Idyll's public subway system is a rotting corpse in all but name. The industrial aspirations of the city are its natural predator. When the mining drills and ichor rigs stir from their distant mountain citadels their decrees are echoed in the ground beneath the city's feet; the subway tunnels fight an endless war of attrition against them, the routes buried and unearthed and rewritten around new fault lines and collapsed segments and mineral veins so often that the entrances to defunct stations populate Idyll nearly as much as the people do. For ChorTek Tower, the city's sterile steel heart, there is always at least one functional station among its graveyard of dead underground gateways. It is into this stairwell that the priest and the horse flee from their crime into the humid belly of the desert.

A passerby holds open the broken emergency door for them and they pass fare-free to the platform where an aluminum boxcar bakes on the tracks. The priest and horse enter and have their pick of seats. Only the most desperate of Idyll's citizens use the subway; almost all trips are delayed by tunnel collapse and many result in death. Down here the abnormal is of no surprise to the people of Idyll. The horse they barely register; the only reason they look at the priest at all is because of the siren call of gold at his shoulder, and the only reason they do not act on their impulse is the gun in his hand. The priest presses his boiling forehead to the foggy boxcar window as it howls past half-opened wounds in the earth, glimpses of active excavation and the stolen snatches of shouting laborers flashing up on the glass like stills in a zoetrope. People leave and enter the boxcar as it leaps down the line, stuttering and shivering in fits and starts like a skittish racing dog, until it stops at the end of its unfinished track at the very edge of Idyll where its paved sewer-tunnel station gives way to an open maw of earth and refuses to go any further. Here the priest exits and slips down onto the line and walks into the barren darkness westward, and the horse canters clumsily after him. The trailing tail of the steel track turns to hard grit under their feet as they walk with the silence and solemnity of a funerary procession through a stillness like the inside of a coffin. The heat crushes their breath so the only sound is their six-footed step thumping into the ground. They walk for hours that feel like minutes and minutes that feel like hours until an ambient light introduces itself and breaks the darkness and they surface from a wedged slope, blinking in the brightness of Arizona's red-capped night.

They emerge as if from a grave back into the desert. Behind them Idyll still rages, blazing violently and blaring with its violet song once more. Before them the desert's darkness unfurls to the horizon, the red eyes of the mining rigs flashing intermittently down from the rust-fog like the angry eyes of monstrous gods, illuminating the dull columns of their steel throats as they pulse with ichor like bursting metal seams against the dark night. The priest puts his revolver into his briefcase, shifts it to his left hand, and with his right unearths a clay-rimed shovel from the abandoned tunnel construction. He mounts the horse a final time. The desert welcomes them back into its barren embrace and they are engulfed into it as if diving into a boundless ocean, plunging through its murky depths like a sinking stone.

Here at the apex of the night the familiar landscape of the desert takes on an alien and alluring quality. The supine curve of the distant horizon line blurs into the archaic geometry of the earth, the black mountains monstrous and ancient as exhumed fossil. The drone of the gates is the suspension of a beating heart. Though the horse has led the priest all night it allows itself to be spurred into a gallop across the wilderness. The night is cold and friendlier than the day, and at their fast clip it strokes his cheek like a familiar friend. The horse huffs as its limbs work, cutting a path straight and true over the land. The priest leans forward and aligns himself with the shape of the horse, his dark chest pressed intimately to its shining coat. On this last leg of his journey, he allows himself to close his eyes.

The horse and the priest sprint wild and reckless over the terrain until they arrive at one of the thin seams of silver that split the desert like stained glass. They follow the dry river as it gurgles and spits and bleeds out—on the brink of death—a trickle at the bottom of an eroded groove where it once freely flowed. And at a spot like any other the priest brings the horse to a stop and they go no further.

一 •••

•

In his first life the golden cicada traveled thirty-six thousand miles west and bore eighty ordeals. His suffering beggared description. The heavens made careful record of his hardships. He had done this all in the name of retrieving enlightenment and, at the foot of the Buddha's mountain where he waited like a vulture in a cleft of stone with the scrolls in his hand, at a river of rolling waves some three miles wide, the cicada had died.

There was no grave to surface from that first time. The sand-demon had crushed a locust between his fingers and the pig-demon had raked up the soft silt by the riverbank so they could bury it in the cicada's stead, and the cicada had risen from that simple grave into his second life with the body of a young woman with innocent eyes. As they crossed the river they had seen the corpse of his first life, its pale and familiar face surfacing from the water like a phantom from forgotten memory. The cicada had been horrified, but the monkey had laughed. Don't be frightened, Master, he had said. That's you. And the pig and the sand-demon had taken up the chorus, clapping their hands and cheering wildly. It's you, it's you, and the monkey had said congratulations, because it was the only way forward into the land of the gods. As they were ferried past his companions also gave up their first lives one by one to that silver river, and as each choked and drowned they grinned victoriously and were congratulated by the others. In this manner they had passed from the mortal plane to the other side. It was there that they had received enlightenment in the form of a golden scroll.

Then they had been tasked with taking it back east.

•

••• 二 •••

•

When the cicada died for the second time the monkey was the only one alive to bury him. He had not been able to distinguish any one of their remains from the other. He had carried what scraps of flesh and shards of bone he could pry from hungry teeth in his hands for miles and miles until he was sure he would not be followed, and then he had split them into four fistfuls and buried them in separate mounds. He had split bread and spilt wine. There had been no incense so he had lit a branch of heather. He had stood vigil over their graves as day turned to night. And within hours they had all risen, dragon-horse and sand-demon and pig with new forms and new faces and the cicada this time with the body of a golden eagle, into the suffering of their third lives.

•

••• 三

The priest enters the shallow gully. The bottom of his black robes swell ripe with a brackish and moldering river water that reeks of sweat. He selects from the trickle one of the tableted stones that lie flat against its surface and pries it loose. He flips it over and its belly is dark and dripping like fresh-killed meat, and he climbs from the gully and kneels in the ground and opens his briefcase. Inside is his revolver, two bullets remaining, and the stranger's knife bathed in golden blood that is the brightest light in the desert darkness. The priest takes up the knife and with its blade scratches four deep cuts into the stone. At the top he joins two lines in the sign of the cross: 十. And underneath he joins two lines again: X. He sinks the tablet deep into the ground, where from his vantage point as he kneels it sits between the red eyes of the distant gods as their glare sways and swims in the rust-fog.

Then he takes up the shovel and begins to dig a grave.

三 •••

•

When the cicada died for the third time there was nothing left to bury. His meat sat warm and heavy in the belly of demons and they had woven his feathers into their hair after using them to pick his own tendons from their teeth. His bones and beak had been ground into powder and dissolved in their wine. His feet they had stewed in stock and spices, and they had ripped the socket of each individual talon from its joint and sucked each knuckle dry. They had gnawed the gristle out from between his claws and pried the flesh of the palm from the bone. The scrolls of enlightenment, the ones he had clutched fiercely to himself since he received them in his second life, had seemingly vanished. All that remained of him was the grease on the demons' fingers.

They had raised a stone for him on a cliffside and done funerary rites for his third life, and then they had waited the proper amount of time, and then they had split up to look for graves. It was the monkey that found him, a youthful boy freshly-surfaced from the final resting place of a decomposing deer some thirty miles away. In a grip so tight his knuckles strained yellow sat the golden scroll, and the monkey had asked how did you manage to find it and the cicada had looked up at him, eyes bulging as if on the verge of something more calamitous than tears, and then down at his own hand. His old body's every element had been consumed by demons so completely there had been nothing left to bury, and he had felt every inch of it, and yet this new one had the same shine that called more monsters to him like a beacon. In his bright young voice he had said it seems I am permitted to take what I can carry.

•

••• 四

Here in the desert the earth is so dry it rejects even rain. The priest works at the ground for hours and merely dents it. The horse stands motionless and pale, a specter of death, as the priest painstakingly wears a shallow pit in the ground. It is the size of a pallet and only inches deep when the priest steps away and turns his face to the sky, where the rust-fog moves in its perpetual billowing clouds of bloody matter, the endless fallout of an eternal apocalypse.

The priest wipes the sweat from his brow and flicks it into the river behind him. Then he lifts the shovel with both hands, testing the heft of it.

He turns to the horse.

The horse tilts its head. "What are you going to do now?"

四 •••

•

When the cicada died for the fourth time the pig had died with him. This was not always the case. It did not benefit the monsters to eat anyone but the cicada, and yet when his companions protected him they often inevitably shared his fate. The monkey had always been the best fighter. He died the least and when he did it was usually a strategic sacrifice so the others could escape and bury him. The rest of the companions varied. The sand-demon and pig had suggested making a game of it, once. The dragon-horse, in every life there to carry the cicada on their journey, had thus far matched him death for death.

Their companions had found their skeletons this time. Their bones had been stripped and preserved in a hard shell of cold grease. Their skins had lain a small distance away and the undersides had been fringed with bits of muscle and furred in a blue mold. They had separated their mingled bones as best they could, bundling them in their skins before burying them, and after an appropriate amount of time the cicada had risen from his grave in the body of an old crone but the pig's grave had remained inert. They had waited as day turned to night, and the monkey had left to get a birds-eye view of any graves nearby and returned without finding him, and still the pig did not rise. It was only until new monsters came to feast on the cicada that they had been forced to flee.

Where is that lazy ass, the monkey had snarled as they stole away into the night, and the dragon-horse had said nothing because it was not in his nature to speak but the cicada had known. And that night when the rest had gone to bed the sand-demon had come to the cicada's side in the darkness and sat with him. They had been crossing an island at the time and the sand-demon had looked out across the ocean as it breathed long and slow. In his fourth life he had chosen to be a human woman and in the moonlight the cicada saw in his eyes a natural and primitive longing as he watched the ocean sigh in relief as it was permitted to dash itself against their shore.

He must have surfaced at some point, the cicada had said, and the sand-demon had said yes.

We would have found him if he wanted to be found, the cicada had said, testing the words. The sand-demon was gazing at the ocean, so no one else saw the cicada's lips move in the night. He had been grateful. The truth could not have survived the stark glare of daylight, let alone the knowing eyes of another. He found a grave far enough from us that we wouldn't catch up with him, and he left.

Yes, said the sand-demon—so, so softly, and watched the next wave come to a grateful end, and nothing else.

•

••• 五 •••

•

When the cicada died for the fifth time the sand-demon had died with him. The dragon-horse had barely escaped with his life. He was in this incarnation a young girl and a sword-dancer, and he had struggled under the burden of three sets of remains. In the end he had not even been able to use them. They had been in some barren part of the north, a wasteland of ice, and he had been unable to do more than pierce a hole into the frozen ground and coat a waterskin of their mingled blood in a layer of snow. To substitute he had caught three fish from a frozen river and laid them out a few feet away, the only other graves from which to rise within a hundred miles.

The monkey and cicada had surfaced at the appropriate hour, their new bodies blue and hypothermic in the howling sleet. Before the cicada had even lifted his hand to wipe the snow from his glowing scroll the dragon-horse had told them that the sand-demon had died alongside them. The monkey had not suggested a search. The cicada had not pressed the issue. Since that night by the ocean, some new and resigned part of him had known how the sand-demon's next death would end. This part of him had not been killed by his fifth death. It remained with him from that point on, and knew in its bitterness how the journey would end.

•

••• 六

In the priest's hands the shovel is an instrument of extraction. It is born in the dirt and branded by rust. The priest lifts it in both hands and rams it into the white head of the horse with a flat and final crack. The horse shrieks as it is beaten savagely aside and the sound splits the desert like a harpoon. The gates of Idyll blare with panic. The priest thrusts forward to pierce the barrel of the horse's belly open with the shovel's sharp point and it glances off its matted hide, and the rust-fog makes a sound like a cliff crumbling into the ocean, a great and laborious heave as if a behemoth stirs right above its churning surface. The horse's head swings back like a pendulum and its eyes are split stones in the deep sockets of its head and it stamps its hooves into the earth, and each stamp rolls through the desert like a death knell. Its massive form lurches and its cavernous maw bifurcates and when the priest swings again the horse brings its jaw down on the priest's hand. His finger is pulverized between its teeth and gold bursts from the horse's muzzle, coating its chin in a fierce blaze and falling in drooling sparks onto the unyielding earth, and as the priest howls mutinously the swollen rust-fog gives another gravid throb and ruptures to a violent and unnatural downpour.

The rust-fog pulls back for the sudden storm as if curtains whisked back to reveal the night, vanishing in a vacuum with a primordial shriek. The rain plummets through its crimson surf and greedily devours its grit and rust so that the steaming deluge that strikes the desert is a red and lurid splatter that shines and smells of copper. With its color and scent it is indistinguishable from blood. Sheets of it surge and recede in a rhythm like the breathing of a wounded animal. The wet slap of it against the ground erases everything else. The horse removes its teeth from the priest's exposed bone and mauled flesh and snatches him up by the cassock, thrashing him by the neck across the desert. The earth is slick and shining wet and as the priest is keelhauled over it he leaves hairline cracks of desperate, trembling gold. The blood rain is a thick vertical wave that baptizes them both in a drowning death from which they cannot surface, a viscous ocean of hot metal that fills the priest's mouth and greases his hands as he grabs brutally for a direction while he is tossed like a dinghy in an ocean storm. The horse's gallop beats a wild maelstrom and each blow is seared into him as he is tossed and dragged, seized and compressed in a brutal fist of earth and blood and horse hoof bone that tears his flesh away to a thick smear of the gold beneath. The horse's hot breath streams under the peeling film of his cassock and over the bared skin of his shoulders. The priest's four-fingered hand climbs clumsily up the shovel and he spears it up into the horse's neck and the horse screams as the sky slams open with a white brand of lightning, the world vaporized for a stark moment into black and white, the horse silhouetted as it rears at the climax of its pain. Amidst the bloody rain and the sweat-stench of the river as it swells like a distended belly and sloshes lasciviously over its banks the smell of the horse's blood as it falls is the wild and untamable scent of ocean froth, salt spray spurting ink-dark down its streaming and rust-caked neck. The priest is thrown from the horse's mouth, flung aside in a tumble of sodden skins.

His brain flips in his skull. He stakes the shovel blindly into the dirt and drags himself up hand-over-hand by its gold-streaked handle. His legs tremble like a foal. Through the rain as it slams against his eyes and burns his open wounds and lashes the ground like endless gunfire he cannot see anything but a soup of red and black, and an empty blank space against it where the horse reels in a frenzied circle. Its maned head flings up toward him and the priest, soaked through, cannot feel his own body as he pitches forward, pulling the shovel back, and as the horse lunges for him he smashes it into the side of the horse's head again and again and again, snot and drool and blood and rain and gold running raw and wet down his face and hands as he gives himself over to mindless animal violence, to rage, an act of sacrifice and worship to the bloodthirsty god within him. The horse gives a punctured squeal and stumbles under him, writhing and cowering as it is beaten into the wet ground. The earth shivers and unseams like a hungry mouth, gorges peeling open across its overwhelmed skin, and the horse's hoof slips on the streaming ground as water pours over it like an ocean wave and its leg distorts and folds in on itself with a sick snap. It goes down on its side with a crash, thrown against the ground, and stays there.

六 •••

•

When the cicada died for the sixth time it had been at the hands of humans. The hunger had not come to them instinctively, though it was just as natural. The age of demons openly and flagrantly wandering the earth had long since come to an end but there were still humans who saw and sought their power, and their avenues varied from proximity to service to leverage.

It was to the latter that the cicada fell in his sixth life. His captors did not think of him as monster or human but instead saw him as the settlers of Idyll saw the desert, to be laid claim to and stripped of its resources and then the remains sat on to be utilized as opportunities arose. They sealed him into a coffin and from within it they mined him for their material gain. They extracted from him his blood, dark and rich and red as wine, and bottled it in glasses. They subjected him to lingchi. These parts of him they sold at exorbitant prices, demons who hungered for the prime cuts of him and humans who wondered shyly at that hunger, and when they had sold the last they exhumed him to take yet more, and he was not permitted to move and he was not permitted to die. And when there was nothing more of him to mine they scraped the skin from his emaciated husk and put it in their mouths, and it was then that the cicada discovered what his flesh and blood did to the humans who ate it. They turned into monsters and those monsters discovered a new way in which to hunger for him and ate him, bones and all.

The dragon-horse bartered for a vial of his blood. He had buried the cicada under a pagoda in the woods and when the cicada rose from the grave, scroll in hand, he had raised his head and said: we've passed this pagoda before.

We haven't, said the monkey. We've been tracking you since you disappeared. We just arrived here this morning.

We have, said the cicada. Once in my second life, and again in my fourth. He had closed his eyes and then opened them, and even then it had still been there. He had wondered if there was no escaping it, or indeed anything else, for the remainder of four unnaturally long lives.

•

••• 七

Under the bloody eyes of the oil-rig gods on their high towers and the clear bow of the desert sky sprayed white with buckshot stars—under the panicked eyes of the horse as it lies beached on its side in the dirt—the priest takes a step, then another, hobbling over to the makeshift grave. Water thick as blood and deep as a rising tide splashes over his ankles and into the desert as he approaches.

The grave has not been spared in the wild laceration of the earth. A jagged crack now replaces the shallow square from before and splits the dirt up to the untouched headstone, an uneven wound with an unnatural bend that stretches some twelve feet long and about as deep. The priest readjusts his grip on the shovel, his shattered hand stiff and the remaining joint of his bitten finger twitching uselessly. With it he removes shaky shovelfuls of loose gravel, neatening the lines of the grave and smoothing out the slope at the foot of it that might permit one to voluntarily enter.

七 •••

•

When the cicada died for the seventh time he had done so at his own hand. Like his sixth life he had been captured by humans; like his sixth life he had been alone; like his sixth life he had been locked into darkness. Unlike his sixth life they had left him in a room, and in that room they had left him a candle.

He had been by this point well-acquainted with what would happen to him if he left them a corpse to divide. The trouble of it had been finding a blade; the priest had made do with a loose nail in the end. He had pressed the nail into his palm as deep as it could possibly go, his blood murky and dark in the twin golden glows of the scroll and the candle, and dragged its straight point mercilessly through the length of his arm until it met the canyon at the curve of his elbow. As his gaze had fogged and his limbs gone cold he had done the same to his other arm. And then, when the ground before him was so slick with blood it coated the tops of his feet and he was quite sure there was nothing left inside him for anyone to take, he had flung the nail to the side and stumbled to his feet and put the candle to the corner where the woven mats of the floor met the splintering wood of the wall, and as the hut had gone up in flames and himself with it the cicada had laid down into the warmth and pressed the scroll in blue hands to the glowing coal of his chest as it burned and thought first that the next time he came back he did not want his blood or any other part of this many-eaten body back at all—and then vowed, fierce and feverish and half-delirious, that even so he would not give up anything that mattered ever again.

When his remaining companions arrived they had found nothing but charred bones. They had buried his skull and a fistful of ash before a stone, and they had conducted his funerary rites, and then they had waited. And when the appropriate number of hours had passed the cicada had risen, his eyes cold and face blank as stone, with no scroll in his hand.

The dragon-horse had asked, did the fire happen when they tried to eat you?

No, said the cicada. He had turned to the dragon-horse and his eyes had stayed exactly the same but the bottom half of his face had moved, as if possessed, into the satisfied ghost of a smile. This time I did it to myself.

The dragon-horse had looked as if he wanted to say more, but the monkey had stepped forward. In his seventh life he had chosen once more to be a monkey and the great wrinkles of his wizened face made it impossible to tell if he was truly as exhausted as he appeared when he said, where is the scroll?

The cicada had looked at his empty hands. Then he had looked up at the monkey and frowned.

I think... He had paused, then, and taken stock of himself. And then he had bitten harshly through his tongue, and when he opened his mouth holy light poured from the wriggling stump and down over his jaw. The golden scripture that dripped from his tongue had shifted restlessly as it fell in liquid light from the tip of his chin to splatter on the ground, and from it the threads of written truth that wove the world together had shone stark and reproachful in the dirt. The cicada had touched his mouth without surprise and said thick from his swollen tongue, in that same possessed voice without emotion: it seems I am permitted to take what I can carry.

•

••• 八

The ground is loose and, by rain or by divine intervention, has softened to a custard. Even if it were not, the priest is an old hand at digging graves and has long known the trick of it. He straightens when he is done and is pleased with his work.

There are worse graves he has dug before. Worse graves to be buried in, worse graves to rise from. He knows all this from personal experience.

The horse lifts its beaten muzzle from the ground. Red water drags at his mane.

"It's empty," he says, nodding to the grave. "The dragon-horse's tenth life is not here."

The priest turns.

He looks at the horse. The horse looks at him and the way it looks at him is the same way the old man used to look at him every time he came out from his church and onto the public road and the same way the dragon-horse looked at him from his regal white head all the way in his first life, when he had then too been a white horse with golden eyes. The horse looks at the priest and it is the same way he has always looked at him, the same way they have always looked at each other since before people knew to keep track of the passage of time.

The priest says: "yes, you are."

八 •••

•

In the library there is a book called Journey to the West. It tells the story of a bodhisattva named the Golden Cicada who, as punishment for defying the Buddha, is banished from the heavens and sentenced to live ten lives of human piety. On his tenth reincarnation, he is tasked with journeying west to retrieve the secrets of enlightenment and delivering them east. There is a monkey who is also the human mind, a pig known as human nature, an ogre known as human resilience, and a dragon-horse known as human will. There are demons that chase them, seeking to partake of the bodhisattva's flesh and the immortality it bestows. In the end, he and his companions successfully retrieve the secrets to enlightenment, attaining it along the way, and ascend to their positions in the celestial pantheon as bodhisattvas in their own right once more.

This is not that book. Instead this is the story of a bodhisattva named the Golden Cicada who, as punishment for defying the Buddha, is banished from the heavens and sentenced to live ten lives of human piety. In his very first life, he is tasked with journeying west to retrieve the secrets of enlightenment and delivering them east. There is a monkey who is also the human mind, a pig we know as human nature, an ogre we know as human resilience. There is a dragon-horse we know as human will. There is the cicada, who we know as human faith. There are demons that chase them, seeking to partake of the divinity in the bodhisattva's flesh and the immortality it bestows. In his first life, he and his companions successfully arrive in the west and retrieve the secrets to enlightenment.

They resume traveling, returning eastward to deliver it. The road is not the same. It is confusing and ephemeral, part of a plane that runs superimposed over our own world and yet stretches endlessly through time and space. They travel this plane eastward through one life after the next, circling the earth many times over. Still there is nowhere to deliver their burden, no destination in sight. Still they are hounded by demons who seek the Golden Cicada's flesh. His companions are gifted ten lives to match the ten they will have to protect him for. At first they stay with him, rising from their graves when they fall to the demons besieging them; then they fall, disappearing from the journey one-by-one, flung too far to return or beaten too tired to continue.

In his sixth life, the cicada finds out what happens to humans who bite deep enough to draw blood. In his seventh he loses a little too much of himself and, given the opportunity, allows the knowledge to change him. Unable to carry the burden any further, he is permitted to take only what he can carry; he chooses to give up his blood, and when he returns, the scripture he is tasked to deliver has taken its place.

They continue eastward. They circle the world through an era beyond human memory and a distance that defies description. They see each mountain and valley and ocean and plain and at no place do the gods in their infinite foresight say that they have brought enlightenment to its intended destination. Finally, at the end of his eighth life and the beginning of his ninth, the cicada rises from his grave to find that the monkey, too, has finally left. It is then that the cicada stops and refuses to move a step further.

The dragon-horse disagrees. For him, too, eight lives have passed. Human will has been a white steed, has been a human girl, and is now in his ninth life in the guise of an old man. But at heart human will is a dragon-horse, and a horse knows only how to walk forward. He makes his arguments. But human faith has been killed too many times, has lost a little of himself each time, and has now lost the human mind. There is only human will left, and will is not enough alone to take faith any further.

No more, says faith. He will stop here, in the desert of a distant land, where he will either rest or make his bones. There is faith enough to live—perhaps even enough to thrive, or to erect a city from the dust in five hundred years time. It will have to be enough for humanity that enlightenment exists, even if they cannot have it. Let them try; if the gods deem it enough, they will let him rest. And if they don't, and they stay, and the demons continue to come for him—well. The human mind is not here to protect them anymore, but human faith has lost enough of itself to be bitter, angry. Let them try.

Human will is not convinced, but cannot move further without faith in what lies ahead, the promise of what lies at the end of their tenth life.

So faith settles here, in the desert of Arizona. He is not a man, but we call him the priest anyway.

•

••• 九