Earlier in her life, after days rooting around, eating and keeping on, she’d tunnel to the surface, looking for light like it was the whole meaning of her life. It was so vague to her but so compelling. Light was a thing, she thought, you can see and feel. There at the end of the day was always the light of the setting sun, doing its turns from white yellow to banana yellow to tobacco orange to burning orange to faint fire red, each color streaking through the next. Eventually Sheila knew, absolutely knew, she needed to give the rest of her life to light, to pursue it all the way to where it settles at night. The problem was growing up as moles do, you’re taught to dig and eat, to love the darkness. That’s your whole life.

As she looked at the sun’s light each dusk before night, she noticed there was a line it went below when it lost itself. It made her sad and she wanted to find out why light somehow couldn’t stay. Light didn’t do what you asked it to do; it always found its own way and settled as it must. Or maybe, she thought, light was always there and you could only see it from where you were. Or maybe everyone saw light a little differently, which then led her to wonder what light and the color it begets could really be. Or maybe the dark was another kind of light. She didn’t know and couldn’t say. But what she did now was that it was time for her to finally go, to finally find out.

So one bright day Sheila jumped like a dolphin down in her hole. She knew the horizon line was west, so she set out with all the fury she could muster. For days she didn’t drink or eat or sleep. It was just forward digging, like she was a fuzzy drill bit plowing toward forever. She hurtled forward with a drive never seen in a mole before. Mile after mile, deep through the soily vastness, she was like a rocket in the outer space of earth below. And the earth was actually much deeper than she could have imagined. She carried on, moving through a dirt tunnel of her own spinning, rich and uniform until, that is, she really looked. When she really looked, she saw the granules of earth as changeable forms stuck to her, around her, poking her tiny eyes and coating her body. It was as if the earth was saying she belonged to it, and this voyage to light, this voyage to the horizon where light fled, wasn’t relevant to her life. It seemed to say to her that only earth mattered.

Sheila had to dig deep down in herself to deny these thoughts. The earth would not tell her who she was, even if it was all she’d ever known. No, for her, the light was everything. After all, whatever grows in the earth doesn’t grow without light. She’d asked her teachers about that one when she was younger and they never had an answer. They would insist she accept her place in the deep earth, that light was for those with the gift of sight. And she knew a journey to the end of the earth’s soil, a journey to the edge of light, was never going to be easy, but here she was, turning her life toward a unity of purpose, a convergence of vision and feeling.

When her relentless digging tired her, she swore she started seeing lights beyond the way she could, but they were only the ones on the backs of her eyelids, those stars of the lid, as she barreled forward. Sometimes she’d even close her eyes while digging, tricking herself into thinking she was soaring through some portal way out in the remotest corners of space. One time Sheila even forgot she was digging at all and found herself digging while asleep, stopping only when her nose smelled limestone deposits near a riverbed she almost failed to dig deep enough to pass under without drowning.

A few days later she ran smack into something dead. She saw and smelled it was another mole and it filled her with dread. She didn’t want to think it was dead. Why couldn’t the dead mole move? Because it’s dead, she said. But how did I get it into my head that it shouldn’t be dead? Because it’s impossible to know dead things. Dead things have the luxury of stillness I do not. So she wiped the death off her nose as fast as she could and went on, somehow, hurtling toward the light.

One dead mole couldn’t stop her mission, but, still, she felt strange for a time. She had been told all animals die, but she’d never seen a dead mole before in all her digging life. It took her traveling to the end of light to meet this stifled mortality. It was as tragic and forgettable as life is when you look at it without illusions. Still, she pressed on, digging forward since she had to, since she thought that knowing where light ends meant knowing where it begins, or if it begins at all. She sensed light could be a constant but she couldn’t commit to such an idea till much later, she told herself, after she accomplished her mission. So day after day, night after night, she dug on, dirt streaming like nightwater droplets, soft and rough, past her shiny cheeks and poky nose and flippery claws.

Days later she hit something else. She thought it smelled like the dead mole from before, but no, this was worse. This was a whole family of dead moles, cruddy little dirt follicles clinging to their fuzz. She was struck by how they lay there still, slung around each other, as if in a ring dance where love reigned over death’s grubby grasp. It looked like they’d been hit by a bomb and buried in embrace. Sheila thought it was as tragic as moles could be.

And she couldn’t help but worry. Why was she seeing all these dead moles? The more she wanted to understand the light, the sadder the world became for her. She wondered if she could carry on, listless now as she was. Every time she looked above ground she noticed in her blurry way how the horizon wasn’t getting any closer, yet still she went on. She had to go on, even if her mind was still wandering in the shadows of death.

She kept feeling this tingle in her nose. It was a kind of fear where she thought that in the next inch in front of her there’d be more dead moles, rotting and looming, suspended in cradling earth. But how could she turn back now? Nothing could stop her, even as she scraped against all the little bones of more dead moles all around. Each scrape made her bleed. She trailed little blood blots all over, cutting a red black trail for future moles. She hoped they too would trace their journeys to the resting place of light.

Yet after a while she didn’t know where she was anymore. So far from home, it was all her home now. If she died on the way, she thought, so be it. She started pretending she was an earth version of the dolphins from the books she read in school. The soil sea was the real sea, she thought, where no light penetrates even inches down. Then other times her mind wandered to the meaning of things, which she dismissed. Light was more profound than the self-interest that meaning requires, she thought. The world, she’d say to herself, can’t be bothered to mean anything. The world is only illuminated. That is the great mystery.

Sheila started getting skinny for a mole. She felt that maybe she was dying. There was plenty of food and she’d kept herself alive, but it was like her voyage had depleted her on a basic life level she couldn’t replenish but with light, and even then she wasn’t sure at this point. Then one day the earth ended. She poked her head above the ground and spread against it all was the tossing waters of blues and greens and grays going as far out as anyone, mole or not, could see.

She’d never seen such water before. In fact, she was unsure how she was seeing anything at all, since she was still a mole that mostly couldn’t see. But it looked like the ocean she’d read about in her dolphin book. She gazed out, plopping her paws atop her hole. The sun was setting like so many times she’d seen before in the smears and blurs of diffuse, impossible colors. Light played on the waters, in all its ribboning, singing silent graces across an untraceable sky.

This is where it ends for me, she thought. I can’t dig any further since there’s no more earth. She drew a breath and watched what she could see of the reds and oranges deepen and ripen to blues and purples. Perched on the bluff, she hung over the ocean’s edge, when, suddenly, she felt tugging and shaking and fell down to the beach below. Sheila couldn’t dig anymore and didn’t know how to get back to the reliable earth above.

That’s when the water started reaching for her and dragged her in. She thought of the dead moles and the water and the light as she sank. It felt like the end, but something hard and round and tile-like came up under her. She clung to it. It was a sea turtle named Gene, and he told her he couldn’t take her with him because she belonged to the earth and not the sea. She asked him if he knew where the light ended, where it came from, but he couldn’t answer. So sorry, he said, but no one has ever been where light ends. I’m not sure it has an end. He swam close and let the surf toss her back to the beach, where she rolled wet and cold in the sand. All she could do was burrow in and sleep the deepest sleep. And she slept and slept and, soon, slipped away to death. She whispered something as Gene looked on, but he couldn’t make it out.

Sheila died dreaming of light, no closer at the edge of the sea than it had been when she’d set out. Years later, back at home, the other moles said she had gone all the way to the horizon, that she had gone to where the light merges with darkness, where seeing and feeling were one. They said she’d seen where light ends, which, they taught, is where it begins. And one day, they said, she would return. They felt it deep in the earth of their being. What they didn’t know was that when Sheila died the waves took her far out to sea.

At night, as you can imagine, the glass door reflects the inside back at you when you look out from it to the dark outside. But if you are outside and the light is on, you can see inside just fine. The fox outside couldn’t tell what my laughing was. That night she sat in the dark beyond the door’s glow and wondered about it all.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the fox lived in a den behind the garage. I’d see her at night when the kitchen light was off and I could then see outside. She would do her scanning and scurrying little circuits around the fig tree, though the concealed stilts of the house, and back out to rest under the wood pieces splintered from the garage, made of what I used to think was redwood but was actually Douglas fir. For the fox, survival was its own reward; the rest, such as the glowing glass door at night, was that extra bit of fascination in those short moments between living and dying. Still I remember how insistent my laughter was that night as she listened, still as nothing, under cover of dark.

Don’t ask me how I know, but she thought my laughing was provocative but sad, like I was hurling a rebuke at this world that wasn’t paying attention to me in the first place. To her, my laugh cut deep into the nature of things. You may not know, but foxes want to know the nature of things. That’s why they move so lightly through the world. That’s why you only see them when they want you to see them. That night my face was still wet from laughing when, suddenly, she was standing at the glass door.

She stood and looked in. I assumed she saw a graying, sun-kissed man laughing at a screen. I looked at the screen like we all looked at the screen back then. I laughed because of what was on the screen. To the fox, the screen light on my face looked like the glowing glass door from the dark outside. She was a wafty soft furry thing, long-backed, with a pointy dog face that could plausibly have been a cat’s. When I saw her, I bent down like a children’s toy breaking at the knee. I peered through the glass door darkly. The light in the kitchen only darkened the outside, making it harder to see her. Still she could see me just fine, and that was all I wanted.

But if I looked hard enough, I could see through. And when I did, she met my eyes for a moment and went back down the steps. She stopped, faced me, and cocked her head genuinely to the right, as if to tell me something I already knew but had forgotten, before she gamboled off. From then on I’d see her from time to time but that was all. Sometimes she would sleep on the warm hot tub cover in the late mornings when I wasn’t out there. And the hot tub, I should say, is where I did my meditation, a low-discipline meditation, where the soak set my thoughts bobbing up to the surface before they would sink under the weight of their own irrelevance.

One night when I was out in the hot tub I could hear paw steps behind the garage and I whispered I am here and you have nothing to fear. I said it with a kindness I don’t think I’d ever summoned till then. Frankly I didn’t know who I was talking to. I am here and you have nothing to fear. Soon I got used to saying it all the time, wherever I went. It started to sound to me like something believers would say God would say, but that’s not what it was for me.

It became a kind of mantra, a chant, a drone I’d say to myself. I am here and you have nothing to fear. What made this so strange was I started to think I knew what I was actually talking about. I felt like I had married the two parts of myself that had seemed irreconcilable: my I and my you. Think of it as the dualism we live each day. There’s the I that I know inside myself from living as myself, and then there’s the you that is who people see mixed with who they are, the you I can only ever infer from the way people, or foxes, act toward me. That night, when the fox saw me washed in glow, while she sat washed in shadow, she saw me better than I could see her, and better than I could see myself.

Still I saw. Through the glass door I saw. You were there. I know it because I know now what the fox saw. Don’t ask me how. It’s not my place to say what a fox thinks at night or during the day. Yet now that I had seen you, now that I had seen I am the same as you, my repetitious sounding, my living chant, rose once more: I am here and you have nothing to fear. I saw you, and you saw me.

He wasn’t sure why this imperative had come over him, though he had a feeling all the time like he was being watched. It was as if he didn’t have a choice to be a tear collector after decades chipping coal out of a cold dark hole. It’s haunting, he’d say to anyone who would listen, like someone’s right here and I cannot speak and it cannot speak. It demands that I save the tears of those who have felt, or they will have meant nothing. I must feel. My life has been without it till now.

As you might expect, all around town people started talking about him, but they didn’t want to gossip and they didn’t want to judge him. They pitied him, sad as he seemed to be, but they had mixed feelings too. They’d never heard of anybody collecting other people’s tears. It was beyond their comprehension. They would say the collector looked like he’d seen a ghost or God or something beyond the category that anybody could conceivably know. A little boy sitting on a purple park bench once noticed the collector and asked why he wanted to collect tears. He holds a glowing lollipop, his mother told him.

I don’t believe that, the boy said. Candy is not sad. Or is it? Others would say the collector looked frightened of his own shadow, that he was helpless and paralyzed by creeping insanity and so they pitied him more. And that’s when the stories about him started, whether they pitied him or not. They’d say he was crazy or ill or possessed by spirits. They said he was incurably lonely and so they had to see to it that he was going to make it. He was all alone, yes, and always had been, yes, but he seemed content with that until he’d turned to collecting; they thought the least they could do was oblige because they could feel the pain he was in and they knew from what he had said that he couldn’t feel the pain of others or, really, any feeling at all. Not that it made him mean or bad or anything, but maybe now, they thought, he had had an awakening and they would support him if he was in need.

For the collector, this was finally his way to feel the feelings of others, but he had always stuck out a little bit. The people in town remembered the mysterious circumstances of his arrival all those years ago. He had just shown up in his teens and started working in the mines. He had no history and he’d never told them hardly a detail about his past other than he was from somewhere else and he’d rather not talk about it because there wasn’t much to tell. Back then they found his phrasing strange but ignorable, since he was quiet and soft-spoken, affable and agreeable, and working most of the time. When he started collecting tears, however, things got more complicated.

When others would walk by his place in the evening, the lights would be out as early as dinnertime, as if no one was there at all. No one thought to ask him why, and of course he never said. One woman who had a habit of walking right after nightfall said she could sometimes see shadows moving behind the curtains of the collector’s house and they had the shapes of ovals and spheres and tumbling triangles, darting and turning all around. It’s just what I see each night, she said. I’m not trying to look and I can’t explain it.

So when the collector started talking about collecting everybody’s tears, the people of the town had mixed feelings but, again, they knew what they had to do after his abrupt retirement from the mines. The first day after, the collector came out to the town square. He looked like he’d been wandering in the desert for years. His clothes were ragged and his hair was tangled and brushed to one side of his head like he’d clumped it in his fingers and pressed it over his pate. His eyes darted around to each person as if he recognized them from a previous life but not this one taking place right before his eyes. He had a frantic but non-threatening energy.

Dear friends, I have come here for one reason today. I wish you to make a donation. I need you to help me. I need you to donate to me all the tears that you have. Nothing less will do.

What do you want?! an insolent shopkeeper yelled. We might not have everything you need since we haven’t cried yet today! Everyone laughed uncomfortably, like the collector was kidding when they knew he was not. He remained silent, expressionless.

Two boys, each riding bicycles in circles around him, shouted something cruel, a wicked joke about the real reason he wanted everybody’s tears. Their mothers looked on, disapproving of their otherwise perfect young gentlemen. Then the entire town square lost their grip on decency and erupted in laughter. They felt bad in the moment, laughing as they did, but, oddly, the collector laughed along with them this time, like he was in on the joke. And it wasn’t like he was trying to save face, or at least it didn’t seem that way. And when the laughter of the crowd died down, the collector was still laughing, much to everyone’s confusion.

It sounds mad, I know, he said, beaming but candid. But it’s what I must do.

They’d seen in movies how when lonely people laugh uncontrollably it means something bad is going to happen, though his laughter seemed to them as if it was full of joy, as if he really was sharing their light mockery as a kind of delight. But as the night fell and the square emptied out, the collector remained, silent and no longer laughing. It seemed he didn’t know what to do next since he wasn’t sure anybody would bring them their tears. He was only staring at his hands and shaking his head. One of the sensitive children brought a tuft of hay for him, and so the collector slept right there in the middle of the square that night.

The next morning when the square filled again, he was still there, sleeping. When he awoke at midday they asked him why he had come and what he wanted. He told them again how he needed their tears, yes their tears, just as they already knew from the other times he’d asked. And they told him they already knew that and how they were confused as to the meaning of all this.

I don’t have the faintest idea myself, he said, sheepishly, his eyes resting on each person, one by one. But it’s what I must do.

Are you sure you’re not just bored, a fellow former miner said. People collect things when they’re bored. His wife elbowed him in the ribs and he shrugged as if to say what else am I supposed to say?

At this the collector paused, collecting his thoughts. He weighed whether boredom was really in fact his affliction. No, no, I must. I must collect all of your tears. It is my sole reason for living. And I must preserve them. It is my duty. It is my greatest purpose, my only purpose. I have never felt any emotions, and now I must. He looked blankly at the ground, and everyone else looked awkwardly around. They didn’t know whether to stay or go, so they reconvened as a group some fifty feet away to discuss the situation. He stared elsewhere, as if they weren’t there.

I don’t know. I feel bad for him, a bright young woman said. But how often does one really ever cry? Then there’s bottling of it, the jarring of it. None of this makes any sense but still, the town must come together. You might ask ‘what is he going to do with jars of tears?’ If you ask me, I worry more about what he’ll do without them. We need to gather our tears for him then. It’s decided. And if we don’t have any to share, we must feel for him and create the appearance that we have gathered them.

There were murmurs of approval but some skepticism too. You’re seriously considering doing this? the former miner spoke up again. Yes, I think we owe him something, another miner said, nodding toward the bright woman. He needs our help.

I don’t think we owe him anything if he’s deluding himself, said an aging firefighter, bobbing his eyebrows while making his case. But let’s help him anyway. Let’s be honest with ourselves too. At this point, I don’t think that what we give him has to actually be our own tears. As long as it is clear liquid, it should suffice. You know? Just fill some jars with water. He looked pleadingly at everyone, as if the bright woman hadn’t just proposed the same thing.

Shhhh....quiet. He’ll hear you, said another woman, looking back over her shoulder. The collector was still staring away, like it was the polite thing to do. The local pastor then spoke up, agreeing with the others. I think we at least owe him the courtesy of playing along, he said, to mutterings of support. It’s the Godly thing to do of course. But when they turned back around as a group to tell the collector what they had decided, they found him sleeping again, curled into a ball on his tuft of hay. He was speaking softly to himself, but there were no words they could make out.

Yet the next morning the collector awoke to dozens of jars. Everybody in town had brought one they’d filled with water and labeled Tears and set it next to him. When he woke, he bowed to them one by one, showing his deepest and sincerest gratitude, proclaiming he was grateful for all their tears, even if he lamented any excess of sorrow, any undue anguish they incurred in gathering so many tears so selflessly in a single night. And they assured him it was no problem at all.

At home he arranged each jar on his shelves, then sat down in his only chair and gazed at them, reflecting on the wonder of each one filled to the brim with the height of human feeling. He felt he had gained a measure of serenity, with all this feeling in front of him, but as the night wore on he tossed and turned and woke in a sweat. This wasn’t done yet. His collecting, he knew, had only just begun. He went back to the square the next day. He again thanked everyone for their jars, but he noted that this had to be ongoing. No collection could end, especially his.

Again, the group assembled as it had the day before to discuss what to do. And again, the collector stood nearby, gazing away. Some had lost some patience and said that he clearly needed help, that he should be placed in a sanatorium. They were willing to indulge this once, but not forever. But others objected, feeling they didn’t want to subject the collector, vulnerable as he was, to what amounted to imprisonment when he didn’t seem to be a threat to others or himself. No one knew what to do except continue filling small jars with water at home and placing them each day on the stoop of his house. So for the next two weeks that’s what they did. He thanked them each morning and so it went on.

But when he returned home one day after all those donations, something had changed. Until then, having the jars had given him a sense of peace. Then, as if in a flash tearing out of his depths, a passion screamed in him. How did he have the right to keep this record of humanity all too himself, he wondered. He stepped up to his shelves and now stared mournfully into each jar. No, he said, I have no right to these. This is not how one sets out to feel. I am betraying their kindness. I cannot let this go on.

When morning came, he woke up, took all the jars outside, one by one, and fiercely smashed them against the back wall of his house. In the end, all that was left was a big pile of jagged glass and a puddle, already evaporating. He left his house after that and greeted everyone once more in the square. He once more thanked each person for their contribution, but this time his message was different.

I just want to thank you, each of you, for your jars of water over these last couple of weeks. It has meant a lot, he said, a broad grin on his face. Without your consideration, without your compassion, I’m not sure what I’d have done.

Jars of water? they said, in a chorus of transparent denial. You must be mistaken. Those were our tears, the tears we shed for you. Those were our tears we gathered for your collection.

Please, now, you mustn’t say that, he said, a warm smile rising across his face. I know that you only gathered water in jars and labeled them ‘Tears’ and gave them to me each morning. Do you think I couldn’t hear you when you were talking to each other and I stood nearby? Yes, I would sit at home and stare into those jars and marvel at what they could have been, but I also knew what they already were. It made a great difference, but I don’t need to burden you further. Still I am moved by the feelings that moved you to help me.

Honestly, we didn’t think you could hear us, the firefighter said. You looked like you were in a daze. But still, why are you grateful if you knew that we weren’t really gathering our tears, but only water? Don’t you feel cheated? Betrayed? We only thought we were doing what was right. We only wanted to help. The collector smiled again, a little knowingness clear in the corners of his mouth. No, I thank you for that. You did as I asked.

But we didn’t, they said all together. We only faked the tears you asked of us. Everyone was confused and so they dispersed, leaving him standing once more in the middle of the square. He looked on at them as they made their way, beaming with gratitude.

Days later the collector died alone in his house. He left no will and only a short note concerning his burial. He asked that he be buried with the shards of glass from the jars piled behind his house. Just lay the shards of glass on the bottom of my casket, it read, and set my body gently on top. There I will rest forever. And, in accordance with his wishes, they buried him in a modest casket lined with the broken glass of the jars. Scraps of ‘Tears’ labels clung to him. The collector was buried in the early evening. It rained till dawn.

Eons ago they had cast off language, and now they lived by tones and in the intervals between. This was because all the people of the breathing world were musicians and listeners. They divided their time equally, for how could they compose without listening or listen without composing? But words, for them, had no place. Words hail from memory, the elders taught, and memory is for what no longer is as it relates to what’s in front of you right now. Words were layerings of memory, ever expanding, ever fascinating, but ever veering further from capturing a world like theirs, a world that only breathed. Words, the elders taught, only produced more words. Thus the people of the breathing world only played music and listened to music and never spoke. What did memory matter to them anyway? Music only exists in the moment it’s being played, in the moment it’s being heard.

What’s more, in school, the people of the breathing world were taught in tones by the elders that words were dangerous because they were carriers of concentrated mood and subjectivity, the result of them coming from all different people and not just one. And if the games of language were meaning-making exercises that brought some worlds to greater states of coherence, then surely words had value. But they cease having value once you’ve transcended them once and for all, the way the people of the breathing world had.

It was this previous age of language the elders called The Fall. Music and silence, they taught thereafter, preceded language, and thus were all that one needed to know in a world that only breathed. It was music that spoke into being what language could only capture in its most inspired moments. Thus, after the Fall, music and silence rose, and with it a new age: The Sonora.

During this time the people of the breathing world lived in music, in tones, in the silent spaces in between. Yet they knew too that tones, like language, held magical powers, and that music could be a much more powerful force than language could ever be. The elders taught in warning tones of the ancient Sorcerer of the early Sonora who composed in variegated tones of light and darkness, tones that rose and fell in vivid colors and wild dynamics, not quite singing and not quite speaking, but terribly and profoundly alive.

Yet, for all its sublimity, the problem with the Sorcerer’s music was its dissonance, its imbalance, the elders taught, since tones had to be resolved in a tone of origin; a tonic they called it. It was a matter of harmony in the breathing world. Yet the Sorcerer and his apprentices had found ways to summon denser, deeper, more complex spans of tones and therefore feelings that also preceded language, except these forever threatened the harmony of the breathing world in favor of more intense experiences of it. The Sorcerer called this eternal expressiveness.

But the elders of the breathing world taught their followers that the Sorcerer’s eternal expressiveness was the opposite of infinite wisdom, the opposite of harmony. They taught that since the nature of a tone was in seeking its own resolution, to reject such an imperative would be to kindle everlasting desire with no chance of fulfillment, which they contended was the nature of desire in the first place. And they taught that such a musical practice as the Sorcerer’s led, inevitably, to eternal despair. But the Sorcerer then had preached that the elders were wrong, that irresolvable, vibrantly colorful music was not a perversion mired in endless desire, but, rather, that desire was the true essence of music, liberated at last from the elders’ constraints of tension and resolution, the allegedly solemn rising and falling of their breathing world. Breathing, he held, was the suppression of desire.

The Sorcerer taught that the elders’ music was self-constricting, that it was music that only concerned itself with matters of form and not color, and that color was the substance that lent itself to life. Yet, over time, it was said by many who played and heard the Sorcerer’s music that his apprentices did indeed fall into despair, taking exile deep in the mountains where they could breathe the irregular rhythms, colors, and tones of their eternal expressiveness. One day they disappeared and were never heard from again. Absolute freedom, unbounded desire, had cast them to oblivion, the elders taught later, but not one of them had been quite sure what really had happened to those musical dissidents.

Then one day an explorer surveying a distant corner of the breathing world saw the apprentices on top of the Most Distant Mountain. They were gathered close, in a group, each sleeping and twisted around the other. Long, gnarled beards covered their faces so thickly that it was presumed they’d been there alone on that snow-covered peak for millennia. There they slept as infant children, cradled in the sky, as the world rose and fell beneath them. But when the elders heard the explorer’s account, they didn’t seek their fallen fellows.

The legend of the Sorcerer’s apprentices endured because no one from the breathing world knew if they were sleeping forever because they’d finally given in and resolved their dissonant tones, or if it was because the apprentices had pledged themselves once and for all to eternal tonal subversion, finding themselves suspended forever in a dissonant eternity. Whatever it had been, the elders never cast judgment on them.

Deep down they too yearned for the boldness, the staggering color of the music of the Sorcerer. They even admitted it, but they wouldn’t give in to it, they said. Sometimes even, in a state of absent-mindedness, they would look toward The Most Distant Mountain till they could regain themselves, once more in the harmonies that rose and fell in the rising and falling breath under their feet.

The elders also taught that infinite wisdom was stillness. And they taught that such stillness was the central paradox in their world, since it always rose and fell with the rhythm of breath. They taught in tones that constant motion was stillness, and that the balance between music and silence, the breathing in and the breathing out, was the gateway to stillness. And when the young ones questioned them, as they often did, in dissonant and bold and colorful tones of youthful voice, redolent of the Sorcerer’s romantic vision, the elders only smiled and looked away, as if to their countless ancestors long since gone and, yet, all the while, they felt, eternally there.

Some of the young ones thought the elders were looking away toward the Most Distant Mountain, but the elders always denied it, for they knew what lay down the path of desire. That was why they began musical training with the onset of youth. They felt they needed to instill discipline early. The training was difficult and demanding. Each student had to spend at least nine hours a day devoted to the tests of music’s tones, and the rest was devoted to rests.

During their training, the young ones lived in total isolation till the time came for them to emerge. Once they finished, they set about to travel the universe for what was called their Gap Eon. It was called that because it bridged the gap between their musical training and what would be the rest of their lives contemplating the stillness of motion through music and silence. Yet sometimes during their time away, the young ones would be tempted by other planetary cultures. Sometimes they even stayed.

They would talk to their intergalactic fellows about the breathing world and its elders, about the reverence there for still motion and tonal silence and how they wondered if truly that was all there was that they must seek. They would confide in others how sometimes even they, the young musicians of the breathing world, felt like aliens among the elders. It’s only ever music and silence, stillness and breathing, they’d say. What about all the life spanning the universe?

But the elders wanted the young ones to see everything possible in the universe. They wanted their teachings to be tested, stretched to their limits. They dared the universe to prove their wisdom wrong. Still, what the young ones found strangest, with all that they learned while they were away, was that other worlds didn’t breathe. They’d look at the ground beneath their feet and find it motionless. It was disorienting to some and invigorating to others.

Many of them visited one blue planet in particular, since it was known almost everywhere in the universe for its heavy emphasis on language and its intense hatred of wisdom. While there, the young ones would sometimes try to convince themselves that a revolt against wisdom was wisdom too, but they only thought this after drinking something from that blue world called spirits, which they found was not what it sounded like but also kind of was.

It was only a matter of time before the young ones would find what the elders of the breathing world called Everything Else. After some time, most of the rebellious young ones would come home, intrigued but ultimately averse to the cruder forms of life built around appetite and domination and materialism and passion they’d found on their ventures. Those few young ones who stayed, who never returned to the breathing world, found they needed Everything Else more than they needed the elders’ teachings. They might have been corrupted, they thought, but corrupt was how they wanted to stay. Corruption, they thought, kept the mind busy. But there was one who stayed with Everything Else who started a movement as wide as the universe, a movement that threatened to destroy the breathing world once and for all.

The Brilliant One, as he was known, preached a philosophy based on the languages he learned traveling the universe during his own Gap Eon. He taught that the elders of the breathing world were wrong, that truth was not found in stillness and tones and the silence between, but, rather, in absolutely committed, constant engagement through language, through engagement with Everything Else. Soon enough, more and more of the young ones started to follow him. His path wasn’t for everyone though.

Many of the young ones of the breathing world wondered, as they had been taught, what the point was of endless shifts of words, signs, call them what you will. Many wondered about the ultimate meaning of oceanic swathes of linguistic complexity and depth and nuance. But the Brilliant One, shaking his head, answered them by teaching there was no ultimate goal to Everything Else. He taught that the illusion of meaning, as he derisively called it, was the delusion that withered the bodies and souls of the elders of the breathing world. For millennia his movement grew and grew from one world to the next as he spoke, entrancingly, in the most beautiful languages of the universe.

The elders did sometimes worry about those who didn’t come home, those who really wanted Everything Else and had come under the spell of the Brilliant One. All of the elders had struggled with the choice at some point too, and so they understood the temptations, but also how to overcome them. Yet every once in a while the allure of Everything Else would surface in them still, much like the Sorcerer’s chromatic music would. They accepted it all as only natural when they lost touch with the essential breath of their world.

They even found that they had to acknowledge that they, the elders, were immersed in Everything Else too, that they too were Everything Else. Except for them, infinite wisdom, infinite stillness, was not embracing Everything Else but merely accepting it as the terminally imperfect stage on which they sought the eternal perfection of stillness, of the rising and falling of music and silence. This, they taught, was what the Brilliant One misunderstood in his zeal to live and breathe languages of the vast multiplicity and prismatic wonder of Everything Else.

Yet he held forth across the universe. You are Everything Else, the Brilliant One proclaimed from his floating pulpit in the middle of space, and therefore do not be taken by the ‘acceptance’ of the elders of the breathing world. Learn all there is that is contained within the universe. Speak with all there is in the universe. Let it change and disperse and change again, within you and outside of you. Live and breathe and speak the uncontainability of it all. And he railed further and further against the elders’ ‘acceptance,’ saying it was another name for renunciation, for cowardice, for nihilism, before the everlastingness of Everything Else. With sneering disdain, he taught that asceticism like that of the elders was extreme and delusional and life-hating and nothing more.

He jeered them from across the cosmos, challenging them to rebuke him, to silence him with their solemn tones and their blessed stillness. The Brilliant One knew the elders could not defend themselves, for they had renounced language. The breathing world, he thought then, was his to liberate. Yet still the music and silence of his home world hummed without cease across the universe, all the way to him, where he tuned it out with the Sorcerer’s music when words failed even him. And, over time, much to his surprise, the Brilliant One lost most of his followers. During his protracted death over centuries, he sought to write a thousand-volume account of his life in every language of the universe. But he died alone before he could finish it, very far from home.

Soon after, the people of the breathing world spotted a speck in the sky. As the day went on, the speck got bigger until it was clear it was an asteroid. A panic rose in them, a sudden, irrhythmic span of breath, but they suppressed it and walked the rising and falling of the breathing ground beneath them. The sky grew dark as the asteroid got closer. The elders knew this was the end. When it hit, the asteroid crushed their world with such force that no one knew what came next.

The people of the breathing world floated or fell, and which it was they couldn’t tell. Then a hum spread out from where their world used to be. They couldn’t tell what it was till they were met, once again, with the sound of breathing. It was faint but steady, all around, rising and falling, up and down, filling the universe with itself. And now the people of the breathing world had nothing to hold on to, nowhere to live, nowhere to go. They still couldn’t tell if they floated or fell, so they breathed as they only knew how, for now Nothing was left.