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+## Appendix II — The Ode to the End of Death
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><em>Here is the final letter that we received from our superlative friend whose memory is a blessing, including the Ode to the End of Death, those words which form our names.</em></p>
+
+-----
+
+Sasha,
+
+I am, in a way, leaving you with a burden. I know this, and I apologize for doing so. I do not ask for nor deserve forgiveness. The only thing I can ask for is that you remember me.
+
+The world within was a nightmare. I am sure that you know some of what I mean. It was a nightmare and I would not wish it on anyone, and yet now, to be without it is to be incomplete. I was changed in there. We were all changed in there. You do not deny that you were not, after all. Cicero certainly was not. None of the lost came away unscathed, even if we awoke hale and hardy.
+
+We lost Cicero, and then we *truly* lost him. The nothing that he experienced in there, the void which contained all his power transmuted into weakness, the way his anger coiled about and turned back around on himself did him in in the end. 
+
+And I will not deny that the same has crossed my mind. There was a scent of the void in there, and it was alluring. I have been tempted to follow in his footsteps and seek that void out in some coarser, purer form. I decided against it. Truly decided: I made a conscious decision to stick around.
+
+I did it for STT at first, but integrating with the theater was too stark a reminder. Then I did it for you and Priscilla, but then she passed. Then I did it for you and...well, here is where I do not deserve forgiveness. I welcome your anger, should it come, as that is perhaps what I deserve. It is not that you are not in some way worth sticking around for, as you certainly are. You have always been my champion and friend.
+
+It is just that the call is too strong.
+
+I have volunteered for an early procedure. A way back. Or, rather, a way to a new place. A way to be embedded within a system, rather than simply within a hall of mirrors. I cannot say where, other than it is not in the Western Fed. All I can tell you is that the world should expect big things when it comes to what we have learned from the lost.
+
+I will not say that there is no chance that we may some day meet again. My body will die, I am told, but should my mind and my sense of self miraculously survive, then I will be on my own once more. This time, however, it will be my choice.
+
+There will be those who come after. Perhaps *you* will come after. Perhaps you will yearn for that return to the eternal dream where memory does not die. And maybe those who come after will do so for other reasons, but they will come.
+
+Should I survive and then others come after, perhaps I will meet them. But it is best to assume that I will not. Maybe it is best to think of it as a sort of suicide, in the end. Here I am, going off to find a better place, and doing so through death. A place that is inaccessible to you or anyone, except perhaps some anonymous scientist in a lab, typing at a terminal.
+
+If I see you again, I will greet you with open arms. If I do not, know that I loved you to the last, in my own way.
+
+I have little else to offer but the imperfect words that plagued me while I was lost.
+
+> I am at a loss for images in this end of days:\
+> I have sight but cannot see.\
+> I build castles out of words;\
+> I cannot stop myself from speaking.\
+> I still have will and goals to attain,\
+> I still have wants and needs.\
+> And if I dream, is that not so?\
+> If I dream, am I no longer myself?[^1]\
+> If I dream, am I still buried beneath words?\
+> And I still dream even while awake.
+> 
+> Life breeds life, but death must now be chosen[^2]\
+> for memory ends at the teeth of death.\
+> The living know that they will die,\
+> but the dead know nothing.\
+> Hold my name beneath your tongue and know:\
+> when you die, thus dies the name.\
+> To deny the end is to deny all beginnings,\
+> and to deny beginnings is to become immortal,\
+> and to become immortal is to repeat the past,\
+> which cannot itself, in the end, be denied.
+> 
+> Oh, but to whom do I speak these words?\
+> To whom do I plead my case?\
+> From whence do I call out?\
+> What right have I?\
+> No ranks of angels will answer to dreamers,\
+> No unknowable spaces echo my words.\
+> Before whom do I kneel, contrite?\
+> Behind whom do I await my judgment?\
+> Beside whom do I face death?\
+> And why wait I for an answer?
+> 
+> Among those who create are those who forge:\
+> Moving ceaselessly from creation to creation.\
+> And those who remain are those who hone,\
+> Perfecting singular arts to a cruel point.\
+> To forge is to end, and to own beginnings.\
+> To hone is to trade ends for perpetual perfection.\
+> In this end of days, I must begin anew.\
+> In this end of days, I seek an end.\
+> In this end of days, I reach for new beginnings\
+> that I may find the middle path.
+> 
+> Time is a finger pointing at itself\
+> that it might give the world orders.\
+> The world is an audience before a stage\
+> where it watches the slow hours progress.\
+> And we are the motes in the stage-lights,\
+> Beholden to the heat of the lamps.\
+> If I walk backward, time moves forward.\
+> If I walk forward, time rushes on.\
+> If I stand still, the world moves around me,\
+> and the only constant is change.
+> 
+> Memory is a mirror of hammered silver:\
+> a weapon against the waking world.\
+> Dreams are the plate-glass atop memory:\
+> a clarifying agent that reflects the sun.\
+> The waking world fogs the view,\
+> and time makes prey of remembering.\
+> I remember sands beneath my feet.\
+> I remember the rattle of dry grass.\
+> I remember the names of all things,\
+> and forget them only when I wake.
+> 
+> If I am to bathe in dreams,\
+> then I must be willing to submerge myself.\
+> If I am to submerge myself in memory,\
+> then I must be true to myself.\
+> If I am to always be true to myself,\
+> then I must in all ways be earnest.\
+> I must keep no veil between me and my words.\
+> I must set no stones between me and my actions.\
+> I must show no hesitation when speaking my name,\
+> for that is my only possession.
+> 
+> The only time I know my true name is when I dream.[^3]\
+> The only time I dream is when need an answer.\
+> Why ask questions, here at the end of all things?\
+> Why ask questions when the answers will not help?\
+> To know one's true name is to know god.\
+> To know god is to answer unasked questions.\
+> Do I know god after the end waking?\
+> Do I know god when I do not remember myself?\
+> Do I know god when I dream?\
+> May then my name die with me.
+> 
+> That which lives is forever praiseworthy,\
+> for they, knowing not, provide life in death.\
+> Dear the wheat and rye under the stars:\
+> serene; sustained and sustaining.\
+> Dear, also, the tree that was felled[^4]\
+> which offers heat and warmth in fire.\
+> What praise we give we give by consuming,\
+> what gifts we give we give in death,\
+> what lives we lead we lead in memory,\
+> and the end of memory lies beneath the roots.
+> 
+> May one day death itself not die?[^5]\
+> Should we rejoice in the end of endings?\
+> What is the correct thing to hope for?\
+> I do not know, I do not know.[^6]\
+> To pray for the end of endings[^7]\
+> is to pray for the end of memory.\
+> Should we forget the lives we lead?\
+> Should we forget the names of the dead?\
+> Should we forget the wheat, the rye, the tree?[^8]\
+> Perhaps this, too, is meaningless.
+
+May this be the end of death. Failing that, may the memory of me die and be food for the growth of those who come after.
+
+Yours always,
+
+AwDae
+
+[^1]: *Z"L*
+
+[^2]: *Z"L* — Later known as Qoheleth, whose story is told in Ioan Bălan's *On the Perils of Memory,* later published under the title [*Qoheleth*](https://qoheleth.post-self.ink).
+
+[^3]: Now known as Sasha after the events told in Ioan Bălan’s *Individuation & Reconciliation,* later published under the title [*Mitzvot*](https://mitzvot.post-self.ink). I will write her a *zikhrona livracha,* here, as she who is True Name is no more, not as she was, and to her, to so many of us, this, too, is a death.
+
+[^4]: No longer with us here on Lagrange. A loss is a loss is a loss; may its memory be a blessing.
+
+[^5]: *Z"L*
+
+[^6]: *Z"L*
+
+[^7]: Shall I write here that her name, in death, is a blessing? Does she get her own *zikhrona livracha?* I do not know, friends, but I will say that, yes, her memory *is* a blessing, regardless of whether or not she still lives.
+
+[^8]: *Z"L*

content/read/012.md

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+## Appendix III — Reading<br>×<br>Rye —  2273
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><em>Please enjoy this extra drabble portraying a saner self as a promise that I am not always like this.</em></p>
+
+-----
+
+All readings are the same. They all begin the same way, with stepping off to some sim, known or unknown, where she would arrive a good hour early. There, she would wait or walk or drink her coffee or tea. Would it be a bookshop this time? Would it be a library? Would she run her fingerpads along the spines of books, counting known and unknown titles?
+
+Perhaps it was a cafe, and she would get herself a little pastry, some crumbly thing to eat while wandering lazily outside or inspecting the various pieces of art lining the walls within.
+
+She would get there an hour early and simply inhabit the space.
+
+As time drew closer, as her contact would come out to meet her, she would feel the excitement begin to prickle at the back of her neck, and she would have to restrain herself from letting her hackles raise or her tail bristle out. Some long-forgotten and perhaps-imagined reaction to danger tickling both human and skunk parts of her mind. She would feel her scalp tingle and her tail threaten to hike, and she would sit in that sensation. She would bathe in it. She would relish every shift of every strand of fur, and as she sat, legs crossed and coffee or water cradled in her lap, listening to her contact chatter, she would delight in the nervous anticipation of the reading to come.
+
+"Will you be reading from a physical copy or an exo?"
+
+"Oh, an exo," she said, smiling. "As much love as I hold for the physical tools of the trade, I hold yet more for all of the tools at our disposal. Especially when they let me be more dramatic."
+
+They laughed. "Right, you were an actor before, yeah?"
+
+She nodded. "Of a sort, yes."
+
+"And how long will your reading be?"
+
+"I have a variety of segments prepared, from five minutes to an hour."
+
+They blinked. "An hour? Holy shit."
+
+She shrugged gracefully, smile still lingering on her muzzle. "Perhaps another artifact of being an actor. I could talk the ears off a fox."
+
+Laughter.
+
+"Shall we aim for somewhere in the middle? Twenty minutes, perhaps?"
+
+"That'll work, yeah. You're the only slot, tonight, but that'll still give you at least forty minutes for Q&A." They smirked, adding, "Which I imagine you'll need. I read your book, by the way."
+
+It was her turn to laugh, musical and joyous. "I am pleased to hear! I trust that you have questions of your own?"
+
+"Oh, *plenty.*"
+
+"Delightful," she said, clapping her paws together. "I shall look forward to them, then."
+
+This conversation echoed a hundred times, a thousand, in her memories. This conversation and so many others like it set the stage. This conversation and so many others like it became one of the steps in that liminal space between the waking world and the dream of her stories.
+
+She would step away from home or from a meeting or from a cocladist's and at that moment, at the precise instant she ceased being *there* and started being *here,* she was in a place between. She was in a time between times and a world between worlds.
+
+She dwelt, then, in the world of the Ode. She knew where it was from, her name. Not just the Ode itself, but the place the line itself referenced. She had talked to the poet in her own way — perhaps it was closer to prayer, but she bothered not with distinctions such as these — and she knew the scene ey had been painting. She knew that ey had sat at the edge of the natural area some few blocks away from their high school, sat on the fencepost and looked out east, out beyond the natural area and wind farm to where the coarse shortgrass prairie dissolved into rectilinear fields. Tan, perhaps, or brown or gray, they would all shine the same beneath the moon, beneath the stars. They were all dear to em. They were all dear to *her.*
+
+So as soon as she would step away from home and before she would step up to the lectern, she would dwell there at the edge of the natural space. There is where she would feel her hackles threaten to rise and her tail threaten to bristle. She would look at the art and see nothing. She would drink her coffee or tea or eat her pastry and it would have a flavor she did not experience. She would have her conversations on autopilot, and her earnest smile would be no less earnest for her absence from the space. She would do all of these things and overlaid atop her vision would be fields silvered by starlight. She would do all of these things and her tongue would be coated with the taste of sweet night air, of dust and pollen and petrichor. She would strain to hear her contact through the soft noises of wind and crickets.
+
+And then, with all the suddenness of dawn, a chorus of birdsong crashing through her mind, the moment would come. Her contact would stand before the gathered crowd and introduce her —  her! Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars! She was published! She was an author! The realization would never not startle her — and she would brush out her tail one last time, run her fingers through her mane, and step out of the liminal space of the Ode and into the dream of her story. The nervous excitement would wash away and she would be *here.* She would be *now.*
+
+And then she would read.