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"The soul shines proudly after falling in battle. The birds have a belief: This is the only method of earning an immortal soul." -"Valkyrie," Odin Sphere

It was dark for a while. I believe that there had been a sunset. Also, eventually, a sunrise. The sun was right in front of me as it rose. That was my first discovery: I was facing east.

As far as I had been able to tell during the night, I was in an endless desert. The monotony of darkness was broken by that light: Sunlight directly in front of my field of view. I slowed my pace and eventually stopped, staring into the wind. Had there been an east wind before? Perhaps I had only begun to notice after the stilling of the onrushing air, as I had hurried.

"Symbols are the key to telepathy. The mind wraps its secrets in symbols. If we discover the symbols that shape our enemy's thought, we can change our world."
-Lady Deirdre Skye, "Our Secret War"

I found it difficult for a moment to keep my footing. The change in my momentum, from full speed ahead to stumbling stop, had been a shock to my system even slowing down gradually. I took a moment to get my bearings. My glasses were gone. My clothes were disheveled. There was no longer any room for doubt: I would be limited to the items I found in this desert, if I was to locate a way out.



At this point, I had a decision to make. Although I did not yet know it, I was quite close to a water source. However, I had passed the source while running full speed ahead. I was on edge and unconsciously aware that help was close by, but I was also very reluctant to go off in search of that help.

Eventually I would find myself in that forest again, a place I dimly remembered, and there I would make two fateful decisions: Whether to fight, and whether to permit myself to lose. The option to fail -- to allow myself to disappear or to simply lay down my weapon -- would not naturally occur to me. However, every step of the way I would have the opportunity to reconsider, and it is those opportunities that allow humans to avoid past mistakes.

However, at this point, I was still in the desert, the place I would later learn to be the Storming Battlefields, resting place of the furnace that spews despair. Unlike in the second Oz movie, there was no reason to believe that the sand would turn me into dust. Also, in that movie, Dorothy had lost her Technicolor shoes quite early on.

The stakes here were different. I was lost and thirsty. I could have given up, but if so, this tale would have been short. I was unaware that the water source called Lethe, or sometimes Argax, was to my right under a rock.

I tell you truthfully, although it may seem strange: I do not know whether I drank of that spring. I only know that I was not about to pick sides, in the war that was about to occur. Between Aesir and Vanir, human and fairy, Empire and Undine? The outcomes of these conflicts are set, and they are ancient dramas meant to teach or to provide tools to question.

Those who know the outcome of the wars may see what I am leaving here. It is an intentional absence. It is a clue.

Although as an independent I would be called the "Forest Witch," attacked and reviled, I could not have chosen otherwise. And the water of Lethe would have just as easily made me a fairy princess as a Valkyrie or a god. These are things that are generally assumed to be unreal, but in the life before life, anything goes.



I still intend to save the life of the Undine, Nietzsche. While I do so there will be less and less times for the duties of an eJapanese Representative. I was willing to accept this because of my firm belief that it is better to be wise than too strong, better to be mature than too arrogant, and better to be young than too experienced.

Those who have already assumed that these events are only parables, or perhaps fables, or metaphors... They are the ones to whom I write. It is not enough to confirm the literal truth of these words. I must also make clear the intent of [Tao].

To write the stories that are too true because too passionate, that are deadly if only because of repetition -- the stories which, in Plato's account of Socrates's words, would be banned from the ideal Polis[/i}?

That is the purpose of [Tao]. The reason is because whether or not these tales are remembered, history will still repeat. And it is no longer sufficient to know that I may be the only one listening.