Hope knew exactly what kind of person she was dealing with in Quiet-Dream. Someone with an unshakeable moral code. Someone who would fight you to the bitter end if you crossed the line, but would just as quickly stop fighting and save your life without feeling the slightest bit bothered by the contradiction. Compassionate to a fault, emphasis on the fault. The exact kind of person she wanted to have on their side, and the exact kind of person she didn’t want anywhere near the coming conflict once it inevitably escalated. There was just one problem.

  He clearly didn’t know what was at stake.

  “Follow me, and do not wander. It can be crowded in the studio.”

  Hope had expected to need to field all sorts of questions about the studio, such as whether the practicing Artists who frequented it were genuine or if it was just a front for the Inheritors (both were true), or why she had set up shop in an art studio to begin with (she was a sculptor herself, subversive political action was a more recent development). However, the squirrel had been completely silent since she had mentioned the graves.

  The studio itself consisted of a handful of simple rooms containing the equipment and materials used in a given medium. Most of it was sourced by the artists themselves, with excess left here for others to use. Their destination was a small walled garden behind the building, and Hope led Quiet-Dream down the central hallway and through the sculpting room towards the back.

  There were two people working in that sculpting room, applying plaster to fill cracks and breaks in a crudely chiseled chunk of limestone vaguely resembling two weasels or otters curled up together, a gift for one of their friends and its mate, if she recalled. They gave Hope a friendly greeting when she entered, but were otherwise engrossed in their work enough to not pay her or Quiet-Dream any mind.

  It always made Hope happy to see the animals of this world engaging in artistic pursuits they were not particularly skilled in. Between the emphasis on Roles and the directness of Understanding, it was easy for many to go their whole lives without really expressing themselves creatively. Not too unlike the Earth she remembered, in that respect. But plenty did seek creative fulfillment, and she was glad to provide a space for them to achieve that in. It was a way to improve the lives of the people living here without exerting any proper influence.

  No, right now there were only a select few people that Hope wanted influence over, and one of them was the squirrel silently following her outside. She wasn’t stupid, she knew that if he really wanted to, Quiet-Dream could scamper up and over the walls and make a break for it. She was fairly sure that he wouldn’t, he was far too invested in seeing what she wanted to show him to leave. That hadn’t stopped her from posting a pair of Scouts on the nearby rooftop and in an adjacent alleyway, though. Nothing was to be left to chance.

  “This is my memorial to them,” Hope began, gesturing to an arrangement of candles and sculptures sheltered from the rain by an overhang sticking out from the wall above it. “Only one of them is buried here, though. For the rest, there was no way to recover their bodies.”

  “What happened?” Quiet-Dream spoke up for the first time since they had come above ground.

  Briefly, the fact that she was about to engage in incredibly blatant emotional manipulation gave her pause. She was making a show of dredging up her pain, with the goal of preying on Quiet-Dream’s strong sense of empathy. Her emotions on the subject were genuine as could be, but there were far kinder ways of going about this. However, this was necessary. Kindness would only get in the way.

  “You appeared around the edge of the Lost Lands, right?” Hope asked, needing to set the stage for her explanation.

  “Yeah?”

  “We appeared right in the center of it, in the ruins of a city named Deepcross.”

  “So Ink-Talon was right,” Quiet-Dream muttered. “We can exist there.”

  “For a… certain definition of existence. It took almost three days before any of us realized we were not alone and managed to make contact, because while our minds can exist there, the Gift of Understanding does not.” Hope tried to relax and let the recounting flow naturally, she needed to get farther before she could afford to start falling apart. “Alan had the fantastic idea of building a bonfire in one of the city squares, making signs, and just making as much unnatural noise as he could to get the attention of other people. It’s thanks to him that I found anyone.”

  “Who?” Quiet-Dream tilted his head.

  “Alan?”

  “His name is just coming across as ‘the Pangolin’ to me, but I can tell there’s more meaning there, somehow.”

  “Ah. Right.” Hope sighed. “Absent Understanding, we all learned each other's names by writing them out. Drawing in dirt and mud and soot with claws and hooves. I… had to force myself to remember them once I left the Lost Lands. I do not know if I would have been able to if I hadn’t formed such strong associations with the written names without being able to Understand.”

  Hope stepped forward, clenching her jaw as she turned to face the squirrel.

  “You wanted to know what happened, so I am going to tell you what happened. It will not be pleasant, but I need you to hear this. I need you to Understand this.” She wouldn’t be telling the whole story, of course. What exactly they found in those ruins was something he didn’t need to know just yet.

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  “...Okay.” Quiet-Dream nodded, visibly tensing as if to brace for a physical impact more than emotional one.

  “Six of us found each other in those ruins. We did our best to find food and shelter, collaborating as best we could with our unfamiliar bodies. It did not go well.” Hope turned back and gestured at the leftmost sculpture in the arrangement, one of a proud tiger, positioned as if to protect the others. “Adrian was the first person we lost, only a week or so in. Her body required more meat than the rest of our diets combined, and she was struggling to adapt to four-legged movement. None of us were able to hunt anything significant enough to sustain her. She starved.”

  Hope moved on to the next sculpture, a calm and gentle turtle, not giving either of them time to dwell on the previous one.

  “Kaito lasted maybe a month. He just… gave up. Never told us why, but I have a few guesses.” Hope shook her head, deciding that elaborating wouldn’t be a good idea. “We decided that we needed to leave the city after that, following the overgrown remnants of roads. Food was becoming too sparse in the ruins, and we were holding on to the hope that we could find civilization out there. And for a while, things were going well. We developed some basic signs and signals to get across simple ideas and feelings, and we actually survived our first winter unscathed.”

  The next sculpture Hope pointed to was a vigilant deer, its antlers both deliberately broken off at the base.

  “Mae left us in the spring. Out of all of us, she was struggling the most with her identity. Being a trans woman forced back into an iconic masculine body, even a non-human one, must have been a special kind of hell. One day, she just bolted, having been agitated since the previous evening. It turns out we were downwind of a herd of feral deer in the middle of their mating season. She ran in the opposite direction. We never saw her again.”

  Next up was a cautious pangolin, tentatively peeking out from behind its armored tail.

  “We were attacked by a starving wolf a few weeks later. It mangled my leg and would have dragged me away if Alan hadn’t started tearing into it with his claws and scales. So it dropped me and fought him instead, each fatally wounding the other. I only survived my injury because Simon saw smoke over the trees. He dragged my unconscious body towards it, crossed the border of the Lost Lands, and ran to get help the moment he realized he could Understand things.”

  “And… What happened to him?” Quiet-Dream nodded at the final sculpture, a playful opossum hanging by its tail from a tree branch, having the time of its life. “You were safe at that point, right?”

  “We were. But Simon died of 'natural causes' just two years later. The natural lifespan of an opossum is three years, maybe four in perfect conditions, and his body was probably already a year old when he got it.” Hope dug her claws into the black dirt beneath her feet, unable to stop herself from trembling.

  “I’m so sorry, Hope,” Quiet-Dream squeaked, moving to place a supportive paw on her shoulder. She brushed it away.

  “He was twelve years old, Quiet-Dream!” Hope snapped, hissing as she spun to put her snout right up against his. In the cramped space of the shrine, he didn’t have any room to back up, scrunching in on himself as she pressed closer. “Not even a teenager yet, and he died of old age! And I just had to stand there and watch it happen! It is a cruel, horrible fate that I would not wish on anyone. Same goes for everyone else. Nobody deserves what has happened to us! And for fifteen years I have prayed that it would never happen again. But you being here has proven that it will. And this society is not prepared to handle that!”

  “I- I don’t- I didn’t-” The squirrel tried and failed to convey a complete thought through his terrified trembling for a few seconds before finally reaching a question Hope wasn’t expecting. “Why did you show me all of this?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Am I the first person you’ve ever talked about this with? In all these years? Did you bring me here to convince me, or to just have someone who ‘gets it?’ Did you think your friends wouldn’t?” Quiet-Dream pointed to his left with a paw, finally drawing Hope’s attention to the two other creatures standing in the garden with them. It was the Scouts she had asked to keep watch and make sure Quiet-Dream couldn’t run.

  “I… was able to see you tell most of your story from my vantage point,” Black-Tip, the seagull, chirped, seemingly ashamed of its eavesdropping. “As you became increasingly distressed by it, I informed Honed-Claw that I was going to make sure you were okay. It decided to join me.”

  “I apologize for abandoning my post, Inheritor Hope.” Honed-Claw, the bobcat, bowed its head. “But that is an unfair burden you have placed on yourself and Apprentice Quiet-Dream.”

  “We all agreed to be Inheritors of the Truth,” Black-Tip nodded in agreement. “To share in the burden of that knowledge and let it guide our actions. You should not have to bear any aspect of it by yourself.”

  “Thank you. Both of you.” Hope sighed, releasing a tension in her core that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding on to since walking into the garden. Quiet-Dream had been correct, she had been keeping the exact fates of her old companions to herself, never wanting to garner pity when there were more important things to worry about. But that was exactly what she was trying to do with Quiet-Dream, in the end. Pity begets sympathy. Sympathy begets cooperation. “I am sorry. You all deserve better from me than that.”

  “Sorry, but…” Quiet-Dream squeaked, having worked up the courage to interrupt the moment. “What ‘Truth’ are you ‘Inheriting,’ exactly?”

  “It is…” Hope weighed her options here. She hadn’t planned to get into the particulars just yet, but much to her surprise, Quiet-Dream hadn’t been nearly as emotionally overwhelmed by the first half of her story as she’d expected. If anything, he only grew more serious and determined when faced with someone else’s suffering. But this Truth was as much about him and his actions as it was about hers or anyone else’s. She couldn’t risk it. Not yet.

  “It’s a secret, I get it,” Quiet-Dream cracked a bizarre smile, baring his teeth in an attempt to express like a human would. It could not hide that he was a bundle of raw nerves ready to jump at the slightest movement, though. “It makes you look like a cult, which I’m not convinced you aren’t, to be clear. But I get it.”

  “It is the Truth behind us, Quiet-Dream. The reason we are here. That is all.” Hope turned around and motioned for him to follow her back inside, not elaborating further. For now, she could only hope that curiosity would secure his cooperation. That what she knew was too important for him to give up on learning it. She was far from certain it would work, far from certain that any of what she was doing mattered. She could only hope that in the end, their collective efforts could make a difference.

  Because humanity’s reemergence was inevitable, as was the suffering that would follow. This time, she refused to simply stand by and watch.

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