The Spires of Talos (Intro or Part Four?)

I stood here in my dreams, eons of Earth time ago, as a boy on the shores of Lake Sebago, at my family's home in Maine. I had spent the morning water-skiing with my family, and after lunch, (as was my favorite habit in summer), I had waited the appropriate time, gone for a swim out to the float anchored off-shore, and fallen asleep on my stomach in the sun, lulled into tranquil slumber by the sound of water lapping the underside of the float ... to this day, my favorite hypnotic. There, a young boy growing up in the late 1960's, on a planet three galaxies away, I stood HERE, as clearly and lucidly as I was doing so now, though I did not feel the Red Wind cut my skin, or my lungs strain for oxygen, as I do now. But everything else other than the physical senses was identical - the Ruby Spires beside me rising up beyond the limit of my vision, the same disappearing into the crimson mist below, with Talos' two suns reflecting their glow off into the expanses that surrounded these extraordinary mountains, and the Knife Edge trail zig-zagging off out of sight in the other direction, spotted here-and-there with the shapes of the Pahoun stragglers, who seemed almost ritualistic in their navigation of the Knife Edge ... surely they were far more adept at climbing and balance than I was with their extra limbs, yet they took twice the time that I did coming across, despite the danger that the growing darkness posed..

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