The canyon walls slide by, streaked with gray water and scalded runnels where the snowmelt from earlier weeks has boiled away in firestorm. Reddish shadows dance across the road like filaments of spirit, unreflecting memories of dismembered phantoms, tumbling along in a hallucinatory glaze. A pilgrimage of those no longer breathing. She squints, she beholds and disbelieves. She drives on. She can barely dare to see the canyon as it is. And what of the byways beneath the mountain and on beyond the canyon, the labyrinth of Ruin, she wonders? What of the underworld, torn apart and risen over all that was? She tunes these impossible questions out, just as she tunes out the remembrance of dead bodies and sutured wounds and static begging and cries of pain. Nothing has happened to her, not ever. She is only the moment. She is newborn. The past of a spidery husk-self she had once been is now a cocoon of ruptured and silken memory left far below, and down behind her. She listens, hearing alien echoes of once-reality as the canyon walls slide by. The engine, the tires, Silas’ ragged breathing. And when the gray-spun winds weave high, there reigns above her the ultimate silence — no birdsong, no traffic, no roar of distant fire upon that day, only nothingness and the gentle fall of ashen people and incinerated forests, unchronicled motes falling softly out of the sky.
