Epilogue

Epilogue 1.04

---Tahj---

     "Tahj!"

     A glob of glowdark goop wriggles on the ground. It makes a wet gurgling sound, like a phlegmy camel. The glob squelches and squirms in the crater resulting from the detonation. The damned thing's alive.

     "What the hell are you doing?" Comma glares at me.

     "Disgusting and beautiful at the same time," I say, still watching the goop. "Like an angel taking a dump."

     "Want to take it with us as a souvenir?"

     I shake my head. "Only an idiot would touch that stuff."

     "I'll tell you one thing," says Comma, taking a swig from her canteen. "They taste like the wrong end of a dead goat."

     I raise an eyebrow. "You've tasted that?"

     "Yep." Comma tosses back her hair—at least the bit that isn't crammed into her toque. Why the girl insists on wearing that thing when it's hotter than the devil with a fever, I will never know. "Almost got me back in the nothing. Em saved my life."

     "I meant the dead goat."

     She elbows me in the ribs. "We should get moving. Who knows how long it'll be before the glowdarks recoup."

     I reach into my backpack for my water canteen. I flip the bottle upside down and pound the bottom. Not a drop.

     Comma glances back at me. "You can have what's left of mine," she offers.

     "I'm not drinking from anything your lips have touched," I say. "You've got glowdark breath."

     Comma grins. "And let's not forget the dead goat."

     "Believe me; I haven't."

     We trudge on through the desert. Only about a mile to go until we hit the oasis. I'll just have to suck it up until then. If we're lucky, we'll run into another glowdark swarm. Nothing takes the edge off the heat like the kick you get from firing an AK. Damn near threw my shoulder out the first time. Not here though. One of the first things I learned after The End: the laws of physics don't work the same in a dead world.

     "The sun is such a buzzkill," Comma mutters, after we've travelled for five whole minutes without encountering a single glowdark. Just two apathetic cacti and a scorpion with a hangover. "How's it even still functioning? I thought this world was supposed to be dead. Doesn't that mean everything's supposed to, you know... stop?"

     "First of all, that isn't a sun," says Miu-sama. I'd forgotten she was here. She's not chatterbox-gal like when Nobu was still around. "That's a terrestrial."

     "No kidding." Comma pauses to stare at it. "I always thought they'd be bigger."

     "Um..." I wipe my brow. "Someone care to explain, for those of us who haven't taken mystical beings 101?"

     "Terrestrials are deities that exist symbiotically with dimensional hubs, or worlds, as you refer to them."

     Comma gives a low whistle.

     "What?"

     "It just occurred to me that I've already met one of those," she says.

     "Usually, terrestrials cease to exist when their world expires," Miu-sama continues. "I've never heard of a terrestrial lingering on after its world has already died. It would take a powerful magic to bind one here perpetually."