You can scream, no one will hear. I only meet a creature here. In fact, I meet it again and again. It's a staring raccoon. At first I think the wings of a butterfly have made a home on its face. But they're only his eyes, and gunpowder shadows fanning out from them. I don't know him, don't want to know him or anything else in this place. I can only walk in circles through these endless woods. Trying to mark the trees results in failure. Leaving a trail of leaves just confuses me even more. But this little raccoon sitting perched up on one the branches of a tree every few rounds I pass it, fills me with despair.

"You should learn how to talk."

A pearl falling on an ice ramp, rolling and rolling down. That's a voice I heard. For the first time in forever. My eyes shoot out in all directions.

"Not polite not saying anything back."

The voice is coming from overhead. Maybe someone came to rescue me. I let the words dangle in front of me and rearrange them like links on a chain. Why would someone who wants to help me say something like that?

"Hello-o-o?"

My mouth twitches. I stay silent when I realize who it is. That's it, I've finally gone off my rocker.

"It was fun seeing you waltz around but I got seasick from your rounds," the raccoon says.

He starts climbing down the tree until he's right in front of me.

"You're the densest one I've encountered here," he says.

I scoff.

"You're a talking raccoon. You're not real."

The little beast bares its teeth and the forest darkens a few notches. My options are limited.

"I am not some talking raccoon. My name is Meškėnas. And let's see about that when I get you out of here, Aušra."

And with that the creature starts walking, lets some dust twirl up with his tail.

***

Whistling bounces off the holes in the stems and the light pouring from the patchwork sky. Meškėnas the raccoon knows his tunes. I think of why I could have been condemned to the woods. These trees are yellow, they still make my heart phantom-pump. This must confirm I have once lived before. And if leaves curl up into felled spiders, mushrooms make me think of roofs with stars over them, I must be fairly close to still knowing what life is.

"Can you bring me back to life?" I ask.

"Ha!"

I almost trip over a carcass of a bird.

"Tell me what that is and I'll bring you to it, Aušra."

The forest seems to clear up little by little. My companion might actually be getting me somewhere instead of this roundabout of a forest. I need to impress him with an answer somehow, he seems a little conceited.

"It's whatever Orpheus wanted to retrieve from hell when he went looking for Eurydice."

"That's not your story. Not your life."

"So you mean I have never loved anyone before?"

The raccoon comes to a standstill. A gust of wind comes smiling by.

"That's soon. Normally we start off with... But whatever, I guess I could call in a favour."

He starts balancing acrobats of nonsense on his whiskers, he might as well grow into a purple dragon.

"It's ridiculous how some of you think of love so easily, you would think you're rather simple creatures at first glance."

A light fires underneath my brows.

"You are not wary of offending, I see."

Meškėnas says nothing, instead starts thumping on the ground with his paws. Quickly, it turns into smacking himself against the ground, over and over. I take some steps back, alarmed for his ribs.

"What are you doing?"

"Not to worry, the old bastard is just hard of hearing."

He keeps stumping, my teeth reverberate in my skull, my neck hairs stand up iron-spiked. And then, sulphur. Heavy, dulling wafts of almost-getting-sick envelop my senses. The earth cracks open.

"Get back!" the raccoon yells.

An enormous purple shell squeezes out of the ground, the trees shudder, a groaning worthy of a moon falling from the heavens erupts.

It is a purple dragon which stands before me. Somehow, I am not scared. I'm far beyond it, I am electrified from my kidneys up to the last blink of my eyes before my face stopped working.

"Why?" I manage to bring out.

"What!" the dragon answers instead of the raccoon.

The volume of his voice has aligned with that of a normal shout now that he has completely emerged from the ground. His eyes shine like copper pots, out of his hollow cheeks and the millions of cracks in his bone structure the sulphurous steam billows continuously. It doesn't kill me directly at least. But most imposingly is the beating globe-like thing in the centre of his forehead. I count, I count, I count. I feel like it's telling me something.

The raccoon trots around the dragon's body, evades the sweeping spiky tail like he's dodging a lazy afternoon fly.

"Love! Love! Love!" Meškėnas sings.

"Is this dragon supposed to be a sorry syncope of an allegory for love?"

"Far from it!" the racoon cries. "What do you see?"

The beating thing in the dragon's forehead pulses like a tooth that keeps aching. I feel for my teeth, then I wonder if the dragon notices those beats anymore.

"A dragon... with a harness for a face -a copper harness- and mangled teeth."

The raccoon exchanges a glance with the dragon.

"Good! I mean, some of you are as blind as a bat, they see their past lover in Slibinas or something."

"Well, no. What is that beating thing?" I ask.

Slibinas the dragon yawns, or merely opens his muzzle. It's hard to tell. Violence sits in the whole span of his head, and yet this raccoon is going on about love? I just want to get out of here, not get held up like this. The beating copper pot says something, says something, says something.

"My heart," Slibinas growls.

"Up there?" I exclaim.

"Where else?"

"In your chest."

He roars from deep inside his stomach.

"Am I a Greek god? Do I seek idle chat? I am Slibinas the dragon, and as punishment for your mockery, Aušra, I will place your heart on your forehead too."

I am so much smaller than this creature, surely my heart won't survive on my head. But then Slibinas spits a chalk substance from his tongue, I am blind for a second, and my chest feels cooler than it's ever felt. I think something, think something, think something. But I have only a faint idea what.

"Come on, you weren't supposed to do that! Such petty pride you have," Meškėnas complains while shaking his head.

"Be glad that I have prepared her adequately for Sparnai."

"Sparnai this, Sparnai that, they're all you talk about. They're really not that terrifying as you think," the raccoon says.

"Who are they?" I ask.

He stares at me in a squint.

"Aušra is afraid. Her heart is beating years ahead," the dragon sneers.

"That's not her heart anymore, I wouldn't know what you've made of it."

"It's not?" I say in a small voice.

"That you will have to find out in front of Sparnai," Slibinas says. His legs and paws dig into the ground again. His tail waves around, creates a spectacle of leaves and sticks flying up, and the raccoon gestures for me to quickly follow him in another direction.

***

I'm panting when I catch up to my guide.

"What was that for? My chest feels so strange, am I honest to god dying now?"

"Look, you weren't supposed to ask any questions. I thought you'd simply fall to your knees begging for someone back and be content."

Faintly, I hear the flapping of wings. Surely, the dragon would have be long back in the ground by now.

"I didn't know what to do! You should have told me what to do," I say.

"You think that's how it works? Besides, I don't know you."

The raccoon has the audacity to sneeze after he spits out a thing as ridiculous as that.

"Bless you. What the hell?"

"What?"

"You clearly know my name."

"Aušra."

"See! I never told you."

"Aušra. Aušra. Aušra."

Another bout of wing-flapping. The wind that it produces wraps in cellophane around my limbs and neck. Distracted, I try to peel the sensation off my skin. It doesn't work. When I turn to Meškėnas to see if he has an explanation for that, there is no trace of him. I should be used to the empty forest by now, but I still swallow hard. The movements of the air get louder, and greyer. I'm wading in mist.

And then I bump against mist. A dark shadow bites out of the haze, envelops me. I struggle back, but as it grabs me in its hold I realise it's only a wing.

"You're looking for something, Aušra?" a knob of a voice spills from its mouth. It's so concentrated it feels abrasive that it should disperse into separate words.

"I think."

The wing breathes in with my uncertainty.

"You do not."

"You are Sparnai, right?"

"I ask the questions. Why are you here?"

The wing sways me from side to side. What nerve! Putting me into this situation, then acting like I have planted my own demise.

"Because the raccoon brought me here."

Now is my time to discover what a leaf feels when Autumn comes peeking by. The creature shakes me upside down, then rolls me over to their other wing, a flap full of dead charcoal nerves. When my forehead accidentally touches one of them, I almost bite off my tongue.

Searing pain it is. That of a seer, knowing they can't act, only see. My forehead almost explodes in circles of light. And then, I don't feel anything.

"Nonsense. Before that, how did you end up here?"

"Slibinas placed my heart in my forehead, and he wanted to punish me even more. He thought you terrifying."

"As do you?" Sparnai shoots out.

I touch my forehead, but I don't feel a thump, I don't believe I have a dislocated heart anymore. The pain is gone, but so is the vehicle for it.

"Yes."

"What have I done to you?"

"Burnt my heart, for starters."

A head appears out of the shrouds of mist. At least, a ball of strangled vines does. Sparnai's head only keeps still, doesn't move a centimetre.

"You mean the touch of my wing? You believe it burnt your heart?"

I trace the empty sensation on my forehead.

"You are lying," the unmoving anti-sun of thoughts proclaims.

"I am not, I swear! It truly feels like that. The thumping isn't there anymore. How can I keep living like this?"

Avoiding any and all contact with another one of those veins, I try to straighten myself up.

"Before you took me under your wings, I was as close to knowing why... to knowing something as I ever would be. And even then I didn't know exactly what! How can I answer you now, without even a corpse of my heart?"

Sparnai is silent for an instant. My mind is full of rain waiting in its cloud to fall.

"You have let Slibinas put ideas in your belief sytem that shouldn't be there. You convince yourself that that dragon could alter your human way of feeling. You are stalling, Aušra."

I am beyond indignation. These creatures, they think they have the key to my innermost philosophy.

The head of the wings tightens its tone.

"Why are you here, Aušra? Why did you chose to keep walking in circles?"

"Because I was stuck in these woods. I don't know!"

The head still preserved in its immobility. The wings trembling slightly in an ill-falling wind.

"You don't know. Yet you kept walking."

"What else could I do?"

"The lines you draw with your steps. They only become circles when you are avoiding something," Sparnai says.

"These woods are a roundabout, not my fault. I thought I must be dead."

I finish speaking, and the wing I am curled up in yanks me up. The charcoal veins, stamped on my forehead. The unwavering bud of Sparnai's head, menacingly impressed onto some corner of my mind. But I feel no searing burn when I bump into the wing now. The knot of Sparnai's head fixes me again. Examines my reaction to my forehead long and quietly. Then all mist from all the sky presses me down, throws me on the ground. My spine gets a beating.

"Now you feel no pain? You don't believe your heart is not burning anymore?"

The silhouette of the strangled vines pulls me full into its sight.

"I will ask you again, Aušra."

Sparnai's wings start picking up the weight of the atmosphere, beats against it once and again.

"You believe anything anyone tells you. That you need to meet Slibinas first. That your heart is in your forehead. That your heart can't possibly burn or hurt upon touching my wings. Meškėnas, Slibinas, now me. Why are you here?"

My whole reasoning getting tossed around by these creatures' words like it's some thing that they can see but I cannot. What to say when all of them constantly tell me what I can or cannot believe?

Sparnai stares. I stare back.

"I wanted to see if I could meet myself again. I figured that had to be the way out."

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