The Luminous Wrangler

I

The night was warm, waning, waiting. The spirits of the downtrodden ancestors were drunk on the river water that flowed from the past and the fumes that strolled into town from the future. Miles away from town, in some desert dystopia that housed nocturnal crawlers, bleached coyote bones waited for Time, the Great Consumer and Transformer of All Things, to dissolve their insubstantial existence. Death was in the creaky boards, the signs, and the flesh. And so was Life.

He came stumbling out of the clamor, the ugliness, the impertinence, and the swinging door that hid a room of louts and prostitutes. His head was hung low. The drinking establishment had taken him for all the dirty change in his pockets. After the raucous night of debauchery, he had nothing but some lint and some fragmented cognitions. Oh, and the refried beans in his belly. But those soon abandoned him when he stumbled to the mucky street, drunkenly regaled in the presence of the limpid moon, and puked his heart out. As he allowed quasi-translucent strands of saliva-stomach-acid-soup to fall gingerly on the partly congealed mess that lay naked and barren at his feet, vague shapes in the distance discussed the commonplace sight and then moved onward into the limitless twilight. In their ire-fueled thoughts, they despised his abject existence just as much as the God who had placed them in a town with more shit than shinola.

When the time was somewhere between being right and wrong, an old collector of antiques and sundry approached the wasted wrangler from an alley tucked away from sight. The townsfolk called the languishing traveler of the dusty plains, “Old Smeller,” because the odor that emitted from his being resembled putrid socks. But he was harmless. He just hawked his wares and collected what the townsfolk deemed ‘crap’. Such a man was necessary in those times. The universe was incomplete without him.

“A little under the weather,” the old man said with a smile that revealed black gums and thick wads of mapacho. “Maybe I got something here in my bag that will help you.” The intoxicated wrangler, still reeling from the alcohol-fueled purge, looked into the dwindling face of the old man and responded in a series of unfriendly grunts. The old man neglected the unfriendly grunts and continued to search his bag for some kind of serum, a nostrum for a man who felt passionately about the steed and the scotch. After a few awkward moments, the old man presented to the wrangler a bronze apple that reflected the rays of the moon most peculiarly. “I got this apple from an ill-tempered son-of-a-bitch up in Albatross County. The man said the apple has special powers, but he said he didn’t believe in those special powers. He said the devil was inside of this ornament. I personally think it has healing powers. Take it, stranger.” The wrangler superficially inspected the apple and then dismissed the old man’s friendliness to be some kind of marketing gimmick. “I have seen you around town, you, you, you tinker man of many appetites. Take your weird, possessed wares somewhere else in this town. I am satisfied with what I got.” The old man once again smiled at the wrangler. The fathomless, dark yonder that was somehow contained in his teethless mouth was on the same page as the twilight. “Fair enough, stranger,” he calmly responded. “Don’t find solace in my gifts. But I have a funny feeling this apple will find you again.” The wrangler laughed and nurtured the queasy feeling in his stomach by clutching at his belly. Oblivious to the wrangler’s derisive laughter, Old Smeller walked back into the alley he may have been born in.

It was around this time that a hirsute man rushed out of the drinking establishment with a bottle sticking out of his head. Bloodied and running as though castrated without an anesthetic, the man finally collided with a mahogany beam and spent the rest of his time here on earth cursing the man who had handed him such a fate.

“I think I will head home,” the wrangler said to nothing but the emptiness. “Tomorrow is already filled with surprises.”

II

As the drunken wrangler slept and snored, tossed and turned, and slept and snored some more, the old collector of exotic and lusterless goods traveled into the spacious desert in search of a crone who lived in a hovel made of buffalo bones, and who knew how to fly. He traveled there because he needed to know how to get the wrangler to accept his mysterious bronze apple. As they sat by a fire that popped and hissed like snakes, the old collector told the crone that the bronze apple had to be given to the wrangler before a certain date and that it had to be something he wanted. “The bronze apple is in fact cursed,” he informed the crone in a blunt tone. “The sheriff of Albatross County passed it off to me with a large sum of money after informing me that the wrangler had slept with his daughter. He said he got an old, ornery sorcerer to place a curse as heavy as a thousand pounds of lead upon it, but the curse would only have a potent influence over the wrangler if he accepted it. How do I get him to accept it?” The crone tossed some effervescent powder on the fire, and then sat back in order to dissolve into the shadows that swam around the corners and crevasses of the room. Her green, luminous eyes were as big as an owl’s. “I will tell you what I can do,” said the crone. “I will place a special love powder on the bronze apple. This love powder will not enchant the wrangler, however. This love powder will enchant a prostitute. The prostitute will ensure that he gets the apple.” He thanked the crone for her hospitality and occult services, and then he left the hovel as quickly as he came. Ten minutes after he left the crone’s creepy den, as he rode in his clanking and clamorous wagon under an early morning sky, he looked back just in time to see a crow flying into a distant valley. He realized that the crow was the crone.

III

The wrangler woke up dry-mouthed and aching like a man who had fought a phalanx of raging spirits and lost. He lazily put on his pants while mumbling incomprehensible things to a crooked, distorted reflection of his face that was captured in a broken glass. He was cursing at himself for going through with the rotten routine once again: walking into the bar, losing his money to slick and savvy gamblers, getting angry, and then drinking himself into a stupor. But when the light of a new day—the light of the Occidental Sun—moved into the room without being welcomed first, the wrangler forgot about the pitfalls of his past and embraced the surprises of the future.

When the queasy wrangler reached the street, he noticed that a quiet crowd was gathered around a black object that seemed to writhe this way and that. The wrangler straightened his trousers and then spit into a tuft of grass that mysteriously grew in a land as parched and desolate as the most treacherous of deserts. As he approached the sober crowd, as meticulously and methodically as he would a nervous horse, the wrangler noticed that the writhing object was a big, black dog with forty or so tiny needles in its throat. When he blended into the crowd, a spectator amongst spectators, an old woman said something along the lines of, “This is the work of those damnable Merwacwa Indians. They send this dog as a warning to those of us who search for gold in their territory.” After another rotund woman finished praying for the soul of the dog, a carpenter dumped a couple pints of an incendiary fluid on the dog and then threw a match onto its neck. When the smell of burning fur and flesh got too great for the crowd, the crowd itself dispersed and moved into various shops and houses that spotted the God-Fearing land in the God-Hatin’ town of Moonspeckle.

With a strange swagger, the wrangler entered a barbershop at the far end of town and said to the stylish barber, “I want to cut down this hoary hair some.” To which the barber replied, “My pleasure, but the pleasure is surely not as great as yours.” The wrangler smiled. “The day is going to give me a bourbon, a couple breasts, and a map to a land made of gold,” said the jubilant wrangler. “This day came to me in a hazy dream.” The barber, brandishing a blade as sharp as sin, quietly nodded his head and said, “Whatever you say dreamer. I pray for the happiness and welfare of all my customers…well…as long as they keep coming back.” The wrangler fell into a chair stained with sweat and the wounds of time. “I will be back if I like the work, good sir,” he said. “I will not return if the work with the blade is sub-par.” The barber smiled and went to work. Thirty minutes later, a new man emerged from that barbershop, with a smile just as great as the sun.

Like a small particle mesmerized by an omnipotent magnet, the wrangler headed towards the bar.

IV

For five straight hours, the wrangler drank shot after shot of firewater from a squalid glass. As patrons appeared and disappeared, momentarily sated their desires with stiff drinks, and conversed amongst one another like mumbling strangers, the wrangler contemplated the meaning of the black dog’s death. After all, he was forty or so, and there were forty or so needles in the craggy mongrel’s throat. It was a sign sent from some bardo realm where the schemin’ gods play with the miasmic dreams of a man in order to show him the tenderness and harshness of impermanence. It was a sign that caused the simmering pain in his heart to heat up some. And most importantly, the sign was a kick in the proverbial ass: do something with your life!

At some time in the afternoon, an enigmatic man who wore a sombrero and smelled of some kind of scented tallow soap sat down next to the wrangler. The man had many scars on his sepia-tinged skin and his focused eyes told many tales. He took off his sombrero and dusted it off on a leg that was also covered with dust. After he cleaned the hat to his liking, the enigmatic man carefully placed the hat back on his head and looked at the wrangler’s firewater as though it was a liquid revelation. “I think I am going to have me one of those,” commented the man. “It has been a long day and ridin’ has rendered me sore and surly. By the way, what town is this?” The wrangler informed the stranger that the town was Moonspeckle, a place where money disappears from one’s pockets and where one can do nothing but wait for the blossoming of oblivion. “Moonspeckle!” the man said rather excitedly. “Why but a day ago I was ridin’ as straight as a tomahawk headed towards a lout, and I crossed paths with a horde of riders who were coming back from Albatross County. They said they lived in this fair town. They also said they just robbed a few banks out there. Then they told me they were going to visit a sorcerer out there who has loose ties to the Merwacwians. When I asked them what they wanted to visit such a powerful man for, they told me they wanted to know about the future.” The wrangler took another shot of firewater, the muse of his drunken heart. His movements were visibly shaky and his vision was blurry. He tried to carry a conversation on with the man as best as he could.

“I heard about that sorcerer. I don’t want to know him. I don’t care about him.”
“That’s your business.”
“Yes. Yes it is my business. What’s your business here?”
“My business lives in harmony with all men’s business.”
“I never met another man who had the same business as mine.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Positive.”
“How positive?”
“Very.”

The wrangler, anchored in a drunken state where the words of another man seemed like harsh judgments, didn’t like the questions of the stranger. He thought that he might have come from some distance just to interrogate the hell out of him. But before the wrangler could question the enigmatic man about his ‘true business,’ the sombrero-sportin’ man got up and headed over to the bar where a curly-haired man with an aquiline nose and greasy moustache was having an arm wrestle with an intoxicated patron. The arm wrestle lasted only a few seconds. The sinewy bartender quite easily defeated the drunken oaf with one fast swing of the arm, and the patron didn’t even notice that the forceful swing had broken his arm. After the defeated man walked away, the stranger walked up to the bartender and asked for a shot of the damnable, yet holy firewater.

As the bartender reached around to grab a bottle from the top shelf, the stranger pulled out a shiny colt with four chambers full and two empty. “Before you turn around barkeep, I ask that you grab the cash from the drawer and I ask that you hand it to me,” said the nameless man who was covered in dust from head-to-toe. “Do it quickly!” As the bartender did as he was told, everybody in the cantina watched the trigger finger of the stranger. No one in their right mind thought the stranger had the balls.

Before the cash could change hands, before the stranger could make a fool of a man who did nothing but serve lowlifes of all shapes and sizes, a robust Argonaut with itchy fingers pulled out his old firearm and put an end to the situation by slamming a bullet into the back of the stranger’s skull. The force of the bullet caused the stranger’s head to fall forward onto a burnished railing. When the head fell forward, blood flew out of the fresh hole and landed on the bartender’s face. In disgust, the bartender wiped the blood from his face, went around to the other side of the bar, and then investigated the man’s pockets. He pulled out what looked like a stack of greenbacks. “A round of drinks for everyone,” proclaimed the barkeep. “Courtesy of the dead fool.” The cantina exploded with cheers.

“Good,” thought the wrangler. “That situation was making me thirsty.”

V

The hazy-headed wrangler woke up and realized he had been droolin’ on the table. To his surprise, the cantina was practically empty. Only a plaintive woman with droopy eyes was cleaning up the blood of the stiff and slain bar-robber. When the wrangler heard muted voices outside, he stumbled through the swinging doors like he had a thousand times before. He thought it would have been morning. Wrong. Dead wrong.

Congregated under the stars was a procession of star-struck patrons and prostitutes. They were looking towards the moon as though its milky light imparted inexplicable secrets to them. When the wrangler gazed up and joined his fellow Moonspeckle wastrels, he noticed that the people were starring at a bright comet. Its twinkling light was hypnotic, a candle in the impeccable and insuperable heavens.

Franny Floozy, a longtime prostitute, was the first one to break out of the transfixed state. She started yelling and ululating incomprehensible things to the moon, and then English-able things to the gathering. “This flying rock marks the end of our world. This event is in a Merwacwa prophecy. Don’t you fools know what this means?”

They didn’t. They thought the Merwacwa prophecies came from a tribe of war-mongering magicians who fabricated the truth. The comet was simply a rock that happened to be entering the earth’s atmosphere. Its beauty was natural; it was not something sent from a supernatural order that transcended rational understanding.

“Franny, that prophecy is a joke,” said the sinewy bartender. “It has been around since the advent of this fair town and it will be around long after this town is boarded up. It is meant to strike fear in us and make us feel guilty for taking the Merwacwians land. It is nothing but a tale, a mythologized yarn that tries to tear down commonsense. Come on, let’s all go back into the bar and finish off this blasted night.”

And so they followed the one who housed their sins back into the town’s surrogate sanctuary.

With a second wind, the wrangler went back to his liquid partner, the ensnarer of his dreams and desires, for advice. The advice entered his body as a stinging sensation and then moved into his dull thoughts. The message was intoxication, the loss of inhibition. Everything was falling into place. The firewater took no prisoners. It realized everything already existed in a self-imposed prison. Sobriety: who the fuck needed it and who the fuck even cared for it?

The wrangler was playing an intense card game with three menacing men when a woman with rosy cheeks and a puffy dress appeared on the stairwell. She looked at the wrangler with yearning eyes and then moved towards his table with a lusty stride in her steps. “You got the ace of hearts in that hand?” she asked the wrangler. The wrangler looked up at the prostitute and then looked down at her bruised arms. “I can’t tell you what I got in my hand,” he replied. “We’re playing for money. I don’t want to lose.” The prostitute walked around behind the wrangler, placed her supple breasts on the back his neck, and then culled the ace of hearts from his stacked hand. She then delicately placed the card between her breasts and said, “You did, and I just want you to know that you’re the ace of my heart.” The wrangler didn’t know what to say. Her yearning eyes had winnowed all the thoughts from his nebulous mind. She then leaned over, tenderly bit the fleshiest part of his ear, and whispered, “Take me…you don’t have to pay…I just want you, now.”

The prostitute then forcefully grabbed the wrangler’s callused hands and led him up the stairs to a room that was painted red. At the doorway, the rosy-cheeked prostitute put her hands through the wrangler’s dusty hair and then planted her lips on his. When he tasted her hot, salty breath in his mouth, he immediately thought he was dreaming. He thought he had gone into a realm of eternal seduction. He thought that nothing remained but her sultry breath, an invisible wind of pure eroticism. When she stopped kissing him and said, “I want to pour myself into your volcanic dreams, I want to be a vine that caresses your bark,” the wrangler grabbed her waist and descended further into the lust sea they both hopelessly floated in. He closed his eyes and only saw the red room. In his mind’s eye, their bodies had dissolved into nothing but sexual fluid.

When it was over, he couldn’t recollect ever being inside of her. The whole experience was like a forgotten dream to him. For her, however, the memory of the sweltering sex was still contained in her sweat (and it was absorbed into the static memory of the red room as well). Like two lost souls, they lay there naked together, their bodies entwined, their minds dead to the flow of time.

After a few moments, she rolled off of him and went into her personal belongings. She rummaged through a chest of drawers and then placed an object in her left hand. Then she jubilantly walked towards the sprawled-out wrangler and presented her gift. “Would you like an apple?” she asked. The wrangler investigated the apple and then cordially asked, “Why?” Her answer was mechanical, almost like it was programmed into her at the time of her birth. “Because…the apple is good for the heart, and it symbolizes love,” she said, with eyes yearning and breasts aching once again for his touch. The wrangler thought about the gift and then realized he was quite hungry. “Alright,” he said. “I will eat the apple.” And then he sunk his incisors into an apple that was as dangerous as it was luminescent.

VI

When the wrangler looked down at what he was eating, after a few good seconds of blissful chewing, his eyes couldn’t believe he had taken a massive bite out of a hard bronze apple and his teeth couldn’t believe they were masticating metal. The transubstantiation of the apple was beyond perplexing. Because he was disgusted by the taste of the apple and wholly dumbfounded by the sight of the apple, the wrangler threw the apple into the corner of the red room. When he looked at the naked courtesan just to gauge her reaction to the strange transformation, the wrangler realized she had changed as well. The prostitute went from being a person who seemed genuinely interested in his company to being someone who demanded solitude and money for her services. “My time isn’t free,” she said. “Oh, and please don’t throw things around in my room.” When the wrangler reminded her that “he didn’t have to pay,” the prostitute gazed at him vacuously and simply said, “Why wouldn’t you have to pay?”

It was around this time that the wrangler reached for his pants and pulled out emptiness. She reacted to the sight of his empty hands by throwing pillows, clothing, and various other objects in his direction. Soon after the conniption fit, she started screaming for help in a tongue that the wrangler did not recognize. Her plangent screams shook the foundation of the building. Down in the cantina, glasses smashed. Out in the desert, coyotes cringed.

The wrangler thought about running. Running fast. Running faster than the speed of sound and sin. But he realized there was no way out: the naked lady stood in the way of the exit and the room had no windows. When he heard stern knocks on the door and the voice of the bartender, the wrangler pleaded with the prostitute to settle down, sit down, and talk about the situation with him in a language he could understand. She looked at him blankly, apathetically, and scornfully, all at once. She had no intention of saving his ass from what awaited him from behind that glowing red door. Without hesitation, without the slightest hint of regret, she opened the door that hid his fate.

In stepped the sinewy bartender and the old collector of exotic and lusterless goods. The bartender was wielding a wooden plank. He did not look pleased. Like a gnomic vulture looking for lost and/or dead things, the old collector noticed the bronze apple hiding in the corner. Before the bartender went to tackle the wrangler for sleeping with one of his employees and for not paying for the lascivious services, the old collector calmly said, “Don’t!” The bartender and the prostitute looked at the sallow-faced old man as though he was crazy. “What do you mean?” they both cried. The old collector, with bones as creaky as dying floorboards, slowly walked over to the apple and then handed it to the confused wrangler. “We must not hurt this man,” the old man said. “His fate is now in the hands of a curse, and this curse must blossom in him until the end of his days.” The bartender didn’t believe any word of it. “Not true,” he said. “Hogwash.” Just before the wooden plank connected with the side of the wrangler’s head, the old collector grabbed the piece of wood and looked straight into the center of the bartender’s fierce left eye. “This curse is talked about in a Merwacwian prophecy,” the old collector whispered. “This wrangler is not to be injured or harmed in any shape or form. A sorcerer told me about this event. Trust me, we don’t want to hurt him. If we shed any blood, the blood will come back to haunt us.” Even though the bartender was skeptical of all prophecies, he settled down, dropped the plank, ferociously gazed at the wrangler one last time, and then exited the room. The courtesan followed him like she was his angry shadow.

The old collector sat down next to the wrangler on the bed and started talking to him. The wrangler didn’t understand any of it. It was all nonsense to him. He could tell soluble vowels and soluble consonants were mixing in some kind of verbalized language soup, but he couldn’t understand what was being conveyed to him. He might as well have been listening to the mating calls of intoxicated birds, wheels turning on a dilapidated wagon, or even the susurrus the wind makes when it enters an empty jug.

“I know you don’t know what I am saying,” said the old collector, “but please try to follow my lips and actions…they will get you through the next couple of days. It is important that we get you to the Merwacwa Indians. They are now your brothers and sisters.” The wrangler, puzzled beyond repair, looked at the collector. “Merwacwa?” he asked. “Yes,” the old collector said. “Merwacwa. They are now your brothers and sisters because, as a matter of fact, you’re transforming into a Merwacwa Indian. It is something I can’t explain on a rational level, because, well, you see, it is something that the realm-walkers, shamans, and sorcerers only know about. I am only a messenger, and I guess a puzzle piece in this ancient prophecy. But enough with words…we got to get you out of here before your skin starts changing color.” The old collector handed the wrangler his dusty pants and his shirt. “Put them on. We got to get going.”

The old collector led the two of them down the staircase, led them past a throng of bellicose wastrels arguing about nothing in particular, led them past a table where a silent itinerant was drinking from some anonymous honky’s skullcap, led them beyond the menacing eyes of the bartender, led them through the swinging doors, and into a wagon filled with goods and sundry. When the old collector looked up at the tenebrous clouds that were forming up above their heads, he said a soft prayer to himself and then grabbed the reins. The black horse blew his nose and then trotted off into the direction of the storm. In the distance, in that place the old collector was always traveling to, lighting and thunder discussed the fate of mankind.

VII

As the once-was-wrangler was transforming into the soon-to-be Indian, the old collector trundled along the edge of an old oxbow river while singing a song passed down through the generations, a song that very well could have been composed by the ones who were here before man. Every time the collector reached the catchy yet oracular chorus, his face would turn to the dark yonder like a desert-dweller in heat. If the dark yonder happened to be staring back at the man, it would have noticed that the man was slowly turning into pure song. His flesh was turning into vibration, melodious mystery of being.

When traveling became too much for the old collector, or when his weary mind became too much for the reins, he pulled over and camped in a dry arroyo for the night. He gently placed the once-was-wrangler down by the hissing and hawing flames, and then told him about his patchy history, a patchy history that was enveloped by the prophecy of the dreaming world. “I have lied to many people and broke many hearts in my day,” he said earnestly to a man who was gradually turning into another man. “But I have never told a lie just for the sake of telling a lie. All my lies were told for the fulfillment of prophecy. You see, it is okay to tell a lie when it is intentionally directed towards the fulfillment of prophecy. In fact, there are no truths or lies. There is just the movement towards the fulfillment of prophecy.” The old collector then turned away from the flames and closed his eyes. A little voice inside of his head then told him to open his eyes and look at the flames. Rather quickly, he turned towards the flames with his jaw wide open. What he saw next was a crow rising from the center of the glowing and crackling flames. The mysterious bird then flew off into a dark yonder that greedily swallowed destinies and desires. The old man knew it was the old crone, and he knew he was on the right track. When he turned around again and placed his head on a dust-ridden pillow, the old collector disappeared into a dream he could never escape from. The old collector died peacefully. He had completed his ultimate task. From a distance, the crow guided his wispy soul to the empyrean heights beyond.

The once-was-wrangler and soon-to-be-Indian sensed the exact moment when the old collector died. He sensed it when his “mind forg’d manacles” disappeared like a smoke that never was. He felt that death wind pass through him. But he could do nothing but sense such things, for his body was prone like a felled cactus and the identity inside of his skull was shifting like the sand. In fact, there was a time in that in-between state when time reversed itself: the night suddenly decided to go backwards in order to fall into the arms of dusk; dusk, in turn, decided to fly into the nest of morning. When this reversal of time completed itself, the once-was-wrangler realized he was a member of the Merwacwian Tribe.

And then they were there: a cabal of sepia-skinned, bare-chested Merwacwians. Like human-birds, they were levitating in a circle all around him. They called him “brother” and they sung a song of gratitude. An imperious chief then telepathically communicated something to the once-was-wrangler. His voice was attuned to the One Spirit:

“You now know what is like to be one with us. You now know that we aren’t savages or doom-makers. The people of Moonspeckle and other related communities created these lies about us. Realize that we are skilled harbingers, people who believe in a destiny that is destined to reach greatness. We will now bequeath our sacred power to you, lost brother. Close your eyes.”

When the once-was-wrangler closed his eyes, he saw an image of his former self burst into flames of passionate revelation. His skin was nothing but fire, divine compassion, luminous understanding. When the soothing and circumambient flames retreated into his heart, he saw his former self in a whole new light. The hate and indifference was gone. The need to drink and denigrate others was gone. The need for craving was gone. All that was left was the pure and noble, the condor, the ageless light.

The luminous chief then instructed his brother to open his eyes. “Look at your body,” he said. “The curse is now lifted, and you have been blessed with our teaching. Your body is now entirely yours, and it is not controlled by the bad dreams of others or even the whims of your own. Please go back to your community and inform the people of our true existence. They will resist, but they will eventually trust your opinions and wishes. After all, you are their brother as well. One more thing: give love to your sisters. Tell them that they aren’t inferior to man. Tell them they don’t have to be subservient to man’s insatiable desires. Please do these things for us. When the time is right, under the light of a luminous comet, our two worlds shall meet again. The fifth world awaits us.”

When all was said and done, and when the levitating Merwacwians had faded from the spacious landscape, the wrangler-who-once-was-and-was-now-again got up and perused the land from the arroyo. He breathed. He felt like he was in his body for the first time. The scree that covered a distant mountain range breathed in tandem with him. Life, Love, Understanding, Wonder: all of it was there as the one nameless substance that existed in everything. The “world’s song” was then heard. The black horse was even singing it, even though the horse was completely silent. The wrangler smiled. For the first time in his life, the smile was real.

After some time, the wrangler then headed back to Moonspeckle with the old collector’s dead body and his wagon of wares. Later that day he cremated his body, scattered his ashes in the land that was so important to him over the years, and then sang his soul to sleep. In his illuminated dreams, he saw strange towers, power lines, and sad faces walking around on gray concrete. He noticed that the people didn’t hear the “world’s song”. Then an explosion killed everyone. Fire consumed all appearances. When he woke up, the wind was blowing strong and caressing the dunes. Small flames were still crying in the fire.