Three hours on foot.
I had done worse. Probably. The 12-hour shifts came with a 3-hour commute each way, standing on a train that smelled like shit. I always had a hunch that someone relieved themselves on the transit, every night.
Three hours of open road with grass on both sides and an aggressively happy sun overhead was, by comparison, almost pleasant.
Almost.
The road was real, at least. Dirt-packed, wide enough for two people to walk side by side, running in a straight line toward wherever Fesceland was. Cast Ration had said I couldn't miss it. I was choosing to trust this.
I walked.
The cloth bundle from Cass Ration Jr. was under my arm. I hadn't opened it. I wasn't hungry yet and I had a policy, recently developed, of not investigating unknown food until hunger made the investigation necessary. Also, I didn't want to become fat as Cass Ration Jr. intended.
The road was quiet for the first hour. Birds—normal ones, or at least ones that were flying the conventional way, using wings, landing on feet—moved through the sky above. Or, they weren't so normal at all, pooping something out every couple of miles that they flew. The grass moved. Somewhere in the distance something made a sound I didn't recognize and I made the deliberate choice not to investigate.
Progress.
I heard it before I saw it.
Two voices, both arguing with the committed energy of people who had been at this for a while and had developed firm positions. I slowed. The voices were coming from the edge of the road where the grass met a shallow stream—small, clear, running in the direction I was walking.
I rounded a slight bend.
In the stream, standing in the water up to what would have been its waist if fish had waists, was a fish. Large. About the size of a medium dog. It was standing on its tail fin with the effortful balance of something not built for this, its front fins extended outward for stability, its mouth moving with the rapid conviction of someone making a very important point.
On the bank opposite, a crow was standing on its wings.
Same posture as the crow from chapter one. Wingstand. Beak near the dirt. Thin legs pointing skyward. This one was managing the stance better—or had simply been at it longer—and was arguing back with the fish with what I could only describe as confidence.
I stopped walking.
"—demonstrably horizontal!" the fish was saying, fins gesturing at the ground. "Look at it, idiot! It goes left and right! That is horizontal! A child could understand this!"
"A child," the crow said, from its inverted position, "would look at the sky and understand immediately that the world extends upward and downward, which is vertical, which is what I have been saying for the last—"
"Upward and downward is not the orientation of the surface—"
"The surface is irrelevant to the orientation of the planet as a whole—"
"The surface is the planet—"
"The surface is where we stand, which is not the same—"
"WHERE YOU STAND IS HORIZONTAL—"
"I AM NOT STANDING—"
They both paused, apparently registering this simultaneously.
"You're on a wingstand," the fish said, slightly deflated.
"You're in a river," the crow replied.
A moment of mutual acknowledgment that neither of them was in an ideal position to be making geometric arguments.
"FUCK YOU—"
"I AM RIGHT YOU ARE WRONG—"
Then they resumed.
I stood on the road and watched a fish and a crow argue about whether the planet was horizontally flat or vertically flat, and I thought about all the things I could be doing instead, and I could not identify a single one, so I kept watching.
"Uh, excuse me," I said.
They both stopped. They both looked at me. The fish nearly tipped over. The crow's legs wobbled.
"Is this—" I tried to find the right framing. "How long have you been arguing?"
"Since the third morning of this season," the crow said.
I did not know how long a season was here. Based on the available evidence, it could be anything.
"Have you considered," I said carefully, "that you might both be—"
The ground shook.
Not an earthquake. A footstep. A very large footstep, followed by another, coming from the grass to my left with the unhurried confidence of something that had never needed to hurry.
A lion walked out of the grass.
On two feet.
It was exactly as tall as a person, which somehow made it more alarming than if it had been larger. It wore nothing, carried nothing, and walked with the specific posture of someone who had decided long ago that the world was arranged to accommodate them personally. Its mane was extraordinary. Judging by its smug look, it knew this.
It looked at the fish. It looked at the crow. It looked at me with the brief assessment of someone cataloguing an audience.
"I," The lion said, "have been listening to this argument for three mornings of this season and I can resolve it."
The fish and the crow went quiet with the specific quiet of people who have been interrupted by someone more confident than them.
"The world," the lion said, "is round."
The fish and the crow exchanged a glance.
"Round," the fish repeated.
"Round to perfection," the lion confirmed. "This is because it revolves around me."
A silence.
"Around you," the crow said.
"Around me," the lion said. "I am the center. The world moves in a circle around me at all times. Therefore it is round. This is simple geometry."
I looked at the lion.
The lion looked back at me with the serene certainty of something that had never been wrong about anything.
"What do you say?" it asked me.
They were all looking at me now. The fish, listing slightly in the current. The crow, upside down on the bank. The lion, standing on two legs with the gravity of a being around whom planets apparently orbited.
I opened my mouth.
I thought about what I actually knew. The world was round. It revolved around the sun, not a lion. The fish was wrong. The crow was wrong. The lion did say that it was round—wait, it said that the world revolved around him. That meant that the world was round in another manner, like a capsule that entrapped all of us.
You know what? Among all three of them, the lion was the most wrong.
I thought about what would happen if I said any of this.
They'll eat me, I think.
I then thought about what had happened every time I tried to apply my world's logic to this world's questions.
"Uh..."
I thought about the one thing I had said in the last twenty-four hours that had produced a response I hadn't expected.
"The answer," I said, trying to sound as mysterious as possible, "lies in Ey."
The silence that followed was a completely different quality from any silence I had encountered since arriving.
The fish stopped listing. It stood completely upright in the water, both front fins pressed to its chest, mouth open.
The crow's legs stopped wobbling. It was motionless.
The lion—the lion, who moments ago had been explaining how the planet revolved around it personally—took a small step backward. Something moved through its expression that I could only describe as awe.
"Ey," the lion said quietly.
"Ey," the fish breathed.
"The answer lies in Ey," the crow repeated, as if tasting each word.
They looked at each other. Then they looked at me.
"You are searching for Ey," the lion said. It was not a question.
"Apparently," I said.
The fish waded out of the stream. The crow righted itself—actually righted itself, landing on its feet for the first time since I'd seen it—and shook out its wings. The lion straightened to its full height.
They fell into step behind me.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Following you," the fish said.
"Why?"
"You know about Ey," the crow said.
"I don't know about Ey. Nobody knows about Ey. That's the—"
"Exactly," the lion said, with the gravity of a profound agreement.
I looked at the road ahead. I looked at the three animals behind me. I looked at the sky, which was doing nothing helpful.
"Fine," I said.
I walked. They followed.
The fish managed surprisingly well on land. The crow alternated between walking and short bursts of flight, landing on my shoulder twice before I indicated, gently, that I preferred it not to. The lion walked on two feet with the same unhurried authority as before, occasionally making observations about the landscape that seemed designed primarily to establish that it had noticed things.
We were perhaps 40 minutes further down the road when I smelled something—and it wasn't the load of shit stains generated by birds in the sky.
Not bad, exactly. Just strong. The specific concentrated smell of something biological being handled in large quantities.
Then I heard whistling. Professional, focused whistling—the kind of person who whistled because the work required attention and the whistling helped them keep rhythm.
Around the next bend, a man sat on a low wooden fence beside the road. On his lap was a creature I needed several seconds to fully assemble in my mind. It had the head of something feline, the body of something reptilian, wings folded against its back that didn't obviously belong to either, and a tail that was making slow deliberate movements with the patience of something that had decided it was comfortable for now.
The man was brushing it.
Not nervously. Not carefully, in the way of someone managing a dangerous animal. Just brushing it with the methodical ease of someone doing routine maintenance on something they'd domesticated thoroughly.
"Chimera," the crow said quietly, from somewhere near my left ear.
"That's a—" I looked at it again. "That's a Chimera."
"Tamed," the fish said. In a tone that suggested this was remarkable.
The man with the brush looked up. He saw me. He saw the fish. He saw the crow. He saw the lion. He looked at the Chimera, then back at us.
The Chimera looked at the fish.
The fish looked at the Chimera.
Something passed between them that I cannot describe except to say that whatever it was, it was not friendly.
The Chimera stood up.
The man—or the tamer, then shouted,
"Go, Chimera!"
The fish, the crow, and the lion all turned to me simultaneously with the unified expectation of a group that had designated a leader and was waiting for instructions.
"What do I—" I started.
"Instructions, Ey man," the lion said.
"I don't have—"
"You know about Ey," the fish said. As if this were sufficient qualification for tactical command.
The Chimera took a step forward.
The man with the brush stood up from the fence, brush still in hand, with the expression of someone watching a situation they had managed carefully for a long time begin to depart from their management.
Three animals were looking at me.
One Chimera was looking at all of us.
What even is the point of this battle?
I took a breath.
"Okay," I said. "Fish—water. Is there water nearby?"
"The stream," the fish said. "Behind us."
"Go there. Wait." I looked at the crow. "You can fly. Get above it. Don't engage yet, just—be above it." I looked at the lion. "You're large. Stand to my left and look—" I searched for the word. "Authoritative."
"I am always authoritative," the lion said.
"Great. Do that."
They moved. Fish turned back toward the stream. Crow lifted into the air with two wingbeats and circled upward. Lion stepped to my left and arranged itself with the specific posture of something around which planets orbited.
I faced the Chimera.
The Chimera looked at me.
I looked at the Chimera.
The man with the brush looked at both of us with the expression of someone who had no idea what was happening but was professionally obligated to stay nearby.
The Chimera's tail moved.
I had no powers. No weapons. No training. No plan beyond having distributed three animals to positions that felt vaguely tactical based on games I had played and movies I had watched in a world that felt very far away right now.
"Hi," I said to the Chimera.
The Chimera blinked.
Somewhere behind me, the fish had reached the stream.
The crow was circling overhead.
The lion exhaled with the slow confidence of the center of the universe.
The man with the brush said, very quietly, "It's never blinked at a stranger before."
The Chimera then wiggled its tails.
I blinked.