Pan

393 AC - As I stretch and rub my sleepy eyes, I realize my mouth is watering. Papa is cooking fried eggs on the cast-iron skillet – and maybe a few slices of bacon, based on that yummy smell. I yawn, blink and look around me. All the Woollybacks have wandered off onto the grassy plain. Most of them are grazing, but a few are having a nap, like us. But if Papa and I are both here, who's looking after… I see him playing around among the animals, causing more chaos than anything else. I watch him playing leapfrog, and my father bursts out laughing when Puff scratches the ground with his hooves.

The panicking Woollybacks start to run in all directions as that rascal Pan continues to get up to mischief. There's something very funny about the way he moves around and gets up to his pranks, but I also feel the Chimaera's annoyance. Eru is there, again, and I realize that I'm dreaming again, half awake and half asleep. I need to pick a side: remain a simple shepherd boy, or become more by embracing the way of the animals? After all, the Musubi is an extension of the Skein, and the Skein is a path already laid out before us. Pan smiles at me, as if his goal from the very beginning was to spark something within me. And then I finally understand which path I must follow…

Pan, whose father is Hermes and whose mother is a daughter of Dryops, is a capricious nature deity in Greek mythology. The god of shepherds and flocks is often depicted as a man with a bearded face and the hindquarters and hooves of a goat, like the satyrs he is often associated with. It is said that seeing him with his true appearance in your dreams is a sign of happiness.

KAURI