With silent pleadings and caresses they courted each other. Wounds, already half healed, were now forgotten, in trembling, febrile excitement.

The summer here, in this once verdant plain on the edge of the Gentleman’s Sea, came a month and a half earlier than for the slake-moths’ siblings across the water. The temperature had slowly spiralled, reaching twenty-year highs.

Thermotaxic reactions were triggered in the slake-moths’ loins. Hormones swam in their ichor tides. Unique configurations of flesh and chymicals spurred their ovaries and gonads into untimely productivity. They became suddenly fertile, and aggressively aroused.

Aspises and bats and birds fled the air in terror, pungent as it was with psychotic desires.

The slake-moths flirted with ghastly and lascivious aerial ballet. They touched tentacles and limbs, unfolded new parts they had never seen before. The three less damaged moths tugged their sibling, the victim of the Weaver, on wafts of smoke and air. Gradually, the most wounded moth stopped licking its multitude of wounds with its trembling tongue, and began to touch its fellows. Their erotic charge was utterly infectious.

The polymorphous four-way wooing became fraught and competitive. Stroking, touching, arousing. Each moth in turn spiralled moonward, drunk on lust. It would split the seal on a gland hidden under its tail and exude a cloud of empathic musk.

Its fellows lapped at the psychoscent, sported like porpoises in clouds of carnality. They rolled and played then swept up and sprayed the sky themselves. For now, their sperm ducts were still. The little metadroplets were rich with the slake-moths’ erogenous, ovigenic juices. They bickered lecherously to be female.

Each successive exudation charged the air to a higher pitch of excitement. The moths bared their gravestone teeth and bleated their sexual challenge to each other. The moist valves below their chitin dripped with aphrodisiac. They swept through the banks of each other’s perfume.

As the pheremonal duel continued, one febrile voice sounded more and more triumphant. One body swept higher and higher, its fellows dropping away. Its emanations stank the air of sex. There were last-gasp attacks, spurts of erotic challenge. But one by one, the other moths closed their female pudenda, accepting defeat and masculinity.

The triumphant moth-the moth still scarred and dripping from its melee with the Weaver-soared. Its scent still stank of female juices, its fecundity was unquestioned. It had proved itself the most motherly.

It had gained the right to bear the brood.

The other three moths adored it. They became swains.

The feel of the new matriarch’s flesh made them ecstatic. They looped and fell and returned, aroused and ardent.

The mother-moth toyed with them, led them over the hot dark city. When their beseeching became as painful as its own lust, it hovered and presented itself, opened its segmented exoskeleton and curled its vagina towards them.

It coupled with them, one by one, becoming briefly a dangerous plummeting double-bodied thing, flanked by eager partners waiting their turn. The three who had become male felt organic mechanisms pull and twist, their bellies opening and penises emerging for the first time. They fumbled with their arms and flesh-ropes and bone jags and their matriarch did the same, reaching behind it with a complex twist of limbs that grabbed and tugged and intertwined.

Sudden slipping connections were made. Each pair consorted and copulated with a fervent need and pleasure.

When the hours of rutting had passed, the four slake-moths drifted on open wings, utterly exhausted. They dripped.

As the air cooled, their bed of thermals deflated slowly, and they began to beat their wings to stay aloft. One by one, the three fathers peeled away and down to the city below, to search for food to revive and sustain them, and to provide for their conjugal partner.

It lolled in the sky a while longer. When it had been alone for a time, its antennae twitched and it curled away and began to make its slow way south. It was exhausted. Its sexual organs and orifices had closed away beneath its iridescent shell, to keep hold of all that had been spent.

The slake-moth matriarch flew towards Riverskin and the cactus dome, ready to prepare the nest.

My talons flex, trying to open. They are constrained by the ridiculous and vile bandages wound around them, that flap like ragged skin.

I walk bent double along the sides of the railways, the trains screaming at me in irate warning as they blast by. I sneak now across the rail bridge, watching the Tar coil beneath me. I stop and look around. Way ahead of me and way behind the river slithers and throws rubbish in rhythmic little bursts against the bank.

Looking over to the west I can see over the water and the swell of Riverskin houses to the tip of the Glasshouse. It is illuminated from inside, a blister of light on the city’s skin.

I am changing. There is something within me which was not there before, or perhaps it is that something has gone. I smell the air and it is the same air it was yesterday, and yet it is different. There can be no doubt. Something is welling up under my own skin. I am not sure who I am.

I have trailed these humans as if I am dumb. A worthless, mindless presence, without opinion or intellect. Without knowing who I am, how can I know what to say?

I am not Respected Yagharek any longer, and I have not been for many months. I am not the raging thing that stalked the Shankell pits, that slaughtered man and trow, ratjinn and shardmouth, a menagerie of pugnacious beasts and warriors of races I had not dreamed could exist. That savage fighter is gone.

I am not the tiring one who stalked the lush grasslands and cold, hard hills. I am not the lost thing that wandered the concrete walkways of the city introspective and lost, seeking to become again something I never was.

I am none of those. I am changing, and I do not know what I will be.

I am afraid of the Glasshouse. Like Shankell, it has many names. The Glasshouse, the Greenhouse, the Planthouse, the Hothouse. It is nothing but a ghetto, dealt with sleight of hand. A ghetto in which the cactacae try to replicate the edge of the desert. Am I returning home?

To ask the question is to answer it. The Glasshouse is not the veldt, or the desert. It is a sad illusion, nothing but a mirage. It is not my home.

And if it were the desert, if it were a gateway to the deepest Cymek, to the dry forests and fertile swampland, to the repository of sand-hidden life and the great nomadic garuda library, if the Glasshouse were more than a shadow, if it were the desert it feigns to be, it would still not be my home.

That place does not exist.

I shall wander for a night and a day. I will retrace the steps that once I made, in the shade of the railways. I will stalk the city’s monstrous geography and find the streets that bore me here, the squat channels in the brick to which I owe my life and self.

I will find the tramps who shared my food, if they are not dead from disease or stabbed for their piss-stained shoes. They became my tribe, atomized and ruined and broken, but still some kind of tribe. Their numb lack of interest in me-in anything-was refreshing after days of careful skulking and an hour or two of ostentatious wandering in my agonizing wooden prostheses. I owe them nothing, those tedious alcohol- and drug-fucked heads, but I will find them again for my own sake, not theirs.