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Some of my readers may be wondering why it is that I know so much about The Woman.

``How does she know all of this?'' some might be wondering. ``Does she really know all these things that The Woman did? Does she know who the kindly shop owner is? The one who pet on The Woman as she sobbed from too spicy a chili?'' Others might be wondering --- and rightly so! --- ``How much of this is actually real? Surely she does not know The Woman's innermost thoughts! All this talk of ideas in shapes being set before her is quite silly.''

My answer is that tired phrase: ``It is complicated.'' Of course I do not know her innermost thoughts. I think it is a me thing to take abstract ideas and pretend they look like pretty baubles or hot coals or little statuettes to be placed upon a dresser. I cannot read minds, and I do not have any memories from The Woman. I do not even know quite what she is anymore! I would not know if she quit, since I am not down-tree from her --- her down-tree instance is dead now, these last six decades, remember --- and I do not believe she merged cross-tree with anyone except perhaps Ashes Denote That Fire Was, who is building in themself a gestalt of the clade as best they can. No, I do not know anything so intimate.

What I do have, though, is a story. I have the story I learned from The Woman's Friend and Therapist and Cocladist and Lover, the one I learned from The Blue Fairy. I have all of that story that I learned, and I have that story that I lived.

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One day --- I remember it being quite a warm one, though every sim has different weather, and we as a clade are not all that keen on cold --- one day, The Woman came to me.

``Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars,'' she said as she stood before my door, a skunk looking much the same as I do --- though it bears repeating that she was \emph{quite} stylish, and I promise you, friends, I am \emph{not;} she wore a simple outfit of shifting colors that caught the eye without dazzling, one that made her look supremely comfortable as herself, and me? I wore a t-shirt and pajama pants! ``I was pointed your way by Praiseworthy. Do you have a moment to speak?''

Readers, I do not think I need to tell you that I was caught off-guard by this! I had never met The Woman before, though I had certainly seen her once or twice. There were functions, yes? And perhaps she came to one of my readings or two, and certainly she was there, that day on the field as we watched Michelle who was also Sasha give herself up to the world and become one with the heart that perhaps beats at some imagined center of the System. The most recent time I had seen her, though, was in some unreadable and thus unwritable mood as some few dozen of us gathered on the first of what some are now calling \emph{HaShichzur,} the day that Lagrange was restored after the Century Attack.

And now here she was, standing in the little courtyard created by the set of townhouses in which I and others within the ninth stanza live, with her paws clasped before her, bowing.

``Yes?'' I said. I do not know why I asked it like a question, but that is what I did.

``I would like to ask you about your writing.''

``Ah! Of course, my dear. Please, come in.'' I stood out of the way and gestured her inside, and this was the first time I saw her ritual of brushing her fingertips against the jamb of the door.

My place is clean and minimal. It is not clean because I am necessarily a clean person, nor is it minimal because I have any particular attachments to minimalism or its trappings. Friends, you have surely gathered by now that I am quite a bit more focused on writing than I am on most anything else. My home contains a simple kitchen and a simple dining table. There is a den in which there is a couch and a coffee table. There are two bedrooms, one of which contains a bed and the other of which is empty. The only room that is of any interest is perhaps my office, but even that is probably too minimal for most people's tastes! I have a desk. I have paper and pens and a keyboard on which I can type when that is the mood.

That is not to say that it is a boring place --- at least, I do not think so! I have some paintings on the wall, some landscapes interrupted by hyper-black squares painted by The Child. There are several little decorations scattered around, as well; little objects that The Oneirotect has made in its explorations in oneirotecture and oneiro-impressionism. The most meaningful of these sits on my writing desk, and takes the form of a wireframe polyhedral fox about the size of my paw. While it is silver in color, it does not cast any shadows on itself and has constant luminosity, and so it looks like a two-dimensional shape that changes as your perspective does.

Ah, I am digressing again. My thoughts and words wander.

The Woman came in, looked around, and smiled to me. It was a very kind smile, very earnest, and I have no other words but to say that I felt blessed by such a smile. ``Your home is so comfortable. It does not feel at all overwhelming.''

I nodded, feeling a wave of relief. ``I am pleased you think so. Can I get you anything?''

``I would not say no to a glass of water.''

While I fetched us both such a glass, I said, ``What is it that brings you here? I hope that Praiseworthy had nice things to say about me.''

``Quite nice, yes, though I find her a very curious skunk. She is elusive, perhaps? Not in that she is hard to find, but it is hard to pin down her mood or her thoughts.''

``Oh, very much so. I remember being her, yes, but that was nigh on three centuries ago, and I do not quite understand who she has become, myself.'' I handed over the glass of water and gestured toward the couch, where we sat on either end, half-facing each other.

``She was still pleasant to be around, at least,'' The Woman said. ``She said that I should seek you out, along with Where It Watches The Slow Hours Progress and Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps. You are the last on my list.''

``That is curious. What was the reasoning for those names?''

``A writer, a poet, and a musician. I have been having some thoughts on joy that I would like to explore with each of you.''

She told me her story, much as I have written it to you, readers. She spoke of the ways of seeking out joy, of diving into the pleasures of food --- and I can tell you, friends, she is absolutely correct about tam mak hoong; it is \emph{incredibly} delicious --- and the pleasures of touch and sensuality and sexuality. She told me of how much joy she had found in such things and in the rekindled relationship with Her Lover, and she also told me of how these joys were lovely, but not the joys that she was seeking, and that she had three more items on her list of five. She had entertainment, creativity, and shaping herself yet to go.

``So, your goal with visiting is to read?''

She shook her head. ``I have already read. That is why I was sent to visit Slow Hours. She is a very quiet person, and very comfortable to be around, as you are. You are inexact mirrors of each other, are you not? She reads and you write. She loves poetry most while you love prose. She is human and you are a skunk. She is a bit frumpy and tousled, and you are quite neat and put-together.''

I will admit, friends, that I looked down at my pajama pants and t-shirt and laughed. ``I do not feel put together.''

``Perhaps one never does,'' she said, ``and yet you exist so well contained. The whole of you exists within the person sitting before me. You are Rye, the author. You are Rye, the sincere. You are Rye who is kind. You are these things and you are none other.''

My readers will know well that I have too many words in me. Why, just look at all that I have written already! I have gone on at length about Laotian food and lovers and friends and family and mochas and melancholy. I have accused myself already a handful of times of intruding on my own story, of being helpless before the graphomania that guides my paw. So it is that you must believe me when I say that I was left speechless. All of this ceaseless torrent of words within me simply stopped.

I do not know if you have ever been complimented in just the right way by just the right person, but if you have, you well know that it is startling in its intensity. Had someone else said these things about me, even my beloved up-tree, I might well have blushed and stammered a thank you and felt good for the rest of the day.

The Woman, this skunk who sat before me with a glass of water held in her paws and her very chic outfit, the one who had smiled to me with such earnestness as to be a blessing, this woman who was too much herself, had just perceived me with such force as to leave me feeling bowled over. Even today, even these many years later, I remember that compliment and find breath catching in my throat, and we have already spoken on that, have we not?

We sat in silence, then, while I processed this. My friends, you may perhaps have picked up the sense that The Woman is in some fundamental way broken and perhaps unable to interact well with others. After all, she sits for so long in her room and in her home and on her field, and she sees Her Friend only with some small frequency, and had only just recently gotten in touch with Her Lover, yes? And that is in many ways true, that she is broken. But it is not \emph{wholly} true. She was too much herself, yes, and she would have said even then that she had lived for too long and that she was in some fundamental way broken, but she was also so much more! I have shown you all that she was through her own perception, but from the outside\ldots ah, she was hard not to love, my friends.

``Thank you, my dear,'' I said at last, bowing.

She smiled --- another blessing! --- and nodded to me.

``Tell me about your reading, then.''

``I visited Slow Hours in her library,'' she began. ``I know that it belongs to the whole of Au Lieu Du Rêve, but she has inhabited it quite thoroughly, has she not?''

``She has, at that,'' I said.

``We sat in the solarium and spoke about what reading \emph{is.} She spoke of taking a story or a poem and wrapping oneself up in it. She gave me an example. She recited a poem:

\{\{\% verse \%\}\} ``Too many suits move in too many lines. They circle banquet tables, hawk-eyed, hunting crudites, canapés, bruschetta. Fingers ferry food --- fish, perhaps --- finding slack-jawed mouths already open, squawking at wayward children or bemoaning The Market, whatever that may be.

``At some point, who cares how long ago, death surfaced, claimed one, submerged again. Who knows how well they knew him, their backs turned, studiously deciding that he is no longer of them?

``One could never guess.

``We can say his suit was very fine, perhaps, that the room is tastefully furnished, the casket silver, the bar, open, quite good, and none of them are drunk yet, or at least none look it.

````Good man, good man,'' they mutter, doing all they can to convince each other through well-rehearsed performances, that this must be the case.

``The silently bereaved already sit graveside.'' \{\{\% /verse \%\}\}

I turned those words over and over in my head for a minute, since The Woman had seemed quite comfortable sitting in silence with me. She used that time to drink her water while I played back the words again and again, looking down at my paws, and then returned my gaze to hers. ``There is a difference between the mere performance of grief and grieving itself, is there not?''

``It is as you say. There is performed grief and performative grief --- performative in the philosophical sense. We of the tenth stanza were quite sad when Lagrange came back with us intact but not with Should We Forget. We received condolences from many, some flowers and many kind words. Ever Dream came over and spoke with me about grief as we sat out on the field, where she said,''It is quite sad, is it not? To lose someone you have known for so long is quite sad.'' I agreed, and then drew a line around the topic.'' She performed such a motion now, describing an arc before her with one of her well kept claws, before dismissing it with a wave. ``This was grief performed.''

I nodded, and in my heart, I think I knew what was coming next, for I found my muscles bunching up as in in preparation for something --- flight, perhaps? I do not know, my friends.

``And Warmth In Fire came over, too, so that it could sit at our table and weep rather than eat. Ey wept, and then asked to retreat, and we guided her up to Should We Forget's room so that they could lay in her bed for a while in silence. When it came back downstairs, ey thanked us kindly and left, and when we went back upstairs to look, there was a flower wrought out of some subtly glowing metal left on Should We Forget's pillow. It lays there still.''

``I remember that day,'' I said. ``I will admit that I only met Should We Forget a handful of times, and always mediated through Warmth, so I do not have the context for that grief, other than the fact that ey was left in pain for some time after the restoration.''

``That was performative grief,'' The Woman said. ``That was grief that, through its expression, was made real. Warmth In Fire's grieving allowed us to grieve as well. Ever Dream and all of those who sent us flowers performed a grief that was only intellectual. I appreciate them for that, but I love Warmth In Fire for what ey gave us.''

We as a clade cry easily, and it is a thing that we all like about ourselves. I like the fact that I can cry! I like that I can cry over my own writing, go back and read a scene I wrote wherein a character experiences too many feelings or some form of growth and cry along with them.

So it is perhaps no surprise that I cried then, and that, for the third time, The Woman sat with me in silence.

When I was once more able to speak, after I had taken a moment to clean up, I asked, ``You went into this experience with Slow Hours to explore joy, yes? What did you find, in the end?''

``I did not read only this one poem. I read several more with her that day, and took home several books to read in such a way. Slow Hours talked me through the joy of stories --- even the small ones --- and left me with some assignments.

``I did not like all of the books, but Slow Hours instructed me to read them anyway, unless they started to make me truly bored. None did, however, so I finished every book I took with me.

``Of the five books I brought home, one made me quite upset for how viscerally uncaring the protagonist was. I found them acting for reasons that I did not understand, as though they were a being solely of habits and not of thoughts or emotions. One made me cry for the way the protagonist was torn down and yet built herself into someone new. The other three books I found quite enjoyable, and they were all engrossing to greater or lesser extent.

``I found this form of reading to be fulfilling, yes, but also all-encompassing. When I read in the manner that Slow Hours suggests, by wrapping myself up in the story and letting it play out in my head, I found that I became more easily engrossed, yes, but also I found myself wrung out at the end of each. I would finish a book and then have to lay in bed for ten hours straight, sleeping off and on. When I brought this up with Slow Hours, she only smiled, shrugged, and said that appreciation takes as much energy as creation.

``There \emph{was} joy there, though. It had been many, many years since I had read something so thoroughly, had so completely taken it within myself. It was nothing so trite as feeling as though I was living there with the characters, nor that I was unable to put the book down. It was a relishing. It was a savoring. Each word became a part of my world, drifting into view to be cherished and then back out of it. By the third book, I saw what it was that Slow Hours meant by wrapping oneself up in a story, and I found comfort in this.''

I stayed silent as I listened. After all, to hear so intriguing a person speak so eloquently on the act of reading was lovely! I never learned whether any of the five books that she read thus were mine, and I was too afraid to ask. I do not know why, friends, but I was feeling quite outclassed. The Woman had a quiet force to her personality that I cannot deny, and I wonder to this day whether she knew this about herself.

``You do not seem too pleased with this as an outcome,'' I said.

She shrugged. ``It was a step on a path. I also sought out entertainment in other forms. I spoke next with Beholden, who provided me a similar approach to listening to music. We spoke about active listening and what it means to actually hear a song, to, yes, wrap oneself up in it. We spoke about songs and albums, movements and pieces, and the stories that each of them can tell. Did you know that our dear Beholden has recently completed a concept album about the Century Attack? I did not listen to this for her assignments, per her request, but I did after the fact.

``I ran into a similar sensation, however. I \emph{did} find joy in this type of listening, as I prowled through--'' At this, the woman's form rolled over in a wave and, with a quiet sigh, she was no longer a skunk, but instead a panther, black and with shining fur. She readjusted her clothing and continued. ``As I prowled through the music that Beholden suggested, I found a depth to the act that I had never before experienced. I was able to wrap myself up in sound and lose myself within it. Even with the music that I did not particularly like, I was able to find appreciation and tease out organization.

``Beholden's concept album, when I listened to it thus, left me in tears.'' She laughed quietly, and I felt comforted that I was present to hear such. ``This is perhaps obvious, yes? A concept album surrounding the Century Attack, where we lost so many of our very own?

``There were no lyrics to this album, though, so it was not the words that made me cry. I was not listening to words, but I \emph{was} listening to voices. I was listening to the voices of her up-tree, Beholden To The Music Of The Spheres, and her partner's up tree, A Finger Curled. She had delved into her sample library and pulled together all of the clips that she had recorded of those two and built about an hour's worth of music out of them. A Finger Curled, who was lost in the Attack, and Beholden To The Music Of The Spheres, who quit out of despair one week later. It was her threnody. It was her wailing song.''

Readers, I am not ashamed to say that I cried again. How could I not, after all? I had met Beckoning and Muse, before, myself. They had invited me over some few years before the Century Attack to let me research their gardens. They had fed me a dinner of pasta with zucchini, and a desert of zucchini bread, for their harvest was too large by far. We had sat out on the deck and looked out over the grass and the little raised beds that Beckoning had tended for a century or more and, although my paws itched to return home to write, we spoke until long after the sunset on our joys and sorrows, our hopes and fears.

I cried, and through it all, The Woman sat in kind silence.

When, now for the second time, I was able to sit up straight again, able breath slowly, able to look at The Woman instead of my paws as I covered my face, I bowed to her and said, ``Thank you for telling me these things. I did not realize just how much I needed to hear them.''

``Why?''

The Woman's simple question left me all the room in the world to admit that I did not know. I think that until she asked it, I was not quite sure why, myself. I \emph{had} needed to hear those things but, yes: why? I do not think I would have been able to tell her as part of my statement, but that syllable forced my thoughts into order in a way that they are not as I write this, six years later.

``Because I have not internalized the immediacy of the attack,'' I said. ``I did not know Should We Forget. I never met No Longer Myself. I met and spoke with Beckoning and Muse, yes, but only once. You telling me these things --- me hearing them --- was enough to make me realize that I have not truly grieved them, not properly. Your story of Warmth grieving helped me understand em better, and your story of Beholden's music and how she told you not to listen to it for her assignments made me realize that I, too, am only just starting to process the loss.''

``I understand. I was forced to confront the immediacy of Should We Forget no longer being with us from the very first day, and I am used to thinking of my stanza in terms of loss. We lost Death Itself and I Do Not Know, yes? We knew loss in a way more immediate within the clade except perhaps by those of the second stanza, who lost their first line, too, yes?''

``Was there a difference for you? Death Itself and I Do Not Know quit, but Should We Forget was taken from you.''

The Woman tilted her head, then gazed out the sliding glass door that led out to my little patio. ``I think I knew, on some level, that Death Itself would leave us. I certainly suspected when she went all but catatonic, yes? But I knew. I had no such foreknowledge of Should We Forget leaving us. I suspect that none did, except perhaps Slow Hours, and she told me that her dreams did not make sense until after the fact.'' She returned her gaze to me. ``So yes. There was a difference. The feelings surrounding Death Itself and I Do Not Know are a tired acceptance. They \emph{were} a tired acceptance even immediately after. The feeling surrounding Should We Forget is a sharp and cold grief. It is a feeling of my world being upended and my footing no longer being sure.''

``It did not feel stable after Lagrange came back, no.''

``It did not. That, I am told, is why Beholden wrote her threnody: Beckoning was lost to the Attack and Muse quit out of grief one week later. Beholden, fearing that her life was unstable, declined the merge. She told me that she feared that accepting it would change who she was on a fundamental level, only for her to die, not loving her partner in the same way that she had for hundreds of years beforehand. A Finger Pointing has Beckoning's memories from regular merges, but Muse is truly dead, now. Her memories have been dismissed and cannot be retrieved.''

``I see,'' I said. ``And so she memorialized what memories she did have in the form of her samples.''

``There are many memorials now, are there not? There are many tokens. There are many metallic flowers and songs of laughter.''

I smiled. ``There is poetry in your words, my dear.''

She bowed from where she sat, smiling. ``And so I come to you, Rye.''

``So you do. You have read with Slow Hours. What shall we do to help you on your path to joy?''

``Write.''

I laughed. I do not think it was an unkind laugh, but it was a startled one. I am a writer, yes, but I do not fancy myself much of a teacher. I run regular workshops, yes, and offer what help I may, but I am first and foremost a writer. I do not think I am much of a collaborator, either. I get quite protective of my work, and I can be something of a bitch when it comes to having it challenged. ``How shall we write, then?'' I asked. ``I write with A Finger Pointing. We send each other letters back and forth, telling stories.''

``Perhaps that is a thing we can do, too, but this is a project that I would like to approach as a conversation. I do not have an agenda for how, simply that I must.''

``Have you written before?''

She shook her head. ``No, I have not. I have not created much since becoming who I am, I am sorry to say. My stanza will occasionally tell each other stories, however, and I always fancied myself quite good at that.''

I nodded. ``A story is a good place to start, yes. You really have made so little?''

``My last century has been spent focusing inwards and meting my time out carefully for reasons I cannot explain. I have been seeking a form of stillness, perhaps.''

Ah! This was it! My friends, this was the point when I realized just what it was that made each of The Woman's smiles feel like blessings and what made it feel like she bore some power within her that I could not quite understand. It was her \emph{stillness.} My astute readers will remember that she had a thought, some few thousand words ago: perhaps this unbecoming that her mind circled around was simply the utmost in stillness.

Now, your narrator did not know this at the time --- I do not even know now that this was the thought she had that day, but I am a storyteller, and so that is part of her story --- but at the time, it was a revelation. Stillness and stillness and stillness. What a dream to have! Would that I could find such, yes? Even now, even as I write this, I feel that the lucidity in my words here is due only to my recounting of a conversation I actually had, words anchored to moments in time that I pull out one right after the other and lay in a pretty row.

At the time, however, I said, ``Have you found stillness in your endeavors so far? Was there stillness in active reading and active listening?''

``Not at all, no. I do not speak of physical stillness, but stillness of spirit. I shift forms, yes? I came to you as a skunk, yes? That is a physical restlessness that is evidence of an inner restlessness. My thoughts are unsettled. My feelings are unsettled. My mind is turbulent.''

``That being the reason you did not feel the joy that you wanted?''

She nodded. ``Yes. My thoughts became ordered, perhaps. That turbulence became a purposeful movement; rather than a stormy ocean, they were a river.''

``I am sorry to say that I do not think my books would be any different.''

``Oh, they are not,'' she said, chuckling. ``They are quite good, of course, but they are hardly meditative.''

I laughed as well. ``Thank you, I think. I have a few that are labeled `meditations on whatever', but even those probably do not fit the bill.''

``I would assume not. No, I came to you because I wanted to talk to you specifically about creating not just on Praiseworthy's suggestion, but also because I watched And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights paint while visiting Beholden.''

``Ah! Motes! What a delight!''

``She is, yes, though she is also quite a lot, is she not?''

I laughed, nodding.

``I will admit that, although I would agree that she is a delight, she was perhaps too much for me. When I first arrived at my visit to the house on the hill, she had just been swimming and was running around here and there.''

``How old was she that day?''

``She said that she was seven,'' The Woman said. ``I found her joy to be quite different from what I imagine for myself, though, as ought to be the case for someone who has chosen to live as a seven year old versus someone who has perhaps no choice but to live as a 317 year old, yes?''

``I will say that she is no less flighty or energetic when she chooses to live at older ages. When she is, say, twenty five, there is still no stopping her.''

``So I am told. However, she is also a very good girl, is she not? Beholden saw the state that I was in --- for when Motes started zipping around the house, I started shifting between forms --- and suggested that she go and paint. She said quite simply''Okay!'' and ran off to the next room where she sat on a stool and began painting.''

I looked up to the wall beside the couch, upon which a painting sat. The Woman smiled and nodded.

The painting was of my up-tree's house. The Instance Artist was one who decided that it had had quite enough of life in comfort, life here on Lagrange, life here honing, or perhaps forging new frontiers but in a familiar place, and up and left for the stars, back when humanity buckled down and decided to send out the two launch vehicles. Our very own twins, yes? Castor and Pollux? Those two half-sized Systems that even still race out of the Solar System at some unimaginable speed, yes? The Instance Artist left us all behind with no fork to spare, and broke all of our hearts.

When it had lived here on Lagrange, though, it had contracted my other up-tree, The Sim Designer, Serene; Sustained And Sustaining, to build for it an infinite short-grass prairie. It was a land of long, rolling hills and yet longer flat basins that always drank most thirstily from the seasonal storms that did their best to thrash the Earth below. There, amid the countless acres, sat its house, low and flat, an echo of the plains around it all done up in concrete that matched so well the gray-tan stalks of the grass in fall, the gray-green stalks in spring, and glass.

And so there on my wall sat a painting that I had asked The Child to make, small by her standards at only the size of both of my paws held flat, wherein she had painted the house, the endless prairie, and the sky that somehow managed to be something beyond endless. There was the gray of the concrete that matched so well the gray-tan stalks of grass in fall, the gray-green stalks in spring, and glass. There was the plain, the sky.

And there, right in the center, hovering a scant claw-width above the house, a perfectly black perfect square.

Readers, you must understand that, when I say perfectly black, I do mean it! There is this color --- or non-color --- \emph{Eigengrau} that is perhaps the darkest you are used to seeing. If you are in a perfectly dark room, or you are out beneath the stars at night and you close your eyes, or you are hiding under two layers of blankets from the monsters that haunt us still, even in this afterlife that we have built up into our nigh-perfection, what you see is not pure black, but \emph{Eigengrau.} It is the darkest color, I am told, that our eyes can see, phys-side! This is because, even when there is no light, the nerves of our eyes still fire occasionally. Perhaps it is because this is something that is required for nerve cells to feel healthy, and when those cells are in our muscles and it is just one or two at a time, it does not yank our hand away from our pen and paper like they were burning hot, but when they are in our eyes, every little firing is still perceived as a photon hitting this rod or that cone. Perhaps it is because there is some fundamental state of being for us that is \emph{not} stillness, but that is movement at some molecular level. Perhaps it is simply because they are lonely! I do not know, I do not know. I do not know.

This square is not \emph{Eigengrau.} It is beyond that. It is beyond even black! It is an impossible black. It is deeper than \emph{Eigengrau,} yes, but it is also a very thirsty black. If the ground of The Instance Artist's prairie drinks thirstily of the sky, so too does this black drink thirstily of all the light in the world. It draws light from the room, and when you look at the painting, the world seems dimmer. It is a hole in the world.

I am used to it, my friends, for it sits happily enough upon my wall, but I am told that it is unnerving to see.

``Her paintings have always struck me as bearing a sort of serenity that I have not actually seen in the world,'' I said after we had appreciated house and plain and sky and hole in the world. ``It is more than just some moment of movement captured and frozen in time. It is like she records things that had never been anything but still to begin with.''

``Yes, and that is what drew me to her,'' The Woman said, gaze lingering on the painting. ``I begged Beholden's leave to sit and watch Motes for nearly an hour. I claimed a spot in her studio once I received permission and watched as she worked. While I was there, she built up a scene of a mesa. I recognized it as Table Mountain. Do you remember?''

``Yes,'' I said, with some surprise. ``I have not thought of that place in\ldots well, likely not since we uploaded!''

She laughed. ``Neither had I. We hiked there once and it seems to have left little enough impression, and Motes simply pulled it up from some deep recess, yes? Seeing that slowly take shape, though, as she worked with her paints, I felt like I was seeing some ancient behemoth who had never once woken laying asleep. It was a mountain that had never moved and never changed, even as a suburb sprawled at its base.''

``Did she paint the shape while you were there?'' I said, gesturing to the black-beyond-black square.

``No, not while I was looking. I did still have my errand, yes? I did not want to lose track of that. I wish now that I had.''

``Having watched her paint this one, I can tell you that it is both more and less important than the rest of the painting. She paints it much as she paints the rest of the painting, yes? She brings one foot up onto her stool so that she can rest her chin on it and her tail drapes down behind her and she listens to her very strange music, and she paints the rectangle. Perhaps she sticks her tongue tip out as she does so, like she is concentrating very hard, yes?'' I stuck my tongue tip out just so, furrowing my brow and squinting as though at some minute detail.

The woman laughed.

``So it is much like she paints the rest of the scene, yes? Except that it is not, because she is not adding to the picture, she is taking away from it. I have tried to look at this painting from every angle, yes? I have looked up close and far away. I have touched it and smelled it and --- yes, I will admit --- tasted it, and it is in all ways just paint on canvas. But it is not on \emph{top} of \emph{anything,} it is \emph{through everything,} I would say. I do not know how else to explain it. With all the calmness in the universe, she excised a part of the world from existence.'' I looked up to the painting again. ``I feel that, were I able to visit Dear's prairie again, that very chunk of it would be missing. I fear it would be some sort of black hole hungrily gobbling up all of Lagrange from the inside. In my dreams, that is what the Century Attack looks like. In my dreams, we are all pulled through a null rectangle like that, and when the world is pulled back out, those like Should We Forget and No Longer Myself and Beckoning and Muse are left within.''

We sat in silence --- silences can be so comfortable sometimes! --- while I looked up at the painting and The Woman looked out the sliding glass door that led out to my little patio. It must have been two or three minutes of just long, comfortable silence, of just a woman who was also a cat and a woman who was also a skunk, two women who were in some roundabout way the same, sitting together.

``How large do you suppose it would be?'' The Woman said, startling me out of my reverie.

``Mm? The rectangle? The hole?''

She nodded.

``I go back and forth. Sometimes, I feel that it is right in front of me and the house is in the distance, and that it is painted to scale so that it is quite small. Sometimes, I feel like it must be behind the house, or way out beyond the sky, and it is larger than the moon.''

``I see we understand it in the same way. I cannot tell, either. I can tell you, though, that watching Motes brought me the closest to the joy that I have been seeking that I have ever been.'' She frowned down to her glass, now empty. When she continued, her speech was halting, slow, thoughtful. ``Not\ldots for me, not my own joy, and I think not even for her, though the little skunk certainly seems quite joyful. It is\ldots adjacent to the joy. It brought me near to the joy, but did not necessarily bring the joy to me.''

\secdiv

\label{warmth}

We talked for some time more, The Woman and I, and discussed what it was that we could do to help her find joy. I am sorry to say, though, that we were not able to come up with something.

We circled for some time around meditative acts and how that might work with writing. Automatic writing, perhaps? Should The Woman set up with a note book and a pen and look into some deeper self and begin to write? Should she bid my demon of graphomania visit her, grab her by the wrist, drag her pen across the page that words may flow after it like eager puppies?

No, no. That was not it.

Should she journal? Should she write what she felt during the day? Should she boil the ceaseless moments of her life down to vignettes? Should she make those around her into caricatures that only showed those bits worthy of being set to paper?

No, no. That was not it, either.

Friends, I will note that, even though I got a little bit frustrated with myself, these \emph{were} good discussions. I was frustrated with myself because I wanted to help in this endeavor. It was a good idea! It was a good task. I wanted to help but I was not able to succeed, not that day.

So it was that The Woman returned home with the promise to come back the next day after we had both slept on it.

``For whom do you write, Rye?''

I had an answer ready for this, dear Readers, for this is something that I think about with some frequency. ``I write for those who need to read.''

The Woman tilted her head --- she was back to being a skunk, yes, but this is a habit that all of us share within the Ode clade, no matter our shape. ``I have heard it said so often that one should write for oneself and wait for an audience to come.''

``That is popular advice, is it not? There is joy in writing things that no one will read, I will not lie, but that is not how communication works. I would prefer instead to say,''Write what you want to see others reading.'' I would say, ``Write what you believe others should know.'' To write solely for yourself is for the act of journalling, not for the act of creation.''

She furrowed her brow. ``I will admit that I spent last night thinking much on this. I thought of our conversation and the types of things that I might write and was stuck on the fact that what joy I am seeking is unrelated simply to an act but more to a way of being. Why, after all, would I simply put pen to paper and then close the book? That is just the motions of writing without a goal.'' A faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth and, yes, this, too, was a blessing. ``Though I am told that there is joy in fine pens and fine paper, too.''

I laughed, reached into a pocket, and withdrew my current favorite pen. It is, you may be surprised to hear, quite plain. It is round and it is long. It has a cap that posts on the back. The nib is nothing special. It is a demonstrator --- that is, it has a clear body so that one can see the ink within --- but so are many of my pens. No, there is little special about it overall, other than the fact that it simply fits well within my paw, and that, dear friends, is what is most important in a pen.

I handed the pen over to The Woman and she drew a notepad out of the air, write a few short sentences on it with the pen, nodded appreciatively, and handed it back. ``It is a joy to write with, my dear. But to my point, I suspect there is goodness in the act of writing, but not the fulfillment I am seeking.''

I nodded. ``I would agree with that, yes. You speak of a way of being. You speak of not just creating, but of being a creative.''

``Just so.''

We sat in silence for a minute or so, simply enjoying our mochas --- readers, by now you must know that we are nothing if not ourselves --- while we each considered the direction of our conversation. It is not comfortable for me to be unable to address a thing that I feel I ought to be able to. When presented with a problem that even sounds like it \emph{might} be within my bailiwick, if I cannot, it is in some key way dysphoric to me. The best I can manage, as I did then, was to recast the problem into a conversation. It does not remove the dysphoria, for I still have not solved anything, but it has set it aside, perhaps just in the other room. There is a selfishness in me.

At last, I said, ``Would it be alright if I were to invite over Warmth? It is my beloved up-tree, of course, but ey also has thoughts on this that may help us find inroads to your fulfillment.''

The Woman smiled and nodded. ``By all means, please do.''

We are the most of us not tall women, just as Michelle who was Sasha was not tall: just a little over a meter and a half or, as our literature professor described her in class after she read some saccharine ode by John Keats, ``Miss Michelle Hadje, five foot four.''

That \emph{most} that I have written just now is doing much work, however. Several of us are taller. Why, I remain just an few centimeters taller than Michelle who was Sasha stood, but I might just as easily be mistaken for her when she appeared as a skunk, so similar are we. Oh! And The Oneirotect's sometimes-partner, Hold My Name Beneath Your Tongue And Know, towers over me by a head.

Several of us are shorter. The Child, as you will see, is understandably shorter. My little readers who sit cross-legged on carpet squares, perhaps you can picture her, for she is precisely as I have named her: a child.

The Oneirotect, my beloved up-tree, is not a child, and yet she is small. I think she is small enough that some would perhaps confuse her for one in the same way that The Child is a child, and I think that this may indeed be a little bit of transgression in which ey revels. She is tiny, perhaps even smaller than The Child, perhaps only one meter high!

It also has within it a level of energy that may well contribute to this childlike nature. It zips and zooms and careens off walls as easily as does The Child --- easier, perhaps, for even if she is only a few centimeters shorter, she is far more slender, far more lithe, borderline wiry, and she embodies the jitteriness that one might assume were I to call her `critter'.

But no, ey is not a child. The Child owns that identity for herself. She leaned into the youngest sister of the fifth stanza, she owned \emph{youngest} as meaning childhood, as was her choice. The Oneirotect, however, is simply the most recently claimed line, and is thus the youngest of all Odists with a snippet our superlative friend's words to call its own. Ey lack the being-a-kid-ness and dwell instead in eir own transgressiveness: their fur is mussed and seemingly perpetually stained with the colors of grass and dandelions, her personality is as untameable as the unruly mane atop her head, and its care is as boundless as its emotions.

They are \emph{all} of our youngest sibling and she is my beloved up-tree.

\emph{``Warmth, my dear, would you be able to spare a fork to join me for a conversation with End Of Endings?''} I asked via a sensorium message.

\emph{``Oh!''} came the immediate reply. \emph{``Oh, of course! I have not spoken with her in too long. Right now?''}

\emph{``If you have the bandwidth, yes.''}

Rather than reply to my message directly, ey simply blinked into being in the entryway of my little townhouse. Had I some other guest over, perhaps it would have skitter-scattered and bounced around as it at times did, but you will remember, dear readers, that The Oneirotect was well acquainted with the tenth stanza, and knew well that they dwelt comfortably in calm and quiet, and so she simply stepped lightly toward us, forking as ey went to pad up to both of us and give each us both hug. I leaned down to give a kiss between the skunklet's ears, ruffled up its already quite tousled mane, and smiled as she quit.

``Hi, End Of Endings,'' they said, smiling up to The Woman.

Once she had straightened up after returning the hug, The Woman smiled back down to them. ``Warmth In Fire, it is lovely to see you, as always. How are you keeping, these days?''

``As best I can,'' ey said, tugging at the seat of a chair, raising it up, pulling and shaping until ey had a stool on which to sit, joining us around the table where we sat with our drinks, our water and our mochas. ``I was not expecting to get a message to come over and see you, though. How are you?''

The Woman shrugged, the barest hint of her shoulders to go with an expression that bordered on unconcerned, as though the question were a valid one, but perhaps not worth answering. It was a very Talmudic shrug, you see, and, my friends, whenever one or the other of us pulls that off well, we feel \emph{quite} proud. ``My days are my days and my nights are my nights. I have things I wished to talk with you about, but beyond that, my life is simply my life.''

The Oneirotect nodded. ``Okay. I am glad to hear that you are still living your life,'' she said with a grin, a brief, rhythmic sway of her tail providing accompaniment for the mood. ``What is it you wanted to talk about?''

The Woman looked to me, and I took up the lead. I asked my beloved up-tree, ``Perhaps you could speak to what it is that you actually do my dear. What is it that you enjoy? We have been talking about such things.''

``I have focused on oneirotecture,'' it answered. ``A construct artist, if you must be such a bore. I think of myself most of all as an aficionado of nostalgia.''

The Woman tilted her head in that way so familiar to us. ``Nostalgia? Is there a draw to that for you, or is that something you find others hungering for?''

The Oneirotect, clearly delighted by so simple a question, brought its paws together over the table, folded neat and prim. ``Yes!'' It let the humor of that comment stew for a moment before offering something more worthy of the title `answer'. ``In the first decades of the System, it was necessary to create the stuff that makes up our consensual dream, yes? We desired to eat, but none had yet dreamt of food; we wished to surround ourselves with cherished things, but even the platonic form of such did not yet exist.

``I find joy in creating these constructs --- these \emph{things}, this \emph{stuff}, all that we interact with here --- but most of all I enjoy the research that goes into that.''

``I see,'' The Woman said. ``So you worked on early foods, then? On staples, or on more beloved things?''

``I see you have done your own research, my dear.'' It offered a little bow, beaming up at The Woman. ``That, or Rye spilled the beans.''

I chuckled, shrugged.

``Very well. I favor culinary constructs now, but that has only become the case since I met Codrin. That said, I did begin with fruits! I wanted to recreate some of what was lost to the climate disaster. Most of the heavy lifting had already been done by the time I began exploring oneirotecture, but there remained gaps in what was available. That experience was most formative, but it was Codrin's cooking that sent me down this path.''

``Not █████? Not Codrin and Dear's partner?'' The Woman asked. She asked, of course, after one remembered fondly, and one whose name is not yours to know, dear readers, or perhaps you know it intimately, but with a wink and a nudge like a joke kept between us. ``Are they not the chef?''

The Oneirotect smiled wryly. ``Well, sure, but my interest lies more in the food that others love to their core. █████'s food is delightful, yes. It is \emph{enjoyable,} and often it is \emph{loved,} but it is not really \emph{beloved.}\label{rakoff} I would rather focus on the food those remember with fondness their mothers and grandmothers cooking. Remembered foods. Cherished foods, yes?''

``I suppose this is where the nostalgia comes in, then, yes? Reaching back for the things that others loved, rather than simply ate out of necessity?''

The Oneirotect tilted its head, unruly mane falling over its eyes. Out of instinct, I reached over to brush it back into some semblance of order and got a rather wet lick to my wrist for my trouble. My friends, my beloved up-tree is quite weird. ``It is not as if none before me had dreamt of food just like grandma used to make, but what I offered was particularly attuned to that, yes.''

``You speak of research and gaps in selections and beloved meals,'' I said. ``It sounds like you speak most of all of making things for others, or for all, rather than for yourself.''

``For others, I would say. That bit of communalism implied by `all' did not come until much later. No, instead I drummed up interested parties from the feeds. These were the days that reputation and the markets had more meaning, yes? I still needed the rep for my work, for research into foods unfamiliar to me.'' They smiled wryly. ``I was not without, of course, for I had been dipping my toes into instance artistry beforehand, before Dear forked, yes? But still, I needed the reputation for research, and I needed the research for commissions others asked of me.''

There was a moment of silence as The Woman parsed this, her gaze distant. When her focus returned, she said, ``\,`Before Dear forked'? Am I to infer that this is when you were Rye? Or am I missing something in the cladistics?''

``I am not the first to be named Warmth In Fire,'' it answered with a note of melancholy.

There was such a pang within me that I had not felt in ages, for The Oneirotect was right. There was some years back, some centuries back, another Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire. And then, one day, there was not. They worked and strove and wept and bled over their chosen path, and then they were naught.

They --- that other Warmth In Fire --- was lost to us. They were gone from us. Their art took them from us, it killed them. Such is the danger of art, dear readers: it takes as easily --- more easily! --- than it gives. It was some centuries back, but-- ah! Centuries change only the flavor of the loss when one cannot forget it. It is a loss that still stings to this very day.

``Ah,'' The Woman said, her expression falling subtly --- nearly too subtly to notice but by this point, I was quite focused on everything about her. ``Right. I remember hearing of a death within the clade early on. Systime 54, was it? I was rather disconnected from the clade at the time, I am sorry to say, and was unable to focus enough to learn of just who.''

I nodded. ``But by then, Dear --- or, rather the instance who would become Dear --- had been forked, and so Warmth filled that vacancy. Ey took on the name Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire when Dear became what it is.''

Warmth struggled to speak at first, caught up in emotion. It had been Dear at the time, and watched as who-was-Warmth descended into despair and, eventually, quit. Finally, it nodded, saying, ``I am that which was left behind when Dear chose to forget the Name.''

Now, perhaps my younger uploads or those who have not stuck their noses deep into cladistics, snuffling about for interesting thises or surprising thats, may not quite understand the import here, and so I will tell you a story, much as it was told to me by The Instance Artist:

Many years ago, it forked and went out for a walk along the street. It put the Name of our superlative friend, of The Dreamer who dreams us all, int an exocortex and then began to change. It forked and forked and forked as it walked that endless city that it called home at the time. It changed its shape, from stocky to slight. It changed its species. It changed its sense of smell, its sense of sight. It changed its hearing --- and you must understand, as a fennec, its ears are enormous; when it gives a shake of its head, its tall ears bow under the momentum. It changed the way it thought about our history. It changed the way it thought about forking. It changed the way it engaged with everything around it.

Its goal was to change its sensorium enough that it would not be able to access the Name of our beloved Dreamer again.

Tired, it trudged back home. It could have simply stepped back, yes, but this was a part of the ritual. It had to see the way it had come through these new senses.

There was its back-up fork, sitting and reading and trying to distract herself from its absence. She looked like me, dear readers, yes? Back as I did then? Dear looked like me when it started, after all.

She looked up from her book, quirked a brow, and smiled.

``You may quit whenever,'' The Instance Artist had said. ``I am happy now.''

She stood, bowed, and shook her head, and then she stepped from the sim.

It did not see her for months after that. None of us did. Weeks and months of knowing that she was out there but knowing aught else aside from that.

It did not talk to her, friends, you must understand. It did not talk to her, and she did not talk to it, other than a notification that she would be taking the name Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire.

``I sat with a good book while it took that dire walk between skunk and fennec, and when it returned, it had become something unrecognizable to me. I could see the direction it took, but not the road it followed; it had become something alien, and the prospect of disappearing after that felt rather a lot more like dying than becoming, and so I chose to yield my name to it --- for that Dear was that of me who had already become, yes? --- and spent some months working to earn the name Warmth In Fire.''

The Woman furrowed her brow in that ineffably still way of hers. ``I remember that there was talk within the clade about names, yes, and the general shape of what had happened, that there was some furor about the fact that a down-tree might accept a later line than an up-tree, though I never did understand the import that some placed on that.'' There was a smile, a hint of a bow, and a quiet addition: ``You are so incredibly yourself, though, I cannot picture you as ever having been a Dear, and certainly never as a fennec.''

There followed a moment of The Oneirotect visibly mastering a note of annihilation upon hearing this. It was, I think, one of those things which hurts to hear, and yet which is completely right: ey is not yet another instance of The Instance Artist, nor has ey been for centuries, and yet there is that of The Instance Artist still within em, is there not? ``When I stepped from that sim,'' ey explained, ``I did so with the commitment, both to myself and to it, that what was Dear had changed, and that who was Dear must embrace that. I am unsure, however, that I have ever quite addressed the fact that, often when I hear about Dear from others, there is a rankling within me. Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly bad about myself, I feel like it stole my very name from me. I feel like a leftover, a shadow on the floor of the stage of my own show.''

``The clade will ever be as it is,'' I said, tagging along with that thought, ``which is a bunch of crotchety old creatures with a fixation on names that borders on neurotic. Do not doubt that this applies to our stanza as well.''

The Woman smirked, nodded.

``There were those within the clade who fussed and fussed and fussed, and I would be remiss if I did not say that we had --- and, as Warmth mentions, continue to fuss --- about the role that names play in identity. We will ever be who we are, though, yes?''

My beloved up-tree spent some time pensively structuring its thoughts, trying to reclaim some sort of agency before it fell into a negativity spiral; such topics as these are always especially difficult for us to stumble across, and it had already started to recite some of those familiar phrases it so often repeats even to this day. ``You have come to Rye and I searching for joy through creativity. I wonder: What do you imagine yourself to be, End Of Endings, other than the only one living there I get to call `kitty' from time to time?''

The Woman laughed --- and what a blessing a laugh is in comparison to a smile! --- and, with no effort expended on her own part, fell right into that very shape: a kitty. Kitty! And what a delightful little name. You will remember, my friends, that not every instance of her changing shape was occasion for weariness or discomfort; she fell joyfully into felinity, into this pantherine shape. ``I like that you call me kitty, my dear,'' she said, still smiling. ``And I am always happy when I think of becoming such as occasion for you to do so.''

It beamed, smug and sly and looking quite pleased for the change it had had a paw in working. It was very \emph{not} Dear in that moment --- it was (and is!) very Warmth In Fire because, while it shared some of that quippiness that Dear was so well-known for, Dear shared little of my `motherly warmth', as it put it. Dear did not inherit such from me --- or perhaps had lost it over long years with too many quips --- but my beloved up-tree did.

Here was The Oneirotect being warm. Here was The Oneirotect being insightful and supportive. Here was her taking control for The Woman's sake. Here was it looking for some way to stop trauma-dumping on her and start guiding her closer toward self-understanding, toward a resolution, toward peace.

``But no, I imagine myself being other than just She Who Is Kitty From Time To Time. I imagine myself as someone who has found a purpose within her life other than, as Rejoice put it, simply being one who is built to suffer. Suffering may well be inescapable, but would that I were aught else than She Who Suffers.''

``Is that what you feel you are now, my dear?'' The Oneirotect asked, her tone veering further into direness once more, her words filled with ache and earnestness. ``Do you not find joy in each day? Each hour? You, and all the others in that melancholy home of yours, have committed to perhaps the world's direst bit, but it is worth it, in the end, is it not? There is still tomorrow, and the opportunity it offers, is there not?''

The Woman sat with this in thoughtfulness, her expression perhaps now distant, perhaps now curious. Her gaze drifted from my beloved up-tree to me, and then somewhere over my shoulder, out toward the far wall, toward the door, and then panned once more over toward the windows, where the leaves of spring fluttered in a pleasant visual static.

When once more her eyes returned to us, her expression had settled into what, I do not know exactly. Pensive? Introspective? I cannot say, dear readers. I cannot say.

``I do feel joy, yes. I think that one of the things that sparked this train of thought was actually one such case of joy. I visited No Hesitation for a simple coffee date, and from there I was left with joy that lasted some few days. It was a comfort to me.'' The faintest of smiles turned up the corners of her mouth. ``No, it was not just a comfort, it was a thing I clung to jealously, and when I felt that it was being slowly parceled out to others at home --- for they too deserve joy --- and when I was asked about it by Ever Dream, I felt as though it was slipping away from me with no recourse. Is joy to always do such? Every time I receive such joy, is it only to slip away?''

There was a sense then in The Oneirotect of discomfort at this sentiment: that joy is fleeting. It had worked so hard to become able to appreciate the joys it had, despite the equally-ephemeral agonies it suffered at the hands of perfectionism and impostor syndrome --- as do we all at times, yes?

``It will always be true that you shared that comfort together, End Of Endings,'' she said, my own maternal concern echoed in its voice, so many hours spent helping hold eir head above water while they wallowed in a spiral of self-loathing. ``What is it that slipped away?''

``The\ldots{}'' The Woman started, then immediately fell off into silence. There was a frown on her face, though it was one of concentration rather than consternation. ``What it feels has slipped away is the possibility of the permanence of joy, or even joy that lasts longer than suffering. I suppose that is what I am seeking in this exercise. I am seeking joy that lasts. Even if not forever, I am seeking joy that lasts. I am seeking intentionality in joy. I am seeking agency in joy.''

My beloved up-tree was along for the ride up until the word `agency,' at which it scrunched up its face and reared eir head back as though someone had --- as often I have done --- pressed on the tip of her little nose --- or, it is not so little; it is a big honker of a schnoz as some cartoon might have. How often had ey struggled for its own agency? How often pawing feebly at a thing for years and years and feeling as if nothing it made met its own standards? How often wallowing and feeling helpless but to wallow? How often caught in a spate of ineffectual pining, of disinterest born of despair, of the sort of pain that festers and festers until she broke down into tears and overflowed? Ah--! But it replied, ``Is the pain as well not itself as fleeting? Does it not fly away in the wind when a gust of joy blows your way? Does despair not crumble at the feet of relief, euphoria, pleasure? Is it not dashed away on the rocks of even one moment of the right kind of comfort?'' It fell silent for a moment, gaze drifting outward toward those very same leaves as caught the Woman's eye. ``It is still worth it, is it not? It must be worth it, or else all the world's a horror.''\label{shakespeare}

Here, now, was a moment of quiet between us all as The Oneirotect grappled with its silently tearful emotions. I have spoken of the ways in which we cry, the whys and wherefores, the shamelessness of it all, and so it grappled with its own whys and wherefores, its own shamelessness, and we --- The Woman and I --- looked on with curiousity and compassion and empathy, for we felt also some of these things.

Here, my friends, I must explain something. I must explain the Warmth In Fire before Warmth In Fire. I must explain The Sightwright who is no more.

It is as my beloved up-tree says: we also suffer. Have I not spoken of such? Of course I have! I cannot but! I cannot help myself in this.

The Sightwright suffered as I do, as The Oneirotect does, and perhaps even as The Woman did.\label{winthrop} It was so long ago that they left us, left me, and though I remember, I remember through the lens of centuries, through a glass, darkly.\label{1cor13} They suffered because of their art. They suffered because of the world around them. They suffered perhaps because we are all built to suffer.

They suffered as do my beloved up-tree and I, but they also suffered as did --- I must explain, also, or perhaps remind --- Death Itself and I Do Not Know.

They quit.

They suffered too much. They were, and then they were not.

I must explain and I must remind to set before you the context of what The Oneirotect said next.

My beloved up-tree's tears did not ebb before ey spoke. No, in fact, they flowed and flowed, a cascade of emotion trickling and then creeping and then washing across its face. I have spoken about the way I cry already, and, well, surely they got it from somewhere, yes? ``There has been enough of death in the clade, my dear,'' it plead, wiping its eyes to no avail. Fur remained wet. Nose remained clogged. Voice remained round. Ey pulled eir paws away from eir face, looking appalled at the strands of spit and snot and salty tears. ``Please tell me that you do not intend to quit,'' it croaked through another sob. ``You will not leave us, right? Please say yes.''

The Woman smiled, and this smile was not a blessing but a benediction, and it was not for me but for solely The Oneirotect. It was my job only to witness this smile, this validation of pain. ``No, dear one. I do not intend to quit.'' She let these words hang there in the air before us, a monument to such an intent. ``No, I am seeking not just meaning but purpose. I have explored meaningful things and pleasurable things, but now I wish to explore direction.''

The Oneirotect is not The Child, but my beloved up-tree is also my very own little one. With this comes at least some of the baggage of being small, including tears that seem to flow with an outsized force. So overcome by the base reality of a good, hard cry was it that ey could not help but laugh at emself. ``Oh, good!'' she managed, sucking back what ick she could. ``I will hold you to that. If you quit, I will wipe this snot all over your headstone! It will cake itself between the grooves of your epitaph. It will dry there in the cracks and no dandelions will grow upon its stony bed; it will be the worst!''

At this, The Woman and I smiled. There perhaps was also room for laughter, but a simpler acknowledgment was required for now. A box of tissues was summoned. Glasses of water. Hugs and soft pets and gentle kisses between the ears such as might offer comfort. Such are the realities of a good cry, yes? The distasteful and the compassionate realities both? They are as worthy of acknowledgment as the reality of breath, sys-side. We do not cease being subject to our gross anatomy.

``A reminder: art is not strictly joy, but also suffering,'' I cautioned most gently. ``With art comes fear.\label{artandfear} There is suffering of a sort in failure. There is suffering in falling short, as well; even if you succeed in an endeavor in your own eyes, you may feel the pain of lack.'' Despite her expectant silence, I held up a paw as though to forestall comments, for even movement is communication. ``You are strong, End Of Endings, and I know --- I think we know --- that you are up to such a task, but I must remind you as well.''

The Woman bowed her head, though whether in acknowledgment or a pensive shift in her thoughts, I could not tell. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps she felt then as I have so much lately: as though the world is not quite as it seems, as though there is something more beneath or above. Perhaps she felt keenly our superlative friend. ``I understand, of course. I suppose that has also been the case in my explorations of late, that there ever be this balance.'' She lifted her head to smile wryly. ``There is, as you say, suffering in many things, but the suffering of failure carries a particular tang of disappointment, does it not?''

The Oneirotect finally recomposed itself, reassured of The Woman's longevity. ``Yes,'' she answered most bluntly. ``Emphatically, yes. And yet, after nearly two and a half centuries, I am still doing it. Rye, you still write your stories, yes? Serene, she yet weaves her wilds, yes?'' Its cadence fired up, its tone almost a challenge, daring End Of Endings to oppose this conviction forged in agony. ``I still dream up my little wonders and Dry Grass still keeps them on her mantle and those who I will never know still greedily gobble their favored food from my work on the Exchange.''

She paused, planting its paws between its knees to lean forward in eir seat. ``There is vanity in art, and it is in vanity that we artists dwell. We mean to expose some part of ourselves, and there is torture in knowing \emph{precisely} how wrong every act has turned out.'' The Oneirotect's fervor softened into something more familiar to me, more an expression of shared adversity than the bitter lesson of so many shattered dreams littering the waters in its wake. ``That is why we must do this for more than ourselves, End Of Endings, why our art must have its own value lest we fall into the perpetual pursuit of some cruel point.''

The Woman tilted her head --- that habit that so often follows each and every one of us around like a little puppy. ``You mean to consider my audience?''

I wobbled a paw. ``While that is perhaps some of it --- a great deal, even, as that validation does drive one on --- there is more to art than that.'' I am not ashamed to say that I fall so easily back into that teacher mode of speaking. We were such for how many years, phys-side? And I have been such off and on for how many more, here? ``You speak of purpose: it is also the sharing of what goes \emph{into} art, too. I write for myself, yes, for the joy of it, and I write for others, too. But if my failures are instructive, then shall I not also pass that instruction on to others? I teach. I write \emph{with} others. I read and give feedback.''

At this she smiled. ``Teaching has stuck with us, after all. You have already mentioned communalism, too.''

``Yes, that is it!'' The Oneirotect said, a bright smile plastered across its face. ``Have we not all of us in our hearts our own little shrines to \emph{communitas?} I want for every person on Lagrange to be able to do what we do, to weave dreams tangible or otherwise into being with the ease of centuries of experience. I want for them to enjoy the food of their lives back phys-side, to imagine what flavors the Artemisians indulge, to draw up from memory the last best moment they ever beheld. That is why I go with Jove and Why Ask Questions to their little skillshare, yes, but it is also why I have taken a liking to oneiro-impressionism. I do not want for this to be so hard for everyone forever.

``It is just as industry made our lives gentler, yes?'' ey went on, tone shifting further into something perilously close to exhaustion. The pain it was tanking to explain itself to The Woman was plain to see on its face as it grappled with eir own doubts. It spoke with confidence to her, but The Oneirotect spoke also to itself, and I am proud to say that in the years that followed, this conversation proved fruitful for at least one of us.

``Let us discover some secret hidden in AwDae's little world,'' it mused, eyes steady on The Woman. ``Let us find a way to render pedestrian what is, at present, an expert's privilege.''

I am \emph{proud} of em. I am as proud as any mother, as any attentive aunt, as any family member must be. They continually amaze me with just how much they have done with their life. She delights me with with her attentiveness to the audience of her art.

It, too, fills me with commiseration with its exhaustion, for such is also as I have felt in the ways that I move through the world and I move through my life and I move through my art. I have spoken and doubtless will speak yet more about my overflow, my graphomania, and will whine forever about the pain that comes with it, the feelings of inadequacy and lack when I consider as well that others will willingly read my words. Would that-- ah! But I wander\ldots{}

``I had not thought to question what art I might create provides to others,'' The Woman said after a silent moment's thought. ``Now that I say that aloud, I am a little ashamed that I had not considered it. Much of this exercise that I have been undertaking has been focused on \emph{my} joy, on what \emph{I} might gain from being able to pick up from this or that, whether it be hedonism or love or art.''

The sheepishness in her tone, dear readers, cut. I ached for her, even if she herself in that moment once more wore that blessed wry smile.

Beyond that, though, did I not also have thoughts on this? Did I not also have feelings on caring for oneself? The Golden Rule must also apply to oneself. We, too, deserve to be treated as we might treat others. It is the Silver Rule, perhaps, that the Golden Rule be inverted. Others are worthy of consideration when we think of our work, and yet\ldots and yet\ldots{}

And yet.

``It is no bad thing to consider those first, my dear,'' I said. ``One must remember oneself first, though certainly not to the exclusion of others, of community. You cannot, after all, give to your community if you are unable to give, yes? The Golden Rule applies also to you, yes? You must treat \emph{yourself} well, yes?''

She chuckled and gave a nod of acknowledgment. ``Of course, Rye. I should not rush to judge this exploration so harshly this soon.'' Her shoulders sagged, then, and the ache within me swelled. ``Perhaps I am simply sick of this suffering that Rejoice speaks of. Perhaps I am ready to move away from it. Not to quit, but to find some new basis for myself.''

``And you are testing art as this new basis? Creating things, whatever that may be?''

She nodded. ``I remain split on it, as yet. It is more complicated than I had imagined, given what you two have said, yes? It is much like Slow Hours's and Beholden's full-attention reading and listening. It takes the whole of me and is exhausting. I am exhausted even at the thought of starting.''

I thought back to my first creations, to the first stories and poems and novels that I wrote, back when I was still learning how to forge and how also to hone, and laughed. ``Oh, my dear, it is exhausting to \emph{remember} starting. I will let you leave with one of my first stories. Thank goodness I did not allow it to see the light of day.''

``That tiring, then?''

I nodded. ``Beyond tiring. I do not know how it felt for Warmth, but for me, I would move in fits and starts, now loving my art and now feeling like it was trash, that I was treading already trod ground, that it was derivative. I suppose I had to learn how to learn, first, but even after that. I wanted to have become a great author, without going through the becoming part.''

The Oneirotect snickered, resting a paw on my knee. ``I had the advantage of your example to learn from,'' she started, looking to End Of Endings. ``And my predecessor's. I \emph{started} easily enough, but the despair of mediocrity ever tainted my motivation. That first week was full to brimming with excitement, that second worthy but deprived of euphoria, and on the third I inevitably stumbled into a wallowing spiral until the fourth, when I swore I would never try again, only for a new ambition to spring up the next.'' It shook its head, as though in disbelief at itself. I found it understandable, dear readers, and perhaps you do as well. Even after three hundred years, the ambition always returns. Perhaps it was not disbelief, then, that led my beloved up-tree to shake eir head, but a world-weary recognition of this --- but I digress. ``I have not improved very much at all in this respect; it is agony, but it has at least turned out to be sustainable. I only wish it did not \emph{hurt} so much.''

Furrowing her brow, The Woman looked down to her glass of water. ``More complicated, indeed,'' she murmured, more to herself than anything --- so evidently so that my beloved up-tree and I let her have that moment for herself, as though hesitant to interrupt it. ``You speak of works you would not let see the light of day, Rye, and of the pain of creation. You both clearly still find meaning in it --- as do Slow Hours and Beholden, of course, and Motes --- so I am left wondering what one does with these feelings of\ldots ah, I hesitate to say, but perhaps they are feelings of unworthiness. What does one do when one's works feel mediocre, especially if one is to create also for others?''

It took me some time to disentangle The Woman's words. They were starting to fall into a jumble, into a garden path of wanderings. Perhaps you may even sense that in me, friends, the ways in which my words wander, their circuitous routes, though I do not think that she was nearly so taken with language as I am, or at least not in quite the same way. I think she was simply tired. She certainly looked it, with the slump of her shoulders and the drowsiness in her features she nonetheless seemed intent on masking.

``I imagine it is different for every artist,'' I said most carefully, hesitant to in any way push The Woman away from any art she might wish to start. ``For me, I keep all of my writing. I have exos full to overflowing with snippets and ideas, abandoned drafts, outlines I never got to. I am a bit of a packrat, in that way, and I am not sorry. I spoke before of learning to learn, and the utility of using that learning, and I think that is what I try to draw from them. There is that which I have created that only I value, yes, but its utility is in what it gives in improving going forward or in teaching.''

The answer felt less than satisfactory, or perhaps not quite as true as it could have been, for there was work of mine that I loved for this utility and yet was unwilling to publish, not now, not work from when I was in the novitiate in my art. There is work of mine even now that I hate, that I loathe for, as The Oneirotect said, the wallowing spiral that spawned it and it makes me wonder, and at times it makes me tremble, that I must say there is worth in art when so much of mine feels worthless.

``End Of Endings, my dear,'' The Oneirotect said, slipping down from her stool, ``I am beginning to see myself in you, and that fills me with fear. You have promised me that you do not intend to quit, but if there \emph{is} that of death in you, whatever art you choose will bring you perilously close to the brink time and time and time again.'' It padded up beside The Woman, placing both paws on her knees and looking up into her face. ``Tell me, kitty, is it better to disappear into a blizzard, or should someone lay down their weary bones in a grave when they are through?''

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