Of course the road is a gift from the gods. Everything is a gift from the gods. The grasses might have spoken grain, might have spoken bread. The thistles might have spoken safety. The mountains might have spoken glory, achievement. But there is something special about receiving the gift that you need.

It wraps through the landscape like a ribbon. Sometimes it lifts off the ground so that it can loop around a boulder or raise above the treeline to show a distant ocean. During the daytime it absorbs the light of the sun, warm and soft to walk on, and the quartz in its construction glitters like diamonds amidst the black. At night time it reflects the light of the moon and shines powder-white, and the breezes that race along it are cool and gentle. Mountains come into focus, looming up in the distance. They come closer, closer - and then they vanish, for you are amongst them. And then somehow there is another flat with more mountains in the distance.

The course stops. The momentum checks. An interruption, an annoyance. The... the yellows are doing something. They're mobbing an old white box with a brown stripe along its middle. They chatter and they talk, babbling together an idioglossary between terms remembered and terms invented. The carburetor attaches to the spinny bit and then you undo the bolts and...

Magic.

Such are wizards. For months you've walked and this gaggle has followed, uncomplaining but uncontributing. You've pulled their weight. But all of a sudden on this hill they have come together and built something that can pull yours.

There's space for eight, comfortably seated, in the vehicle - twelve if you cram. Space for another eight sitting on the roof or hanging off the sides. This group goes ahead excitedly until they start coming back with more vehicles salvaged from the roadside. Ancient machines, primordial, at their fastest, with their engines straining barely matching running speed. Words like Thunderbird and Dodge and UAZ proudly shining silver even though their untarnished shine shows their falseness. And along the ribbon road you fly as fast as dreaming, and no faster.

That distant ocean is coming up on you now. On your left side is green hills, soft and rolling and dew-shining, yellow flowers like kisses from summer. On your right side is an endless blue expanse. Ahead of you is the ribbon-road, and the engines roar as they swim against its current. The ancient dreams of wilderness and earth are done and the dreams of people lie ahead. What stays behind in the ancient world?

*

[b]Dyssia![/b]

"Have you heard of the Pix?" said Brightberry. "It's not a story the Azura would tell you."

You're sitting at the bottom of the pillar while Kissingsky leans over the side. Radiant beams of light containing complex information occasionally pass back and forth between the two crystal dragons, both of whom are currently not bored with the conversation. That's always something to be careful with - if a dragon doesn't think a message is interesting she just won't bother to send it, and might wander off entirely. The best that could, apparently, be done to induce them into service in the first place is that they're all enormous gossips and stickybeaks who like to know everything. Sometimes some of them fly around in the path of communications beams just to eavesdrop on other dragons' conversations.

"So, in Atlas times," Brightberry explained, "they needed," she made fingerquotes with her wings, "'Salespeople'. People whose job it was to convince people to want things. Right? Because if they could convince someone to want something they didn't... already... want..." she stops to try and figure out this concept, obviously stumped. "That would give them... power over you. Somehow? Anyway. The Pix are servitors made to do... [i]that[/i]."

She then communicated back and forth with Kissingsky for about twenty minutes, at times nodding seriously, at times giggling and flapping her wings flirtatiously. She doesn't bother to clue you in on anything that's happening in that exchange. This is just how it be sometimes.

"Anyway, so, they just parked a Revulsant-class Grand Cruiser in orbit and destroyed the Skurulsant mountain with an orbital strike as a show of aggression," said Brightberry. "The Oracle and the Sleeper asked for you by name. They're both coming here. You're going to be a hero!"

With crystal dragons, the information you got was often the information you [i]got[/i]. Still, there are a few blanks that you can fill in on your own. The Oracle is straightforwards enough - the Oracle of Apollo, one of Irassia's most important religious figures, the overseer of the Paths, and your personal governmental nemesis. In one sense it's nice to be on the radar of the planet's high priest, but less so because she thinks your continued existence is inviting the wrath of the gods down on everyone. The Sleeper, though, was a nickname and not a title; his real name was Salhadin, Path of the Orator, but was called the Sleeping Speaker because of his mode of speech. He constantly seemed to be on the verge of dozing off, information coming out in dozing mumbles, head constantly dipping as though he was about to collapse. The effect was a unique innovation he'd bought to his Path. The occasional mumble made people strain to hear his every word, and the sense of physical danger that he might at any point topple over and hit his head on the lectern - something he did on occasion - made people afraid to look away in case they missed it. He was one of the most individually compelling people on the planet, and also one lauded highly by the Oracle with whom he was utterly politically aligned.

So why they wanted [i]you[/i], of all people, when it came to dealing with a starship filled with angry foxgirls was impossible to figure out.