diesel-soaked molasses:

(Peat; fields upon fields of it, burning. Enough of it to blanket the sky, ionize the air, spewing from a red crease on the horizon.)

A mayfly thrashes against the constriction of a sundew. Modea’s claw lands barely ahead, sparing it.

(‘You didn’t know?’ asks a dog to a wolf.)

It continues to struggle.

(The dog’s oldest masters burned this land to revive the underbrush, the ones after clearing its trees, heating their homes, making way for tinderbox gorse. This land has been carved, fired, sculpted, hollowed then filled.)

First the holly, then the plum, now: the oil they will become if they lie in this peat, sink down, press into a fossil.

(There are no fire hawks in North America. The wolf, having known flame only when lightning struck true, learns to rush headlong into his scorching planet and pluck fleeing rabbits from their dens.)

Modea prepares to meet the man at the foot of the hill in the valley below. Fur streaked with mud in the little bog where he’s taken a frog into his jaws.

Languid, waiting calmly, the little creature sitting alive between unclenched teeth. He is ready, disarming, even from this vantage where the man darkened against the sky is as unknowable as a whorling sunspot.

❖

Effaced by distance the grey stranger stood in the depression before him, a psychopomp with an open mouth.

Irineu tensed, flashed his teeth. But there was no real anger behind the ritual, only a consequence of the fact that they were both wild animals as of yet unfamiliar with one another.

He regarded the wet splay of grass underfoot, all around them the slumped signs of life struggling to break free of an earlier amniotic existence. Amphibians that housed their young in the pores of their skin; birds with webbed feet, spearing fish with their bills; great waterside bugs shining, perverse and pearlescent in the half-light.

Life on Earth began ensconced in liquid, vast oceans not yet corralled by continental drift. By the same measure, all life surely receded to this featureless, cold moisture.

Hackles pricked, he circumscribed a wide arc around the stranger's front, taking pains to not leave his field of vision.

"Onde estou," (Where am I) he asked. His voice did not admit the rising tone of a question.

❖

The lilting up-and-down phrase begins with open, probing vowels, ending in annunciating -tss - what is here, what is now?

If Modea bares his teeth, their ends will pierce the little frog within.

(Goya’s dog, drowning, would drag down his rescuer.)

He doesn’t. Only his face turns to follow the man’s orbit, whose raised fur on already saddled shoulders plow relentless against the reeds. Modea’s flank, exposed.

(Adversus Haereses, St. Irenaeus: is salvation not made through flesh, is heaven is not achieved on earth?)

His answer: this place is for us to tread softer.

(No demiurge has brought you here, to material and all its madness,)

He hasn’t eaten in days. He has been swept into a trance, fueled by the clarity of fasting, by this vision of the earth reclaimed.

(your gnosis awaits here,)

Modea turns towards the heart of the enemy. The wooded inner continent. His smile beckons back at green eyes, green irises, their bladed leaves.

Will you come with me, he asks the soldier, AWOL, the first whose burden does not elude him. Come study this creature with me today, begin remaking yourself, before you seek what was once yours.

(A farmdog, mangled on the other side of a chain link fence. His fascination, his forebear, his future, whose numbers have laid innumerable claim to his kind’s cells. In his chosen subservience to man, his inability to evolve, he’s failed her.)

He will learn now.

(His answer: yes; Modea, crawling in and out of the amniotic existence. Evolving, seeking every power of man’s conquest in the name of preservation. Destroyed in its pursuit, absolved in that crucible fire, reborn over, over, and over again.)

❖

There were no words, only subtle kineses that made themselves apparent in the stranger's stance, his drawn face, like iron filings seizing into patterns under the influence of passing magnetic fields.

Irineu squinted, saw the small, pale body in his mouth. He felt the ridiculous urge to bite down for him, as prescribed by instinct. But such seamy volition quickly died in the air between the two men.

What had killed it was the desolate grey eyes, which shone with the color & intensity of burning salt. The firmness with which those eyes stared into his, darkening the rest of the world until they were all the remained of the tapered face, which had been unmistakably the face of an auspex, an anchorite, a desert father.

Mostre me. (Show me)

There was no heat nor urgency behind the bloodless demand. Finally something like recognition dawned, molasses-slow, over the dim eyes and the pockmarked cheeks.

Again and again his gaze was drawn to the mouth, half-open, composed with careful slack, as if it held all the answers to any questions he could possibly harbor, as if it instead of a frog housed a single black point, the nexus of all things—Pythagoras's monad, Democritus's atom, the blazing arche of Heraclitus.