He didn't speak at first.

He didn't speak at first. 

They rarely do. 

He had dark, curly hair and a full mustache, hanging over his lip. 

He simply stared at me while I listened to snippets about General Round Mouth. It was only after the children were called off to some lesson that he spoke.

"Why are you still here?"

"You know why I'm here," I told him.

"You're done here," he told me. "You should have left three days ago. We don't want you here."

"I did not come because you wanted," I said. "I will stay until it's time for me to leave."

"You know the number," he said. "It is just as it should be."

I opened my hand and ticked off my fingers as counting, mouthing the numbers one to five. 

Then I did it again, counting six on an invisible finger.

General Round Mouth sat on a rock and looked at the sky.

General Round Mouth sat on a rock and looked at the sky.

Of course, his eyes worked differently than human eyes. They would not have seen the narrow band of light we perceive.

And the general did not use them as intended. The things we would call nerves made their impressions, but not to the residue of a brain that once controlled General Round Mouth's body.

The brain that had grown in it. 

The brain that had used that body for its survival.

General Round Mouth had found the nerve endings as it infiltrated and took over that body. It had wrapped them around a sense-tendril.

But learning to see with them would have to wait, for the body had found a rock and was desperately trying to kill its new tenant - or itself - the general didn't care. After a few minutes of pain impulses into what was left of that original being, General Round Mouth found the right nerve control to take possession of that limb.

And all opposition to the general stopped.

I know the shape of the world.

I know the shape of the world.

It is not an easy thing to know. It's been more than 800 years since the world began. In that time, people have shifted things, moved passages, made walls, torn them out. Most people live in an odd shaped room with a partly open roof for all their lives, rarely going beyond the courtyard they share with two hundred others.

I was in a place like that the first time I heard of Ey. It was told the same way, always. A few words here and there in groups of three or four boys. The Well. The Onion Heads. General Round Mouth. The death of Ey and the beginning of the world.

Every courtyard I visit, every knot of boys rubbing one word of Ey against another, they always whisper a little louder when I am around. I see their glances at me, as if to confirm that the story they tell is right, is true.

The lights flicker and they run inside, making room for another other family or a young couple or a wedding or a viewing.

That could have been my life, too. Most of the time, I wish it was.