Sol

Sol by boy mercury x, with graham groans

---

Chapter One.

Ask a question worth asking, I was told recently.

So. How do I write this to you, James? As your student? Your lover? Your peer—a man of science? 

I've been all of these things in turn. And at times a solitary creature with all aspects at once. Did you know it’s possible to be three things at once? It is. But it’s not always easy. 

I may share details appropriate to one of the three identities but not the others. Be patient. I'll use quotes where I can reasonably approximate what was said, and will be frank about my own responses. I know you'll agree accuracy outweighs propriety.

So how do I write this to you? I’ll begin with a palindrome. Able was I ere I saw Elba. 

Attributed in popular thought to Napoleon in exile on the island of Elba. That quote ran through my head as I drove from Seattle to Asotin, where you sent me.

Able was I ere I saw Asotin.

This wasn’t the palindrome, or a palindrome at all. But the syllables rolled over and over on my lips, like prayer beads rolling over the fingers of old Greek women. Asotin. Asotin. Ass-o-tin. Ass-of-tin, like the Tin Man in Oz, missing his heart. 

Ass. Asshole. Asshole James, fuck you very much for this trip to Asotin, I thought.

I’d always thought of Washington as a state of hi-tech effetes, drinking coffee in their dreary climate. The drear is one reason I chose to study in Seattle. I like cities, conveniences, and technology. I like the cool, and even the rain. But Eastern Washington had none of these virtues. 

At the nexus where Washington, Oregon, and Idaho abut in a jagged triangle on the map, Asotin is arid, barren, and sparsely populated. The Nez Perce native reservation is to the east and a state university to the north, and between all that a lot of desert land, baking under an omnipresent sun.

It hadn’t been a whole day yet, and already I ached for the cafes and bookstores back home, the quiet hum of the servers in the lab, and the cherry-blossoms on campus.

And though I was angry, I missed you. I missed the comfort of feeling I was yours and you were mine. I missed your bed and the silver in your chest hair and nuzzling my face in it. I missed the way you called me your boy. Even the way you used to say I have daddy issues.

But that was the exile I took hardest. The way you gently ended our sex together, just weeks ago was harder on me than I told you at the time. I put on my best face, tried hard to not care, to be simply your student.

But when you told me you were sending me to Asotin—to the ass end of the state—I felt the finality of the situation.

Of course, you couched it in a purpose: to visit your old college roommate, Gus, now a sheriff out in Eastern Washington. To help him with a mystery. It was a wonder I could help anyone, when I couldn’t even help myself.

“They’ve had a series of livestock disappearances,” you told me. “The remains that could be identified are odd. The bite marks don’t look like any known predators in the area.”

“Can they send the remains?” I asked. “There may be DNA samples, if they’re lucky. What are the police for?”

“Gus isn’t a pathologist,” you told me. “just a small-town sheriff.”

I stewed in how convenient the situation was for you—to be rid of me and help your old friend to boot.

You shared the amateur photos Gus sent, and both the images and my eyes blurred. I look at patterns for a living, James. I look at the rules of the natural world distilled into clean, indisputable data. But what was in those photos was a chaotic mess. 

There had to be state resources for such things, I bargained. Real field agents. People equipped for blood and dirt. Besides, was there no statute of limitations on the ridiculous favors you could ask after sharing a dorm room? I could have equally begged: Were there no limits on what you could ask of the doctoral student you used to fuck? But I did not.

“Ah, Gus is an old friend,” you said. “You know I can’t go myself with the new semester starting. But you can.” And this I remember very clearly. “You should, Ed. Get out. See something interesting.”

What you meant was to get me out of your graying hair for a while. Hope a little distance, even for a few days, would make the break final. What could there be of interest in Asotin?

“This will be good for you,” you said. “You’ve had very little practical experience. You can’t live in theory and academics entirely. Go get your hands dirty. It’s just a few days across state, for God’s sake. What are you afraid of?”

What was I afraid of?

It wasn’t the distance across the state, but the distance you wanted between us. It wasn’t the few days, but that there would be no us to come back to. Then you brought up bumblebees.

“You know the old wives’ tale that bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly? In 1934 or so the French entomologist Antoine Magnan wrote that he’d applied the laws of air resistance to insects, and arrived at the conclusion that their flight is impossible.”

I tried not to look at you, to grant no audience. But you went on.

“How this brief note in a scholarly book made its way into popular culture—or how it became associated with bumblebees in particular—is a mystery. But it fueled a widespread belief that bumblebee flight violates the laws of thermodynamics.”

“What does this have to do with sending me to this awful place?” I asked.

“People are so eager to dumb down the world,” you answered. “Of course bumblebee flight doesn’t violate thermodynamics. Nature does not contradict itself. If a thing exists, it is possible. The failure is not in the thing, but in our understanding. But people would rather believe in the contradiction than work to solve it.”

Your voice softened. “Ed. I want you to go see the beautiful riddle of the world. I want you to understand it, and teach us what you learn.”

I scoffed at the thought I might see anything worth teaching about in Asotin, Washington. The dry  Bermuda Triangle. You just laughed.

So began my exile. 

I packed as if for a longer and more ambitious trip—changes of clothes, cash in case, and my passport, as if going to another country. 

I wasn't reliant on the university’s meager stipends. My grandparents had left me a modest, quiet inheritance that I rarely touched, but spite is a powerful motivator. I tapped into it to buy a new Panoptes phone, with the best reception and longest battery life available. What could be worse than running out of power at the end of the earth?

Beautiful riddle of the world my ass, I said as I drove my rented car into the blinding dust.

---

Chapter Two.

I’ve wondered, though I never asked—have you ever actually been to Asotin?

Even in September, the temperature in Eastern Washington stubbornly holds in the nineties, and the sandy terrain is a ceaselessly tawny tone. The land, the jagged rock formations, even the dried, brittle grasses are coated in the exact same dust, making for a disorienting visual monotony. Ideal for a predator with the right camouflage, I observed from behind the steering wheel. A mountain lion would fare well here, practically invisible until it was already at your throat.

Asotin sits on the Snake River, serving as a natural boundary with a number of minor tributaries branching off. These include a few stubborn creeks winding through the otherwise parched earth, supporting thin, desperate strips of green grasses and minor shrubs. They attract the few animals that manage to find refuge in the modest microclimate, and crucially, some are located near the very coordinates where the livestock were said to have vanished.

The third tributary wasn't much more than a gash in the baked earth, but it held a ribbon of water shadowed by a thicket of scrub oak and twisted river willow. I pulled the rental car off the gravel shoulder. The tires crunched loudly in the dead silence of the basin. The heat made the landscape waver like a mirage. 

I didn't care about the flora. I just saw the shade. It felt less like I was pulling over to investigate and more like I was crawling into a burrow to survive the white-hot stare of the sun.

I realized quickly that, in my sheltered, Seattle-bound way, I hadn’t prepared for how overbearing the sun can truly be out here. It beat ceaselessly on my head and back like a white-hot overseer. There was nothing its burning eye did not spy, except for whatever managed to crawl into the scarce shade. A good hat and a gallon of sunblock would have served me far better than my passport on this fool’s errand.

My shirt was plastered to my back with sweat, and my skin prickled. I stripped off my heavy boots and peeled away my socks, leaving them in a pile on the dry bank. I found a large, smooth stone right at the water's edge and sat down, sighing at the simple pleasure of dangling my bare legs into the cool creek, the silt squishing gently between my toes.

I shed my shirt, dunked it into the current, and squeezed it over my head, to let the sudden chill run over my face, down my front, and my back.

As the water trickled over the subtle muscle of my flat belly, into my shorts, I closed my eyes.

James, why did you not want me? I sighed into the heat, lost in the riddle of us.

I snapped to attention at the sharp, violent crack of branches.

I realized instantly that in my search for a predator, I’d made myself easy prey. I was alone, distracted, barefoot, and unarmed. And my Panoptes phone, for all its vaunted battery life, was sitting several feet away, in the shade of a dry rock.

If you’d truly intended to be rid of me forever, James, I might have just been your most dependable accomplice.

“Hello?” I called out, clambering awkwardly to my feet, the water rushing coldly around my calves as I peered into the dense shrubs.

There was a shift in the foliage. And then, I saw eyes.

Human eyes, to my profound relief, set in a man’s face. They were black, framed by thick, dark lashes and set against striking, copper skin. They blinked once, slowly, and we made contact.

“Hello,” I said again, hastily hiking my wet shorts up.

The stranger rose from the brush—not the scramble of a man caught off guard, but with a terrifying, liquid grace. His exposed torso was carved with the lean density of a middleweight fighter. The sunlight slicked across the structural ridges of his trapezius and the slabs of his pectorals. There wasn't an ounce of wasted space on him; just gleaming skin pulled tight over deeply cut muscle.

I found my eyes tracking a bead of water as it ran down the v-line of his lower abs—an anatomical marvel of remarkable efficiency.

For a breathless second, I thought he was adjusting himself, holding his own erection, thinking I’d wandered unwelcome into some deeply socially awkward scenario. But then his arm rose defensively, and the illusion shattered.

It wasn’t any part of his own body in his grasp. It was an animal shank. Bloody, ragged, and broken.

My approach must have startled him. He had clearly just been in the creek, washing the gore of the slaughter from his skin. His face and torso were gleaming and beautifully clean, the water still running from his dark lashes. But hearing me, he must have instinctively snatched his kill back up from the bank. Now, fresh blood from the torn meat was re-smearing across his wet hands and dripping down his forearm.

I gasped in shock, a sharp intake of air, and he moved suddenly toward me. He wasn’t the mountain lion I’d feared, but in that second, I might have welcomed the cat as the safer alternative.

“Oh,” I said, stupidly, the academic reduced to a single syllable. “Excuse me.”

I stepped backward, desperate to put distance between us, and promptly tripped over my own submerged foot. I landed flat on my back in the shallows with a heavy splash and a thud. My sunglasses were knocked askew, reducing the world to a bright blur as the sun rained a barrage of arrows directly into my unprotected eyes.

Then a shadow. I flinched, throwing my hands up, bracing for the weight of him to be on me. But the attack never came.

It wasn’t the man, just a brief, sweeping darkness that passed between myself and the sun overhead, accompanied by the rushing sound of displaced air. Still flat on my back, squinting up through the glare, I saw something fantastic. A bird of prey, I thought wildly, carrying something much larger than itself. A mountain lion.

I knew from my reading that golden eagles could occasionally take down sheep or goats, but it seemed preposterous that they could take down a mountain lion—and a large one at that. It defied gravity. It defied logic. None of it made sense, and in my disoriented state, shaken by the fall, I had to deeply doubt my own sanity.

Desperate to ground myself, I shoved my sunglasses back into place and scrambled through the water to sit up, dripping wet, blinking until the bank snapped back into focus.

He was gone. The creek was entirely empty. I was alone.

My eyes scanned the trees and the tangle of shadows lining the bank. I strained my ears, listening for the crunch of a footstep, the snap of a twig, or the rustle of undergrowth that might betray where he had retreated.

But there was nothing. No signs of a hurried exit into the brush. Just the mindless, steady burble of the water washing over the stones and the distant sigh of the wind in the canopy above.

I waded out of the creek to gather my discarded clothes. As I pulled my damp shirt over my shivering shoulders, my gaze was drawn to the crushed ferns and broken branches where the stranger had just been standing.

I took a tentative step toward the foliage, peering over the trampled brush to see exactly what he had been guarding.

That was when I saw what he had left behind.

Concealed behind the thicket, lying exactly where the man had stood, was a bloody ruin of wool and meat. The shank he had been holding was just a fractured piece of the whole.

I felt the bile rise in my throat, but I forced it down, retreating instantly into the sterile sanctuary of my training. I stepped over the brush and made myself view the scene not as a slaughter, but as a data set.

The hind legs of the sheep were twisted at a disturbing angle, but it was the hollowed-out torso that demanded my focus. The ribs hadn't been gnawed; they had been sheared cleanly, the bone sliced through by three deep, parallel gouges.

I stood there in the baking heat, calculating the force required to snap bone with that kind of precision. It was a chaotic mess, yes, but beneath the blood, there was a chilling, mathematical geometry that belonged in a textbook of impossibilities.

I looked up again. In the sky, growing increasingly distant, was the presumed eagle, still carrying the weight of the lion. I did my best to mark its destination by eye, half-certain I was simply delusional, suffering from a mix of heartbreak and sunstroke.

I stared at the shredded sheep. Then, I put my boots on and got to work.

I hurried to the rental car and popped the trunk, fully intending to rip out the stiff trunk liner to serve as a shroud. To my relief, wadded up in the wheel well next to the spare tire was a cheap plastic tarp—some forgotten remnant from a previous renter.

Returning to the brush, I selected the most vital piece of biological evidence: the cleanly sheared thoracic cavity.

I wrestled the blood-heavy ribcage onto the plastic, wrapping it up into a makeshift, dripping bundle. Hauling it into the backseat of the sedan was a clumsy affair, and despite my best efforts, a streak of  dark blood smeared across my bare forearm. I slammed the door, sealing the metallic scent inside the cabin.

You know my almost feline fastidiousness. Before getting into the driver's seat, I walked right back down the embankment to the creek, and in the shallows, I began to wash. I scooped up handfuls of cold water and coarse, wet sand from the riverbed, scrubbing at my hands and arms until the dark smears vanished and my skin was raw and pink. I grabbed my damp shirt from the bank, tossing it onto the passenger seat before sliding behind the wheel.

As I drove back toward town, the smell of the abattoir filling the stifling cabin, I realized something else.

I was distracted. I was so entirely caught up in the mechanics of what I’d just witnessed, so consumed by the physical reality of that man and that sky, that for the first time in a very long time, I did not think of you at all.

---

Chapter Three.

Your friend Gus had a bemused reaction, even when I hauled the plastic tarp into his office and unceremoniously dumped the bloody carcass squarely onto his desk.

I stood there, chest heaving, my bare arm still smeared with hot blood, looking every inch a madman. "You must be Gus," I panted. “I think you’re expecting me.”

He just leaned back in his creaking chair—a sturdy, weathered man who looked like he’d seen far worse before his morning coffee. He calmly eyed the dark blood, the stench of the meat instantly filling the small room.

"Well," Gus drawled, casually sliding a stray file folder out of the splash zone. "I usually prefer folks use the evidence locker. But I suppose I needed a new paperweight. You must be Ed."

We looked at the remains together right there under the flickering fluorescent lights. Not a proper lab, by any stretch of the imagination. I can tell you only that I learned nothing we didn’t already know. The evidence remained confounding.

Whatever inflicted the harm possessed a deeply contradictory morphology. The bone scoring suggested traits both simian and feline—the striations from the claw marks extended across the ribs in a sweeping radius far beyond the biomechanical reach of any local predator. The dentition patterns were equally confounding: the crushing force of a large cat, but the incisor spread of a higher primate.

I did my best with the crude tools at hand, taking a variety of swabs and tissue samples, hoping against hope to isolate the predator’s salivary DNA left behind in the struggle, and refrigerated them. Tucking sealed plastic vials between a half-eaten turkey sandwich and a carton of milk in a sheriff's breakroom refrigerator is a terrifyingly long way from proper lab conditions, but it was the best I could do.

When I finished, I folded the bloody plastic back over the ruined ribcage. I told Gus I would drop the remind off at the state university on my way out of town for a better workup than I could manage in a sheriff's back room. The DNA swabs and tissue samples, I would personally carry back to my own lab for analysis.

He seemed somewhat surprised that I wouldn’t just cut my trip short, turn around, and take the evidence to the university immediately. Maybe I should have been surprised myself. But as I ran the violent mathematics of the day over in my head, I knew my mission had changed.

Gus sighed, pushing himself up from his creaking chair. He ambled over to a back storage closet, rattled the handle, and emerged hauling a massive, battered white marine cooler.

"Confiscated off a couple of poachers last season," Gus drawled, kicking it across the linoleum toward me. "There's an ice machine out back behind the cruisers. If we fill it up, pack your paperweight in there, and it ought to hold."

Only after the carcass was locked inside the cooler and buried in ice did I allow myself to figure out my next move.

I thought about your bumblebees, James. I thought that perhaps you were right. There was a mystery here. And it wouldn’t be solved from behind a sterilized monitor. If the answer existed, it was out there in the baking, tawny scrub of the Asotin basin.

Gus pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "You look like hell, and my office smells like it. Let me buy you a beer and a burger." I accepted.

The Mercury Hideaway Motel & Bar sat off the interstate, marked by a weathered, neon sign of the Roman god Mercury in his winged sandals—a beacon to those speeding along the isolated road. “Beat The Heat at The Mercury Hideaway.” 

The bar inside was pitch dark and icy cold, the air conditioner rattling at full blast. It was sparsely occupied—just Gus, myself, the bartender, and, tucked into a corner booth, an old man with a white beard, dark glasses, and a walking stick. He sat beside a small, humming tube TV playing cartoons, the volume turned up far louder than suited my preference. But what was I going to do? Tell a blind old man in a shithole town to turn down his programs?

Only after I had downed half a pitcher of cheap beer and devoured an entire burger with extra fries did I realize how profoundly starved and dehydrated I was. The Mercury Hideaway won’t make any culinary lists, James, but in that moment, as far as I was concerned, it was the finest meal in America. 

As the grease and salt righted my battered body chemistry, the long day receded. I felt like myself again. My vision cleared in the cool dark, and as my pulse settled, I actually took Gus in.

“Being out in the sun can play tricks on your eyes,” he told me after hearing my account of the riverbed. His words fell like cat’s feet, each syllable dropping softly, one at a time. 

I can see why you liked him, James. His wry but strangely comforting sense of humor—like you’d need to be lively, on your toes, but never on defense.

He’s good-looking too, especially for a man in his fifties—and you know my weaknesses. His hair is cropped close, just beginning to salt with gray, framing a broad, open face. He carries a bit of middle-aged stockiness, a solid, grounded weight beneath his khaki uniform, and he has a thin-lipped but undeniably pleasant smile. His eyes were pale and remarkably clear blue. 

Looking at him across the sticky laminate table, I began to wonder about the two of you, all those years ago. Were you really only roommates in college? Was that truly all there was to it?

“A naked, disappearing man and an eagle carrying a mountain lion are pretty big tricks,” I answered, keeping my tone level.

I didn’t admit it to him, but now that I was cooled off, fed, and slightly buzzed, my memory of the whole afternoon was taking on a strange, feverish quality.

Gus shrugged his solid shoulders. “Well, it seems most times the simplest solution is the right one.”

“Occam’s razor?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Sure, why not?” he replied effortlessly. “Nature operates in the shortest way possible. That’s Aristotle.” He offered a bemused half-smile as he caught the blunt surprise on my face.

“I guess I didn’t expect Aristotle from a small-town sheriff,” I replied, freely admitting my prejudice.

“Philosophy major,” he laughed, putting his hands up in mock surrender.

Of course. Gus had been your college roommate. He was an educated man who had simply chosen a different kind of life. “Those old Greeks had a thing or two to teach us.”

“Greeks took the property,” a voice piped up, raspy but loud enough to cut right over the television.

Gus sighed fondly and introduced me. The old man’s name was Ace, the uncle of the bar owner. He was one of the oldest living residents of the town, blind since childhood, and he apparently spent his days holding court in the darkened tavern. Once Ace started talking, he was hard-pressed to stop. The thick, dark glasses obscured the upper half of his face, though he tracked the conversation with an unsettling, bird-like precision, his sightless gaze pinning you down whenever you got a word in.

He spoke about the original settlers in the area, generations ago, as if he’d been among them. There had been conflict with the local tribes, a bloody stalemate that only ended when nearly all the settlers perished of some sudden, undetermined illness.

This cycle happened a few times, apparently. I assumed the tribes must have carried some pathogen to which the settlers had no immunity—though historically, that happens almost exclusively in reverse. But more settlers kept coming, and the tribes eventually diminished or moved on. The math of imperialism is an eventual, grinding certainty: numbers always overwhelm immunity.

As the old man spoke, my eyes were repeatedly drawn to the flickering screen beside him, where Tom and Jerry ran through their endless, violent cycle of antagonism.

Ace finally circled back to the land itself, claiming the regional water rights were eventually acquired by a Greek shipping-industry giant. A shipping giant in landlocked Asotin? I chalked it up to the confusion of old age. He was eager to have an audience, and I suspected he favored intriguing myth over boring accuracy. Then again, considering the mystery of biology that I’d dropped on Gus’s desk, I was hardly in a position to be a skeptic.

I eventually retired to my room for a shower and sleep. 

It was a time capsule of mid-century design, all teak and vinyl, heavily weathered and completely unchanged since the late 1950s. The Art Deco logo of the god Mercury appeared everywhere, his winged helm framed by sharp, repeating triangles—stamped on a framed print over the bed, embossed on the notepad, even on the cheap pens resting on the tiny desk. They were artifacts from the days of suburban families taking road trips in station wagons, or traveling salesmen on long, lonely jaunts.

It was a dour setting, James. But exhausted as I was, resting under the watchful gaze of the patron god of travelers and messengers, I toweled off and then spread out in my anonymous bed to jerk off.

In the quiet of the room, my mind wandered away from the aching thoughts of you. A pang of disloyalty flared in my chest—the realization of how easily I was willing to replace your memory the moment I was out of your sight. 

Instead, I thought of the man I’d seen at the creek. I thought of the  coiled danger of him, remembering the way his muscles shifted when he prepared to move, the devastating physicality of him, and the water slipping down his gleaming skin. And my thoughts shifted to Gus, his thick neck, wondering what the weight of him looked like beneath that snug khaki uniform. 

As I stroked myself, the images began to intersect, blurring together: the image of Gus pinning my hips to the mattress, sliding into me, but the torso hovering over me belonged to the stranger in the brush, his copper skin and rust colored nipples. And when I arched my neck, it was the silver of your whiskered jaw, James, that brushed against my lips. 

By the time my hips snapped up and I reached my climax, shuddering into the silence, I couldn't tell whose ghost I was trying to summon, or if I had invoked some new, hybrid creature altogether.

Afterward, I lay in the dark, the cum cooling on my stomach, my mind turning back to things far less erotic.

Something Ace had said back at the bar still gnawed at my rational mind. He’d talked about a time in his youth when all the children fell terribly sick. Wiped out nearly an entire generation, he claimed. I had asked if that was how he lost his sight, but he shook his head.

“Looked too long at the solar eclipse,” he had said, pointing a gnarled finger at the ceiling. “Straight at that old sun, naked-eyed.”

I know the medical risk of actual, total blindness from viewing an eclipse with the naked eye is vastly overstated in popular culture. But I had seen no purpose in arguing the point with him.

“That eclipse,” Ace had muttered, turning back to his cartoons. “It’s not like you think it’ll be.”

I did my best to go to sleep. I planned an early start if I was going to beat the sun.

---

Chapter Four.

I left the motel at daybreak, my canvas bag packed with water bottles, a dozen chalky power bars, and a logo pen and notepad I’d swiped from the Mercury Hideaway's desk.

I drove the rental car deep into the arid basin, navigating the sprawling, pale landscape by dead reckoning. I was tracking the general trajectory of where I thought that impossible eagle had flown, pushing the sedan until we reached a chain-link fence that finally halted my progress.

It was with equal measures of surprise and delight that I found the heavy metal sign bolted to the wire.

PROPERTY OF STAVROS SHIPPING. NO TRESPASSING.

It seemed old Ace was right about at least this, and who knew what else.

Congratulate me, James. I decided to climb it.

Does saying this was my “first” unlawful entry imply there may be more to come? I suppose it does. Once a boundary is breached, it’s hard to un-see the wild on the other side. I recalled you once saying, with that insufferably gentle tone of yours, that you thought I was "playing it safe" by being with you. That stung.

I relished the thought of telling you later how I hauled myself up that rusted chain-link, the sun-baked metal burning my palms, how I snagged and tore the hem of my shorts on the top wire, and dropped onto restricted land though a sign forbade it. I looked forward to the telling, to prove to you that I wasn’t as hopelessly safe as you thought.

Now that I’ve actually arrived at the telling, it occurs to me it may only prove you were right all along. That I had been safe, until then.

I set out into the bleak terrain with no particular direction. I wandered by intuition, looking for any signs of life. There were many times I thought I would simply give up and return to the air-conditioned sanctuary of the car. There were barren plains, and more barren plains, and patches of dormant, brittle grass, all bleeding together in the same tawny color.

Even better prepared than I’d been the day before, with rations, sunblock, and a cheap canvas hat I bought at the motel front desk, the sun was unforgiving. It beat down on the earth like a hammer. I didn’t see how any native tribe could have thrived here, nor could I fathom what a global shipping conglomerate could conceivably want with a dust bowl.

Not until I reached the ruins.

It was the heads I saw first. Immense human heads, taller than me, carved from solid stone and half-buried in the scrub. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me—a sun-baked hallucination—partly because of the heat, but also because everything was weather-worn, sun-bleached, and coated in that same tawny, camouflaging dust.

The faces on the colossal heads were eroded, but I traced the underlying geometry of their features. “What the fuck?”

They did not appear Native American; the cranial structure, the pronounced supraorbital ridges, and the remains of the noses struck me as distinctly Mediterranean or Eastern.

There were other monumental fragments scattered beyond the heads. Sections of massive, feathered wings. The heavy, clawed paws of great feline beasts. There were immense, weaving serpents carved from basalt.

While some figures stood solitary, others appeared to be entwined in explicit, carnal acts, entirely without regard to species. Feline haunches mounted human hips; eagles and snakes writhed together in rigid, stone. 

Behind all of this chaos was a structure lined with thick pillars, some still standing, and behind them, stacked slabs of rock that formed a brutal, sprawling stepped altar. It was built low and wide, crouching against the earth like an artificial mesa—the reason it had looked like nothing more than a dusty ridge until I neared it.

The scene went on for almost a mile, though the greatest concentration of the sculpture appeared to be clustered around the altar's broad base.

I walked through it all in a silent, breathless state. At first, I photographed them, my thumb sliding frantically against the screen to document the riddle. But as I wandered deeper, the sheer scale of the labyrinth overwhelmed my clinical detachment, and the phone dropped to my pocket. 

I dared to touch them instead—running my bare hand over the hot stone of the faces. I felt the sweeping curves of taut muscle on the feline backs, the rounded paws, the extended claws, and the sweeping arcs of the carved wings.

Go see the beautiful riddle of the world, you’d said. I didn’t expect to do so in Asotin.

I regretted deeply, James, that my education was so heavily weighted toward biology and so utterly devoid of the art history or archaeology required to identify or date what I was looking at. I knew only that they did not belong in the Americas. I recognized the Hellenistic pillars, but the sprawling altar seemed older, almost Babylonian. The math of it was all wrong.

I lost track of time wandering the dead city. I was profoundly glad for the new phone and its vaunted battery life. I wanted to call you. I wanted to send you the photos right then and there to prove the "beautiful riddle" existed. But though the camera worked flawlessly, I had zero signal. Even the GPS was spinning in useless circles, though I was cautiously optimistic I could track my path back to the car before nightfall.

Eventually, the heat and the heady reality of the disovery overtook me. I sat in the shade of one of the monumental stone heads, eating a power bar and drinking warm water, my back pressed against the carved cheek of a forgotten god.

I closed my eyes.

Suddenly, I was back at the Mercury Hideaway. You were there, James, and Gus was there, too. The three of us sat crowded around the booth. It seemed funny that you were there, but also completely natural.

The bartender approached to bring me my order, and placed a raw, bloody lamb shank on the sticky table. I tried to tell him I didn’t want it, but the words wouldn't come. I could do nothing but stare at the dark blood pooling on the laminate. It was deeply upsetting, so I turned my head away, only to startle.

Old, blind Ace was standing right beside my booth.

“When is the hunter the hunted?” he asked, his voice a dry rasp over the humming air conditioner.

He lifted his dark glasses. Where he should have had ruined, milky eyes, two pale, blue-white discs caught the dim light of the bar and reflected it back with a startling, luminescence. Tapetum lucidum, my sleeping brain scrambled to categorize it—the reflective retinal tissue of a nocturnal predator. It was a perfectly sound biological mechanic, but seeing that freezing, animal eyeshine set into an old man’s face, my heart seized in absolute, primal panic.

As I drew the sharp breath, my body shook itself to wakefulness.

I was back in the Asotin desert, my spine still pressed against the monumental stone head. The brutal heat had broken. It was nearing dusk.

I was entirely disoriented. I didn’t see how I could have slept half the day away, but when I considered the unusual physical exertion, and the sheer, oppressive heat of the basin, I suppose it made biological sense. If it exists, it is possible, after all.

I roused myself, my joints stiff and my legs aching, and began to make my way back. I could send word, come back better prepared. 

There were still no signs of life, but I found myself looking over my shoulder, peering anxiously around the thick pillars and blind stone heads. Their eroded features looked more ominous in the slanted light.

I reasoned that this was simply my primate brain reacting to the unfamiliar setting and the profound solitude. We are social animals, after all; we look for our kind, and when we don't find them, we invent monsters to fill the void.

But the anxiety was compounding. It felt exactly like the feeling back at the creek. I felt watched.

You know I don’t credit intuition or hunches. I am a man of data. But I must tell you, James, I felt with absolute, biological certainty that I was not alone. I can’t say there were obvious sensory cues—no snapping twigs, no swaying in the brush. But there was objective, measurable evidence if I had the presence of mind to parse it.

The sparse scrub insects that had been humming in the heat all day had gone entirely, unnervingly silent. The prey radius. Everything smaller than me in the vicinity was holding its breath.

My autonomic nervous system was hijacking my rational brain. A tingle ran over the nape of my sunburned neck as the fine hairs on my arms stood erect—a useless, vestigial pilomotor reflex from our primate ancestors, trying to puff me up against a threat I couldn't even see. 

There was a sudden shift in the barometric pressure; I could physically feel the displacement of air rolling off the hot stone. There was a constant and growing sense of something moving just at the periphery of my vision. I kept whipping my head over one shoulder, and then the other, realizing how pitifully narrow a human's forward-facing vision truly is. 

I moved quickly, weaving in and out around the shattered fragments, looking for a corner, a wall, any architectural geometry that might give me a tactical advantage.

But I was hopelessly exposed. James, I knew it in my marrow.

I was being hunted.

---

Chapter Five.

I took my backpack off, my grip tight around the top loop, ready to drop it or swing it if, heaven forbid, I had to. I tried to think of the optimal defense against a predator: Strike the soft tissue, I thought. The optical or olfactory nerves. 

I can only tell you that when it happened, the sheer kinetic violence of the ambush was entirely disarming.

I heard no steps. I saw not a single thing until the shadow dropped from the sky, and then it was far too late. I was slammed down onto a flat slab of stone, driving the breath from my lungs by an immense weight upon my back—immovable, and far stronger than me.

I thrashed and twisted. Surprisingly, the crushing mass yielded just enough to let me heave my weight over onto my back. I should have known it was the instinct of a predator allowing its prey to expose the soft tissue of the throat and belly. But in that terrified moment, I took the turn. I threw a wild, blind punch aimed upward at where a beast's snout should be, but my fist met only empty air. 

A hand caught my wrist, and with terrifying, casual strength, forced my arm back. My other flailing hand was caught by another, and both wrists were pinned high above my head against the stone. The heavy mass shifted, settling squarely over my thighs and locking me down.

As I lay there gasping,  my eyes finally adjusted.

James, if I were in your office reading this, I would assume severe dehydration or acute psychological trauma, but I swear to you as a man of science, the impossible thing I saw was real.

It was not a mountain lion. It was not a bear. It was the face of the man I’d seen at the creek, but the rest of him was a walking, breathing anatomical paradox.

His chest and torso were a study in hyper-efficient human musculature—the same sculpted tension I remembered under smooth copper skin.

But as my eyes tracked past the deep lines of his iliac furrow, the human anatomy did not simply cease; it blurred in a seamless gradient of biology. The velvet skin darkened and thickened into a tawny pelt. The musculature lengthened and shifted to form the devastating, articulated haunches of a great cat.

With a rustle, two massive, richly feathered wings flared out from his back to catch his balance. For one horrifying second, the wingspan cast me entirely in shadow. Then, they snapped tightly shut—thwump—retracting out of sight behind his spine, like a diving bird of prey.

The sudden realization of exactly how much apex predator was currently resting on top of me was terrifying.

He held both my wrists locked above my head with a single hand. His other hand planted flat against the center of my chest. The structure was hybrid—simian and opposable, but the digits were broad, the undersides padded, mimicking the silencing cushions of a lion’s paw. Thick, dark keratin talons slowly emerged and retracted from between his knuckles with liquid slowness, resting gently against my chest. 

The gravity of it compressed my sternum, making a full breath impossible—not just from his weight, but understanding what would happen if the talons resting directly over my heart decided to fully unsheathe.

“Get off!” I demanded, wriggling blindly beneath the weight of the lion half of him.

His head cocked, and his hand shifted from my chest to trace my side, slipping up under my loose shirt. I could see how the underside of the muscle of his arm was paler than the copper tanned exterior. 

With the most minor shift of his body, he stretched me further out on the stone, reading my physiological responses as if looking for something specific. He raised my shirt to expose my belly.

I thought of the carcass I’d seen at the creek, the thoracic cavity unzipped and hollowed. I remembered the dark blood smeared on his forearm. I was put in mind of how cats go for the soft belly and intestines of their prey. My cardiovascular system was racing wildly. I thought to myself, He killed the livestock, and he’ll kill you the exact same way.

My struggling only caused the pads of his hands to bear down harder against me. I was triggering his prey drive. I forced myself to stop thrashing.

James, What are you afraid of? you had asked me.

In that moment, it wasn’t fear I felt. Don’t mistake me, there was the ordinary, biological imperative. But what I felt was the frustration that I might die before understanding how this magnificent, impossible machine actually functioned. More than anything, I was consumed by a desperate, fatal curiosity.

“WHAT ARE YOU?” I shouted, still trying to wrest my wrists free from his grip.

As soon as the question passed my lips, the creature froze. His head cocked again—a sharp, distinctly animal movement—as if his mind were curling around the shape of the inquiry. His lips pursed, tightening in a very human expression, and though he didn’t set me free, I felt the tension holding me down begin to ease.

“Ask a question worth asking," he whispered.

His voice was deep, resonating in a broad thoracic cavity. It carried a trace of some accent I couldn’t place. But looking at the perfect human appearance of his throat, it made sense he’d possess the vocal folds and larynx of a man. More importantly, the fact that he could speak meant he could form complex syntax. If he could reason, he could be bargained with.

Realizing that an inquiry elicited a better response than prey-panic, I forced my racing brain to think. A question worth asking. A challenge.

Lying there, crushed beneath his weight, I gulped, my pulse hammering against the grip on my wrist, feeling with absolute certainty that the quality of my question would determine whether I lived or died. My mind felt as barren as the dust bowl around us. But then, still fresh, old Ace’s voice echoed from my sun-baked dream.

“When is the hunter the hunted?” I breathed.

Have you ever had a housecat, James? I did, growing up. If you have, you’ve likely watched them spot a bird through a window—dropping low to the carpet, pupils dilated, locked into hunter mode. But if you call their name, or make a sharp sound—tch, tch, tch—it short-circuits the predatory instinct entirely. They blink, the lethal tension evaporates, and suddenly they are looking up at you, mewing or rubbing against your shin.

That’s exactly what happened here.

The tension that had held his body as taut as a bowstring simply vanished. I physically felt the musculature of his chest and haunches uncoil, softening. His feathered wings unfurled a fraction of an inch before rustling softly and folding back.

It was as though I had suddenly bypassed his predatory hardwiring by speaking a riddle. 

His heavy brow knitted and his jaw rolled forward, weighing the syntax and the inflection. Able was I ere I saw Asotin, I ruminated in the same way on my long drive, the syllables rolling over in my head like prayer beads.

On several instances, his lips came together as if to offer a response, but he stopped each time. I was certain I could see a genuine cerebral delight sparking in his dark eyes.

Throughout it all, his hybrid body remained over mine, effortlessly holding me down, as still and immovable as the statues surrounding us.

Finally, when the silence had stretched to its absolute limit, he looked back down into my face.

"When he becomes the prize," he whispered, his voice nearly purring.

---

Chapter Six.

He shifted his weight, lifting the crushing gravity of his feline half just enough to let me breathe. He finally released my wrists, rolling partially to my side, though he kept one muscular leg thrown over my thighs to ensure I remained anchored to the dirt.

I had just watched him transition from an ambush predator into an intrigued, almost playful creature in the span of a single breath. And an undeniably beautiful one. The fascinating hybrid nature aside, at this proximity, it was impossible not to notice the striking architecture of his face—the dark, glossy curls, the lively, intelligent eyes, and the flawless musculature shifting beneath his taut, coppery skin.

But I am a biologist, James. I know that instinct is a pendulum. A creature that possesses so many distinct feline properties—one that can shift so effortlessly from deadly to docile—can snap back to lethal just as fast. I was still acutely aware of my precarious position. To keep his predatory hardwiring at bay, I knew my academic mind needed to keep him engaged.

"What is this place?" I asked, my voice trembling only slightly.

"The seat of my kin," he answered, his hybrid hand casually stroking my belly. The sheathed talons rested lightly against my skin—a tactile reminder of what he was capable of.

With my arms finally free, I slowly reached out, dragging my discarded canvas backpack over by one strap to where we lay. I pulled out a plastic bottle of water and two foil-wrapped protein bars. He looked at the shiny, synthetic wrappers with feline curiosity. I unwrapped the bar for him, my fingers peeling away the foil as though I were hand-feeding a captive beast.

The absolute absurdity of it almost made me laugh—serving mass-produced dietary supplements to an apex predator. But when he leaned in and took it from my hand, tearing into the dense nougat with the efficiency of a carnivore, the tension in the air shifted.

"Do you have a name?" I asked cautiously. "Or does a creature like you have no need for them?"

He paused. His dark eyes fixed on me, sparking with amusement at my assumptions.

"Among my kind, a name is not a simple label," he said. "It is the first inquiry a child offers the world. It must be solved before the speaker is truly known."

He studied my eyes. "In your tongue, my name asks: What lives in the sudden silence between the flash of the sky and the roar of the earth?"

I knew the atmospheric physics of a storm—light travels faster than sound. The silent gap between the two is the exact moment of impact.

"The strike," I answered, quietly.

He smiled, a terrifying, beautiful flash of white teeth in the dimming light. "Then you have solved me. You may call me Striker."

I surrendered the game and gave him my own truth. "I'm Hunter. Ed Hunter."

His head tilted, dark, ancient eyes locking onto mine as his mind unspooled the linguistic knot I had just handed him.

"Hunter," he repeated, tasting the English syllables on his rough tongue.

A deep laugh began to rumble in his broad chest. "When is the Hunter the hunted?" he whispered, understanding that it hadn't been just a riddle; it had been a nested puzzle.

He shifted his body closer, the heat of him radiating against my skin as he effortlessly answered the double meaning of my riddle. "When the Striker is upon him."

When I asked him to tell me about his people he looked out into the gathering twilight.

"When your kind were still rising from infancy,” he began, “mine was already ancient. We knew your ancestors in those early days. We walked the same lands, occasionally stepping from the shadows to interact. We would test your wisest elders with puzzles in the dark, or, when the urge took us, we would hunt your slowest stragglers for sport. But mostly, we watched you from afar. 

“To your eyes, our ways might seem simple. We did not use written symbols for words as you do; we passed our history by mouth, as I tell you this now. The land was bountiful, and what we did not gather, we hunted. We were hunters of ferocious skill, Hunter. We took great pleasure in the power and grace of our forms. Male and female alike took part, and we reared our young in the same pursuit. We never knew hunger."

He paused, his eyes tracking the movement of a moth in the twilight. "Our pastime was riddles. We had riddles for all purposes. Some were used to recount a history or a lesson. There were riddles for sport, for commerce, for challenge. We would mull over the precise wording of a single inquiry for generations to perfect it. Among my kindred, a child’s first words were not mother or father, but who or where or what or why. Feuds were resolved with the proper challenge, and lovers were wooed with the same. So was our life for countless seasons, unchanged as the plains... until the Lord of Oaths—the Cloud-Gatherer—came."

His expression darkened, his brow knitting together.

"Knowing no better, we made agreements and arrangements with him, sealed with riddles of honor. It was his White-Armed sister-wife who first recognized the perfection of our hunt. She plucked one of my sisters from the plains and placed her at the gates of a defiant mortal city to punish its king. And when the Cloud-Gatherer saw the absolute, paralyzing terror my sister wrought, his own interest was roused. He realized exactly how we could be used.

"He did not value our minds, only our lethal properties. He saw how our kind could blockade roads and choke the life from your walled cities, demanding impossible answers and slaughtering mortals when they failed. It is why your ancient tongues named us Sphinxes—the Stranglers. He did not see scholars, he saw an army. 

“He descended upon us with his storms, forcing our elders to swear fealty under the threat of destruction. He pressed us into service—a drafted legion kept in reserve, bound in pacts of blood and lightning for some dark time-to-come. We were diminished."

My academic mind desperately scanned what I knew of human history, wondering if that apocalyptic deployment had already occurred during some bloody collapse of antiquity, or if that drafted legion was still waiting in reserve—an ancient weapon that had yet to be fired.

"So we gathered for the greatest convocation my people had ever known," Striker continued, his tail twitching in the dust. "We did not cast votes, Hunter. We posed the three final riddles of our homeland."

"The first third of my people asked: How does the prey hide from the all-seeing eye? They answered by shedding their true forms to hide among your kind. They pruned their wings and softened their limbs to mimic your tongue, your manners, your fragile appearance. They left our kindred forever to blend in, to breed with your kind."

My mind snagged on that detail: To breed with your kind. If viable interbreeding was possible, it rewrote every rule of taxonomy. It meant we were genetically compatible. It meant that beneath the geometry of his body, we shared a fundamental chromosomal bridge—and that ancient DNA had been quietly filtering into the human gene pool for millennia.

"The second third asked: Where does the lightning fail to strike?" he continued. "They answered by filtering away into the deepest, darkest places to form small prides, hiding from the Cloud-Gatherer’s notice to live in a semblance of freedom.

"And the final third asked: What is the only way to outlast a god? They answered by leaving his domain altogether. It was my people who made the Great Migration into the unknown. It was a perilous travel over a distance greater than you can imagine. Many died. But once the answer was given, we had no choice. Those who survived settled here, at Trail’s End. We thought we could hunt and spin our riddles in peace."

I listened, struck by the stark, pragmatic science of it all. Striker’s people hadn't just asked philosophical riddles; they had executed the exact imperatives of a species facing an overwhelming apex threat: adapt, hide, or flee. It was a cold, flawless evolutionary defense wrapped in the poetry of an ancient myth.

He let out a short, bitter huff of air. "But we should have asked: How far does the sky extend? For the eye of the sun was still upon us. It parched the terrain, driving the game away. We weakened. And then the Cloud-Gatherer and his kind came to herd us. They brought thunder and lightning. This is how we hunters became the hunted. His sons herded us like tame beasts, taking us from here to the Great Reserve, where we have been ever since."

He turned to me. "We weave weak riddles there, Hunter. We pace. We have few young. We listen to the mortal wardens who patrol the boundaries. We dissect their chatter, turning your words and your syntax into puzzles just to stave off the madness of the silence.

“To test the sky is to invite the Far-Shooter's arrows. Some at first tried to break the perimeter; none survived. I stole away under the blinding cover of a storm, coming first here to our second home to build my strength. 

“I am a creature who has never known his true home. I know it only through the riddles of my elders—the lay of the earth and the corridors of the sky, woven into verse so that we would never forget the way back. 

“I intend to reverse the Great Migration. I will return to the homeland alone. If I survive the journey, I will search the hidden places to see if the descendants of those small prides still live free. If I have a family left to find."

The weight of his exile settled heavily on his shoulders.

"But it is a cruel thing for my kind to be solitary," he whispered. "We are creatures of the exchange. To possess a mind built for the challenge of the riddle, and to have no one to answer... it is a slow starving of the spirit. I did not know how deeply I felt that starvation until a riddle escaped your lips. It was not a true riddle, Hunter—it was a childish effort. But you cannot know how my heart beat to hear it. To find, even for a moment, that I was not alone in the dark."

I felt a flash of academic pride—childish?—but it was immediately swallowed by the gravity of his gaze. I thought of my own agonizing exile from you, James. I thought of the devastating, echoing silence of a mind that has no one to answer it.

Striker’s posture suddenly stiffened. The musculature of his chest locked down, and his ears twitched at a frequency I couldn’t hear.

"My escape does not sit well with the Cloud-Gatherer," he said, his voice dropping to a flat, dangerous register. "His son, the Far-Shooter, tracks me. The Lord of the Silver Bow is always close behind."

He looked down at me, the brief, sorrowful warmth of our exchange vanishing into the cold vigilance of an animal on the run. "When is the hunter the hunted? When the Striker is the quarry. Before he arrives, I must depart."

His confession hung in the cooling desert air. I looked at the raw power of him. He wasn't just an evolutionary riddle. He was a fugitive, crossing the world in the desperate hope of finding his family. And as I sat there with him, my academic mind finally gave way to something older and much more human.

James, who knows what the antelope truly feels when the lion is finally upon it? Terror, we assume. But are the mechanics of fear and arousal not similar enough that there may be a flooding, chaotic sense of both? 

Ridiculously, I thought of gay men in an earlier, darker day than mine, trying to find each other. Cruising in unlit parks, wondering if the shadow you locked eyes with intended to fuck you, or to kill you. Guess wrong at the risk of your life. I’d always been glad to have come of age in a more liberated time, but I wondered if there was a dark, consuming intensity to that moment that might have fueled and perpetuated it.

Because here, on this ancient stone, my fear and my desire worked together until the drum pulse in my ears was the only sound I could hear.

He felt it too. Or sensed the hammering under the palm he kept against my sternum. I watched the sharp twitch of his flared nostrils as his olfactory senses parsed the spike of my adrenaline, recognizing the  musk of my arousal.

I dropped my gaze. With his weight shifted partially onto his side, he widened his stance. The heavy spread of his feline limbs exposed the sleek, protected underbelly lower down, far beneath his human torso. There, no longer concealed by the muscle of his thighs, was the unmistakable, thick swelling of his own arousal.

I had braced myself for the retrograde keratin barbs that make feline copulation so notoriously violent, but his anatomy was smoothly mortal. His erection was entirely human in shape—thick and heavy, but blessedly free of any terrifying, feral exaggerations. 

“When is the hunter the hunted?” I breathed.

He understood the surrender. A low vibration rumbled beneath his pecs, and the amused spark in his eyes flared into something infinitely darker. He didn't answer with words. Instead, the coiled tension in his arms yielded, and he leaned his human torso down, butting his head against mine.

---

Chapter Seven.

Up close, I could see that structurally, his face was a living mirror of the colossal carved heads surrounding us. The sharp, blunt cheekbones; the angled sweep of his eyebrows. 

I reached up and ran my thumb along his jawline. It was perfectly smooth, like warm marble—no signs of a man's scruff, smooth as his chest and belly. His kind might be incapable of growing it, or—despite the density of his physical maturity—he might actually be still in his youth.

My hand explored his human torso. I ran my palms down the gradient of his back where the human blurred into the beast. The tawny pelt rose much higher up the ridge of his spine than it did on his front, leaving the smooth copper of his chest and belly as the lighter underside. The fur ran as smooth as silk when stroked in one direction, and abrasively scratchy when stroked in the other. That tactile friction prompted the Sphinx to twist his neck, shivering as if I were both causing and relieving a great itch. His wings shifted at his shoulders, twitching.

He reached up to slide two thick fingers into my mouth. I felt the smooth slide of his padded skin, carefully keeping the dark talons housed safely between his knuckles, and I let myself suck on them, gliding them in and out between my lips. 

Looking down again, I could see his cock twitch too. Clear Cowper’s fluid streaming from his slit in the crown. My academic mind categorized the secretion—a biological adaptation to neutralize acidity and provide vital lubrication—even as the heavy, viscous drops streamed.

Lifting my hips, I hooked my thumbs into the waistband of my damp shorts and shoved them down my thighs, letting my own erection spring free. I kicked away my heavy boots and shorts and pulled my shirt over my head. And there we were, naked together.

He glanced down and grinned—a shockingly human expression. I swear to you, James, his cock throbbed visibly, and a gush of fluid surged out of him. He lowered his face back down to mine, and when his tongue entered my mouth, I was somehow not surprised at the rough, beautiful sandpaper texture of it.

In the last of the daylight, he reached a powerful hand under my back and effortlessly flipped me around onto my belly. Through the shadows, I could see the copulating statues looming nearby. Without a second of hesitation, I lifted my own rear up to mimic them, offering myself for him to take.

He moved to crouch back on feline haunches and pulled my hips back with his hands. He shoved his face in against my cleft, lapping at my entry with that rough, sandpaper tongue as if tasting a kill. He gnawed and rubbed his jaw hard against my ass, and then—James, I can only say he devoured me. His rough tongue scraped up against my skin and then nudged inside, exploring with greater strength and zeal than anything I’ve ever felt.

You know the biology. A feline tongue is coated in stiff, backward-facing papillae designed to strip flesh from a carcass. But applied here with such deliberate focus, the brutal friction became a transcendent sensory overload. The force of his jaw, combined with the hot, abrasive drag of his tongue felt like being consumed from the inside out, sending shockwaves radiating through my pelvis until my higher brain functions simply shut down.

When I was left quivering and gaping, he made his way up my spine, biting and teasing along the way. But as eager as he’d been to burrow into me with his tongue, it was the back of my neck that triggered his deepest instincts. He was on me with teeth and tongue, his thick fingers burying gently but firmly into the muscles of my shoulders, the smooth keratin of his retracted talons pressing flat against my skin.

I could feel the sharp, threatening edge of his incisors against the nape of my neck—a predator gripping his mate by the scruff—followed by the smooth firmness of his jaw as it rolled against me. He nuzzled and gnawed so eagerly, emitting low, rhythmic breath, that I found my own groans getting louder and louder, echoing in the hot desert air.

Then, his hands released my shoulders, gliding heavily down the length of my back until his broad palms clamped over my hips, locking my pelvis firmly in place against the stone. With his teeth still grazing my scruff, the hyper-dense mass of his torso dropped flush against my spine. I felt the muscular fluidity of him as his body rolled over mine, the coiled tension of his feline half perfectly mimicking and preparing for the rhythm of the act itself.

He moved quickly, sliding his rigid cock along my cleft, gliding up and then down in a smooth humping motion. The heavy, blunt head pushed between my cheeks, smearing the entry with his glossy Cowper’s fluid, and I was glad he’d spent so much time preparing me with his tongue, because there was a building urgency to what was coming— what we both wanted, and exactly where we were going.

I debated telling you all of this, and in such graphic detail. But in weighing what we were to each other against your inherent interest as a scientist, I leaned toward the latter. You are, first and foremost, a man of science. Your inquisitive, nimble mind is what I liked first and foremost about you, and what I do still.

And yet… is this all truly for the sake of science? I hope you won’t feel I’m being sadistic in the telling. Or, if I am, that it’s of a playful, not vindictive sort.

I was up on my elbows, my rear raised up to meet his stance, when he pushed into me in a single blunt thrust. The viscous precum acted as a natural lubricant, allowing him to slide deep into me with a frictionless heat—all pressure but no burn.

I gasped, profoundly glad he shoved only that far, and that he held his weight in check with perfect control. From there, he let me ease my way backward onto him, slowly wriggling my hips back and forth as my body stretched to accommodate him.

His feline half adopted a wide stance, the paws ripping the stone as he withdrew and pushed in again. As he drove into me, he let his broad chest rest flush against my back and his rough tongue lapped at the back of my head, my ears, the nape of my neck. 

His width filled every millimeter of space inside me; the relentless strikes and drags hit every internal nerve ending. His human cock was driven by the power and angle of his massive feline hips, thrusting with a muscular fluidity that completely overwhelmed my executive function. And then I felt it—the sudden grip  of his long tail looping securely around my ankle, constricting like a python to anchor me in place with every deep plunge.

It didn’t last long, James, but the intensity was greater than anything I have ever known. 

Even as my vision blurred, even as the pleasure crested, my academic mind—that stubborn, arrogant thing—noted I was experiencing the raw, evolutionary mechanics of a living myth, documenting it in the most intimate way imaginable.

In our animal rut I reached down below my angled hips to stroke myself, struggling to not climax before he did. I wanted to feel the exact moment it happened. I wanted to feel him breeding me.

I knew that in any purely feline species, the final moments of copulation are the most volatile. The male clamps down on the scruff with paralyzing force, an evolutionary imperative to immobilize his mate and protect himself from their panicked aggression. As his thrusts grew harder and faster, I braced myself for his jaws to lock entirely, for the beast to completely take over.

But he didn't.

Instead, he threw a heavy, muscled arm around my neck, his padded broad hand clutching at my pec. His head dropped to hold the crook of my neck in his teeth, never breaking the skin as the pace of his hips became urgent—frantic, overlapping/ 

He stiffened impossibly in me, pushing even deeper into my core, with a loud roaring groan as flooding me. His broad hand kneaded fiercely into my chest, paralyzing my upper body in a flawless adaptation of that ancient instinct. My own cock jumped in my fist, pumping out hot, blind gushes of semen onto the ancient stone.

He stayed stiff in  me, his  climax lasted much longer than mine, cumming in thick blasts. Each pulse shook his frame, his human torso and feline muscles tensing and trembling. Even when he was finished, the ferocious energy completely bled out of him, a series of exhausted tremors radiating through his chest. 

He slid down just enough to press his lips against the nape of my neck, gasping and chuckling. He left a string of soft, remarkably human kisses against my skin, and with a slow groan, he shifted his massive hips backward, the thick, heavy length of him sliding smoothly out of me. 

The sudden absence left an aching emptiness deep in my core, and I could feel myself gaping at the cool night air, my muscles instinctively clenching where the rigid girth of him had been just moments before.

He rested on his side, pulling me flush to his damp chest, kissing me again with that rough tongue, slower and softer this time. A heavy, furred thigh draped over my hip, and his tawny tail firmly flicked at my ankle. As if to complete the picture of his hybrid anatomy, he unfurled one of those massive, feathered wings and draped it entirely over us, a living canopy trapping our body heat against the cooling desert air.

---

Chapter Eight.

The logistics of being spooned by a Sphinx, James, are something I suspect no textbook will ever adequately cover.

I was completely cocooned in our shared heat, until sheer biological necessity forced me to rise. I carefully disentangled myself and retreated into the shadows of the ruins to purge myself of the Sphinx’s semen. At that moment I was more shuddering but sated animal than scientist.

When I stumbled back in the chill of the desert night, he simply reached out and pulled me back against the furnace of his body. I surrendered, rolling onto my back against him, and a deep, dreamless sleep finally followed.

I awoke to a dry mouth, a rhythmic, crystalline tink-tink sound that suggested glass wind-chimes in a light breeze—and the weight of a god resting on my chest.

The face of the figure standing over me was obscured by the full, blinding white light of the sun, positioned so precisely behind his head that it created a localized eclipse. His long, dark-brown leg stretched down to a sandal-clad foot planted squarely in the center of my sternum, pinning me flat.

He wore very little—only draped, fluid fabrics in shifting shades of hammered gold and dark bronze that hung low on his tapered hips, and a thick strap of pale leather cutting diagonally across his broad, naked chest. Facing me were three arrowhead-tips glinting with a terrifying, solar brilliance, leading back to a bow of pure, bone-white composite held in steady, powerful hands.

“Striker?” I asked, but it was painfully plain this was not him. This was the one he feared. The Lord of the Silver Bow.

I couldn’t make out the archer’s features in the silhouette. He was tall—taller, in fact, than any man has a right to be. He stood in a classical poise, with shoulders that seemed to span the horizon. His skin was the color of deep, polished mahogany, and though I could not see his face in full, I could see he was beautiful, James. But it was a hard, geometric beauty.

He didn't move like us. There was no wasted effort, no human clumsiness to his gait. When he lifted his bow, the shift in his weight was a silent, smooth transition. He looked me over for a moment with a detached, clinical curiosity. He didn't see a threat, or even prey. He saw a nuisance. A common, crawling garden pest.

His foot lightened, and he turned to leave as if I were a biological specimen entirely beneath his notice—not even worth the friction it would take to crush me under his heel.

He walked with terrifying purpose through the ruins. His hair was a cascade of dark, heavily oiled curls. Woven over and directly into the plaits was a complex, regal headpiece—a shimmering net of gold threads and reflective glass beads that caught and refracted the blinding sunlight, chiming with every flawless step. Tink. Tink.

I jammed my feet into my unlaced boots, grabbed my shirt and clambered up to follow the crowned stranger. “Hey! HEY!” I called. 

His head turned slowly from east to west, searching for the fugitive. 

I fumbled with the belt of my shorts, my stomach cramping with sudden hunger. I called after him again, hoping Striker would hear the warning. As I neared him, I saw the deep bronze of his naked back—supple, gleaming, as if the skin itself was the result of a thousand layered golds. I reached out to touch his shoulder, but just as my hand neared him, he spun.

The glass beads jingled, and I felt a deep, instinctual impulse to turn my eyes away. I fell to my knees, the three arrows leveled at me once more.

“My arrows I will not hold a third time,” he said.

His voice was deep and melodic, carrying the resonance of a cello, but I realized with a start that I wasn't hearing the sound with my ears. My eardrums didn't vibrate. Instead, the resonance seemed to strike at my very DNA, a prehistoric frequency that my cells translated into words. It was a command encoded directly into my biology.

I kept my head bowed, my hands raised in surrender, as the chiming beads in his hair came to rest. He turned away again, leaving me alone on the pale sand.

When he had gone a few steps, I rose and backtracked, desperate to find Striker first. I ran between the monumental heads and the stone wings, whispering his name into the baking heat. I found him in the deep shadow on the dark side of the stepped altar.

“He’s here,” I whispered, breathless.

Striker didn't look up immediately. He was crouched low, one claw extended, carving a jagged, precise series of lines into the sand of the altar floor. It took me a moment to realize he wasn't just defacing the ruin. He was drawing a topography.

It wasn't a human map. There were no roads or borders. It was a bird's-eye view of the world as seen from thousands of feet up. He had charted the spines of mountain ranges, the twisting, reflective ribbons of rivers. He had swept the sand completely away, leaving the smooth, dark basalt of the altar exposed to form a vast sea basin choked with a sprawling scatter of tiny sand islands.

I couldn’t know how long it had taken him to translate his people’s riddles into a visual I could understand, though I felt the delay had cost him his chance at freedom.

His great, feathered wings folded tight against his spine, and I thought I saw the tension in his shoulders. The brutal physics of his own body, James—to launch a mass that size from a dead stop must require precious seconds of unhindered momentum. Seconds the archer would never grant him.

“When is the son the sun?” he asked me in a low, vibrating growl.

I didn’t take his meaning. Not yet. 

But that moment, I abandoned every biological instinct of self-preservation I possessed. I knew exactly what I was standing against—the Lord of the Silver Bow, the Far-Shooter—and I knew what it might cost me.

I grabbed Striker’s thick hybrid wrist. 

"I'll distract him," I said, my voice shaking but certain. I shed the clinical logic—there was only the reality of keeping him free. "I'm going to get his attention. As soon as he turns to me, you run. You launch. You do not look back."

Striker searched my face, his ancient, dark eyes widening at my fragile human audacity.

“When is the hunted the Hunter?” I asked, inverting his earlier riddle.

A slight, sad smile ticked at the corner of his mouth. He understood. I was turning to face the apex predator of the heavens to buy the Sphinx a head start.

“Go!” I urged, pressing my palms one last time against the hard, smooth muscle of his chest.

I turned and ran back into the daylight, throwing myself like a foolish decoy across the archer's path. I darted toward a shattered pillar, waving my arms to make myself as erratic a target as possible.

"Hey! Over here, you giant prick!" I screamed, my voice a raw, primal sound designed to draw his focus.

I ran to loop around him, to draw him away, but his stride was massive and terrifyingly fast. I nearly crashed right into his chest, falling to my knees.

Looking up, the sun was again positioned directly behind his head, a blinding halo that burned the edges of my vision. It seemed to move with him. That was when the logic finally clicked. When is the son the sun? When he is the son of the Cloud-Gatherer, and the god of light and the sun itself.

An overwhelming, primal panic seized my nervous system—the absolute, biological imperative that forces a human to avert their eyes from a burning star. I remembered blind Ace. The eclipse isn’t like you think it will be. To look directly into his naked face was to invite permanent blindness.

I squeezed my eyes shut and threw my head away from the glare, paralyzed, but felt the sleight weight in my pocket. 

I fumbled the phone from my pocket and dragged my thumb across the lock screen, swiping blindly for the camera shortcut. It opened and I thrust the device upward between us like a shield, cracking my eyes open just enough to squint at the screen instead of the god.

Through the digital barrier of the viewfinder, the blinding solar output was reduced to a grid of glowing pixels. My trembling thumb slipped, the shutter clicked.

A harsh, blue-white strobe of LED flash fired directly into the god's face.

In the brilliance of the desert, the tiny bulb should have been invisible. But at this range, the artificial frequency acted like a digital stutter against the golden curtain of the sun—a flickering, man-made glitch.

Through the screen, I saw the archer’s mahogany features twist in a sudden frown. He flinched, raising a magnificent, bronze arm to shield his eyes, halting his lethal pursuit for a fraction of a second.

That was the window.

I jammed my thumb down on the shutter button, strafing sideways in the dust. I fired a rapid strobe of flashes. "Look at me, God damn it" I hissed. The god bared his teeth, his arm raised against the glare, while I did everything I could to keep his irritated focus anchored entirely on me.

There was a sudden displacement of air—the sound of heavy, feathered wings snapping taut against the sky. A sudden, immense darkness swept over us—not an eclipse, but a shadow, cast from high above.

I looked up with my naked eyes, and James, I finally saw him. Not the fleeting, disoriented glimpse I had caught from my back in the creek shallows, but the absolute reality of him. 

Striker was directly overhead, unrestrained and magnificent in the full glare of the desert sky. He was a single, great beast—the massive haunches of a tawny lion, the noble, muscular torso of the man I had held, and the wings I had slept beneath unfurled to their full span.

As I rose to my feet, as the archer recovered with terrifying speed. His bow arm turned up in a perfect, lethal arc. He pulled back the three arrows, taking aim at the golden Sphinx soaring above us.

In the microsecond before he could release them, I lunged. I dropped my shoulder and drove my entire weight hard into his side, throwing his aim.

The arrows flew askew, whistling like falling stars.

I fell to the ground a third time, gasping in sudden agony. The brief collision left my shoulder seared and blistering, the god's raw, solar heat having burned straight through my cotton shirt.

But when I looked up, I saw Striker sweep upward in a majestic arc, his powerful wings pulling him higher, then away. He flew with strong, steady beats. To the east. Toward a home he had never seen.

The archer stood perfectly still as the sky swallowed his prize.

I braced for him to load another arrow, terrified he would aim and shoot again. But he didn't. To scramble for a desperate, hurried shot, I sensed, was the messy panic of a mortal. He was the Far-Shooter. He demanded perfection, and I had fouled it. To him, the shot was already over.

For a terrifying second, the ambient heat of the desert violently spiked. The air around us shimmered in an undulating wave. The beautiful, geometric perfection of the god’s face had hardened into a mask of absolute malice.

He slowly turned his gaze down to me. I could see I was no longer just a nuisance. I was a mortal who had touched him, blinded him, and ruined the hunt of a god.

Standing over me, he reached over his shoulder with frictionless grace, loaded a fresh arrow, and pulled the bone-white string taut. The solar arrowhead found its aim directly over my racing heart.

"My arrows," the archer whispered, but the cello-resonance of his voice sharpened in my bones, "do not return to the quiver unspent."

I pushed back with my feet, dragging my back on the sand. I reflexively held the Panoptes phone up again to shield my eyes. Suddenly, the screen flared with a clinical warning: Your phone is overheating. Sleep mode activating. The screen went black. 

“Oh fuck,” I cursed. 

The bizarre circumstance of my own death added up. I was a  biologist who preferred the dreary rain and steamy cafe windows to arid landscapes, about to be executed by an ancient sun god in a rural dust bowl, and absolutely no one would ever know.

And then, James, I laughed. What else could I do?

The archer drew the string back further, beginning a chant of execution: “I, Apollôn, Python-slayer, Leto's glorious son, Lord of the Silver Bow, light-bringer—”

Then, a thunderous clap shattered the silence of the landscape.

I thought he’d released the arrow, that I was dead. But the string was still taut.

“‘For thou surveyest this boundless aither all, and every part of this terrestrial ball,’” a voice barked from my right.

It was Gus. “That’s the Hymn.”

He had none of the archer's alien grace. He was impossibly real, standing there in his tan police uniform, armpits damp with sweat. He was stocky, dense shoulders filling out the cotton of his shirt, his pistol extended. He had, I gathered, fired a warning shot into the air, and his gun was now aimed directly at the archer’s head.

We formed a lethal triangle in the dust: Gus with his service pistol, myself on the ground with a dead phone, and the sun god towering over us, bow arm extended. 

Apollôn's blazing eyes darted from Gus down to me. The glass beads in his dark plaits let out a crystalline chime as the tip of his loaded arrow shifted effortlessly back and forth between my chest and Gus's head. He held the tension perfectly, evaluating which insect to swat first.

Gus held his ground, cocking his jaw at the god. “Hold it right there, Apollôn.”

I could almost feel him wink behind his shades. He didn't yield an inch.

“Don’t look him in the face, Gus!” I shouted, shielding my eyes.

“No worries,” Gus replied, his gun steady. The reflection glinted on his mirrored glasses—the perfect, modern shield.

“You don’t understand,” I shouted in disbelief. “He’s the sun—”

"The sun’s no god, Ed, just a hot rock,” Gus replied, sweat pouring down his face. His mouth turned up in a half-smile. “That’s what Anaxagoras said."

The archer snorted. The sound of his exhalation was pure, cosmic contempt. To him, Gus was just another gnat armed with a primitive toy, unworthy of a hunter of his stature. He scoffed, raising his bow higher, pivoting to smite Gus first.

While he had been evaluating Gus, the Panoptes phone had been resting in my grasp, against my sweat-soaked chest. I’m not a physicist but I know basic thermodynamics. The moisture of my skin had acted as a thermal sink, pulling just enough heat out of the glass and metal to drop the device a fraction of a degree below its critical threshold.

I felt the chassis vibrate against my ribs as the screen flickered out of sleep mode.

I didn't have a weapon, but I had a lens.

I lifted the phone, using the screen to frame the god in the shot.

“Smile, you dumb fuck,” I rasped, my mouth bone-dry.

As his eyes turned to me, I tapped the shutter. The camera flash engaged right in the archer's face. The lithium battery swelled, and the circuitry began to scream—a high-pitched mechanical shriek.

A wave of pure heat and light—far greater than anything the tiny battery could produce—erupted like a supernova. The world dissolved into roaring, white-hot static.

Somewhere inside that catastrophic glare, Gus’s gun fired—a sharp crack, muffled by the explosion. Then a second.

The phone scorched my hand. I cried out and let it fall onto my chest.

Then, under the burning sun, eyes wide open, darkness settled over me. Darkness, absolute.

Ace’s warning rang in my skull. The eclipse isn’t like you think it will be. I squeezed my sightless eyes shut.

Certain my retinas were permanently burned, I tried to commit one last piece of visual data to memory: the specific endless blue of the Asotin sky, and the arc of Striker flying free within it. I held onto that image, refusing to let the dark take it.

---

Chapter Nine.

Slowly, the world bled back in—not in a rush of color, but in purple and neon-green afterimages that danced across my eyes like ghostly bacteria under a microscope. Then the vast, indifferent universe opened over me again as my rods and cones struggled to recalibrate.

Gus was there, standing in the dust—at first, a blurry silhouette, but as my vision cleared, I saw the steady rise and fall of his chest. The pistol was lowered now, the barrel pointing at the scorched earth.

“Ed?” Gus’s voice was muffled, as if faraway. “You still got your eyes, buddy?”

I sat up, tentatively touching my face. My skin felt tight, wind-burned, but I could see the individual grains of sand on the pads of my fingers.

“Yeah,” I croaked, my voice sounding foreign to my own ears.

With Gus’s help I scrambled onto my feet.

The archer was gone. The only evidence of his presence was a circle of sand—the silica melted into a jagged, glass-like crust.

As Gus kicked sand over the spot where the archer had been, I grabbed the strap of my backpack, dragging it weak-kneed toward the deep shadow.

I found the spot. The lines were still there, etched into the layer of sand coating the ancient basalt.

I reached into the backpack and pulled out the notepad and the ballpoint pen I’d swiped from my room. My hands were trembling, but I forced my fingers to work, charting the aerial topography Striker had left me with  the Mercury Hideaway branding pen and paper. 

Gus watched me in silence. When it was done, I dragged my hiking boot across the stone floor, rubbing out the etching until the sand was smooth once more. We left together in his cruiser, abandoning my rental car for the moment.

The ride back to the Mercury Hideaway was a blur of rattling shocks and the smell of Gus’s stale coffee. I picked up the half-full cup from the console and gulped the warm dregs down. Gus didn't ask questions.

When we stumbled into my motel room, the artificial hum of the window AC unit sounded like a miracle. It was the most beautiful mundane space I had ever seen.

Gus sat me down on the edge of the sagging mattress. He’d brought his first-aid kit from his cruiser. He helped me ease my ruined shirt over my head, then knelt beside me, gently dabbing at the blistering skin on my shoulder where the god's heat had scorched right through the fabric.

"That’s a deep one," he muttered, carefully cleaning the raw burn.

His hands were thick and calloused, but moved with the methodical certainty of a man used to cleaning up other people's disasters. He reached into the kit, unscrewed a tube of medical-grade burn jelly, and squeezed a cold dollop onto my skin.

I watched his face as he worked on the bandage. The soft, tired lines around his eyes, ringed with pink where his sunglasses had been. He wasn't a god. He was a middle-aged man who had stepped between a biologist and a deity.

An overwhelming imperative seized me. I didn't want to think about apex predators or foreign gods. I wanted the soft, mammalian reality of my own species.

I reached out, grabbing the damp collar of his uniform, and pulled him hard against me.

The kiss wasn't smooth or romantic. Our noses bumped. My chapped lips scraped against his stubble, and the shift in weight knocked the plastic first-aid kit off the bed, sending bandages clattering onto the floor.

Gus’s breath hitched against my mouth in surprise, but it didn’t stop us. He brought his hands up to grip the sides of my face and kissed me back with a clumsy fervor, as if he, too, needed to prove to himself that we were both still alive and breathing.

The mechanics of it were wonderfully awkward, with no feline fluidity. When Gus shoved me backward onto the bed, the coil springs of the mattress squeaked out loud. We fumbled with each other's clothes, our hands snagging on cotton and stubborn zippers.His uniform shirt came off sticky with sweat; underneath, his chest was broad and fleshy, dusted with graying hair. The brass buckle of his police duty belt hit the floor with an unceremonious clank that made us both flinch and then laugh. 

When we finally stripped away the barriers, there was no mythic dominance. There was just the awkward, shifting friction of two human men trying to fit their bodies together on a motel bed. Gus was solid and soft around the middle, his belly warm as it pressed into mine. My bandaged shoulder rubbed against the scratchy polyester bedspread. 

When I pulled him closer to enter me, it wasn’t the strange unassisted mounting of Striker. It took the cool slickness of the burn-jelly he’d applied to my shoulder, and patience. Gus’s thick fingers pushed into me, two at first, then three  while he murmured against my ear, “You sure?” The stretch was slow and so fucking tender I could have cried.

"I'm fine," I gasped, my arms tightening around his neck, anchoring my hands in the damp hair at the nape of his neck. "Don't stop."

He positioned himself, slipped against me and adjusted. And when he finally pushed into me, there was no  alien width, no  fluidity driven by a feline spine. Gus was just a man—his cock thick enough to make me feel full, pinned to the squeaking mattress. The impromptu lube made squelching sounds with Gus’s thrusts. 

But the honest weight of his middle-aged body working hard grounded me more completely than any myth ever could. My grunts were muffled against his shoulder, my legs pulled up around his sides as he shifted to find the right angle, hips stuttering when he got it right. His belly rubbed against the slick underside of my cock, teasing my climax.  

When it ended, there was no chest-rattling roar. There was only my cock spurting through my fist onto my belly in hot, messy pulses, and the wheezing exhale of an exhausted cop as his hips slammed once, twice, and he grunted a load deep inside me. He dropped onto my chest, and after a minute of hearing each other’s breathing, he slid out of me. 

I felt the warm spill of him leaking out of me as he dropped to his side. We lay there under the harsh, fluorescent light, skin cooling where it was slick with sweat and cum and burn-jelly. My burns ached, my eyes stung.

The world had fundamentally broken its own rules. But as I felt the human drumming of his heart against my chest, I filled with a soaring, giddy disbelief.

We had survived.

Then the hunger hit, hard and fast. We washed off in the cramped, lukewarm shower and dressed. I was starving. We walked next door to the bar and took a small table in the corner.

As we ate, I had to keep my arm stiff against my side. The blistered skin of my shoulder was tight, the pain now feeling very real and very permanent.

“That’ll scar,” he said quietly, nodding to my shoulder. “A reminder.”

“I don’t think I’ll need a reminder,” I replied.

Behind him, Ace sat by his television, Wile E. Coyote still in pursuit of the Road Runner.

“Are we going to talk about what happened back there?” I asked, finally. “I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. How did you find me?”

“Saw your rental car parked at the Stavros fence line,” he replied, peeling the damp label off his beer bottle. “That old access road is on my regular rounds. Good thing I did. You got lost and dehydrated. It happens out there.”

“Really? That’s what we’re going with?” I asked. “You just miraculously showed up in the middle of nowhere right as I was about to be executed?”

His mouth turned up in a grim, tight smile. “I rolled up in a Ford Interceptor. Not exactly a deus ex machina.”

“And the shootout in the desert?” I pressed. “And the archer?”

“You’re not the first person to have some hallucinations out in the sun too long,” he answered, his pale blue eyes perfectly level. “‘We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.’” He added a footnote. “That’s Ptolemy.”

The sheer audacity of a small-town cop using a second-century mathematician to gaslight a biologist about a sun god was almost admirable.

“Okay,” I replied, allowing him the retreat. “But tell me—how many rounds are in your service pistol?”

He paused, his burger halfway to his mouth. He began to shrug, but I interrupted.

“Here’s a riddle for you, Gus,” I said, leaning over the sticky laminate table. “How does a man leave home with a full magazine and come back with three bullets less, when the gun wasn't shot that day?”

“August,” he replied.

“What?”

“Gus was my name in school. People mostly call me August now.”

He offered no other answer—just answered a riddle with a deliberate non-sequitur to close the door on the subject entirely. He gave me a wide, inscrutable smile and took another bite of his burger.

August. It figured. The hottest month of the year.

Striker had told me that a name was not a simple label, but an inquiry that must be solved. My own name had been the very center of a riddle. When is the Hunter the hunted? The Sphinx had parsed the meaning of who I was. And now here was Gus, hiding behind a brilliant, blazing riddle of his own.

“What was this all about then?” I asked softly. “If you want to reduce this to sunstroke, why ask James to investigate at all?”

“Maybe I hoped to entice him for a visit,” he said, looking straight at me. “Maybe I was lonely for a friend. Maybe the simplest explanation is best.”

We are social animals after all, James. In need of others of our kind. We long to be recognized, to speak and to be spoken with in ways we understand. 

I’m writing this absurd, sprawling letter to you, because even after everything, my mind still automatically addresses its most profound discoveries to yours.

By the time we returned for my rental car, Stavros Industries had already cordoned off the area.

But I have the map. The aerial topography Striker etched into the altar, which I transcribed onto that cheap notepad before I left the site. As you know, I smeared away his original etching in the sand.

Before leaving town, I also swung by the station. I hauled the cooler out of Gus’s office to dump the sheared ribcage out in the open, pouring out the DNA samples I’d taken, letting the sun and nature claim them. 

I’ve left no biological footprint that I could prevent.

My phone is a brick of glass and slag, requiring a brief logistical detour to Spokane this afternoon to replace it. Fortunately, I had my passport already packed.

I have attached a separate addendum to this letter containing my rough field estimates regarding Striker’s wingspan, skeletal density, and the biomechanical load required for his flight. I set the data aside so as not to interrupt the narrative, but I know you will find the math as staggering as I did.

I’m leaving the university behind, James. There is no academic grant money for what I’m about to do, but the beauty of having my own money is that I no longer need the department's permission. What better use could there be of the nest egg I was left?

I’m going to find them, if they still exist. Actual Sphinxes. I am tentatively classifying them as Ailuranthropus aenigma until I can learn more.

What are you afraid of? you asked me once. If there is such a thing, I’ve not found it yet.

James, thank you for sending me on this ridiculous journey.

I’ll be back.

Yours,

Ed

PS: Go visit August. He’d like to see you. Buy him a beer for me.

---

Thanks for reading Sol. This was originally drafted as part of a series of interconnected stories, with artist Graham Groans, Modern Greek Myths—A Wonder Book for Boys & Men. Some stories were published, some were not.

---

To get in touch with the author, send them an email.

---