"I've got to run," I said.

"I didn't know you ran," Paul said, but I was already gone.

I sprinted across the parking lot, past the square dorms, past

Yancey Hall with its buttercream columns and Seward Hall with its laughing satyr fountain out front. My sneakers slapped the brick walk as I followed the song, giving into its tug.

The music grew in intensity, mingling with the music that was always in my mind anyway--the psychic fabric that gave me my bearings, that told me where I was in the world. The brick walk ended but I kept running, stumbling on the uneven, overgrown grass. I felt like I was jumping off the edge of the world. The evening autumn sun blazed across the hills, and all I could think was I'm too late.

But there he walked, whoever he was--faraway on the hills, nearly out of my sight. He was little more than a silhouette, a dark figure of uncertain height on an endless hill of dazzling gold. His hands reached out to either side of him, pressing downwards in a gesture that seemed to urge the earth to stay still. Right before he moved too far away for me to discern him from the dark trees far behind him, he stopped.

The music kept on, loud in the way that music in headphones is--sounding like it was made by my brain for my brain alone.

But I knew now, somehow, that it wasn't for me. It was for someone or something else, and I just had the misfortune to hear it as well.

I was devastated.

The figure turned toward me. For a long moment, he stood facing me. I was held, anchored to the ground--not by his music, which still called and pushed against the music already in my head and said grow rise follow--but by his strangeness. By his fingers, spread over the ground, holding something into the earth; by his shoulders, squared in a way that spoke of strength and unknowability; and most of all, by the great, thorny antlers that grew from his head, spanning the sky like branches.