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Appetizingly red blotches of bloodpoppy flowers grew on the left side, where the forest began, while ponderous boulders and slow hills spiced the sprawling meadow to the right. A bright mist hung over the plains, rendering them infinite to the eye. To the left: the forest floor of rusty leaves speckled by a hurry of tangled green grasses, and looming above, tall, leaning milkbarks, huddling to keep warm. The trees shook loudly, but the wind that caused them to shiver so was inaudible; the only sound was the movement of the lunging pale branches. Sck. A twigs snappy voice pricked the stiff air as a handsome silver fox moving to the left was enveloped by the fringe of the forest. Mushrooms, fallen logs, birds screaming. The poppy-blotches in the field of grass were ladybugs on a leaf. The fox knew better than to march through the layer of flowers on the tree-shadowed floor, but they drew his eye nonetheless. Their seductive innocent scent was inescapable. He stopped. Before long there was a silver shape moving in the red, and the fox was gently drowning in the scarlet sea. His strength left him not slowly but almost all at once: his eyelids drooped and his tail hung limp and his breathing dragged violently. The fox bared his teeth meekly at the heads of his silent assailants. Sinking further as his limbs boiled away, he thought he saw the carcass of some small rodent-like animal in the darkening depths of his melting vision. Yet at the moment before his eyes finally shut, he saw that it was only the ribcage of a larger animal, like a fox. His hotly heaving lungs gave way to a piteous squeal. And as abruptly as it had begun, it was over. The blood dripped from his fur and was gone; the flowers had released their hold on the fox. His tail regained its life, and the rest of his body soon followed; the trees gave him big, wrinkling grins from above as he crawled gracelessly, cautiously to freedom. The violent red had given way to crunchy brown. The fox arched his back before padding onward, avoiding the red that smelled, it seemed to him, of rank rot and fever.

The fox came to a brook. The earth near its edges was delicate chocolate mud, and light filtered through the treetops to brumble chortlingly on the ticklish surface of the water. A small regiment of fish was present; they may as well have been, in terms of their approximate palatability, little globs of mucus. The fox sniffled indignantly and dipped a paw in the water. The fish scattered, but there was no ripple: the water did not react. The brook played and danced, but its antics were immutably endemic; its whirling, gurgling games could have no consequences, and this made interaction with an outside presence unthinkable. The paw was lifted away. No returning droplets fell, for no water had left. Yet the fox found himself shaking his dry paw from force of habit. It was an interesting experience. The foxs tail was unimpressed, however, and nodded drowsily. As the water went about its business, invincible, ignorant of the attempted disruption, the silver fox discovered the silver fox staring back at him from beneath the surface. Now, why would any fox live in a brook? It was really quite absurd. Interesting, though. He was quite certain hed experienced something similar in the past. A rather handsome fellow, to be sure. The sleekest silver fur Ive ever seen. The fox mewled politely at the stream-dwelling stranger before turning his attentions back to more important matters. On the other side of the brook, there was that large unnatural-looking block of natural-looking black stone, and the boy kneeling at the base. He wore something resembling a monks habit, which seemed more like a blanket draped over him as he knelt. For a long time he remained on its knees. His dark face darkened as the light from a square screen on the face of the stone cube shut off. The boy had a youthful and earnest default expression, relaxed, yet very present. He pushed a button on the screen of the Textblock in front of him. Then, the sound of hooves, and two horses galloped into view, approaching the boy. One was riderless, a beautiful and supple liver chestnut, and the other a blue roan who spat and sputtered with exhaustion like a failing car engine. The tired horse carried a long elderly man whose face was shadowed by the hood of his brown cloak. Both horses slowed slowly and came to a halt, and the hooded rider dismounted. He sat cross-legged to the left of the boy. There was a long silence that the scenes vulpine observer found profoundly unsettling, or unsettlingly profound. His nose twitched. It was undoubtedly because of the cold.

What is your name? asked the hooded stranger at last. His voice was gray and heavy. Eudaemon. answered the boy, his gaze still fixed on the stone.

That is right. What does it mean? One thing and many, replied the stranger. Each of us must grow into his own name. What is your name, sir? the boy asked. Pellinore, said the hooded one. And I hunt the Yelping Beast. The Yelping Beast? Its been ten years since last I saw him, the stranger sighed. He has a leopards body, a lions
backside, a serpents head, and a harts hooves. And strangest of all is the sound he makes. Hes not so very large, but when he yelps it sounds as if there were threescore dogs barking.

Why are you hunting him? the boy asked. Because hes my quest. What is a quest? A long journey, with many adventures, many setbacks, and many dangers. Where to? Ah! exclaimed the stranger, pleased. Thats what you have to find out. Each of us needs a
quest. He paused. A person without one is lost. Each of us must have a dream to light our way through this strange world. He paused. So, Eudaemon. He paused again. What will your quest be? Tugging on his hood, he mounted his horse and rode away, deeper into the forest, leaving the chestnut behind. Ignored by the pensive Eudaemon, the horse soon turned and rode after the others. The cloppa-cloppa, cloppa-cloppa of hooves receded, and the stone emitted a hum that hovered for a moment before disappating. Even then, to the foxs dismay, the young man waited a moment before finally rising to his feet, and did not even notice his friends arrival until the fox leapt athletically to the top of the stone. Landing crisply, the fox squeaked as commandingly as one could ever hope to squeak, which is to say, not altogether commandingly. Eudaemon jerked his gaze towards the fox, in the manner of one who wakes with a jolt despite being roused from sleep gently. He was smiling.

Hello, Nicolas.

The silver fox did not like being called Nicolas, but he did not show it. His tail, which had been hanging behind him off the stone in midair, came to rest beside him, curling comfortably about his rear as he sat upright on the cool, carved stone.

I like calling you Nicolas. The name has a rugged kind of mischievousness to it, dont you think?
The fox replied to the inflection by way of returning his tail to its previous position, hovering in midair behind him. Thoroughly less desirable.

Pellinores life must have been very different from mine.

As different as two lives could ever be, the fox wanted to say. He blinked instead.

I suppose it would have had to be, over seventeen hundred years ago. I know so many facts about
it, but I think its these old books that really teach me. His thinking eyes made a soft circle. He produced a bloodpoppy, petals and stem and all, from somewhere in his garb. It could not have been held in captivity for long, as the petals had not lost their eerie vitality. Purpose is like this little flower, he began. The foxs tail flicked expectantly. If you dont have a purpose, or a quest, then... you wilt. Eudaemon completed his remarkably disjointed analogy with great gusto. The fox could have undoubtedly drawn a less nonsensical comparison himself. Still, the boys conclusion was no less correct. A fox was a fox was a fox, and a fox never worried about losing the Yelling Beasts trail, but the boys predecessors had outdone themselves in that regard. Now, aside from his penchant for spending time with his foxy friend, the boy shared, he farmed, he ate, he slept, he was attracted to girls, and he learned. But it had not always been like that. Eudaemon knelt again and touched the screen of the Textblock. This time he did not read a book. He searched for a moment... The Transitions. He pressed his finger on the screen. It was the story that never ceased to fascinate him. The First Transcendentransition, it began, with the familiary of a friends laugh, was above all else a global realization. Pre-TT1 society was designed so that the elite could profit from exploitation of the working class. The creation of poverty was a necessary by-product of capitalism; a few rich owners of vast capital could extract the labor of workers. Before TT1, ten percent of citizens owned more than eighty percent of all assets, while the lowest forty percent owned two tenths of a percent. The options were clear: one could have democracy, or one could have great wealth concentrated in the hands of an elite class, but one could not have both. Capitalism warped culture into an orgy of consumerism,

bringing out greed, selfishness and mindless ambition in the populace, and abolishing useless values like internal balance and kindness. Life expectancy dwindled as cancer prevailed, which would later be proven to be predominantly a result of the intensely profit-oriented agriculture, known then as 'agribusiness.' Food production was about making maximum profits, and the quality of food reflected this. However, people ignored the startling reports that some people managed to make, because the food tasted good. Equally problematic in the long term was the transformation of healthcare from a universal right into a profit-seeking industry. Above all, people needed their plastic Zonks (the camera/phone/computer/e-reader/gaming console/music player/GPS), their ElectroSkid bicyclical transportation alternative, their sex centers, and their MealPills (some preferred MealPill Lite: Go Lite, of course). The government, then, thought: why educate a breed of humans satisfied with eating food made in a factory? Eventually, the government officials stopped giving the people the choice between MealPill and MealPill Lite. This grievous denial of their basic human freedoms did not, however, go unanswered. Tenfold the number of the supporters who witnessed the I Have a Dream speech came to Fight for the Right to Go Lite. It was about the principle of the matter, really. Where post-TT2 society E (known by its philosophical adherents as Perfect) is based in secular virtue ethics, ethics before TT1 were primarily based in religion and, more significantly, purely deontological; people obeyed the laws of Man and god out out of fear and because they had been psychologically conditioned from a young age to hate crime, failure, and themselves. War was waged by and against religious heretics and selfish dictators who were considered impossible to attempt diplomacy with. All people deserved freedom of opportunity, and yet the inherently socialist implications of such a system were ignored because socialism would be terribly inconvenient for the wealthy. After all, capitalism's greatest feature was that it provided a Yelping Beast for everyone: to acquire wealth, power, status (the redundancy!). However, people eventually realized that the Yelping Beast of buying into government-sanctioned social hierarchy was almost as fulfilling as eating a bowl of cereal except the cereal isn't cereal it's poop. In the culmination of this realization, suicide rates surged across all demographics. Enter TT1 stage left. Contrary to popular belief, there were, at the time, those who believed behavior-modying drugs to be immoral, but to the government, morals had become a persistent inconvenience, and were

consequently abandoned. The once-prevalent notion that it was inhumane to pharmacologically or genetically alter humans was deemed radically conservative. Pro-Prozaks, as they became known, argued that if the combination of nature and nurture, whose circumstance could be traced back to nature, programmed humans to do something, then how could it be deemed unnatural? As this selfjustifying determinism became popular philosophy, scientists succeeded in creating a medicine that could curb the influence of chemicals with undesirable neuropsychological effects like testosterone, and injected it into all drinking water. Irrational, primal lusts for power and sex were replaced with moderation: a perfectly artificial form of restraint. And once the struggles for power and sex were controlled, mankind was quite placable. Even the war-waging heretics of the past, who had been presumed incorrigible to simplify things for everyone, were pacified. Some aspects of culture was salvaged, in no small part due the fact that the technological escapism that had thrived previously had become a part of it anyway. A complete victory for the prosaic. The stage was set for another significant reform. Arguably the foremost element of TT2 philosophy was the belief that, in contrast with the TT1 view that nothing was inherently natural or unnatural, pharmalogical behavior modification was equatable to simply hooking a human up to a dopamine regulator from birth and then postponing death indefinitely, and that this was fundamentally wrong. They sought to combat the formidable meaninglessness of human existence that TT1 had produced. TT2 created Perfect. Perfect's perfection was based in the powerfully natural bucolic aesthetic. People could have just watched movies about farming or played rurally-situated X-Immersion Games, but some fiercely human part of people's psychology, dormant for so long, gave birth to the movement to reclaim humanity. A life spent cultivating the soil would provide direct contact with nature; through the contact with nature, people would develop self-reliance, emotional health, moral integrity. A philosophical farmer would have a sense of identity, of grounding tradition, a feeling of belonging to a concrete family, place, and region, which would be psychologically and culturally beneficial to present and future generations. The natural risks of the farmers lifestyle were accepted instead of eliminated. Resources were not identical from region to region, so trade flourished, and thus was culture exchanged between communities. Instead of fighting to gain land from each other, they shared, they learned, they

ate, they slept, they raised children, and they farmed. TT2 added Equality to Liberty and Justice for all, and for some reason people didn't seem to mind. This life would counteract the effects of the amoral, isolational previous society that had so successfully degraded humanity. Where capitalism, industry, and the resulting urban lifestyle destroyed dignity, fostering vice and weakness, the Perfect alternative would offer community and independence in balance. Hierarchy had produced exploitation, war, and crime, but all of these ended when the idyllic agrarian lifestyle took hold of the entire E Continent, the largest of all, and divided it into communities. It was not anarchy; it was an egalitarian community where objective values were not simply poured like light mustard sauce over the people, but instilled over time. Deviants (or criminals, as they were once called) were at first not common, but regular, and became increasingly rare until the very idea seemed silly. Many families that predated the establishment of Perfect and had resettled together found that they had no great desire to preserve their old way of life, but some songs and dances and stories were left over from the past. Indeed, they did not hesitate to learn from the worlds past mistakes. Eudaemon turned off the Textblock. He knew that they could, in theory, simply re-advance through the ages, but the Textblock showed the ultimate consequence of this path, and even he in his youth had gleaned from the stones regurgitative stomach of information enough wisdom to forebear his curiosity. The Textblocks had been left behind to dispense information about the past, and became the mark of a community, where people often met to discuss things like balance of learning from the past and focusing on the future as scholars. They embraced struggle, they embraced death; only thus, in beautiful regression, did mankind truly embrace life, while obeying the rhythms of nature. The rhythms of nature. The silver foxs tail lashed triumphantly.

Im sure Yelping Beasts and creatures of their like are all extinct by now. After all, that loud
sound might very well be an inconvenience to some, and if that Beast were to to stop being disruptive despite the necessity of making sacrifices for the good of society, well, he would have to be rehabilitated. Eudaemon announced, snapping the head off the red flower with a silent sip. Just kidding. Somewhere in the distance, the collective bark of threescore dogs was mistily audible.