We spoke little as we walked. I tried to pose questions to her, ostensibly casual and brief, but designed to elicit anything that might give even a hint of what she was thinking. But her monosyllabic answers delivered in a dismissive tone made it all too clear that my asking was not appreciated. Instead, I observed her and tried to form a hypothesis: she walked staring at the ground, her head bowed, her ears inattentive and splayed. My first guess was that she was contemplating something grievous . . . but in the short time I’d been with her, I couldn’t remember any other attitude she’d been in. Whether she was elated, worried, scared, jubilant, or surprised, her posture was the same.
All the walk, the sun set rapidly. As the fields, the track, and the various shapes of the outside world disappeared with the fading light, vague forms emerged in my mind to replace them: windows, lights, the lanterns darting ablaze, the raging furnace . . . and, most of all, those eyes that had stared at me from out of the darkness, that ireful grimace of a creature seized in the motions of a vengeance plotted and planned long ago. I tried to imagine what I’d looked like: what would a creature who knew about such a threat and who, choosing to toy with said threat, subsequently found himself face to face with his comeuppance look like? Whatever it was, Foil had known I’d be thinking about this, about him. It occurred to me that his silence had been deliberate: knowing that he was about to die and recognizing that I’d killed him, he’d said nothing, thereby augmenting whatever statement he would damn me with, a statement delivered by expression alone, which words would only dilute. And he’d known that I’d see that face for the rest of my life and feel him upon my spine, that a memory of him would be forever instilled in me, his victim, such that though he had died in body, his spirit would carry out its vengeance in the method of spirits. There it lay, in my head, coming to me when the retreating light forced my eyesight inward to fill the emptiness of the black outside world—and there he was, tormenting me from the ashes.
When we reached the train station, it was twilight. The mountainside tunnel from which we’d exited had already disappeared beneath the curvature of the earth. The peak itself was still visible. A thin, dark form was swarming the peak and quivering ever so slightly—I couldn’t tell whether it was a collection of shadows cast by the setting sun or smoke.
The train station was hardly a station at all. The track led past an artificial shelter bearing an outstretched platform. There was none of the movement, shouting, or activity that had marked the Ponyville train station. On the contrary: not a single living creature stood on this platform. Beyond the shelter, the plains stretched to no end in sight.
Upon alighting on this platform, the pegasus went straight for a tall post marked with a sign reading “Call Box” and pressed the red button it extended. She stood idle for a few moments, as though perplexed. At length, she pressed the button again and this time bent her head toward the speaker, her ears perked up.
After three or four more tries, she came back to me in the shadow of the shelter.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I can’t hear anypony on the other end.” And, as though answering a question that I’d neither spoken nor heard: “Not every train stops at shelters such as this,” she went on. “And I can’t seem to find a schedule around here. . . . Besides, I wouldn’t count on the trains . . .”
She didn’t say what founded this last comment. I knew better than to ask.
“Are there other call boxes?”
“In a few minutes, it will be completely dark.” She added: “You were stumbling. Are you finding it difficult to walk? You can’t go anywhere on that leg, much less during the nighttime.”
“Then I will wait till it’s light.”
She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t see any shelters besides this stop. Can you sleep outside?”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I can sleep anywhere.”
She unhooked the cinch securing her saddlebag. In the orange light of the shelter, she placed the bag on the ground and dug through its various folds.
“The only thing from home I need,” she whispered, producing a blanket. Then, she looked up at me, smiling. “Nothing makes a finer mattress than grass, and no roof is more soothing than the starry sky. You may not be used to it, but trust me: once you’ve tried it, you can’t imagine sleeping in any other way.”
It was a clear night. Far from the city, there was nothing to impede the familiar alabaster curtain, dense with cosmic matter and stretching its folds from one end of the horizon to the next. I’d heard that on different points of the globe, different stars, different constellations appeared, and if the old stars were still in the sky, they would be in completely different attitudes: perhaps a star would bear in a different direction, or a constellation would be inverted to your eyes—if you saw them at all, as they were often out of sight. How scary that must be for the traveler who has not even the firmament to remind him of his home! For, in his journey, walking in the alien vegetation, seeing animals that seem to him to have jumped off the pages of a fantasy novel, inhaling the strange-tasting air, feeling a summer sun in the midst of winter, the land provides him no semblances of familiarity. He turns his head upward, and—despair!—not even the stars are able to guide him in the right direction, for these stars, like the land itself, are alien! Can he be sure even the sun is the same? Or the moon?
I don’t know if I could have handled it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. That night, when I laid myself out on the grass, supine, and found that I could look only up, I had nothing in my field of view but the same stars which I, in my youth, had gazed upon; and it was as though I’d woken up from an unpleasant dream to find that I was back home, the night calm and undisturbed around me. The pegasus was sleeping far enough away that her breathing was inaudible. Thus, the world manifested as if it were devoid of location and affiliation, leaving me free to ascribe to it any feeling I wanted, any fantastic image I pleased. I thought of my land, and the power of my mind was enough to make it reality. The air was warm, and a gentle breeze breathed through the air, wrapping me with its assuring folds. If the previous night had felt as though she had wanted to rid herself of me with her spit and wrath, this night felt as though she desired me and was encouraging me to stay beside her with gentle caresses and the sound of her contented exhalations.
But, despite these ideal conditions for slumber, tumultuous thoughts churned themselves over in my mind, preventing me from finding it. Foil’s face came there, occasionally, along with the problem I hadn’t thought about yet, namely how I would get the pegasus across the water to get her back home—assuming I were to manage to get her to Fillydelphia to begin with. And how would I do that? I knew that there would be a moment when her patience and sense of duty would vanish, at which point I would have to use force if I wanted her to come with me; and, in this land, using force on her for any extended period of time would be impractical if not impossible.
That was a problem for daytime rumination, I decided. I was exhausted. With my oxygen-starved brain, I am in no condition to think, I told myself. Just close your eyes, feel the grass beneath you, feel the wind; you’re back home now, nothing to interfere with your peace . . . and then Foil’s eyes appeared to me. Looking at the stars was no help to me either; at times, I thought I saw him up there, watching my every action, surreptitiously lying among the constellations.
Needless to say, I slept badly. At the time, I didn’t know that this would be not only the first night in a long train of tormented nights—but also the most restful.
We awoke just as the sun rose. My eyes opened to the feeling of exhaustion, not a small component of which was the smoke still in my brain. But if smoke tormented the pegasus too, she did not show it; while I lay in my complacency and fatigue, she, upon awakening, rolled up her blanket, packed it securely into her saddlebag, hooked the saddlebag with the cinch across her, and went to the call box. Once again, she repeated the routine of depressing the button and pushing her ear to the speaker; and, like yesterday, she then shook her head and came back to me.
“It’s still broken,” she said.
“I’m going to Fillydelphia, even if I have to walk most of the way there.”
“It’s five miles to the next call box.”
“That’s nothing.”
“That would be true if it weren’t for your leg.”
The leg throbbed dully. Now, the gauze from the splint was as black as coal.
“That won’t do,” she said. “I packed some more gauze, I think . . . ah!” She produced another roll. “If you’d please,” she added.
Oh, please, please, please! I screamed inwardly. I thrust forward my leg, perhaps too eagerly. As she manipulated the gauze, I closed my eyes under the pretense of pain.
So gentle her touch! So much care! How she, with actions so delicate and fragile, imparted to me the will, the desire, and the ability to stand, walk, and run despite pain! “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t thread this properly. Let me do it again. Sorry it’s taking so long.” So long, she said? But I had just raised my hoof to her to begin! This time, I noticed her empathy had waned a bit, and there was just the smallest hint of exasperation (worrisome), but her sympathy was as strong as ever. If I had any chance of getting her home, it would be with a string wrapped around and pulling at that unfaltering part of her.
As she was finishing, I glanced about the horizon. At the far end, to the north-northeast, a small red extrusion jutted out of the earth.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing.
“It looks like a farmhouse.” Then, her eyes lit up. “A farmhouse!” she exclaimed. “Maybe we can find help there.”
I shrugged, as if conceding, but I was afraid to walk in a direction athwart the track, much less lose sight of it. I knew it ran straight to Fillydelphia; and from there, across the ocean in a straight bearing, was home. This land smelled of decay, tasted of sulfur, and hurt me at every turn. The track ran through familiar, blazed ground, a thin strip of safety around which swarmed hostility and savagery.
But what can I do but follow her? I thought, as we walked off the track, through the field, and toward the farmhouse. If I insisted we go to the next call box, that would no doubt tell her that help really wasn’t my end goal.
When we reached the structure, I rationalized the probability of beneficent outcomes. I didn’t even know what would be here for us. If it wasn’t empty, at best we would get some food, some shelter, and maybe find an easier way than a train to get to Fillydelphia. At worst . . .
The pegasus didn’t seem to notice that the window to the left of the door was smashed or that she was stepping on broken glass and splinters. Through the window, I could see that debris littered the floor. Disarray was the house’s sole occupant, I knew, even before she knocked on the door. In addition, an ineffable sensation diffused through the air, to which I could ascribe only disconnected, abstract nouns as they came to me, not at once and randomly but in an order which had been calculated and emitted by a being unmistakably sentient . . .
Trepidation . . . frustration . . . hostility . . . destitution . . . suffocation . . . and wrath . . . wrath . . .
“We should go,” I said, nudging the pegasus on the shoulder. “There’s something wrong here.”
She turned. “What?”
I shook my head. “This place is hostile. There’s something . . . wrong. It’s uninviting. We should leave!”
The door creaked as it pivoted, seemingly of its own will, gently on its hinges. The low angle of the morning sun permitted no light to enter into the doorway. A black slit opposite the jamb appeared, drawing my sight toward it, toward a single spot about a head taller than I, in which a single entity appeared, glowing a milky white. Fear pulled me away; curiosity carried me forward. Something surged underneath that white area, currents of red, as though they were foaming rivers of blood.
I looked closer: there was a pupil.
When the creature spoke, its teeth occasionally appeared, twisting into disjointed, raspy words:
“Go . . . away,” it whispered.
The pegasus had not heard it, nor did she see into the house’s abyss. She did not see the eye which I was convinced belonged to the devourer.
She stepped up and put her hoof once more against the door, as though there were nothing out of the ordinary. I wanted to call out to her—for even I, in my limited knowledge of the way of life in this land, knew something to be wrong—to stop her from entering this place, a threshold through which only hostility emanated, a deep, vacuous belligerence, a void that sucked in life to grind it beneath its teeth. . . . The pegasus not so much as stepped to that threshold as she was pulled helplessly toward it.
“Is somepony there?” she said.
The door yielded, and what was inside stood up and glared at us. It was gray, as though all the blood had been drained out of it. Its mane twirled in knots and tangles around its neck, and half of its horn had been cleanly severed. From the distant, blank expression in its eyes, it seemed that it had opened the door not for us but for a vague desire somewhere beyond. It was not immediately that I recognized it as an adult male unicorn.
I had no sooner accounted this figure than he jumped back, lit his horn, and levitated a shovel which he swung spasmodically—at us and at nothing.
“Vile monsters!” he screeched. “Had enough with half the pretense, have you?” With the broad part of the shovel, he cut through the air in front of us.
“Please!” said the pegasus, holding out a hoof to him. “We’re merely travelers who need—”
“And now you insult my intelligence!” he shouted. “Stay out of my house, you drooling wasps!”
Though the pegasus backed down, still he screamed profanities and hurled the shovel in an arbitrary fervor, his eyes and head describing spirals.
Suddenly, his frenzied motions stopped. He caught sight of me. He turned, his fury seeming to repurpose itself. Every muscle was fixed in my direction, every part of him tuned at that moment to repel any possible response of mine. The motion was instinctual and infallible, I knew; nothing conscious or rational could have instigated this decisive response.
I stepped back. He stepped forward.
He laughed, a choked, pained laugh, of a creature who has lost itself completely to fear. “You . . .” he groaned, gesturing the shovel at me, “yours is pathetic.”
He turned his head to address the pegasus, and an ugly smile twisted his lips. “Your friend,” he said, “his facade isn’t as good as yours. Look how he tosses his head when he’s scared; look now, how he brushes his forehoof across his face reflexively—have you seen a pony do that, ever, to the best of your memory? And, oh, most of all, that gleam in his eyes, a gleam I know only too well—and look how he turns from me to hide what he cannot, the unmistakable mark of one of that kind! I do not know what you are,” he spat, turning to me, “but you are certainly not a pony!”
I fell backward before he even had a chance to bring the shovel up. My shock at his clarity, the power and certainty with which he had spoken those words; my fright at the confirmation of my perpetual anxiety that the facade is unconvincing, clearly transparent, that everyone knows, and any creature who acts to the contrary does so only to lead me into complacency—all these struck me more sharply than any earthly tool might have.
“Who’s been hurt?” said the pegasus unflinchingly, unfazed throughout it all. “Does anypony here need help?”
The unicorn turned away from me, toward her. When he saw her look of compassion, he instantly lowered the shovel. I understood: It was only desperation that could induce a creature to behave as he had. No vie for dominance or effort at humiliation could have so empowered such a feeble creature. The pegasus had saved me from him with a promise of assuagement.
“Who are you?” he whispered, his voice quivering as he desperately tried to maintain that affected air of power.
“We’re travelers,” said the pegasus, “and our transportation has broken down. If we help you, could you help us?”
“Yes . . .” he gasped, staring into the distance. “Yes . . . no! No, I . . . can’t. I’m sorry; I let in others; I can’t do it again.”
“What’s wrong?”
He trembled and turned his head away, lest we see his tears, anything that might further degrade his image of the house’s lord; but though he took all efforts to convince us of his power, his stuttering indicated he couldn’t convince even himself. As he spoke, the difficulty the delivery of the words posed further humiliated him. “Canterlot changelings . . . one was here . . .”
If the grass had been aflame, I wouldn’t have sprung to my feet with more fervor than I did then. “What!” I exclaimed.
He nodded. “One of them came here. I swear, it looked just like a pony! My wife insisted . . . that because of the warnings, we shouldn’t let it in, but I wanted the contrary. . . . So we let it in, gave it some food which it barely touched . . . and the second we turned our backs, there it was doing something to our boy, with its magic . . .”
“Where is . . . where now?” I gasped, fighting the urge to tear up the remaining floorboards, the house, the world, in a desperate but joyful search.
“I managed to trap it in the hay shed out back,” replied the unicorn. “It should still be there.” He turned, lifted his nose, snorted, and posed to close the door. “Go away, travelers, or whatever you are,” he snarled. “I’ve got my terrified wife lambasting me in one ear, calling me a coward, telling me to go finish the job; and I’ve got my son crying at her yells and at my bruises. And believe me,” he went on, flaring up, as if animated by eagerness, but slouching just as quickly when a weak passing breeze extinguished his trembling flame, “I’ll go finish the job myself, but . . . those screeches, the cries . . . I just need a minute. . . . Let me rest . . .”
“I’ll kill it for you.”
Their heads turned to me. With the steadiest voice possible under the circumstances, I said: “I’ll kill it for you. Would that prove we want only to help?”
The unicorn set his teeth together, pondering the offer. Just as he was on the verge of responding, there was a blur of wings, a screech of “No!” and the pegasus appeared between me and the homeowner.
Her voice was raised; but she was not yelling. Her tone was firm; but she was not commanding. She stood up tall, raised her neck, but did not overbear him.
“We don’t have to kill anything!”
“It’s a pest.”
“The poor thing is probably just scared and hungry,” she said. “What’s the harm in—”
“I won’t have it!” he cried. “Not on my land, not after what it did.”
He brought the shovel up, as though preparing to strike her. She dug her hooves into the ground. When he saw that she hadn’t even flinched, he shrugged as if in annoyance, raised a forehoof, and shoved her aside, not so quick as to be malicious or vicious but enough to make her cry out—as though he were throwing open a particularly stubborn barn door.
With the pegasus out of his way, he approached me and extended the gardening tool that necessity had turned into a weapon.
“I won’t need it,” I said.
The unicorn groaned, a horrible, dry grunt, as though his vocal chords were decaying in death. “Be warned: I don’t think you know what you’re up against. It’s not the kind of wasp you see when you go through the orchard on a summer day. As big as I, even bigger!”
I made a move in the direction of the barn.
“No, wait . . .” whispered the pegasus, such that only I could hear, as she took a step toward me. “Please, don’t. Don’t. . . . I beg you . . . ”
She nudged closer, the gentle rate of her breathing increasing slightly. Though words expressed her compassion for another, I felt it nonetheless descend upon me, a warmth that invited me to clutch, promising to protect me from the frosty apprehension in the air.
“Trust me.”
The pegasus looked at me, her eyes wide as though close to tears. I smiled; and she smiled in response, whimpering softly—the only remains of a tentative sob.
I took a deep breath and moved toward the shed, feeling the pegasus’s eyes on me all the way there as she tried to seek reassurance from my gait. She was lucky, I thought: I had no one at whom I could look for the same.
And that was why I walked thus, though nervous and fearful of the future, because I knew that ahead of me was concrete reassurance that everything would be okay. I had only to remove the bar of the shed and let her soar.
*
With the help of my magic, the lock came off easily and the door swung open. I flinched, expecting her to charge out at full speed, teeth bared, and with only death at the point of her nose.
I stepped inside and shut the door behind me.
“Brother!” sounded a voice from the air, as though it descended from the sky. In the web of concrete beams sprawling the length of the ceiling, she was perching on the one directly above me.
She jumped and flitted down in a spiral, shrilling with delight as she twirled through the air like a liberated maple seed.
“Alive!” she exclaimed upon landing. “Alive, here! Oh, were it so! I’d said when I was alone . . . empty fantasies, draining day by day, but here you are! Here!”
She stepped toward me and touched me on the chest, running her hoof through my pony fur. “Let me see! You have to hide no longer! Let me see!”
I didn’t check to see if we were alone before I shifted to my true form. At that moment, in the sight of her, I allowed neither doubt, nor fear, nor compunction, and I would not have turned, even for a second, from the sight of her jubilant form and toward the decayed door. I would not have dared to move any distance away from her, even in thought. And there was nothing in existence—no sun, no moon, no notion of any kind—I say that even if the ground were to have torn up between us, should the malevolent earth have groaned worthlessly under the weight of the two of us embracing, it would have been able to separate us in body no more than it would have been able to in spirit.
We touched, our necks entwining as we nuzzled each other. By those touches, we gave to each other the history of our separations: I cried while she shared to me her despair, her suffocation, and her empty wishes, followed by her panicked tremble at the feeling of the hay prison around her, and I laughed in exaltation when the stream concluded with an untempered joy at the sound of strength removing the lock, determination stepping through the accursed threshold, and solace, now, as she felt my skin against hers; and she in turn felt my pains and struggles, my own despair, now all cleansed, pure, assured by finding her as I was now—and these last emotions flowed through me, through her, and back through me, all in an endless recursion augmenting in each iteration. “Alive . . . alive . . . alive . . .” we shrilled in unison, too exhausted to express in words that which we were already expressing in touch, but the one word we did use was so saturated with emotion as to render any others unnecessary.
At length, she broke the contact, and took a step back. It felt as though she had severed my tether to life. Air separated us by inches—my soul separated me by miles!
Words darted out of my mouth like lightning toward her. I tried to explain one thing, but then another thought seemed more important as I was speaking the first. I touched only briefly on the train, and tangentially, but she stopped me in mid-sentence.
“So it was you!” she blurted. “I understand now! They were your curses in the tunnel! Did you not hear my responses? I spoke them with the same rage as you’d spoken them in order that you should know you were understood.”
“I’d heard nothing . . .” I responded as I thought back—then paused. Echoes down the tunnel, curses reverberating back, different yet similar . . .
“That was you?” I asked. “I thought it was merely my own rage coming back in emphasis!”
“It was I. I wanted to look for you; would that I could have, but so close to capture by the soldiers was I as to make it impossible.” She whimpered. “So, so close to capture! But then smoke—as though the mountain were coming down!”
“I.”
She twitched her wings. “You? Then I stand before my double savior!”
She told me how the last thing she’d wanted to do was to see a pony again, but destitute as she was, she had no choice but to turn here. She’d come across this house with this pony family. They asked her questions, in low grumbles which she hadn’t understood; nevertheless, she could tell that their sympathy was to her. They tried to feed her, and she tried to eat, but she could barely stomach the food. But the juvenile, their offspring, took a great interest in her, and she in him.
“Were all animals so trusting!” she said. “Gentle and kind—even in my true form, he smiled and touched me here.” She extended a hoof and caressed my muzzle. “He rejuvenated me.”
She gasped. Her expression was as potent as though she stood before the calamity itself afresh. “But then the parents saw us and assaulted me, so angry they were! The one with the horn drove me away with his tool and locked me in here.”
“I spoke to them,” I said. “They think you were hurting their son. Were you hurting him?”
“You could understand them?” She shook her head. “Never mind that.” Another gasp, aimed directly at me. It grasped me and ached in my chest. “I would never!” she exclaimed. “He was magnanimous¹ and he had given it to me freely for who I was, not for a facade! I may have fed on him, but I would never have hurt him.”
Our stories over, we stood silent, still staring at each other in disbelief, each of us to the other a creature taken straight from the depths of a fantastic romance. A small part of me wanted to think of how she could help me with my plans—but a greater part of me wanted to look at her forever, to be locked in this moment with her in my sight. Between strenuous, desultory action and blissfully certain repose, while the two competed for dominance the latter would hold the ground till a decisive victory.
“Now that you’re here,” she shrilled, breaking our silent bond, “we may act. This farm may feed us with its stock animals for a while longer. We could evict the owners and wait, just you and I. We may stay here a while yet, brother. Stay low, and stay quiet; you and I could start a new family in such a manner until it’s big enough to show itself.”
No sooner had she intimated the thought than I had stepped toward her, touching her, overflowing with feelings reminiscent of tumults long ago, yet wholly different, exciting as it was terrifying, quaking as it was with anticipation and fervor.
But I was stayed, just for a second, by a hoof to my chest, her face once again emerging in the distance. She had a flustered expression; but though her words disagreed, she invited me to press forward with an ineffable language which had no sounds or symbols.
“Not right now, brother!” said the words. “Understand that I meant later. There should be plenty of time later; but right now, we may not be safe and must wait.”
“Wait!” I ejaculated, approaching her once more. “Must I do nothing else but wait? Understand me! I’ve done nothing but wait since I’ve gotten here! If I were allowed, just once in this land, to not have to wait—just once!—then I should be happy despite any hardships and tribulations, despite the trials I must endure in payment. Wait!—the land has spoken that to me from the moment I could see its coast; the word halted me in my flight through the clouds, and caused me to plummet not into the city’s heart but into the gulfs of the ocean! Wait!—do not speak this to me! I should not wait. Now, I must declare—now!”
And speaking thus, I was upon her, pushing indecision aside with all the might I could muster. In the midst of outcries and struggles, through gritted teeth and shaking limbs, I fought against her, against my own strangling inhibitions, and against that demonic infinitive that she called To Wait. She shrieked and plunged her canines into the side of my neck, flooding a certain frenzy to my head, and there she hovered in a threatening standby, rupturing nothing but maintaining a delicate and precarious balance on my life. The bonds of trust taking their hold, I knew it to be: the painful and frightening establishment of trust, her collateral on me, a panicked reaction from her reluctance in the presence of my temerity, and I felt her fear of it as viscerally as though it emerged from me, intermingling with my own hints of trepidation. She sunk her teeth deeper, the pain a warning to me that my life was inextricably bonded with hers; but I held her against myself, clutching her desperately so that she and I would not fall into the madness below, and still no blood was drawn.
Then, she stopped shaking. She allowed herself to cede. Her nerves eased, and she released the hold on my neck. I looked at her, and she stared back at me, her face inches from mine. Trust was now lighting up her features, widening her eyes, holding her mouth slightly ajar. I didn’t know what she saw in my countenance, nor was I conscious of how I appeared at that time; but I knew, somewhere within me, that my body in some way evinced the trust to her, unmistakably and unequivocally, and it was a trust that she was glad to receive and which I desperately wanted to give.
Distinct entities, she and I, distinguishable from one another, intermingled to ambiguity. Between my gasps and her quiet chirps, I felt neither the world around us, nor the sky above. Life, happiness, fulfillment, solidarity, satisfied longing—goodness diluted and pure—condensed, divided to infinity and shared between us, replenishing more than it gave, giving more and more, straining us but inviting to climb higher.
Then, as I shuddered, a formidable power coursed through me; the world came burning back, but now it was neither ruthlessly hostile nor blissfully sublime; rather, I saw it as flawed but comprehensible, imperfect but assailable, and I knew that the troubles that existed out there, though trying, were not the final statement upon me, nor upon her, nor upon all that was good, the good which I now knew, with absolute certainty, existed—once an abstraction, now given form in this indescribable concrete.
I collapsed beside her, out of breath and exhausted; and there we lay for some time, side by side, our eyes fixed on the same point above.
I could not see the wood of the ceiling. I saw only the boundless firmament.
1. “He was magnanimous . . .”: Literally “having a lofty spirit.” But the word contains an additional connotation in regard to our species: Magnanimity describes a soul replete with passion and sentiment—and, therefore, capable of providing much sustenance. Additionally, in its literal sense, it is the highest compliment one can pay to another, such that both a noble warrior and a fulsome inferior are both magnanimous.