Corin sat cross-legged on his bed, cradling a glass flask in both hands.

A physician student learned about poisons, and had access to things that most people didn't.

All it would take to end the hurting and the emptiness forever would be to drink the few ounces of liquid in that flask. Even if someone found him, which was unlikely in the brief window before it did its work, they'd have to know what he'd used before they could find an antidote, and the flask held a combination of three poisons. There was no reason to think that any would counter any of the others; he'd looked into it at length. He wasn't risking having to face anyone tomorrow with that huge and unanswerable question of why.

No more feeling like every day was a lie. No more watching Jared and knowing that while Jared was fond of him, it couldn't approach Corin's own feelings. No more knowing that nothing could ever be any better than it was, and that it could only get worse.

No more of the constant exhausting struggle to block out his own thoughts, to hide from his own fantasies, to distance himself from his own feelings.

No more denying what he'd always known, deep down under everything: he wasn't a man in anything but the most superficial anatomical sense, which was the only sense that the culture around him recognized. And so, that culture would accept nothing else.

He'd written no note to leave behind. It wouldn't change anything, and would only shame his family. He'd done that enough already. His death would do so further: poison was a woman's death of choice, not a man's, but it was the one that drew him with a siren song of peace. Fall asleep one last time, without another day of misery to face on the other side.

Could he do it?

Could he face life anymore?

Any living thing will react to escape from pain. The greater the pain, the more extreme its response, and the more extreme the lengths it will go to in order to avoid the stimulus for it. Anything to make it end and not begin again.

I'm so tired of lying to myself and smiling when I want to cry. I'm so tired of hurting. Make it stop.

He worked the glass and cork and wax stopper out of the flask, and raised it to his lips.

Before he even tasted it, motion caught his eye; startled, he lowered the flask to look.

Sitting on the floor, directly in front of the door, was a red fox, tail curled neatly around its feet. It regarded him with luminous green eyes, which a fox really shouldn't have.

“Hello,” Corin said, oddly certain that the fox was able to understand. “Whatever you want, I can't help. If you're here as a guide for my soul, you're a few minutes early. But I'd really rather my soul didn't go anywhere else. That would probably just mean more hurting.”

The fox tilted its head—his head, though he had no idea why he was so sure it was male. He got up and turned to face the door, tail waving high in the air, but looked back over his shoulder.

“I can't follow you. I have something I have to do.”

The fox stepped through the door as though it weren't there, vanishing out of sight.

Then his head reappeared through it, eyes fixed on Corin.

Corin looked at the flask in his hand, puzzled. One of them could be a hallucinogen at the correct dosage, but he hadn't actually drunk it yet, had he? At least, he didn't remember drinking it.

That was the most reasonable explanation: he'd already swallowed the contents and was hallucinating while his hated body began to shut down.

Well, it was probably the last thing he'd ever do, in any sense, so why not? Three years of training made him reflexively put the cork back in the flask, hardly aware he'd done so, or that it was still in his hand as he got up. The fox disappeared again, but when he opened the door of his room, he found him sitting there waiting.

It seemed pointless to lock the door. He followed the fox though the sleeping boarding house down to the back door. He couldn't lock that, but he could hope that no one would have any reason to try it before Bruna got up to start breakfast.

What difference did it make? This was a hallucination anyway.

The fox led him through the streets, surreally quiet well past midnight but before anyone woke to begin the new day. They saw no one. A couple of blocks away, Corin realized he was holding the flask; he emptied it into a gutter and dropped it. The sound of the glass shattering seemed unnaturally loud in the silence.

To the edge of the city, and out further, along one of the deserted roads—the one that led to the east. There was nothing in that direction except fields and pastures and maybe a small village or two before the highlands.

Time stretched and compressed weirdly. Had he been walking, following the white flag of the tip of the fox's tail, forever? For only minutes? The sky grew lighter, and he saw wagons pass him along the road, in both directions, and riders on horses, and pedestrians. He ignored them. He had no intention of putting that mask on, ever again, and interacting with anyone would force him to do so. If they could even see him, they gave no indication of it.

Somewhere far off, he realized that his feet hurt, his whole body hurt, but so what? If his body had turned out the way it should have, his entire life wouldn't have been one long excruciating lie. It deserved to suffer. Or maybe it wasn't the walking. Maybe it was pain as the poison worked, and his mind was trying to put it into a context that made sense. He wished it good luck, because in this dreamlike reality, nothing really made sense, or everything did equally, he wasn't sure which was true, or whether both might be.

It didn't matter. All that mattered was that waving tail. His stomach growled at him, or was it only that he thought it should do so, as the sun moved across the sky and began to descend?

Walking, and more walking, and there was nothing for his mind to focus on, no distraction of books or questions to answer, no escape from the memories that tumbled one over another. Things that had happened, and with all his defences stripped away, there was nothing for it but to admit to himself what he'd really been feeling, what he'd really wanted to do. People who had been part of his life, and what he really wished he could say to them, but had never been able to do so.

He must be dying, he decided, and this was either some spiritual road for making peace with his life before going on, or some mad activity of his mind triggered by the poison. Either way, he'd have preferred to avoid it but he couldn't, so he accepted it.

Real or not, rather annoyingly he was growing tired, and it was harder and harder to force his body to keep moving. The white at the tip of the fox's tail showed clearly even in the darkness under bright stars that had never before looked so clear or so close, as though he could stretch just a bit higher and touch them.

The fox led him off the road for the first time, over a rise to a hollow under a cluster of trees, and there was a spring of water there. Not caring about the risks of contaminated or soiled water, he drank thirstily. Utterly exhausted, his body simply refused to get up. With a vague idea of avoiding wildlife coming to drink, he crawled a short way from the spring, and everything greyed out.

If he was dying, if this was the true sleep that wouldn't end, he welcomed it.

Somehow, though, it did end.

Disoriented and ravenous, the only thought that remained clear was that he'd been following the fox, for some reason he could no longer remember but it must be important. He emptied his bladder, wishing vaguely that there was a way to rip away his own flesh and rebuild it, and drank again, and stumbled to his feet. The fox expected him to keep up, though he had no idea why. He'd let everyone else down, all his life, and even with his death. He could at least try to get one thing right.

Because he could remember far too many times he'd failed, and the memories wouldn't stop coming...

* * *

The sounds of something large moving nearby made Corin open his eyes.

That was about all he had the strength left to do. The tall grass bent over beneath him, the soil under that, was a more comfortable bed than some he thought he'd had in the past several nights. He'd decided, delirious with hunger and exhaustion, that this mad trek was his punishment for taking his own life, and it would actually never end, but could it continue if he simply couldn't get up? A thin thread of hope remained that this was all happening in the space of an hour, with the distorted time of a dream, and that he was actually very close to the final systems of his body shutting down forever.

Greenish-gold eyes in a tawny-furred face, and behind it, a sleek lithe body with great paws on long legs. The big cat sniffed at him curiously.

Corin just sighed and closed his eyes, past caring.

Somewhere far away, he heard a puzzled voice with an unfamiliar accent. “We're nowhere near a human settlement, so what are you doing here?”

But the answer was too long, too complicated, and how could he expect a weyre to care any more than anyone else he'd ever known? He licked dry, cracked lips, and tried to whisper, “Let me die,” but his voice, unused for what felt like an eternity, failed him.

Distantly, he was aware of hands tucking a blanket or a cloak or something of the sort over him, and of the wind no longer reaching him. Hands steadied a smooth wooden cup that had cool water in it, and supported him so he could sit up enough to sip at it—that was pleasant relief from the dryness. When the hands went away, he lost track of time again, just existing.

More hands, and multiple voices, one of them female. “Definitely odd. The nearest human settlement would take the better part of a day on two feet from here, most of it cross-country, and he isn't dressed the same. But Sano says to bring him back, so that's what we'll do.” And the hands moved him, still with the blanket or cloak, onto something else, and the something else rose and moved and swayed alarmingly, and he passed out.

* * *