Book One – Chapter 11

Mushroombird unfurled her coat. Yves watched the delicate feathers shifting as she carefully folded it in her lap. “I must say, it is quite hot,” she remarked. “Did you really need to bring us here?”

“Well, I guess it’s better than the storms,” Twig offered.

“But the rain was much cooler,” countered Mushroombird.

“You forget that it was freezing. And toxic,” Twig reminded her.

“True, true,” said Mushroombird.

There was a pause in which Yves just stared at the desert, his focus unconsciously fixed on moving the sled along. There were many pauses like this, but he had long stopped fighting, or even noticing, his blackouts. He was too much in pain and too sick and too fucking stuck with himself in this never-ending, never-changing desert plane, with the burning sun above and the burning sand below and the burning air all around him.

“A bit of rain would be nice,” Twig pointed out.

“Also not wrong,” said Mushroombird.

Again, the conversation halted until Yves resurfaced for a few more sentences.

“At least you can speed up now, with the winds gone,” said Twig.

“Yes,” said Yves.

“Well, there is only so much you can say about the weather,” said Mushroombird.

In truth, there was a great deal of less elaborate conversation among Yves and his shamans as they discussed all the thisses and thats, and all the whats and whatnots he could come up with in his solitary agony. Most of these discussions would be incomprehensible to anyone but Yves. With each blackout and return to consciousness, his memory conveniently reshaped all his past whining into acceptable concerns and considerations, until they passed for sensible reasoning. After over four weeks, he got quite good at filtering out the angry outbursts and the self-pity and the paranoia, eventually recalling his own utterances with nothing but the coherence and sophistication he expected from himself.