Basque walked like a man but carried a feline head upon his shoulders. His fur was a deep purple that faded to gray on his belly and face. His back, arms, thighs and head were accented with orange tiger stripes. Basque spoke quietly and calmly in all circumstances and only the pitch of the growl in his voice discriminated pleasure from anger for his listeners.

His best friend was an entity that was made of several glowing spheres floating in a semi-opaque cloud of swirling colors. These colors conveyed no sound, so Basque referred to the entity as Garesh. Basque liked Garesh because Garesh was quiet and did not attempt to interfere in whatever Basque was doing at any given moment. Besides, Garesh was pleasing to look at when Basque wanted to rest his eyes and did not seem to be uncomfortable with the attention.

Basque first encountered Garesh when he was staking a claim to an unoccupied portion of psychic real estate. There was nothing especially interesting or engaging about the small stone outcropping in the physical world that Basque had chosen to anchor his new home with, which is why the location was unclaimed.

Possibly attracted by the process of construction, Garesh had wandered to Basque’s new home and taken up residence within a few days of the new realm’s creation. Basque didn’t actually meet his new occupant until a few weeks later, although there were almost daily indications of a visitor: abstract smears of color on certain walls, decorative plants changing hue overnight and so forth. Basque took these changes in stride and accepted them as ongoing critiques of his decorative tastes.

Maybe six months after Basque first spotted Garesh, the solitude of the realm was breached again. This time, the visitation was preceded by a thin humming wail that seemed to fluctuate between the edges of painful subsonics and nerve-wrenching ultrasonics without actually touching any of the ordinary ranges in between. Basque spent three days with his whiskers twitching, scouting the boundries of his territory in an attempt to find and (if possible) remove the source of the sound. It aggravated him and entranced him in nearly equal measure and he was not sure which response frightened him more.

The source of the noise turned out to be a shifting curtain of color that reminded Basque of the visuals one gets by moving a hand in front of a lit cathode ray tube really, really fast. Imbedded in the curtain of color was the barest impression of a face. It was not a human face, though; instead, it was thin, angular and arrogant and was clearly an echo of the kind of face that could spark flashes of true love in those who saw it. The features (such as could be made out through the gently strobing curtains) were twisted in agony and the kind of deep and abiding drama that only afflicted the truly vain.

Basque could not tell if the face had been male or female, but he did not have the heart to cast the doomed being from his home, so he made accommodations and struck certain bargains with the creature. The main stipulation of this agreement was that it kept it’s moaning and wailing and carrying on to a minimum.

Privately, Basque did not entirely mind some of the music and was, at times, put in the mind of bagpipes. He could not, however, stand to think of hearing the beautiful, haunting melodies at full volume every day for the rest of his life. It would, he knew, drive him to death or worse.

Both Basque and the unidentified bashee (who Basque referred to The Siren when the other was not around) took to wandering far afield from their home from time to time. Either one or the other would venture forth to see who or what was around them and sometimes both would leave at once, allowing Garesh the privacy that both of the others desperately wanted for themselves.

It was a good life and quiet, for that is how things often are before things begin to change and become crowded. There must always be a time to look back upon and reminisce about for without that time to yearn for and work (however ineffectually) towards there can be no true progress.