When aether looks at the span of the great prairie through the eyes of an Erasmus that was, it does not just see his memories of the Wilds reflected back like a snowglobe in november. When that gold pupil rests on the dusty places between the brush, the grey-green, the gold-green, the browns and the wide blue above, it sees red as well. It sees three memories at once: what was, what is, what became. Indeed, Eluetheria glares back at him without much love in its heart, because it does not trust the way the wind breathes when it winds through the empty places of him. There are the images cast by the boy: The Wilds, vast and sprawling with a lack of saturation like ill earth. There are the images cast by the thing: The Wilds, vast and sprawling with a trail of bodies bloodied and crippled by a cruel, hapless predator. And there is the image what is: Eluetheria, vast and sprawling with life, with promise, no doubt boundless with the same presence of magic that he has sensed in every scrape of Novus he has touched yet.

Each one blends, but the recognition is nothing tragic or traumatic. If anything it is comforting, knowing that of all the shards and pieces of the Erasmus-That-Was that can't seem to fit and cut the thing that has become him with their jagged, misplaced edges, most seem to fit here. Not well. But when he thinks of how that Erasmus and this both realize that The Wilds held nothing of worth to them, it all fits just well enough. It thinks, it thinks, something of worth is here, though. If I wait, as most mortals wait, will something not come? Is that not their common adage, that good things come? But it is not familiar with waiting. It is familiar with the constant revolution of life, never ceasing, even past the end – it all continues on, on, on, an endlessly spiraling staircase.

Of all the grasses, dusts, flowers, antelope, bison, and even the framing of distant mountains that coexist in the blended realities of What-Was and What-Is in the Wilds and Novus, there is only one thing that is out of place. And it thinks, is this it? But it is not a meteor or a wild, galloping sun, though it eclipses as it passes overhead and his curiosity is piqued by the semblance. The shadow passes over him, a black hole suspended in a sea of dusty greens, and when the sun returns it sparks against the gold in his flesh like wildfire. In the distance, the asteroid sets – not with a crash of swallowing heat, but a plume of plains-dirt that are swept up beneath the gust of feathers, sifting out from the tall gold-green grasses that almost engulf the thing.

Erasmus does not move to greet it, though aether drifts from his pores toward it like shifting smoke, hovering questionably over his crown like a languishing snake in the hot sun. It stirs, it hums, and he hums with it in thought as he watches.

It knows the outline of bison because the Erasmus-That-Was had known their odd shapes in The Wilds. But they did not know them as bison, then. They were srreptu, the wise ones, and many of the clans regarded them as sacred beings who led to the finer parts of the great, deadened terra. Where they lingered, fresh green was always nearby. It knows they are more than the wise ones now. It knows they are not sacred, mythical creatures who to children seem like titans on the horizon at dusk, great lumbering things that always know when and where to move. It knows they are bison, and it knows that they are meat, flesh, bone. But it also knows, when it watches the asteroid – which, sheathing its wings reveals that it is not some divine asteroid at all but some odd flighted hybrid of his own fellow – approaches those bison, that it is doing it all wrong.

There were tales in the Wilds that elders told to children in firelight that the srreptu were once equines the same as they were, and there was once a great lake. But the lake was beginning to dry up, the plains becoming hotter because of sleeping dragons and their careless night-breaths. They knew that when the lake dried, it could mean death, as rain was scarce. So they decided they would drink, and drink, and drink, and drink, until almost all the lake was drained. And now they carry the water of that great lake on their backs, and the scalding, merciless heat of the Wilds no longer troubled them.

Erasmus had always thought it was a crock. But questioning the elders was useless, and often led to punishments. When the aether brought him to the library in Delumine, it had been one of the many questioned subjects it cared to explore. This was why it knew that approaching a buffalo the way she was, being the only solitary thing that lingered above the grasses and took sole view of its sideways gaze, was a terrible way to sneak on one. She was either a fool or a terrible predator, or a starving desperate one, or all one in the same. It heard the gruff warnings from others in the distance, and then a harsh huff from the one she gallivanted toward.

Then, the srreptu breaks.

There is a flurry of dust, fur, and feathers, and he watches its horns catch the flank of the mare before she flings herself into the air. The acrobatics are, though mesmerizing, brief and late – and when she perches nearby and Erasmus moves in her direction to examine her better, he sees a trickle from the pinched hole its horn had left. In the distance are low, heavy brays, and he does not entirely doubt that the sounds coming from the bison are not unlike laughter and small triumph. Erasmus does not laugh, though he feels the string of humor drawing in his throat and the line across his mouth, but it doesn't reach his eyes.

When he approaches her, it is mindfully, but he cannot help the way his gait is smooth and lacquered, it hitches here and there like an uncoordinated error, like he is still trying to remember all the ways in which he must be Erasmus. It is getting better all the time – and the movement is almost effortless, wraith-like, perhaps even more graceful than the Erasmus-That-Was could ever hope his posture to be. Despite its dignified appearance, there always lingers something feral in his outline and his eyes, and it does not know to disguise this. He is more disheveled than Erasmus could have ever wanted to be – but he has washed the blood and dirt from his coat, and most the knots have been broken from his mane. Still, the only gleam in his coat is the gold cracks when they catch the passing of sunlight, and they grin malevolently to her.

When he reaches her, the aether falls to his own shadow – it hangs beneath his mane, tangles behind him like nestling vipers, coiling in the hollows of his muscle, waiting, waiting. He does not know how to greet women who un-gracefully bother bison, but he does know that she escaped without much injury, so his grin unwinds to say, "well done," but it is without sarcasm or cruelty. Only the low, hollow drawl of his voice, not too warm and not too cold. But then he sees the blood trickling down her thigh, and o, the hunger starts. His fangs knit against his lips, his tongue dryly rolled in his mouth. "You've been cut." he states casually, absently, and with a deep inhale looks back to her eyes (as is proper, he learned, if not a little unnerving for others).

"What were you trying to do?"

The Aether, as much as it was an it, had never considered itself as an extent being confined by an it. It had always been undefined, intangible, a force among the cosmos that was as complicated as it was simple – it had been the breath of wind upon the reeds, the ribs of deathly spires reaching for uncharted heavens, the acrid nature of properties too otherworldly to put into earthly terms. It had been the magma center of warm planets, the icy hades of cold planets, the grumbling cores of stars, the silence of space in between. Each passing particle of dust, each unnamed god, each vein of life and death and all that existed once flowed through the same channel that was aether – that was it. But never, never had it been categorized as such a small organism as an it or a he or an Erasmus. Therefore it struggles in the lining of horseflesh and bones, writhing in marrow, splintering thoughts, reflections that glint like mirrors in the dark of what-was, what-will-be, and what is no more.

Erasmus is no longer the boy, the vessel, that dreaming and sad thing that hungers and hungers but never knows what it is he truly wants. That boy who looks to the stars and thinks that his mother's tales meant that he was some blissful demigod, destined for greatness bounded by the heavens. That he is Achilles, or Orpheus, or Theseus, and his victories that amounted during his short time in Novus had not done anything to alleviate those childish assumptions. That Erasmus is no more than filament in the bulb – a resting encyclopedia that the aether calls upon when it knows no better, an open book of mortal knowledge laid before a savage which dreams of sophistication. It does not wonder if that is what she sees, though it does notice that she looks for something in the eyes of What-Was, as if there was something there that caught her eye for the slightest of moments and she is trying to see it again, yearning for that glimpse, that movement in the dark.

Aether is that movement in the dark. Aether is the ghost in the machine. At its core thrums only curiosity, violence, and things that it can only translate as hunger.

It doesn't tell her that. There is no need. There is no fear when she searches – even if she finds it, those coils glistening from black lakes, those gilded cosmic waves of lurching terror, eldritch shadows stretching beneath the moonlight – and no fury either that she dares, there is only cold complacency, allowing himself to be analyzed and analyzed again if she must. It almost teases, whispering in the bones of what-was, find me, then. But in time she relents, and it cannot tell if it is with satisfaction or wonder or even disdain, but she confronts him now as the Erasmus-That-Was, and not what waits beneath the surface.

It hears the discrepancies when she speaks – like she is backpedaling over the grassy knoll, recounting her less than graceful encounter with the bison in the field. The bull stands there still, lifting his head every once in a while, munching alfalfa and witchgrass that falls from its mouth in silver-green hairs, to be sure that the winged thing that challenged it still stood at a distance. She stammers, stutters, and, regaining her footing, returns his question with one of her own. Did you ever just feel drawn to something? The aether laughs cryptically, no more than a shudder in his flesh when it creeps up his throat like blood and is swallowed back down, down, heat in his core. Drawn to things. Like dying suns, like crumbling planets, like scattered moons, like gravity, like – like – Learn something from them.

Erasmus looks back to the buffalo bull, and it has by now semi-turned its back to them, seemingly satisfied that she did not return to tempt its temper further. It thinks of the thing that sits in the register of the photographic memory for What-Was, the srreptu. Those great, hulking, ugly, wise sages with the waters of a Great Lake on their back, divine things that held the knowledge of the deep earth readily supplied in their spines like an acid drip memory. The boy's mind had always devised them to be a crock, and while the aether did not entirely understand the depth of the word, it touched to the surface of what it meant – a lie, a fanciful untruth, things that old men told children to make it seem as though they sat at the center of everything, a store and wealth of infinite, old knowledge.

Not unlike the srreptu.

"They do not speak your language." he says, absentmindedly, watching the bull graze through the golden-grass that undulates dreamily in the breeze. It does not hitch itself when it says your, forgetting that awful truth that aether is still confined within an it, that it is not some disembodied thing that speaks in the wind and the waters and the clouds and the trees. That it does not grow roots into the center of this planet, tunneling and voracious, and spring from it the fruits of new things: new hymns, new beings, new gods. That it does not reach into the cosmos and strangle their stars, making new moons in the eye of their sun. "They speak the language of this earth, only, without words. And they share secrets only with one another." his voice is distant, pondering, unwavering, a call from some forgotten nether that croons across eons and finds her now. Do you see it yet?

When it returns its eyes to her, they are desolate hollows that birth the cold moons in their center, and it is hard to tell which part of him truly looks at her. It too learns, and aches to learn, aches to understand the why - because they are things that it could not have ever comprehended, separated from them by millions of galaxies and rifts whose chance had only found his once. In there, it was not a he or a she or an it or even a they. It was all, and now it is miniscule, and it searches for an answer of how miniscule, and an even more terrifying question: how may it grow beyond those limits? It doesn't know what it wants beyond this. It only knows that Erasmus's last thought before he gave himself to the aether was hunger.

It, unknowingly, conflates many emotions therefore with the single solitary feeling: hunger.

It does not tell her this, either. In fact, it tells her nothing.

When it sees the trouble in her face, it grins. It is amiable, balanced, and its shadows do not border the terrifying when he looks to her. In fact, it may be the very first genuine grin that the aether has ever manufactured on the borrowed face of Erasmus. If it knew any better, it may have been proud. Or starving. In the corner of its eyes, it still remembers that blood drips from her wound, and it is clotting. Wasting. But he remembers the way he had seen her overhead – some soaring comet, some flailing asteroid, wondering if time had lent him some secret of Novus, some stone he did not yet overturn. He would ignore her cut, no matter how it prickled at the back of his skull. But if it was revealed that she held the secret in her blood, so he would drink it in.  "You are not... from here, are you?" his tone bears a nod to the prairies that surround them, but for a moment, it seems deeper than that.

There are times in which, like watching refractions belt over the water, the aether cannot understand its point of being, its point of flesh, its point in time – where in examining those waves, frothing and churning and overturned in the depths of the limitless blue, it loses itself to ponder urchins and sharks. It might run its soft tongue along sharpened teeth, or feel the way the cool water smooths over seal-velvet flesh, and dream of the darkness that exists in the nightmare and memory of the Terminus leagues. There are no stars there – no suns, no planets, no seeming unfettered skies to back to, to swell against, to taste and taste again, to create within and without and to dream... perhaps this is another dream in itself. It, Erasmus, the srreptu, the curious girl and her strategic gaze.

When she asks him if he speaks their language – it is as if the thing knows and brays in response, though Erasmus's eyes watch it move off into the other huddled forms, watch it chase flies with a swing of its head and the tight flick of its tail. Watch smaller forms, even less graceful than the titans around it, fall away to the center of their ring. Erasmus considers this, their economy, seeming uncomplicated ebb and flow of life captured in the bed of the plains. What did she see? What did she intend to see, with the naked eye, or with the imaginative pickings of an assumptive mind?

The thing that becomes Erasmus does not know what it is. It is equine flesh, hot and thrumming now with the freshness and vigor of the aether that has consumed – or otherwise, has been consumed. But there is more. It does not know how it is different from srreptu, or sky-girls, or suns, or stars, or wolves, or sharks. It knows that it is separated by bone and skin and the musculature that divines it some odd mechanism of four legs and two horns and a tail that flows, as if part of the breeze, with luxuriant tendrils of night-dark indigo and gold. On his shoulders, a beehive of a mind.

Did he speak their language?

“No.” he answers simply, though there is a hint of confusion in his voice when he says this; the aether doesn't know it, doesn't understand the inflection of not knowing because it should know. It, this thing that has birthed and carved and devoured and destroyed planets, stars, an entire solar system collapsed into the sore eye of a black hole. This thing that should not exist as anything smaller than a god, or the very concept of one, as true gods, like nature itself, do not have measure. Why does it not know their language? Why do they not speak to the creatures like Erasmus?

The srreptu keep the timeless waters of wisdom on their shoulders, a burden we may never carry. They are miserable things because they know the heart of this world, they know its faults and frivolities, they do not share but with the wolves and the jackals and the wildcats who have grown maddened with hunger for more. We do not eat them. Bothersome. We do not eat them because we, too, may go mad. Limits on the limitless.

To Erasmus, to the aether, to what becomes and has become, they are no more than meat. And if meat could speak to him the way those dying lights in the eyes of previous creatures have, he doubted they held any more wisdom. They did not speak because they were not like them. Not like Erasmus, or Nicnevin, or the rest of the Novusians. Superiority, perhaps. There may have been a time when the aether could speak to them, but it may not be in this same place and time. The world had a pattern to it, as all worlds did – there was nothing created out of coincidence. Only situations, the implementations of a terroir, and the convergence that bore its hybrid material. Survival was always necessary, and there were more than two sides, predator and prey.

To the fortunes of those that the thing that becomes Erasmus has met, it has not ventured to wonder where its place in this terroir is. To commit to ultimate motive. Predator. Were not others like Erasmus also as carnivorous, as adaptable, as lusting?

A flicker of the question is posed, when the mare responds to his assumption and provides her own. Indeed, a part of him intended the possibility that she was from nowhere near a place like the Plains or the Wilds (which still blended in front of him like a mirage, or a dream, or that convergence we considered once before) and her confirmation does not lead to a further suspicion as to what would follow the Aether's – what planet, what system, what plane, what dimension. He is satisfied, left to wonder of an overgrown forest in which death cannot exist – and the image is not so far-fetched, that death cannot touch a realm of life. He does not question it. Nothing truly dies, does it? Things are only decadent and reborn, like a cathedral formed from the bones of a leviathan, or meteors from the cold skin of planets, or soils that churn with the minerals from the long “dead”. Death, or what is understood as the concept of death, begets life.

Maybe Novus is different.

Erasmus thinks of the things rotting in the forgotten caverns dug in the foothills of the Veneror mountains. Will anything come of them?

And then, you aren't from here either, are you? Then it is pulled from the cold dregs of the Denoctian catacombs, the skulls and bones which grin from beneath the leather-taut thin flesh of what-once-was. What metamorphosis happens there, ungraved, unearthed. Dust on the marble floors. Then he is in the bloodied battlefields of the Wilds, and then in the nesting grounds of srreptu, somewhere between. And then, above, far beyond the light of the sun, he is in an empty notch at some far corner of the next galaxy, where space dust does not remember what once existed. But it expands. He feels it in the edges of his stolen skin. If he could just reach it –

Erasmus swings his eyes from the sky to Nicnevin, and a grin returns to his features. This time, not quite so genuine, but not violent or feral or unkind. It simply is, as most things are. An easy thing that treads softly along the lines of his lips, but fails to smother the light of dying celestial bodies that glimmer in the far-reaches of his gaze. He blinks them away and, “Walk with me? I'm not sure where to. I find myself burdened by a many un-knowings, lately.” And before she can answer, before he can even finish the sentence, he is moving away from the bison yards behind them. Moving into the dried fields of wheat and withered heads of poppies, coneflowers, low growing aster, and the butterfly-swarmed graying milkweeds.

It makes up for the empty space between her question and his answer. Because the aether does not know which response is appropriate – did she ask Erasmus? Or did she ask the aether? But in a moment, he deduced that she must certainly be asking the Erasmus-that-was, as it was skin worn and presented like a war trophy. Like furs. Like sheepskin. “They call it The Wilds.” The aether thought it supposed the textbook definition of Wild was apt to describe the unfurling fields of dying grasses and grain, and the rocky encampments of beasts that warred only because they could. Perhaps if they drank from that great, ancient lake of wisdom, they would have known that the aether was as close to their gods as their gods could ever dream of being. Perhaps they wouldn't have warred with each other, bloodying the fields for scraps of wheat and short-lived greens. Perhaps they would have known that the prairie rolling into desolate desert was the lap of an altar, and the woods they grew so terrified of, its waiting chalice.

Perhaps they would have sought to murder Erasmus sooner.

 "Not unlike this place." And then, almost dismissively, "Why did you leave your forest? Is there something you search for, here, in Novus?" The sparse arrays of coneflower and gold-grass tumble dry beneath his footfalls. But his eyes are on the sky again, and the silhouetted peaks of the Veneror. On and on his mind tumbles like the dreary heads of the coneflower.

Before she speaks, the aether is diving through fragments of time and place again – each step lacquered with the mindfulness of the movement, but the mind hitched to a where, roving over bloodsoaked plains and shuddering woodlands that scream, that scream, and the night bending to kiss the dry and unholy grounds with star-fire. The crater where once the pool of wisdom stead, a puddle of blood and mud. Were it the cries of srreptu that echoed that night over the emptiness, peeled from the foothills and the pines? And the ocean, forever hungry, roaring over the howling gales, muffling the song of a dying era?

The wilds, the wilds, the wilds. She yearns for more and he does not fault her, he is not some clandestine guard of his own secrets by necessity but habit. The wilds were, in truth, not as interesting as what some would regard the vast variety of Novus – the silvery sentinel peaks of the Arma Mountains, the rolling meadows, green foothills, the cultured halls of grand and ancient cities. To the aether, all creation was an anomaly worth observance – the Wilds were beautiful in their own way, in the way that each biome has its own peculiar details few cared to immerse themselves in. But they certainly were nothing like that web of existence it was once a part of, from the fiber of things like grasses to the pulse of creatures that soared through its bitter air. Every molecule, every cell, divided and consumed by the essence of what bore the Aether unto all.

It was not a part of this world. Novus, and the Wilds, were a reminder.

“Like and... not like. Far, flat dry plains and sparse grasses for as far as the eye can see. Moreso a desert, gray-brown sands and grit. Few hardy plants. Mountains are a faint shadow on the southeast horizon, woodlands to the west. There were no cities, only vagrant camps.” There is nothing now, he ceases to continue, but bones and blood and tattered fabric, and the wind that howls on, on, and on, and the wild things left to scavenge. A subtle grin crawls to his features as hunger stirs fondly, remembering the thrill and consumption of appetite. When he looks back to her, he wonders what she would think if she visited the Wilds, if she witnessed what the aether had left in its wake. Those who lived there were troubled, their lives empty, children dying in the heat of the blistering sun and the desolation of drought and famine. Now they were liberated. Would she see this, she, who believes that death is not finite?

But she does not see him when he looks to her, for her eyes are marked on the distance, somewhere far beyond the plains before them. He wondered what she had seen then, before – there is someone i'm searching for, but i'm not sure who. An heir to a kingdom, lost in the civilized wilderness of Novus. Spoken like a legacy of oaths, a promise, or a curse. She is gone again from them then, her mind left to wander elsewhere, but Erasmus does not ask to pry on those private sectors of memory or contemplation. What does not make sense then is the combination of not knowing who and yet knowing that it is an heir, a simultaneous knowing and un-knowing that riddles itself, and the chore itself then seems counter-intuitive. Is it not possible then that she come across this heir in passing, perhaps even striking a conversation, sharing a meal, a room, a road?

Before he asks, her curiosity rises again and she returns, lively as before. Why did you leave the wilds? It thinks back to the remains of the wilds, the dry air silent and still, bodies lifeless and strewn. One hunger satisfied, another anew. It thinks to the boy, or the memories of the boy, floundering over the waves of the Terminus sea and dragged to shore by a woman in a cowl and a smile like starlight, or like a setting sun. “I am not sure yet.” he answers, drawn aside still in thought, dreaming of devouring stars and meteors and seawater and flesh. For purpose. It is a helpless thing, and it distills something unsettling when it reaches desperately for an answer to a thousand of its own questions.

Did it begin with the aether, or with the boy?

The boy, tumbling over downed trees, the sound of his dying mother's screams echoing wildly in his ears, peering desperately over a loathing ocean, gasping for air in its depths, choking on sand and water on the shores of Novus. For a purpose. Was it not? The boy supposed once that Caligo had saved him from an oceanic grave, dragging him to the shore of Denocte. He supposed once that he was the child of a god, child of a grand purpose. Was he right? Or was he simply a vessel for the aether to consume and devise, to ruin and devour? What was the purpose left for the Aether then, when it had only known destruction and absolution? When carving the belly of a galaxy, it dreamed of creation, was it so unlike death?

When Erasmus stops and looks back to Nicnevin, it is not with the eyes of a boy that is the son of a god and a doting martyr mother. It is a gaze full of starlight and galactic dust, of beginnings and endings, of dying suns and sparking meteors tearing through the black stretch of soundless night. “I served my purpose there, and I was drawn here. But I do not know why.” Godless eyes. They reflect her, reptilian. Something darkens, then wanes, flickering in and out. Hunger stirs silently.

“How will you know,” his voice rolls like dark clouds and thunder, calm before the rain and wind. “How will you know when you meet the heir?”