Though I walk through a valley shadowed in death, I will fear no evil.<\/p>\n
No, wait, that’s not how it goes.\u00a0 I checked my smartphone, but for some reason, I wasn’t getting any signal.\u00a0 I guess I really was in a “Dead Zone.”<\/p>\n
The world around me was shadowed, and loose grey earth, not quite as fine as sand shifted underneath my sneakers.\u00a0 A single oval moon barely lit the sky.\u00a0 I could see markers of some sort at angles planted within the darkness.\u00a0 I used the flashlight mode on my phone to examine them.\u00a0 Unlike the monochrome grey of the sky and earth beneath me, the markers were marvels of colour, each intricately painted in golds and reds and other vivid shades with hyperrealistic splendour.\u00a0 They had meaning, I could feel it, but they rushed in to each other, like a collection of tattoos that were done at different times and only really had significance to their bearer.<\/p>\n
The closest one had a black cat snarling at a golden dog, a feminine sun in a pair of wrinkled blue jeans leaning down to speak to a group of crows, a field of migrating dandelion blooms in sixteen gorgeous colours, a silver spider turning with a few stocky legs in the air as it crawled against a brilliant red flower.\u00a0 The symbolism was likely either very subtle or blatant to a practitioner of the particular flavour that designed this reality.\u00a0 I didn’t know if this was a memento mori or some other kind of installation.\u00a0 I made some notes, being careful not to touch anything.\u00a0 I could hear any number of small potential portals, and didn’t want to accidentally activate one and end up elsewhere.<\/p>\n
The smell of cooking flesh was slowly fading, to be replaced by a heady earthy smell, like of dirt just at the first touch of rain.\u00a0 There was a definite chill in the air.\u00a0 I took a moment to breathe it in, glad I wore a good jacket.\u00a0 If it got just a touch colder I might be wanting gloves, but right now my hands were fine out in the open.\u00a0 Mists were drawn to me, and then they faded away as if finding me uninteresting.\u00a0 Perhaps they were sentient, noting that I was of the particular variety “not dead,” and thus without need of their shelter or guidance.<\/p>\n
The soft earth beneath me made way to broken rock that reminded me of drywall, crumbly and flat and chalky.\u00a0 The walls of the valley were made of a moist reddish rock.\u00a0 I’m no geologist, but they didn’t look natural.\u00a0 One wall stalked me, pushing my path over the crumbly rock and into something more solid, more like iron, in circular, smooth steps, almost as if poured in dribbly little bits.\u00a0 Somewhere I could hear a susurru, made more of wind than waves.<\/p>\n
There was a faint, constant thumping, as if a giant heartbeat rippled through the land.\u00a0 It matched the frequency of the gate.\u00a0 The only other sound was my clumsy finding my way through the strange landscape.<\/p>\n
A cold wind came through, chilling my hands and face.\u00a0 I hunched a little against it, and noticed flakes of what might be snow.\u00a0 They stung against me, and smelled something sharp, more like salt.\u00a0 They left little trails of what in the pale moonlight seemed to be soot.\u00a0\u00a0 I muttered, “Acid rain?” and continued along the path I and my geography had chosen.<\/p>\n
I saw light in the far distance, flames of red and yellow and orange like the twinkling of a large star.\u00a0 Hints of purple at the edges gave blue colour to the darkened sky.\u00a0 Bare rock led down into what I think were birch trees, or maybe aspen.\u00a0 I’m not a botanist, either.\u00a0 The flames seemed to be held in a bowl of reddish rock, or so I saw from below, in the woods.<\/p>\n
I am an urban fellow.\u00a0 I do not like the woods.\u00a0 Wolves wait in the woods.<\/p>\n
Yep, wolves.\u00a0 Wait for it.\u00a0 There’s the howling now.<\/p>\n
Ed had told me that a wolf was a dog whose pack was his brother dog, and a dog was a wolf who had humans as its pack.\u00a0\u00a0 I wanted to argue it, but, look, not a zoologist, either.\u00a0 Or animal psychologist, for that matter; I certainly couldn’t alpha my way out of this.\u00a0 Are you supposed to climb for wolves?\u00a0 Or was it big cats and bears?\u00a0 Or the other way around?\u00a0 Bears don’t howl, I’m pretty sure.<\/p>\n
I spend enough time in Boulder to know these rules, you’d think.\u00a0 I could tell you scary, scary stories about raccoons near the campus.\u00a0 Unafraid of human, and they turn their reddish eyes to you and all you see is the inherent, greedy evil.\u00a0 I don’t like calling natural behaviour “evil,” but every rule has its exception, and these raccoons are evil.<\/p>\n
I walked carefully through the trees, keeping the fire in line of sight as much as possible.\u00a0 My carpet was the usual debris of leaves, soft, bendy sticks and twigs, and who knows what kind of carcasses and carapaces as populated this place of endings.\u00a0 Did Russian bugs have enough self-consciousness to go someplace when they give up their mortality?\u00a0 Is that the rule, or am I not Buddhist enough?<\/p>\n
Wolves, though, wolves are a metaphor, and this was a place where metaphor had strength.\u00a0 I’d like to say I never metaphor I never liked, but that’s a lie, because it would need be a simile to properly assimilate.<\/p>\n
I didn’t run.\u00a0 Never run from anything immortal.\u00a0 That’s a hard and solid rule.\u00a0 Plus, if they are coming, they are coming for me, and I thought I could make it to fire, man’s metaphorical weapon against the metaphorical darkness and the metaphorical wolves.<\/p>\n
The problem is, it’s also the metaphorical weapon of Dragons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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