The Egg took its place, takes its place, will take, will have taken... the Egg made time even more meaningless to those who stood outside of it. A center with two satellites, a child with two caretakers: the mating of minds, the marriage of instincts to foster and to shape the raw power of the Center, the eternally born, the ever-transforming, both acting in its name and bringing the world's will to it.

The Fox bears little in the ways of comparative power. Its body is small, its jaws narrow, its bones light. They operate alone, and eat whatever they can find, be it berries or bunnies. One fox hunts while the other distributes to the young. A mated pair raises the young together, chase them off, and then return to either side of the territory.

The intincts and biology of a fox... how much does this extend to the Spirit of the Fox, which arises in humanity's observations and emotions towards the animal? What does a holy symbol gain when fostered by the presence of mind? What does the Fire of Judgment learn when raised by opportunism and resourcefulness?

In turn, what do the ambivalent figures learn and gain from serving this Fire, the Cosmic Egg, and what place develops in the ensuing cosmogenesis for the chaos that they embody? How do the holy symbols and paeans of peace reconcile with beings who both protect the stores of grain from vermin and raid the gardens of their stores? How does one address the being humble enough to clear one's refuse, and who also exploits the shoddiness of one's workmanship by raiding the unprotected henhouse?

Are the sensible, instinctual efforts of the Fox obscured by the projection if trickery, of humankind's own deviations from the simplicity of instinct, the bent-lines of sentience which curl the world back onto itself playing tricks by using the most diligent, most dutifully pragmatic animals to displace its own charge of misleading the eye?

Perhaps, in joining the two, does pragmatism and duty hide and justify chaos and illusion, and conversely, the seemingly ambivalent, amoral behavior of the creature serves the higher pattern of Heaven's will through its most humble servants.

Saffron had bolted herself in her room at the Horne's. The decorations remained: the posters of her favorite bands and movies, the mini wall-shrines to superheroines, the Tachikoma plushie, the old Hungarian dresser she trash-picked during one of her tumultuous early moves, the zabuton rolled up in the corner for when she wasn't sleeping. Tucker, Audrey's fat old beagle, had kept up with his skateboarding, though it was little more than a slow roll down the hall, propelled with the occasional, beleaguered shove from the back leg that still had a strong hip. For all the surface reasons, it seemed like the same room, from the chaos of Tina's cooking and Chester's lagomorphic panty raids to the cacophony of her hosts in flagrante during nightly hours, when Susie wasn't trying out her lungs.

The absences, however, were glaring to the little fox-eared lady. The water bowl on her altar had developed a crack in the edge since her arrival, first at the edge, creeping down toward the center by fractions of inches each day since her arrival. It came close to the point of becoming useless for its purpose. A candle that she'd lit during her meditation had a second wick hidden within the wax that brought the flame to rise higher than is holder could handle, warping it into a mess of cracked glass, singed wood and splattered wax. The flame had burnt a hole in her altar cloth, ruined her gemstones, and roasted half of the little bonsai that she'd kept hale and hearty for months; it had at most two viable branches left, and those had turned brown and sick. Her sewing machine, which had survived for nearly a century and through numerous strange and mystic variations, finally collapsed and bent into a irreparable mess of rusted metal and rotten wood that housed innumerable spiders. The Dakinibot, android representation of Shakti bearing all of Saffron's practice weapons, had gone missing, leaving behind her lotus stand, with the Garden of Earthly Delights still etched in its center.

She sat in half lotus at the room's center, blinds drawn to let in the light from the full moon. Her kerambit rested sheathed at her left side, and the backs of her hands settled on her knees. She'd pulled her mohawk back into a narrow ponytail. She wore a simple pair of gray yoga pants and a black tank top over her heavy-duty sports bra, gray eyes centered straight ahead, diffuse, blank. Her abdomen moved in and out slowly as she breathed through her nose, every so often one of her little round nostrils twitching to ignore the tingle in the scar across the bridge of her nose. The animals were asleep, Mags and Audrey were out, Tina, who could be spuriously described as Magenta's half-sister, had finished reading to the baby Susie, and the house remained oddly silent. Her ears rose and fell in time with her breathing, and the thick fluff of her tail curled around her legs, the wide cone of the white tip touching to the narrow base.

She felt the energy in the base of her spine begin to uncoil, to rise, to meet the centers of subtle energy. Here was where she would normally feel the blooming Ghost Rose along with downward growth of roots through her pelvic floor and her tail; it failed to register. The prismatic flash of the Phoenix Egg never reached her. The meticulous net of the Crystalline Spider never formed its mandala, only a hollow, unseen, undefinable abyss. She kept her eyes open, she kept her breath even, and she stared, waiting on the monsters that would stare back.