Ain't Talkin'

On and on the void stretched. It was all and nothing. Roche kept on walking. He’d done this for forty years straight once, lost and alone in the coalesced nothing that made up untold numbers of parallel realities. It was all very poetic. So much so that Roche lit a smoke and wished he still had some liquor.

How far or how long Markus and Lucky had ridden was had to tell. The formless and timeless white stretched infinitely, but with characteristics that were tellable only to the most experienced of walkers. A place where the plane of impossible evenness was off by a bare hint of nothing for a pace. A mirror-sheen spot the size of a pinhead that appeared only when seen from directly above .The white was impossibly perfect tempered steel, tainted only by the barest irrevocable bits of warped reality.

He walked on and on, feeling with his senses to track his charge and his horse. The walker continued, keeping careful, automatic track of the subtle nuances of the white as he went.

In an endless world of white nothingness, Roche was entirely aware of where he was.

He expanded his senses, sending tendrils of white feeling out into the created void and looked for his oldest friend. He who had stalked him so long ago and had always found him in the nothing nearly every time that Roche entered the ether.

Ah. . .there he was. Way away into the endlessness. A cosmos and a galaxy and only a hop, skip and jump farther. But, the wolf was there, indeed.

He’d started following Roche some many dozens and dozens of years ago. Roche had made the mistake of asking old Wind In The Trees about the wolf. Wind In The Trees had a different interpretation of the wolf that followed Roche with his pale white eyes.

For the indian, the wolf was the soul that Roche had left behind when he first entered the white, the youth and the luster and the innocence that a human being left behind when he became a walker.

For Roche, it was just some poor scavenger that had wandered into a hole in the world without meaning to, and had never gotten back out. Without a conscious sense of itself it had forgotten that it was ever hungry, or tired, or should have died ages ago, it only knew moment to moment that it was still a wolf, and that the white was still endless, so walk a little further. . .walk a little further.

And nothing became of it, until the wolf had seen Roche ambling by.

He’d been a young walker then, but the wolf had taken to him all the same.

The wolf followed him a ways at a cautious distance, scampering further back any time Roche attempted to come close.

It danced along his peripheral vision and spooked when Roche made a sound. And it followed at a walk a little further.

The only time the wolf hadn’t followed Roche was when he’d stepped from the white through a hole.

That first day he’d sort of hoped he could lead the wolf back out into the world. But the wolf either didn’t understand where the walker had gone, suddenly disappeared, when he stepped back out of the white. . .or he just didn’t wanna go back to the real world.

But there, far into the reaches of everything and nothing, Roche felt the white-eyed wolf, deep in the bowels of existence. And the wolf at that second felt the walker reach out.

His tongue lolled, and the wolf broke into a run across the facelessness of white nothing, coming to find Roche.

And for nothing else but to walk a little further, Roche turned back to his path and continued through the ether to find Alex Markus and his horse.