Awake, he thought he'd slept into noon. The shade of the cedar felt too warm, and a thin vapor rose off the side of the pond like the steam that skirts a fire. The fire was the sun, so gravid and red that it confused and filled him with a terrible vision of holocaust.
A pair of joulops startled the water, and then the fog. Only fog. His face was hot but the morning was still cool. The forest made her familiar coughs and shuffles of diurnal inhabitants reluctantly limbering. Birdsong and the tang of dew reassured him. Nothing out of place in his furtive bivouac; not even a proper camp but just an embrasure in the woods that crowded a wide clean pool.
He wanted to bathe but he feared to stand juxtaposed with his reflection.
Instead he shook out his coat, picked up his little pack, and his staff. A few steps away he found two acceptable stones, fist-size and worn, and traded their places to honor Gaerigania, long dead. Eaten by a greater power.
What would he have seen in the mirror? A man and the last god? Or god and the last man?
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