They wondered if Mosscap was going to be like this with every human-made object it encountered. “Yeah, well, we’re not in a ruin,” Dex said, panting lightly as they crested the last of a mild incline. “I’ve never seen a sign this legible before,” it called back. It stopped before a road sign, placing its hinged hands on its matte-silver hips as it read the text to itself. “Oh, and look at this!” Mosscap hurried ahead of the ox-bike, clanking with every step. If this was what passed as manicured, they couldn’t imagine what Mosscap was going to make of, say, a rose garden, or a public park. “I knew it would be, but I’ve never seen it for myself.”ĭex glanced at the dense ferns and web-laced wildflowers spilling over the edge of the road, barely held back by the highway’s border. “It’s so … manicured,” the robot said with wonder as it studied the seam between road and forest. Mosscap walked alongside them, its tireless mechanical legs easily keeping pace with the bike.

Not that Sibling Dex was alone, of course. Instead, there was cream-colored paving, smooth as butter and just as warm, lined with signs people made to let other people know which way to go if they wanted to rest and eat and not be alone. There were no creeping branches catching their clothing, no fallen trees posing problems, no unlabeled forks that made them stop and stare with dread. Their heavily laden double-decker wagon no longer shuddered as they willed it across chaotic surfaces rent by the march of roots and the meandering of soil. The wheels of Dex’s ox-bike no longer caught on the broken crags of old oil road. But the moment they pedaled their wagon out of the wilderness and onto the highway, Dex felt the indescribable relief of switching back to the flip side of that equation-the side in which humans had made existence as comfortable as technology would sustainably allow.

It had been important-vitally important-for Sibling Dex to see their world as it was without such constructs, to understand on a visceral level that there was infinitely more to life than what happened between walls, that every person was indeed just an animal in clothing, subject to the laws of nature and the whims of chance like everything else that had ever lived and died in the universe. Houses were invented for excellent reasons, as were shoes, plumbing, pillows, heaters, washing machines, paint, lamps, soap, refrigeration, and all the other countless trappings humans struggle to imagine life without. The thing about fucking off to the woods is that unless you are a very particular, very rare sort of person, it does not take long to understand why people left said woods in the first place.

A prayer for the crown shy release date