The Golem works. After four days he is finished with his measurements and claculations. He is courteous enough to warn Taxchan, "I am leaving now. The minimum destruction area is thirty meters."
The iguanodon stops chewing. "No. I will accommodate you so that you do not have to destroy any bit of Mu Merai," Taxchan says. "It is too precious. What will you need?"
"I need nothing, but to leave within," Golem pauses as if stumped, "I have no reference for your time. A short period."
"Can you not go beyond the shell of the sky and depart from there?"
"I need to be where the storm was. I can make the gate larger, but I cannot make it smaller."
Taxchan doesn’t understand anything about the gate, but if the Golem wants to leave the way of the storm, then it will be a dire threat to the Salvage Gardens. Suspecting that the strange creature is more insane - more fixated on suicide - than malicious, Taxchan spells it out for him. "The storm broke the shell. If you break the shell, you may destroy what separates this tiny world from the vacuum. In doing so you would cause the extinction of countless species dwelling here in their last refuge."
"If it matters to you that much, I will enlarge the gate to accommodate your world. The destruction will be vast, but outside of it. The world will travel with me to the next dimension of reality."
"You give me only these two options?"
"It is all I can give."
Taxchan lays down. "Then, I will make another option," he says, and his enormous gut begins to tremble. He bellows in his echoing, honking voice before collapsing in a pile of dead meat.
There is a tearing sound, and the iguanodon's broad, round side trembles. From within the beast’s belly some emerges - first a claw
- then a scaled hand, and a feathered wrist
- then a blood-smeared muzzle
- then horrible and black-and-red: an orange-eyed fury of claws, entrails, and teeth. It is covered in coarse feathers and fine scales, and it is dripping in blood. It bursts from the carcass and lands on its toes, holding its foreclaws at its side like a bird would hold its wing. It leaps forward like a giant chickadee - "To the underworld with you!" - and is upon the Golem in an instant. It slashes at him with the wicked, sickle-like knives on its feet, shreds him with its taloned hands, tears out chunks of protoplasmic flesh with its rows of sharp, reptilian teeth. Taxchan has decided: Insane or evil, it will die.
The Golem sighs, apparently unfeeling. It tries to speak, “As you wi-” before the front of its face and it teeth (made from unassuming little stones) is torn off and flung away. As its throat is ripped out, bits of goo fling in every direction. Taxchan swallows it like a terrible robin downing a most gruesome worm. When the strange traveler has been pulled to ribbons, Taxchan calms and feeds. First he swallows blue and green chunks of the Golem’s body, but finding protoplasm and ferns not to-his-taste, he turns to the dead iguanodon.
It is not long before Golem rises again, directly from the soil of Mu Merai.
"Your death dimension holds no more secrets than any of the countless others I've seen before." Its voice is muffled and indistinct, as though forced through a clothe: the soil has made for only a slightly moist mouth - it doesn't afford Golem's voice the beautiful resonant quality of fluid. "You have approximately -" he pauses as if doing math in his head "- five times longer than the period for which I was gone before your decision will be made for you."
Taxchan’s narrow, toothy muzzle is buried up to his eyes in the iguanodon when Golem arrives. He is a cracked-out prehistoric rooster; angry, clearly dangerous; he slings bits of flesh about as he draws his maw from the wound in the iguanodon’s side and leaps to face the resurrected enemy. Taxchan clucks and begins to circle.
"I understand your will to kill me," says the intruder. "But you will be unable."
The raptoran dinosaur hisses. "Truly!" Taxchan brandishes his claws. "You cannot be killed!" He leaps around Golem. "If you cannot pass through worlds –" ducks and comes up behind the Golem "– except by the point –" he puts his gory, scaled hands on the Golem's shoulders "– through which you entered . . . then I ought to keep you killed."
The orange eyes fix on where the elemental man’s navel would be. "What world is next? Now!" Taxchan's claws grip Golem and he taps the ground impatiently with the killing scythes on his feet. "Now! Answer!"
"I can see only a little from here; it is a barren universe that contains but one planet with life."
The dinosaur's claws press into the soil of Golem's chest.
"That is where the storm has gone. There, where your species is naught but buried stone and legend."
"No different than here - Five times the wait, you say?" Taxchan snarls.
"Show me what you use for a time piece and I will translate it."
"No need! I too can count time!"
(sculpture: "Velociraptor mogoliensis" created at Art Dinouveau)
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