Have you never sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?

Those words seemed to linger on the walls of the cave, as a cloud of smoke might hold close to the rafters above the hearth.

The Corvid stepped out from the cave’s entrance, met with the biting cold of the desert night. Grains of sand pelted his face, driven by the wind.

As he straightened up to his full height, a pale shape darted out along the ground: the white rat.

“So you were real after all,” the Corvid said.

“And you have already grown accustomed to making claims about reality,” said the rat.

The Corvid was silent.

“I am joking, of course. This must feel a bit strange to you — the cold, the sand, the light of the stars.”

“Yes . . . strange,” he almost whispered, then raised a glove to his face. “Though none so strange as this beak, and these feathers. These will take some getting used to.”

The rat now stood upon its hind legs. “Odd for you to find your true form a burden, isn’t it? What is it to your beak and your feathers, that you have been so long deceived?”

The Corvid turned back toward the mouth of the cave. It looked quite small against the rock face, which in turn looked quite small against the outlines of distant peaks, and those of the endless rolling sands. As his eyes adjusted he could make out the warm flicker of firelight deep inside the cave, which cast intoxicating shadows against the flat rock walls. Even from this distance they seemed to dance like Bacchae, working themselves into a feverish sort of ecstasy.

“Then no more can be saved?” he asked the rat.

“You were the last,” said the rat. “Though perhaps others would have found their way out, were it not your duty to seal the entrance.”

The Corvid laughed. “My duty! And how will this odd fellow with a bird’s head seal the hole in this great rock? Shall I go looking for something to roll up against it? Or pile up pebbles one by one with my beak until the cavern is filled?”

The rat did not break its gaze. “I told you your name deep in your chthonic prison,” replied the rat, “have you forgotten already?”

“JackDaw, you told me. A mighty name,” he laughed. “Just the sort of name for someone who spends their days stacking up rocks.”

“Right you are. JackDaw the Geomancer. JackDaw of the Platonic Shadow. In the past you might have closed this hole in the rock like one shuts the flaps of a tent. Or you might have buried the rock face under a mound of sand." The rat paused here, perhaps in expectation of protest. JackDaw was silent. "And it is my lot to see to it that you regain these powers, so that this place might be erased from living memory."

The rat returned to all fours. The wind had stopped, and in its place spread a majestic silence. The stars above, arranged in a great band, spilled into each other like a seam of some fluorescent mineral.

JackDaw, hands at his waist, turned his gaze out upon the dark, rolling expanse.

"I suppose I can't keep you from following me," he said to the rat, and began to walk.

Entered by: 0x1075…4bBA and preserved on chain (see transaction)