Chapter 31 - Guidance

Jude had one desire in his heart on this day. He wanted to find Tyra and his friends. He needed to be reunited with them. But in order to do that, he would have to decipher how to follow the Dancing of the Skies and the Dancing of Souls. Despite the fact that he knew what each one of them was, he did not know how to follow them to his destination.

He had not spent time reading the Kryonomicon, instead traveling and trying to find his former companions. He had been walking for the whole day without stopping, and now night was beginning to fall.

The aurora came out. Jude looked up at its ceaseless patterns. What had before looked chaotic and unorganized now looked made sense before his mind. It was amazing what his revelation had done for him.

He looked at the aurora, and suddenly had a thought. He opened the Kryonomicon, and watched as the fractal patterns unfolded before his eyes into a linear fashion. Then he wondered what exactly he had done to do that.

Jude decided to unfocus his eyes at the book, and the lines refolded into their fractal forms. So he stared into the sky, and unfocused his eyes. And the aurora had the opposite effect. They unfolded themselves into a straight line before his eyes, reaching far out over the horizon.

But they did so in both directions, and so Jude did not know in which direction to follow it. They did not reach towards the directions that the sun rises and sets from, but perpendicular to them. So he had to figure out how to follow them further.

He decided to light a fire, knowing that he would have to follow the Dancing of Souls as well. He gathered debris and lit it, and soon had a small bonfire. Watching the fire crackle and burn, Jude wondered how he could make it unfold in a line.

He decided to try an experiment, though he had no idea how effective it would be. Closing his eyes and rolling them back into his head, he reached into the aurora above. His mouth moved to the form the word "direction", but that was not the sound that came out. The resulting sound was an alien one, which could best be rendered as "rêlik". Jude heard the similarity between this word and his friend's name, and wondered if Relik's parents had known the word.

Jude opened his eyes. The fire still blew straight up, but the embers and sparks all flew along the straight aurora in a single direction.

And so he followed that path.

He walked for an hour or so, however stopped to sleep when he found a good location. When morning came, he walked further, his mind still projecting the aurora though it was not in the sky.

And then he heard speaking. They were not speaking kryon, but the human tongue. Jude crept forwards to hear what they were saying, but he did not watch his step.

Glass shattered under his feet.