California Exodus

California (yeah, let’s say California) left the City behind—two cities, actually; and, contained within each were multitudes of dreams, memories, creatures, layers, lairs, and so on; you get the idea. With them (and we say ‘them’ because they have a range of genders—some static and fixed, others quite mutable) floats along a light, a sort of flame whose fuel is its own essence (even though it would deny the existence of such), an energetic ouroboros of blue-green fire, not flickering exactly, but neither rocksteady. At its base is a sort of rag, not unlike a wick, but without any length, merely an inexact circumference; so think of a pile of melted wax but cloth-like.

The road ahead is long.

With continuously tired yet somehow inexhaustible eyes, California looked down that road. Their left eye flickered and sputtered, so they flicked it with a long-nailed finger—twice, in fact—until the image remained clear.

“I’m getting old, Teach,” California said to the floating light, which hovered near their left shoulder—which, incidentally, was also continuously tired and in pain, to boot.

“We all get old,” the light emanated, its voice clear in California’s head but making no sound waves, only light waves. “We all experience pain, aging, illness, death.”

“Paid in full,” California said with a grin, then scratched an itch in their beard and pulled a gray rag across their face. It had holes in it for the nose and mouth. Over this rag, they clicked into place their mask, a kind of respirator that was fed by tubes exiting each side, going over the shoulders and down the back to the breathing bladder (which itself reminded California of those city backpacks that were popular in the 2010s). All sorts of biomechanical magic happened in the bladder, as well as in the mask itself. California had once understood it; but, since the practical use of it had not required them to remember much, they had not.

“I used to have a near perfect memory, Lantern,” they said to the light.

“Or you thought you did, anyway.”

California sighed. “Yeah. Okay. Whatever.”

They put one old foot on the road, then the next, repeating that process thousands of times, as they had before, as so many had before.

This is the opening to the book No One Ever Knows Why. It usually follows both Teresa's Backbone and Beautiful Wasteland, but that depends upon if, when, and how you took part in those.