Kronos, the starry rock-walled city of the Jenn.

Kronos the brave, Kronos the strong, Kronos the high-rent district. 

Meanwhile, in the inner level of the city, where the worker-caste lived, on a simple bed of aged feathers and twisted wisps of straw, Alron the Perspicacious was psyching himself up. Alron was one of the few selected to be a student of the learned; his ultimate destination, priesthood itself. It was a great honor, one that the young men and women of Kronos had to work many long, hard years to qualify for - the requirements were a full basic education, eight years of mindless labor, three years of scientific study, and a 1200 minimum aptitude test score.

Alron had passed his ten-year basic courses in two years and then had done more or less whatever pleased him for the next eight years, much (perhaps, some said, all too much) of which was spent holed up with a magic book, only showing his pale, wild-eyed face in order to spew forth a neverending shopping list from his private chamber upstairs. The house was one of the few in quite a sizable radius to have more than one room, to say nothing about having more than one floor, and Alron wasted no time in taking advantage of the potential for privacy. 

"He /must/ get out for a walk /some/times," the neighbors agreed. And the curious disappearance of subtly large quantities of the strangest foodstuff from the cupboards and shelves conveniently explained how he ate -- if only the owners of certain well-scratched foreheads could understand how he managed to get at all that he evidently somehow did manage to, without ever appearing to leave his room. 

So it came to pass that, from what little of him others saw, Alron the Perspicacious seemed quite satisfied with his lot: to remain quite politely dead to the world. 

As a lark, however, he took the aptitude test. His score was a perfect 1600. Soon, the great temple was demanding his name so, well, demandingly, he was frightened into action. He possessed neither the heart nor the guts to tell them he was Jewish.

It was now time for his initiation, and he realized that he was about to be forced into what was completely and utterly the wrong lifestyle. That is not to say he actually would have recognized the right lifestyle had it bit him on the kismet. But the fact, ever so doggedly, remained: he had to do something. In fact, he was going to have his brilliant plan of escape ready for action, each and every last detail worked out flawlessly, just as soon as he could think of one. 

Time was growing alarmingly short. His appointment with the head priest was alarmingly soon. The suns were climbing alarmingly high. 

Alron the Perspicacious' digital watch began alarmingly alarming. 

He inhaled, exhaled, closed his eyes, opened his eyes, tried desperately though unsuccessfully to wake up or fall asleep, whatever would make for a good cue to segue into a more pleasant storyline, and set his teeth. Before he quite knew what was possessing him, he had set out for the outermost regions of the innermost wall... to the temple. 

His meandering mind was snatched from the scene by a sudden vision of his love, as she lay asleep inside the darkest, dankest, duskiest, deathliest dungeon of the temple (the majority of which was really a rather nice place to visit, actually, but you wouldn't want to be imprisoned there). 

He saw her beauty twist in a painful grimace as slowly her dry, open, desperate mouth struggled to breathe the misty odors of souls whose last remnants lay coldly in midair. Her fists, shaking, clenched as tightly as when awake; reliving her attempts to escape in the nightmares again. He heard her pained sighs of helpless sadness and knew his heart could take little more. He wept with her a moment and the vision was gone. Daylight, sunlight -- damnedly bright, hot, aching sunlight was squinting his eyes. 

He shook his head to clear it, his shouting thoughts cursing life; cursing his luck that he had just left the room when the police came; cursing the love he felt for her; and cursing his own clairvoyance for bringing all of this back to him when there was absolutely nothing he could do about it but to curse all of these things so. His wavering determination gradually steadied, reminding himself that he had first to calmly negotiate his way out of his own bureaucratic entanglements with the order of priests before he could kill them all to set his beloved Nitire free.

And with these thoughts settling in his mind, he trudged to the Conbey, the moving walkway that would carry him the five remaining miles to the temple. He stared at the ground passing under him, watching the straggly, tiny brown rikias dart and dip down for a taste of the trickle of rainwater that stretched down the dusty slope he was descending. There must have been thousands, but he wasn't of a squeamish stomach and contented his conscience by trying to avoid stepping on them. 

"Conbey -- Moving the Present Into the Future, and Back in Time for Tea; please pay toll at gate," chided the faded billboard. 

He reached his left hand into a fold of his cloak, and, with a bit of magician's flair, produced the octagonal holographic coins with a flourish of the arm and a cynically sarcastic "tadaa" added under his breath. There were three trynes in his palm, and their perpendicular blue whirlpools spun a bit with the momentum of his motions. With an aire of grandeur, he tossed them one after the other into the air. They landed in a stack--on edge--on his right palm. He held them out in front of him, perfectly balanced and sparkling splendidly in the summer sun, ready to pay his fare. 

The automatic electronic toll-basket was unimpressed as it swallowed his money with a /whiz-clack/.

Alron smiled a very tired smile beneath the hood of his dusky cloak, but the twinkle that somehow managed to remain in his eye as he did so revealed that he was younger than he seemed, or perhaps more aptly, that he seemed younger than he truly was. He realized how desperate for an audience he was, putting on a magic act for an audience consisting of three bored toll machines and a couple of slithering rikias. But a /whiz-clack/ was better than being booed off the stage, he decided, and he entered the slid-open door out onto the wide moving belt. 

He was surprised suddenly by a tapping on his right shoulder. 

"Wha--?" he whirled to his right. He was somewhat on edge. Romantic quests had a way of gnawing at his nerves like a rat gnawing on, well, anything. 

There was nobody there. Realizing he'd been tricked, he sheepishly turned to his left, and standing behind him, having appeared as if from nowhere, was his best friend and worst enemy (depending on the phase of the moon), Inralion the Light-Shadowed. Inralion clapped mockingly for Alron's little display while the latter sized him up, trying to decide if this was a safe time to talk to Inralion -- he could never quite remember the system that Inralion's mind was based on. 

Inralion was wearing his most mischievous grin, and that made Alron's logic take a turn. Inralion was, he was almost certain, on his side now; he seemed to have just changed over, in fact. Good; that would give Alron a reasonable reference point to use when it came to figuring out when to duck. He would have to be careful, though, for always at such times as these -- that is, while awake -- Inralion was constantly causing trouble, and constantly dragging everyone around right along with him. As if Alron hadn't had enough to worry about already. 

But still, he wasn't sure. 

"Is it--?" he began. 

"Safe? Sure," interrupted Inralion. 

Alron tried to fail at concealing his stage sigh of relief. He succeeded, and Inralion chuckled.

"Am I /really/ that awful?" he laughed, knowing full well that he was.

"Well, no, not really," Alron lied just to be polite, knowing full well that Inralion knew full well that he was, and that he was indeed lying just to be polite.

"You know full well that I know full well that you're lying just to be polite," Inralion remarked, knowing full well that his friend would insist that he wasn't. 

"I know," he replied, knowing full well that his friend thought he knew that he would have insisted that he wasn't just being polite. Well, he thought, what he'd known he'd thought he'd known he'd do he'd discovered he'd not heeded, seeing, you see, as he did what he did.

The two old friends smiled. 

The Conbey lazily rumbled along the mountain's ridge.