— TO DEATH —

What is real?

I view the world weird.

I’ve let go of the next,

And drag my fingers along the now.

Memories past plague me.

No more real than the next,

Yet insist their influence all the same.

I don’t know why I persist.

Walking one foot in either, living in neither,

Right real, left aloft—above the abyss.

What is real rings me hollow.

The world will crumble around me, and I can only tumble and fall.

All anguish mine for I should never have presumed reality. 

I should have known nothing.

If there is real, my perception precludes its acquaintance.

Vanity to try,

I cannot know it as I know nothing.

— 46 —

Affected Substance

•

—

From death’s womb born anew, Lise opens to the world. It takes time for her mind to fully emerge. As though drawn from the deepest sleep, her dream still colors her thoughts, pigment running off. Even as pain courses through her again, she feels it different. Blinking away the film warping her lens, she sees past pain’s perversion.

Then she opens her eyes…

Dry moss drapes a chain hanging from the ceiling, splitting the triangular room into two rights. Verdant buds glow dim on the gray tendrils. Raising her head carefully, she looks over the room’s austere furnishings. To her left, a pair of skeletal steel chairs are positioned either side of a tall, narrow window, beyond which darkness reigns. The plain candle on her bedside table bears dust and an unburnt wick.

The first question, always: How long?

Its answer rings in her mind as death’s bell tolls.

Too

long.

Too

long.

Too

long…

Uncanny, ambivalent. She can feel her past absence, and struggles to fit time where none exists. 

The air is stale, sterile, but under that is a smell she can only describe as ‘of Kellean’. It is reassuring—if barely so—that she is in the same city as she recalled.

As her head hits the pillow, she is stricken with deep unease. The source is easy enough to identify—until she knows beyond this room, she is in emotional limbo. Change is undeniable, but how much? How will the changes affect her? How much?

It comes back to the most pressing question: How long? ‘Too long’ is an answer, but not a functional one. Nebulous—as, in her mind, too long can range anywhere from a cycle to a century.

The portal to resolution is a few steps to the right of her bed, painted off-white to match the walls. An unadorned door, so… near. The pain is manageable just now, but will that carry past sitting up? Standing? If her legs buckle, can she rise again? 

She breathes shallow, staring so intensely at the door it might open itself for fright of her mean gaze. Her lungs are tight and she begins to fear the exhale as much as the inhale; the pressure is such that with each breath she takes back less. Her chest rises little, yet she feels the strain of a yawn suppressed every time. And she can’t draw her eyes away from the door.

The silence is strenuous, and in it she comes to a thought she’s always associated with the undermind. I am the only person alive, and she feels silence’s betrayal.

Irresolute, she does nothing. She fears to find a city dead, and from this state of uncertainty her wildest thoughts are as reality. Tears come up at the images reflected; at her feet corpses spread in a wave and as she follows them with her eyes she meets her horizon.

In bed she lies, living lies.

It seems petty, the reason that brings her back from her dooming projections, but her stomach is insistent. She interprets its growled threats to mean it will eat her if she doesn't sate it soon.

I need to get up. The thought is hard to swallow, though the thought of doing so weak from hunger is harder. Swallow she does but the thought alone won’t serve for sustenance. Get up.

It takes her several repetitions to start and finds herself at a halt again once she’s thrown off the blanket. Her skin dimples where the gown leaves her open to the chill air. Cold and hungry, she might stand yet. Lise despises her fears even as she suffers them. Which do I dread more, the pain of mind? The pain of body?

With care not to strain her chest wound she rolls to her right side, letting her legs dangle over the edge of the bed. Breathing faint, Just get off the bed. Just get to the next respite. Trembling, she lets the weight of her legs bear her off, landing knees on the hard floor.

“Mmmckk–” The involuntary utterance forced from her by the impact. “Fck…”

Despite the jostle being indirect, she felt it as a stab in her chest. Fuuuck… She kneels there, cradling her chest even as the dull pain in her right knee grows hot, throbbing; all is second to the talons transfixing.

She rests her forehead against the bed, just a moment…

Her knee is a scream unheard under the reverberant roar of her chest. Leaning on the bed, she rises on shaky legs. Her steps to the door are clumsy, more a fall interrupted by a balancing hand than a true walk. Again she has to stop, head spinning. She waits.

Tentative, she opens her eyes, door-handle at hand. No more waiting. She pulls it open and fresh air flushes her.

It is pervasive: with the air comes new smells—preeminent, life’s putrefaction.

Speaking into the dark hall, “Hello?” It doesn’t quite echo, but rings strange in silence’s maw. “Hey!” Again, her voice is consumed quietly, unheard.

Following along by feel, she steps into the hall, hand dragging. Each shuffle shifts the talons, but so long as she steps steady she can stand it. The faint glow of her room falling behind she finds herself blind, cold encroaching. So dark…

“Anyone? Somebody…” She speaks periodically into the silence, begging an ear to hear.

Safety’s edge is sharp. An intersection? Careful, she walks forward, feeling for another wall. Three steps, four, six steps, ten… nothing. The slap of her feet on polished floor, but no more. Stumbling around, she finds nothing. She tries turning and going back but can’t find her wall anywhere. There is just… nothing.

“HELP! Ach… Someone!” Her voice comes out cracked—split by the talons. She staggers, “Shit…”

Her trembles are nearing spasms, unable to control her arms. Legs near collapse. She has to sit lest she guarantee her fall.

I’m going to die of cold.

The smell of death is subdued by the chill—a beast beneath the ice, lurking. She knows its imminence, a thin layer quick to shatter. It passes under her and she feels it in her spine. Of a sudden, she knows her fortune in sitting when she had. Something within, unconscious to her, knew the danger and drew her in and closed off her mind.

Centered in nothing, seeing nothing, she keeps still and silent. Controlled breaths coming and going as dry rasps. Long she sits there, staring into the dark—its breath in her ear but eyes never meet.

The floor is gone. She didn’t know when it had, but she knew it then.

Drifting,

drifting.

She grasps the first thing she feels and, as it had gone, the floor returns. When she blinks, the consuming dark is gone as well. 

Sprawled in the center of a ten-sided room, she gradually gathers herself. Rising, she gazes about the unadorned room and although she can’t say it certain without measuring, it strikes her as subtly asymmetrical. Perhaps due the nine exits, a lone wall bearing a sconce whose torch smolders iridescent. Still, she suspects the walls are irregular.

The torch smokes red-violet and stinks a sickly-sweet. She takes it even as her face scrunches from the scent and knows not to dally here as it burns away its usefulness. 

Which exit she chooses doesn’t matter, there is nothing to indicate any as the better path. So she picks the hall immediately right of the sconce and begins her trudge, again steadying herself against the wall. She walks what feels an hour, interrupted often to breathe, before the torch has dimmed to the point of uselessness. Cast aside, she continues in the consuming dark once more.

Cold to numbness, she feels a mere mind moving along. If not for the soft slap of her footstep, she would be quicker to believe what she feels.

Lise does not foresee the end. There is no light in the distance, no place to anticipate. Just an end, and as she realizes it is upon her, she is there. Her fingers do not drag, and her feet do not slap. She falls.

From death’s womb born anew, Lise opens to the world. It takes time for her mind to fully emerge. As though drawn from the deepest sleep, her dream still colors her thoughts, pigment running off. Even as pain courses through her again, she feels it different. Blinking away the film warping her lens, she sees past pain’s perversion.

Then she opens her eyes…

And closes them again. So warm… She will just go back to sleep. As she has before and before and before and before and before and before and before and before and before and before and before and be–

“What the…? Hey! Yo, she’s waking up! Hey!”

“What?”

“I said she’s waking up! Get in here!”

They prod her face, “Hey, you’re waking up, right? Hello?”

Lise opens her eyes once more, resigned to reality. She feels it dripping from her again—the gloom. She looks into the light, the flicker of a fire nearby, and remains. 

The woman leaning over her is a stranger, pale-faced and permeating the tent with bitter breath. Her lank blonde hair itches Lise’s nose. Anywhere but here, now. Why here? Why now? Above all she desires to be anywhere but near others—and this woman in particular. Even as she knows it a symptom of the gloom, her irritation grows overwhelming. Against her will, tears run from her eyes. Anything but this. Please anything but this.

Lise cannot keep from crying. It’s not her. It’s not her. Don’t do it. Damn it. It’s not her!

The woman frowns, “Why’s she crying?”

Pelanea appears, peeking in, “What?”

“Please… Please leave me.” Lise tries to express the weight of her request. Bile rising to burn her throat, she wishes to spare them her ire spewed.

“What?” They ask.

“Just leave! Please!” Despite her chest’s protest, she nears shouting.

Pelanea frowns, “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

Clenching, “I… I can’t explain! Not now.” They continue to stare, and she despairs that her words will not strike true. “I’m still there! In my head– Something, I… I’m still there! I-I-I… I need time! I beg you, leave me!” Even as they withdraw, by their faces she knows they do so from a place of fear, not understanding. 

Still, her relief is the same. The frustration settles, soothing her into the gloom’s lonely melancholia. Unwinding one muscle at a time, her shoulders, arms, fingers, blooming in solitude. Suffused with abyssal blue, her mind leaves aside worded thought to dwell in the deep.

Through the tent-top she stares, past the sky, over the moon, beyond the stars… she stares into death’s eyes and sees herself there. Long she lies there, staring, feeling for what remains of her to gather. And all the while she grieves; weeping for what she will never recollect; for the bark pared back. She feels the cold on her core.

Change is undeniable. It chills, to look back on time she will never touch, never trail her fingers over. Yet, as her gaze pulls back, turning, she sees it. A new acceptance.

‘When death is imminent’… She reflects, death is infinite.

Now comes the first question, effervescing bubble popping at the top: How long?

And as before she has hints but no answer. Turning the question trivial: her new acceptance.

— 47 —

Eyes Sore

//\\

NON runs still, bleeding from her brain. Streaming down her face, it is so cold it is hot… or so hot, cold. Blinking it from her eyes, continuous, awaiting its ebb.

Lise keeps her focus on the fire flickering between them. There are more than two, she’s found. Pelanea she knows, but with her are the bitter breathed woman: Eclait, and a man: Bente. Stiff in their silence, they watch her with suspicion. However, each bears their suspicion different; Pelanea is fearful, Eclait disdains her, and Bente sits somewhere between curiosity and concern.

Since exchanging names, not a word has passed between them and Lise prefers it remain that way—allowing her thoughts to flit within the flames. Words are still too sharp to handle in her yet tender mind, she follows the slow rolling dance of her distant emotions.

The longer she stares into the fire, the more the darkness consumes around her. Their faces vanish in it, the world drops away, and she feels the parts of herself lingering in NON—or is it that she feels their loss? Do her severed fingers persist as a part of her, or do they now exist apart from her? She feels the former and thinks the latter.

Blinking away tears splitting in three; pain, grief, and from looking into the fire a bit too long.

She breaks her stare and with it the silence, “Where are we?”

Their distinct reactions are lost in the dark, but she hears some shifting mingling in. It is Bente who answers.

“At the expanse’s edge. We near the soft soils of the mid-east.” His words clack in his throat like jagged stones in a tumbler. “We are scheduled to arrive at The Dwelling five cycles ahead of their solstice.”

The Dwelling… It feels so long since she left it but it hasn’t been a year… hardly half. Wait, “What year is it?”

Again it is Bente who replies—his baby-smooth face appearing as her eyes adjust, an uncanny contrast to his voice. “The same. 3323.”

Edge of the expanse, arriving near the solstice, same year. “Then… I have been dead only a few weeks?”

“Dead? What do you mean dead?” This from Eclait.

She ignores her, “Why do we go to The Dwelling?”

“You. The Kelle ordered we seek treatment for you there.” It’s at his mention of The Kelle that she notices his robes—green, of Harmony. By his foreign features she had set him apart from the Kelleanic folk accompanying them, but he wears their garb. “You were, as you say, dead for several weeks and it was decided that we know too little to continue.”

They know too little there, as well. “Why do they accompany us?” She nods in the direction of Pelanea and Eclait.

Bente nods, opens his mouth to reply but Eclait speaks first.

“I know your type.”

Lise turns to her, hearing the current of resentment under her words. Even as she suspects her misunderstanding she asks, expression unaltered, “What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re the type to think yourself above others just because you can control your dreams. Dreams aren’t even real, yet you put them on a pedestal and treat them as if they are. It’s stupid.”

“Thank you.”

“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“In a mere moment you single-handedly erased all my biases.”

“I…” She frowns.

And as she sees her misunderstand again Lise feels guilty for her sarcasm, thinly veiled as it was. “I should say, I only ask why you two accompany us because you won’t be allowed within The Dwelling. It’s not personal, and whatever you assume of me is like to be mistaken. You don’t know me, so I ask you not to act on your conjecture. Your projections are as my dreams.”

Bente begins again before Eclait can continue. “To answer your question, Eclait is a physic—The Kelle’s personal physic. And I am a dweller, as you seem to have perceived already. I was there when you… died.”

Lise sees the omission but does not address her. Instead, she tries to recall him. But her memories of what happened in Kellean are vague. She nods anyway. “Will we continue now that I’ve returned?”

He glances at Pelanea before answering, “Yes,” again she feels the omission, “The Dwelling is still more fit to treat your condition.”

What other purposes can we have for going? I… She can’t shake the feeling that he is avoiding the whole answer. I’m not worth all this effort alone, am I?

“I see…” She glances around their small encampment. “And how am I getting there? I can’t keep pace.”

“We have a pair of cart-trained skoi tethered over there.” He gestures into the night, but she can't see the creatures.

When she leaves aside her eyes and listens more closely, she hears the skoi’s gruff snorting. Muffled but for the guttural clicking which seems no less loud for their distance; it sounds so near she first hears it as part of the fire’s crackle. “When do we go?”

Bente begins, “Whenever–”

“Been waiting on you since your little tantrum.”

Lise restrains herself, side-eyeing Eclait.

“Whenever you’re ready, we can set off.” He finishes.

“Show me the way.” Before I say something I will regret.

— 48 —

Blessing Entangled

//\\

“The dreams stopped for a week or so, but when you… Well, when whatever happened to you happened, they… came back. They came back, but different.” Pelanea explains.

Lise nods, waiting, wincing as the cart hits a rough patch of ground. “I-I see.” She is trying her best to understand the explanation but it sounds rather convoluted from Pelanea’s perspective. “But how am I to help with this? I’m not quite sure… what you want me to do about it.”

Bente hadn’t said so much when he’d been riding with her, but the moment they switched places Pelanea started her story and has hardly let up since. It is a strain on her tender mind, trying to make sense of it all, but if she is honest it is a welcome distraction. The dark leaves too much to imagination, too little texture to get a visual hold sturdy enough to pull herself from the pain.

“Oh… Oh, well I just figured you would know what to do, you know… you’re a dweller and all that, I just figured….” The difference is abrupt; from the eager outpouring of emotions, to this despondence. She massages her hands, not meeting Lise’s gaze. “It’s alright though, I… I just…” The sudden tears were as much of a surprise.

Lise watches the tears fall silver, catching moonlight on her deathly complexion, and is struck dumb. Handling her own blistering emotions is usually a case of tossing them between her hands until they are cool enough to examine, and she rarely manages to do so with grace—her experience with others’ is clumsier still, often ending in a blaze when she loses her grip.

“I… Just wait, I will still try.” Just don’t cry. “Can you give me some time to consider what you’ve told me?”

Pelanea takes a shaky breath, wiping her eyes on her sleeves, and nods. “Please… It… It’s tearing me up inside and I don’t know what to do anymore…”

Inside… “I have an idea that may help me help you better, but I need to… sleep on it.”

\\//

Lise slides smoothly into the undermind. She feels her thoughts clear, a presence of mind she hasn’t known since Dejed. A breath of painless air.

Rubbing the scarred nub of her pinky, she takes her time scanning her surroundings—though there is not that much to see. The earth is dark, amorphous. What she supposes must be the cart she rides in, begins to take shape as she recognizes it, ferrying her across the surreal black sea, sloshing. A pinprick drifts along next to her, alighting the cart with her iridescent glow. 

Over the deep to her left floats another, a brilliant orb larger by far than any she has encountered before. She frowns, knowing it is Eclait. The significance of such a size disparity is something she’s never been able to parse, and in this circumstance troubles her ever more for its subject.

Another time, Lise knows she would have leapt at the opportunity to puzzle at it. It is the pressure of other problems that keeps her from it—a more present puzzle. Or is it a past puzzle? No, the past is where parts of the puzzle are, but the puzzle itself is present. Wait… is that right? I don’t know. Does it matter? Probably not… Definitely not. 

Lise purses her lips, prying her attention from Eclait and from her own impertinent word-toying.

Bente is formed to her right as expected, a blocky built man, bald head bobbing along beside them. He seems the most reliable of her three new companions but beyond his placid demeanor she knows little. Still, she can’t sit satisfied until she knows what purposes he keeps from her, and why. To erase that concern would be simple, a short perusal of his thoughts…

She looks back down at the spark floating beside her, and instead resigns herself to sifting through Pelanea’s recent memories. In the back of her mind, nagging, the thought that at some point she will have to tell her of her brother’s fate. That the girl’s dreams have dealt with his death directly does not bode well for her hopes she can leave it alone. Fuck me… Why did I agree to this? As it is, she doesn’t want to think about the people passed in her passing and to do so in the context of his sister’s memories feels worse.

Shaking her head, she reaches out. Tender in her approach, she hesitates a moment to clear her thoughts and takes Pelanea in her hands. And as she peers in she coaxes from her what she wants to see, Pelezel…

—5 Weeks Ago—

Pelanea does not get out of bed. She stares at her ceiling, seeing nothing. Deep is her dread at the dream’s portent. Pelezel suffers. Pelezel suffers—and that is all she knows. She’s felt his torment as a nightmare, a terrible sensation without context to couch it in. 

The longer she lies there, thinking circles around it, the more she begins to associate it with torture. Tied to a chair, blindfolded. They take of him. Peeling and prying parts away. And she can’t keep from weeping at the sight—her brother plucked at; a helpless creature in the clutch of buzzards, his entrails left exposed.

\\//

Lise comes away from the memory troubled. It seems to tie back to another memory she’d touched. Elineal stripping from Pelezel what she’d determined detrimental in her fiend-addled mind. Her horror is renewed tenfold, to know some of the experience from both ends.

She takes some time to process it before trying another memory, but soon dives back in.

—4 Weeks Ago—

She knocks again and waits. Flexing her hands, she tries not to show her nerves. Her heart jumps when she hears the footsteps approaching from the other side. The left door comes open and The Kelle herself peers out at her.

Pelanea freezes. Never has she stood so near The Kelle and never has she had those eyes settled on her.

“U-Uh… Um…” She grasps for what she intended to ask but her palms are slick with sweat and the thoughts slip away. The Kelle’s eyes are amber and Pelanea finds herself trapped in them.

“Hello.” Her voice is flat and gives no hint to her thoughts. She doesn’t seem annoyed, or pleased. She doesn’t seem anything.

“Hello?”

“Yes, hello.”

“Oh…” Pelanea tries to swallow the lump in her throat but chokes. “Hello.”

“Do you need something of me, Pelanea?”

Pelanea near falls back from shock when her name leaps suddenly from The Kelle’s lips. An involuntary exhalation rasps from her, crackling in her throat. “Brother… in my dream…” 

And then she turns and runs away. In the moment, she doesn’t know why; she only knows that she can no longer be where she is. Running is unnecessary but she doesn’t stop sprinting until she’s out of the complex and only slows then because she is too tired to keep pace with her terror.

\\//

The memory isn’t as enlightening as the first. Lise is not surprised to find Aleen is The Kelle. She had suspected as much, though it remained in the background of her thoughts as vague curiosity, untouched until now. There are more questions she has but she doubts they can be answered by any but the woman herself, so she sets them aside. 

Admittedly, she is still holding back from the memories consuming Pelanea’s mind after the first memory was so visceral. The longer she holds her thoughts, the more she is able to differentiate the memories arising. Like a child observing ink-blotted paper, she begins to pick out the disparity of size and color—their shapes and textures starting to stand out as well, but she knows not their exact significance until she dives into them. These are patterns she’d known briefly in the past but she hasn’t ever stayed with any one person’s memories long enough to learn them well.

There is one blot that strikes out at her—heavy and wet—a dark pool rippling, seeping into the page, mingling with older marks. Lise regards it with equal unease and understanding. She eases herself in, holding out a moment before making the plunge into the deep cold. She lets go and slides down into the slick.

—1 Week Ago—

Pelanea tries to suppress the yawn but it squeaks out her tightened jaw. She doesn’t  want to sleep anymore. Every time she sleeps she dreams. Every time she dreams she knows dread of death, and again she grieves. She doesn’t know who she is anymore and she chafes at the shell of who she was.

Pelezel is dead. She knows it, so why must she relive his death? She knows it. Zel… Why do you show me this? Am I to learn some meaning from this, or is it just shared torment?

She can’t reconcile waking each cycle to life when every dream she dies anew. She knows Pelezel’s death as her own, and her own life begins to feel false. Since Lise’s loss, she seems to stand in a world separate. Is this what it means to be in the undermind? Am I closer to harmony? Or is she falling to fancy as she is so often accused? I can’t keep on as it is…

Pelanea tries to wipe the blear from her eyes, standing from the bedside chair. Lise looks just as she had. Even as all changes around her, this peculiar woman is unaffected. She envies her for her deepest of sleep the same second she pities her. The manic look in Lise’s eyes before she went under is stuck in her mind, and she feels grateful she was blind to whatever the woman witnessed.

She leaves the infirmary oblivious to the cold, attention on her grief. Father didn’t believe her when she reported his death, nor did her sisters. Alone, she grieves. Neither can The Kelle’s servants spare time to help her parse these dreams. As it has been before, it is now—except she can’t even go to Aleen; always The Kelle and she cannot set aside the whole for a lonely piece.

In turn she had turned to Lise. Though Pelanea is unnerved by the lifeless stasis the woman is in, she finds a semblance of comfort in her silence. She’s become her only visitor and in that exclusivity she finds a special connection. There is a preciousness to something solely hers. A friend all her own, insofar as she can cling to her while the floor falls away and all else she knows goes with it.

The streets of Kellean are eerie, empty of her people; as ordered by her keeper, the retreat to the caves had come early this year. Pelanea has procrastinated instead of packing, persisting on the surface although her family are already gone below. As she walks the road she stares through the street stone, wondering where they are beneath her. That she can’t sense them in some way speaks of her detachment. Or am I only noticing now the distance that has always stood between us?

A discordance rings in her mind suddenly with the violent sounds of untuned instruments played with ill-intent for a single piercing moment. Painful, her grief creeps up her neck and she flounders in the new chasm cracking open beneath her. Had she not waded its waters before she would have been sucked into grief’s depths; as it is, she struggles desperately against the forces sucking her down.

Breathing heavy, she can’t walk any further. Her feet bear her down, leaden, and with every faltering step her head is battered by waves of unrelenting grief. Her wail comes uncalled by her and carries far with the sweep of sorrow she’s dammed these long weeks. She is cut off as suddenly when comes the answer to her call—a fit of fury flushed with ill-expressed passion, the sound of undammable rage and this time she doesn’t mistake it for merely the pressure of her own grief. 

It incites an instant panic in Pelanea. Free of the weight—grief forgotten in her fear—she sprints for the first safety she can find. The infirmary remains near unmanned. At reception the few nurses left watch her run in, alarmed by her flight, yet do not follow in her footsteps. They know her, and they know her reputation.

She runs on unknowing, feeling each foot fall slow. What she flees, why she fears it, are to be fretted for later. The clap of her worn-smooth rubber soles on the waxen floor and the squeak as she kicks off it are all she registers. She runs on, barely conscious of her destination.

The door clicks shut behind her before she dares think. When her mind descends, thoughts flood back. She finds herself stretched over the door as though to stop its opening, but her body trembles, ready to come apart at the slightest push.

Even as thought begins again she continues to act unthinking, sliding under the bed scraping her back on the steel frame. She is only able to cease when the sheets slipped off her back and hang down, concealing her.

How long she lies under the bed, breath constrained to near stillness, eyes wide and staring, waiting. Her hair itches her nose and she never scratches. The thought she keeps pinned among the tumult is something she can’t express in words—it is simple smallness. The idea of smallness, being small, tiny. She holds onto the thought so tight she might wring it of its essence, absorb it herself. She becomes small while she is cramped beneath that bed. How long…

The terror passes.

Tentative, Pelanea crawls from her hiding place. Her neck is stiff but as she tilts her head, rolls her shoulders, it eases. Maybe my fear was misplaced? She has learned to doubt her tendency to fright, but this time was different, wasn’t it? I hope it was. Misplaced, that is. Certainly Lise looks about as she had when she crawled under her bed. 

She is satisfied her fear was unnecessary and lets go with a sigh. Shaking her head at her own silliness she retreads her path out the infirmary. Relief has her smiling as she steps into the reception area. She is still smiling when she first sees the bodies.

The nurses who were sitting together before are sprawled across the room. They judder, shifting unnaturally, limbs convulsing. Pelanea can’t move. Her face feels plastered on, smile turned into a tense rictus. As she watches one nurse shake his last, and she sees the others are subsiding. She watches them go rigid and still, and only then can she be otherwise.

In the streets she finds more dead. Staring into the face of a man few days older than her, she wonders if this is how Pelezel looked when he died. She wonders if this is how all dead people looked. She knows it is so as she goes from corpse to corpse, staring into mirrors. Empty.

— 49 —

Foreboding Bonds

//\\

When she comes out from the undermind, Pelanea no longer shares the cart with her; Eclait sits near the rail, picking at dry skin on her knuckles. Lise is grateful she doesn’t talk to her—her aversion is loud enough before opening her mouth, and she hasn’t the energy to try dissuading that judgment. Pain’s renewed castigation is deafening without incorporating Eclait’s invectives.

It isn’t until they stop to sleep that she has an opportunity to discuss Pelanea’s predicament. However, it takes some time then to renegotiate sleeping arrangements. Until Lise returned from NON she shared Eclait’s tent while Bente shared with Pelanea. She will tolerate Eclait if it means not sleeping in the cold, but the sentiment is not mutual. In the end, it is decided she and Pelanea will swap places.

Bente is gracious, reserving more than half the small sleeping space for her. It leaves her room enough to breathe without hurting herself beyond what is inherent to the act itself. He snoozes with his back to her, face pressed up against the tent wall. She can’t sleep, and for the first in too long, it is because she simply isn’t tired. 

After staring at the tent top for a time she crawls out to sit by the smoldering remnants of the fire. She was fitted with new woolens but the cold penetrates them. It doesn’t help that they are small on her and she can’t button the front of the coat without putting excess pressure on her chest. Stoking the fire alleviates it but the chill still leaves her aching. Stretching gingerly and adjusting her sitting position, the throb in her right knee does not abate.

She finds herself staring again at an undefined point in the distance, this time somewhere past the fire. Instead of trying to ground herself when she realizes it, she lets her mind wander away. Leaving pain in the present, she drifts. 

Unfocused, what she saw in Pelanea’s memories reflects in her mind. She begins observing them, meandering through as she would an art show. Pieces stand out as more significant than others, lingering on them longer when she comes back around.

She startles at the hand on her shoulder.

“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you.” Pelanea chuckles quietly, taking a seat beside her.

It takes Lise a moment to recover, wrested from her rumination. “Ah, yeah… I was just thinking.”

“What about? Must have been thinking hard not to hear me coming.”

“Not hard, really, just, like… Well, I can’t explain it very well.”

“Was it about something to do with what I told you?”

Lise turns and looks at her. “Not exactly…” And as the woman waits for her to continue, she sees the way she looks at her in turn. While she slumbered, Pelanea developed a strange, one-sided relationship with her, and she is now unsure how to feel about the situation. 

Pelanea looks at her with expectations.

At least she already knows about her brother’s end…. It is a feeble reassurance in the face of hopes she assuredly will leave unfulfilled.

— 50 —

Ah, Sure

//\\

“I don’t know where to start, really… I suppose I should explain that I took a look at some of the experiences you described to me so I could get a better understanding.”

“Took… a look?”

“Um, yeah… I realize in retrospect that I should have discussed it with you first, it’s not something I have a whole lot of experience with. In the past, I’ve mostly stumbled into peoples’ memories by accident, but I’m sorry,” Lise winces as she admits. “I only sought what was pertinent to your issues, if that’s any consolation. And, though I don’t necessarily have a solution, I do have an answer or two.”

“Right… What do you mean answers?”

“Well, in your memories I encountered certain uncertainties. I can help clear up a couple of them, though I might need as much help in that regard. After that, we can talk about… your state of mind.”

“Alright, I think I get it, but what uncertainties?”

“Pelezel is dead.”

Pelanea is surprised, at first, but soon settles into exasperation. “I know that. I know it again every time I sleep. I didn’t need that answered.”

“What I mean to say is I saw him.”

Her face is already pallid, but her expression now reflects the apparent sickness. “…What?”

“I encountered Pelezel briefly in a town to the northwest called Dejed. That’s where he was when he died.”

“Did you… see how?”

She hesitates, then says, “His body was unmarked,” and does not contradict the blank Pelanea fills in false. Maybe it’s better to let her think of fiends than explain his partner pulled him apart on their behalf.

“Oh…” She exhales, then leans over to puke.

Maybe not.

As before, Lise finds herself wishing to assure her, to comfort her in some way, but shame hollows her sympathy out—carving away until only a membrane remains, diaphanous; a finger poke will pierce it. Instead, she stares at the ground while Pelanea spits sour and struggles.

Wiping her face of sweat, tears, and bile, “Tell me what else… Do you know anything else?”

I know too much and barely a thing…. “I wasn’t always conscious of what happened around me while I was in Dejed, but I do know some.”

She relates an abbreviated version of the events, briefly touching on her own reasons for being there, where they become relevant to her telling, but tries to center Pelezel. What she chooses to omit is as often for her own sanity as Pelanea’s. After she finishes her tale, the two fall into a heavy silence.

It feels like I left Opis Luma days ago and cycles ago simultaneously. In some ways, her departure lingers in her mind so vivid, yet as she tries to touch them the memories ripple and her view of them warps. To think… I once counted the deaths I’d seen on a single finger. I once dreamed of a life spent in companionable silence, me and myself.

“Can I tell you something?”

Lise looks up from her hands, eyes starting to water. “Ah, sure… I mean, depending on what it is I can’t guarantee I’ll give the response you’d like, but I will listen.”

“Oh, um, I don’t really know if I need a response like that, it’s just… Well, while you were not here, I visited you a lot. Or your body, or whatever. Anyway, I just sorta got used to telling you things, and I don’t know anyone else I can tell this. I don’t know, maybe it’s a bad idea…”

Lise’s curiosity subdues, but it is there all the same. She doesn’t press, “For what it’s worth, I can keep a secret. Whether I like the secret or not.”

Pelanea tilts her head at that, and she can see her wavering, weighing the cost of giving against keeping. Then, hushed, it pours from her, “Itritokmysef.”

“…I’m sorry, but I missed that.”

The panicky look in the young woman’s eyes turns wild, and she leans over and repeats it in a whisper. Her words are nearly lost again under the breath blown into her ear hole, but Lise manages to parse them this time.

“I tried to kill myself.” 

Falling back heavily, Pelanea struggles to steady herself. Lise watches, silent. I tried to kill myself. She feels the echo and nods her acceptance of the admission. Despite what she said, there is an expectation in the woman’s tensed brow and watering eyes.

Lise halts herself ahead of taking a deep breath, settling for a middling inspiration and a spike of pain. She speaks slow and in it the truth resounds, “I understand.” And then recoils as shame gores her.

— 51 —

CRICK CRANK

\\//

‘I see a small town a bit to the south. There isn’t much to it, just a couple structures. There’s a light of some source at its center, shifting amber and pink and eleile in sequence.’

Bente nods slowly, then turns and speaks something to the two sparks hovering beside the halted cart. While she awaits his reply, Lise looks again in the direction she saw the town. From this far up the river she can just make out a faint glint against the hazy gray horizon.

‘Whatever the town is, it isn’t on our map.’ His words touch her mind inaudibly, and she turns to see him staring into the space above her sleeping body. She moves to stand where he is looking and finds his eyes scrutinizing her stomach. He lifts a hand, ‘Wait a moment and I will join you, we will survey it first.’ Speaking some more to Pelanea and Eclait before lying down in the cart, she watches him close his eyes.

A moment, indeed, she thinks, watching him blink open his eyes—widening when he sees her peering down. ‘You’re quick to sleep.’

‘But slow to wake,’ He adds as he stands. When he stiffens his back he finds he is still looking up at her and his mildly amused expression falters. ‘I…. You’re taller here.’

‘Strange, the effect standing has; even stranger, the effect of standing straight.’

He grins, revealing a row of broad teeth, ‘Fair enough.’ 

As he hops from the cart cobblestones rise to the oily sea’s surface to meet him. Lise steps down as the assorted stones bubble up before them, extending south along the river’s silt-slicked embankment. 

She watches his back, broad shoulders rolling, rippling his emerald robes as he walks. The diligently detailed silver filaments glimmer despite a lack of light. It takes time to render intricacies, and it is clear it had been done with care. Perhaps care in excess. The cloak she liberated from Rese’s study is represented a faded blue-black here—all its gilded thread lost in translation—and as quick as she recalls its loss it dematerializes. She sighs.

Turning her mind, Lise says, ‘We should be cautious as we near, I didn’t go further than was necessary to confirm its existence.’

‘I know.’ 

He says it lightly, but something about his tone stubs. She shakes it off. ‘Do you know why Eclait is so… large here?’

‘I do.’

Lise waits… and is left to it, and she find herself questioning her impression of the man. Resisting the urge to press with more pointed questions, she amuses herself with the thought, your answers are as your stature—unfortunately short. Then, shaking her head, Fool. Regretting the unspoken slight. A holdover from the silent rebellion she held against her father out of fear of his retaliation.

‘Are you willing to explain it to me?’ Lise asks, anticipating the answer and hoping otherwise. In a way, she anticipates correctly—that he is unwilling—but there comes no answer. He does not speak again.

She breathes to calm, and let go the instant’s resentment—and exhales a lament, ‘So it is…’

The town turns out less than a town, appearing more like an outpost to some purpose. Three buildings blend together in gray congregation about the source of shifting light. Sloshing black gives way to semi-solid stone walkways interlinking the structures. Ill-defined, but defined all the same. Someone is here—or was recently—though on first look Lise sees no sparks of life.

Bente breaks into her observation, ‘Earlier you spoke of a light coming from here? I see no light.’

She blinks and turns to look at him. ‘I understand you don’t trust me, but I would appreciate you not questioning what we can both see clearly.’

Frowning, ‘I sincerely see no light. I would not mess with your mind so.’

‘Really? Because if the light were a fire, well, you would be a much louder liar.’

He shakes his head, ‘What?’

‘It’s… You’re bathing in the light as we speak. Right where the buildings part the light is pouring out.’ She is baffled when he continues to act baffled. ‘I’m baffled.’

‘I see only darkness.’ He takes a moment, patient, and turns tolerant before her eyes. ‘I will let you investigate the light you see while I survey the buildings.’

‘I think that is unwise.’

‘Think as you will.’

‘So I do.’

I will never not find it funny when one frames themself less the fool. Lise muses, watching him go. I would have hoped better of a fellow dweller—to know we are one in this aspect. To be human is to be a Fool.

‘Fooly fool, for what do you tool? For what farce are we fooly, oh fool?’ She intones to herself, ‘You’ll show me this and I’ll show you your rule.’

The rays of light turn amber and pink and eleile, and she leaves her song where she stood. The radiance demands witness. She is drawn forth, between the buildings—which seem to crowd closer as she goes until she has to turn sideways to fit. A pop and she leaps free into a clearing, and is quick to spot the source of light. A wound coil fixed in painted glass. The glass is an off-center spheroid, revolving slowly, each side a corresponding color—amber and pink and eleile. All this atop a short framework tower, under which a crank turns.

Lise watches a man push the wheel round, and as she nears he looks up with a grin more radiant. ‘Akota!’ He calls, ‘Hey, is not this a funny sight? A crank cranking a crank to make light?’ And he laughs.

She can but stare, ‘Are you real?’

— 52 —

Wit’s Excretion

\\//

‘I don’t know! What even is real? Am I real?’ Akota asks, though whether he is asking himself or her she can’t determine.

‘I don’t know… I don’t care anymore. Akota, I thought I… I thought you died in Opis Luma. How are you here?’ She lets her tears come unchallenged, ‘I thought I’d killed you.’

‘No way! Me? Dead? No, no. I don’t really do the whole dying thing.’ He lets go of the crank to lean in conspiratorially, ‘To be honest, I find the whole process a bit disgusting. All your piss and shit just comes spewing out and then you slowly turn into a bunch of slimy bones soaking in a smelly puddle. I mean, to each their own—let everyone believe in what they want and all that—but it’s just not my thing. Anyway, why?’

‘Why?’

‘Why did you think you’d killed me?’

‘Oh…’ Lise hesitates, knowing the truth will come. Until now she thought Seli the first she would admit this to, but Akota would know now. She has never known him to lie and with him she will never. ‘I created something terrible, Akota. When I returned to Opis Luma, I–’

‘Hang on—before you start with that, do you mind helping me with this?’

‘Helping you with…?’

‘With this crank thing. I’m turning it.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s taking forever to finish. I think with the both of us we could get it done faster.’

‘No, I mean why are you turning it?’

He shrugs, and a knowing grin spreads his ruddy cheeks. ‘I want to see if something cool happens.’

‘Alright, but if it takes long my companion will be coming to find me. He went to have a look in those buildings.’

‘Oooh, those buildings?’ He asks, as though there are other buildings around.

‘Yes, those buildings.’

He winces, ‘Oooh, that’s no good. Yeah, that’s not going to turn out well… You didn’t warn him?’

‘I told him I thought it unwise, but he doesn’t trust me.’

‘Ah! Akota, I thought I shared with you my saneness. You’re supposed to share that saneness so people don’t just go around going insane in places that aren’t real.’ He sighs, ‘Ah well, there’s nothing to be done of it now. Just know he might come back a bit weird.’

‘Can we go save him?’ She is beginning to fear for Bente’s fate.

‘Nah, not now. You already tried, didn’t you? You told him about the light?’

‘I did, but he wasn’t able to see it for some reason.’

‘Then yeah, you did all you could—some people just can’t see it… Platitude unintended. Now will you help me with this?’

Lise looks at the insubstantial gray buildings, and they seem to waver—little more than reflections in the water. ‘I suppose I will.’ And she turns, taking hold of the spoke opposite him. However, when she begins to push it does not budge. ‘It’s not moving…’ She growls, straining.

‘That’s cause you’re pushing it the wrong way… No, not literally! Turn back around. Stop trying to force it to move.’

She sighs, following his instruction. ‘Alright, I’m not trying to force it.’

‘No, you’re just trying to force it with less effort. Stop all that. Just… turn it. Like this.’

The crank begins to turn, and she lets the spoke pull her along. She tries to stop it turning and finds it impossible. Strain as she may, it will not move as she does.

‘Ah, you’ve almost got it! Keep going.’

‘I haven’t “almost got” anything, Akota.’ She sighs. ‘Can’t you just tell me?’

‘It’s not a knowing thing, Akota. It’s a doing thing.’

‘Right. I know what that means.’

He laughs, ‘It’s not a knowing thing!’

She is never quite sure whether Akota’s enigmatic quality is affected for humor or because he has genuine trouble with verbal expression—either way, she finds its familiarity a comfort. ‘Do you do that on purpose?’

‘What? My shitty explanations?’

‘Yeah, that.’

‘It’s my innate mystique. I’m puzzling by nature, not by posture.’

‘Then why do you always laugh after?’

She knows his shrug more than she sees it—near blind by the light. ‘I’m aware of how it’s perceived, and I find it funny. Don’t you ever laugh at yourself? I mean, I know you did, but it seems you’ve forgotten how.’

She moves along, hands holding loose the revolving shaft. ‘I have found it difficult of late. As I said, I believed you dead. And my sister, corrupted by my mistake—and countless others dead, changed for the worse, fiended… It is hard to laugh when always in the back of my mind, what I am responsible for lingers—prodding a reminder every moment I see a release from it.’

‘Well, you know how it goes. What begins as an arm slung, as a stone skipped, sends ripples far beyond the scope of the stone itself. The ripples themselves then bounce off and create new ripples—and all this before the arm rests, before the stone ceases to skip and sinks, and then after continues. It is impossible for the person who throws the stone to foresee how it will skip, how far the ripples will reach, how all of it interacts; I’ve found that is something that can only be done in retrospect, and even then we miss the minutiae.’

‘I understand that, but when I see innocents dead at my feet I struggle to reconcile what I know and what I feel.’

‘You know better than anyone what death is, what life is, what it means. Still, it troubles you?’

‘I know a meaninglessness, an emptiness in which reality resides, and I’ve struggled with it. To know that all is relative; that what exists exists; that all I am is another stone cast—skipping along—to eventually leap last and fall, and set still. To know that a stone is a stone, whether it is skipping or stopped. Yet I desired to skip far and, rather than ripples, send great waves. All despite knowing a stone is a stone, no matter how it is thrown. I now see my waves swallow stone after stone, where smooth waters would have left them at least a skip more. Given the choice I would have left myself to rest on the shore, undisturbed and undisturbing.’

‘“A stone is a stone, no matter how it is thrown.” You mean that in the sense you are the same as anyone else?’

‘I meant it more as I am not superior to others—so to desire to send great waves is only ego, or a desire to rise above other stones in some way when in the end a stone is a stone no matter the ripples it sends.’

‘Hm, I see that—however, I think you’re missing out on other illuminating interpretations of it as well. Of course, a stone is a stone, but some stones are better shaped to skip far, some to splash big and sink fast—some neither or less. Should we value one stone above another? No, not really, because a stone is a stone. Still, some stones create waves, some hardly touch the water. I would not curse a stone for its shape, how it was thrown, for the waves it makes(or the waves it doesn’t). As much, I see no value for a stone to curse itself.’

‘Yes, but Akota, people are not stones and this isn’t hypothetical. I made a mistake whose consequences are the real lives of real people. I know life is meaningless, but does that give me the right to go snuffing it out carelessly?’

‘Who gives you the right to do anything?’

She slows a moment, thinking, and she doesn’t have an answer to that. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, depending who you ask, they might say god, or government, or parent, or whoever or whatever else. Yet, as you have expressed to me before, those are meaningless—authority is arbitrary. On that supposition, no one has the authority to claim one thing more right than another. Do you agree?’

‘…Yes, I suppose so. But still, what I think I know and what I feel stretch different ways. I think life and death are ultimately meaningless, that whatever control we have over our fates is more illusion than reality—but I feel otherwise. Even as I long for an end, I strive to continue. I have experienced beauty, I have been stricken with awe, I have laughed and played and felt joy—and those moments like a drug keep me hooked to life despite the terrible things I have seen and done, the suffering I have felt and feel, the true emptiness I have known. I know I cannot stop death—I’m not so arrogant as that—but I would delay it, or at very least not hasten it. But I’ve set in motion the greatest tragedy in millennia—a wave to consume all stones. I feel two options for myself: live in regret, doing what little I can to counter; or kill myself, for I should not live while all else die by my hand.’

‘Hm… I mean, I hear you, and I understand why you bear the weight, but, in the end, it all seems a bit unnecessary. And I’ve said this before, but important to consider: who benefits by your suffering?’

‘I–’

He cuts in, ‘Don’t worry answering it for me, I certainly don’t benefit by it. Now, as an aside—this is hardly the “greatest tragedy in millennia”. Sure, it’s probably the greatest tragedy this century, maybe the last few centuries, but millennia? There’s a lot of world you don’t know, Akota. In Opis Luma alone there has been more death in a day than what is likely to result from your ripples. You forget that once the undermind was new—that fiends spread faster than the first dwellers could manage. Before the first dweller, there had been death by fiends in such numbers you could not fathom. This world was once rife with humanity. Your home still bears evidence of that. An immense city, structures tall and broad, yet its present population barely occupies a quarter—not even that. The majority live packed into the very center of it, and still there is more space there than can be filled.’

Lise doesn’t know what to say. ‘…I see that, but I don’t know it necessarily changes anything about the present situation.’

‘It doesn’t, but it helps to put it in perspective. Anyway, as much as I would like to continue this conversation I fear we’ve given each other as much new to think and rethink about as we can handle for now—and this thing is almost done.’

‘…almost done?’ Lise wondered, then realizes that at some point she began to turn the crank. It is something like conceiving an object into the undermind, but it is effortless. As she looks down at her hands on the spoke, she comes to understand what he meant originally. ‘What do we do when it’s done?’

‘I imagine we’ll be done with the doing, so nothing in particular. What do you think’s going to happen here?’

She doesn’t even bother guessing, ‘I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like this place. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe the lights will change color.’

‘That doesn’t strike me as particularly cool. Wait, how do we even know it will do anything?’

‘Trust me, it’s going to do something.’

‘How do you know it’s almost done?’

‘It told me.’

‘This thing talks?’

He laughs, ‘Look where the crank meets the whatever you call it.’

She looks, and there, as she rounds it once more, is a small display with four digits counting down. It reads 0014. ‘Ah…’

‘Oh, before I forget, don’t come to this place in reality.’ Akota tells her.

She frowns, ’Why?’

‘All I can say is this: those buildings don’t exist in reality.’

‘I don’t understand the significance of that. I know you didn’t manifest them, so who? I’ve seen no other dwellers around, nor even a spark of a non-dweller.’

‘What about that one?’ He asks.

As she completes another revolution, she sees it. From the alley between the buildings, a large light comes floating. The buildings seem to move in to swallow it whole, but as they close around it, the gray mass is repelled. Lise recognizes the light as Eclait as she drifts to a stop before the crank.

‘Does this thing exist in reality?’

‘Yes. You should go.’

‘What? But we’re almost done.’

‘I don’t think your companions will last that long left as it is. This one seems resilient, but the other? And the man? Trust me, Akota. We will meet again in The Dwelling—lest this get the best of us. Go on now, leave this bit to me.’

Lise steps away from her place and meets his eyes for a moment as they alight on hers, gleefully blue. ‘Thank you, Akota. I will see you soon.’

Akota gives a goofy salute, ‘See ya later.’

— 53 —

Oh Shit!!!

//\\

From the dark Pelanea calls, “Lise? Is that you moving?”

She grunts, rising despite pain insisting otherwise. “Yes. What’s happened? Where is Eclait?”

“Something’s wrong with Bente! He’s keeps quivering!”

“Eclait, Pelanea. Why did Eclait leave?”

“I told you! It’s something wrong with Bente!”

“Alright, alright. We need to get over there fast, else Eclait may meet his same fate. Can you get the skoi moving? I’ll tend to him.”

“O-Oh… right, yes, I can do that. Um…”

“Nevermind, you keep tending to Bente. I’ll get them moving.”

“Okay… Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” She pinches out past grinding teeth, standing.

The skoi snuffle and reverberate a guttural click as she steps near. Bente moved them by a series of specific whistle sounds he made, and she can’t mimic them from memory. She sits on the front end of the cart and raises both arms to slap them on their calloused backsides hard enough to produce a squeal from all three of them—Pelanea yelping a moment later as the cart is yanked to a gallop. Lise holds on tight, trying to keep her regret gritted but the pain is excruciating and as the cart jumps and jostles she is unable to hold it in.

“Are you alright?!” Pelanea yells over the rattle and roll.

Lise doesn’t answer except for the involuntary cries of pain.

“Are we going the right direction?!”

“I sure hope so!”

It isn’t long, but it feels longer—every bump is a new talon thrust through her chest. She is bellowing an unintelligible animal cry by the time she sees the shifting light beaming through the mist.

“What is that?!”

Lise can’t answer her.

“There she is!”

Eclait; dark silhouetted bright, unaware of her plight. As if I know what we’re facing… “Be ready!” Lise manages to say.

“For what?!”

“Get in the cart!” She shouts as they close on Eclait.

“No!”

“GET IN THE FUCKING CART!”

The light winks out.

\//\\/

Lise is thrown from the cart and she near knows black on impact. She is heavy, half-sunk in wet ground, cold. Pain creeps up beside her and whispers close a curse—hot breath in her ear, mud in the other. Get up. Pain’s laugh is loud. Fuck off.

Someone weeps. Skoi shriek, floundering in the earth’s sudden softening. She slides her arm from the muck and pushes up, and her arm sinks back in. Move, fool! Weak ass! Letting pain best you again? She berates her body into motion, dragging herself out the sludge. Get up! I will get up! 

And she does—with an ease she’s not known since her injuries. Half caked in mud, she stands tall over the upturned cart. Pain screams indignance that its authority be overruled and she laughs her insolence. Half-mud, half-mad.

Just past the cart, Eclait stares at the crank—no, not the crank, she realizes, Akota. Akota steps back, hands on hips, satisfied smugness smeared across his face. The coil thrums, and as they stare the crank’s spokes start to unwind.

Akota turns and pauses when he finds their eyes fixed on him. He looks back at the iridescent coil, turning eleile and pink and amber, then back to them. ‘Huh.’ Nonplussed, he purses his lips. ‘Weird.’ He is gone before anyone else speaks, vanished in a blink.

Lise’s understanding comes before the words to define it, and she turns to find those nebulous gray buildings looming out of the dark. Without moving they appear to approach; intent: to consume. Of the mind made real. She shudders, terror beyond reason creeping up and sticking her throat closed. 

Stood still, nothing happens.

She breathes. “We need to leave.”

“The fuck’s happened?” Eclait says. “Where did those buildings come from?”

Lise lifts her hand and in it manifests her axe, forming haft before head. Its weight settles familiar and the weight of what they’ve done unsettles her. “Reality undermined.” The cart shifts, squelching in the mud. “Pelanea?”

The earth steadies beneath her feet and she expels pain with a flicked thought—sparing none to marvel. She raises the cart with a focused will and flips it upright, setting it back on solid ground. Where it was sunken the mud still churns.

“Help me pull her free!” She beckons Eclait, kneeling.

The woman stares at the axe Lise holds. “What is… Where did that come from?”

“Memory, mostly. I think.” She turns the axe in hand, casts off the edge and extends the haft well over her head, and plunges it into the mud. “Help or stop distracting me.”

“That’s not the girl.”

“What?” Lise looked up.

“There.” Where Eclait points, a splayed body is laying facedown. 

The pole is heavy as she tries to pull it free. Before she can try again it is wrenched from her grasp, disappearing beneath the surface. The ground rumbles and swells under her, and gradually gains form. Bulge turns ovate; turns anthropoid; forms man. Immense earthen avatar—Bente blinks wide his oversized eyes. He is his former bulk doubled, blocky shoulders bouldered. His standing shakes the ground—mud sloughing off; left in its place: a naked clay carapace, a glazed-over grimace for his face.

Eclait gives voice to Lise’s thought before she can, “Oh shit…”

The moment stretches taut, both staring at this strange creation. “Bente?” He reels back and swings a clod-fist at her. She doesn’t move soon enough to avoid it. The clay is dense and wet. It slaps against her shoulder and throws her whirling to land heavy on her side.

“What are you doing?!” Eclait shouts outrage.

Lise doesn’t care who it is directed at, “Not the time to ask questions like that.” She rolls to her feet, axe haft gracing her hand.

Bente doesn’t wait, raising his left arm. His clay form shifts, sliding over his shoulder—his fist is threefold as it comes down on her. It ripples the sucking mud at their feet, and Lise is floored despite dodging it. She swings and her axe sinks into his calf and sticks there. She doesn’t bother to lever it out, leaving it as she scrambles to get out of his reach.

“Get her out of here!” She calls—pointing to Pelanea’s still slumped form, just visible through the scintillant haze.

The haze swirls around his fist as he assails her again. She wills the earth to rise, a wall of mud throwing off his assault—he flounders as it flows over him. Her retreat offers less respite than she’d like, the soft ground slowing her backsteps. He is following after in moments.

Though she does not turn to look, she feels the buildings just behind her. The hair on the back of her neck prickles, and she halts. His steps shake her footing, and she has to keep lifting her feet out the mud to keep surfaced.

His fist comes for her once more, and she procures a spiked sphere around her. The metal dents in and she finds herself rolled back. A wall phases through her shield and her head is submerged in it. She is drawn back out a moment later as her sphere is lifted and hurled. On impact, she slams against the metal.

Dazed—and disturbed by the brief understanding she gained by touching the building—she releases the shield and sinks back into the muck. She struggles to rise again as Bente nears her once more, the mud sucking… sucking… down and down…

She strains against a memory drawing her back, something simmering just below the surface. A fascination. A flare and bodies afire—the fetor of burnt being. The expiatory flame.

Bente staggers up to her, looming with the buildings at his back.

It erupts from her chest, engulfing. A blast of blackened crimson scorches her on its way out. It gutters and splutters and ceases. Leaving in its place a statue of fired clay, cracked and glassy, weeping wet from the fissures in his form. His porcelain tears go

clink

clink

clink.

— 54 —

Empty Cusp

\//\\/

Bente shudders, plates of hardened clay grinding against one another until, at last, he topples, setting the thick sludge rippling around him. Half-submerged, he lay still.

Lise does not breathe for the stench of her burnt clothes—charred round the fringes of a gaping hole in her chest. Left bare her bleeding breast, she raises a tremulous hand. Her scars were split, shedding blue-black liquid, bubbling. It is an ugly sight but she thinks it is not mortal. 

As she falls back, sinking into the muck, she watches his unmoving shell and knows a nostalgic odor. She can’t escape the smell, even as she drifts into reverie.

—13 Days Ago—

She is miserable. “Momma, I won’t!”

“You will, and you’ll enjoy it. Now quit your complaining, you’re setting a bad example for your sister.” Her father answers.

“Momma!”

She turns to her husband, “Rese, let me talk with her a moment.”

His thick brows draw together, shading his dark eyes as he looks over Lise. “Alright, but don’t you give your mother any more grief.”

She stays silent as he steps out, then turns to her mother. “I don’t want to do it, momma. Can’t I do something else?”

Her mother’s gaze is patient as she kneels down before her, “I understand you don’t like to dance, dear, but the solstice is not your time. It is time to allow others to pass on, and to celebrate them. If you don’t want to do it next day, you don’t have to, but you will dance today and tonight. Think of it as an opportunity to gain greater understanding and appreciation for the value of life.”

Lise can’t argue with her, no matter how she wishes she could. Feeling powerless, tears blear her vision. “I… I don’t want to.” She begins to cry.

“Oh, Lise…” Her mother pulls her into an embrace, and as she cries into her shoulder, speaks softly into her ear, “I promise, it won’t be as bad as you think. It will take but a few minutes, then it’s over. Alright?” She pauses, allowing Lise a moment to compose herself; then, squeezing her shoulders, adds, “Tell you what, if you can do the solstice dance I will make you a big plate of your favorite food later.”

Lise continues to blubber on a moment longer, rubbing her eyes. “Really…?”

Her mother smiles and tugs the bead on one of her budding black locks. “Really. Spiced apples and barbecued spirkin with extra pepper—though, if you want anything else we’ll have to check the pantry first.”

“I don’t have to share with Seli?”

“Not if you don’t want to this time.”

“Okay… I’ll do it.”

Lise stands beside her family, determined not to show a hint of pleasure. The dance is short, as they had practiced; terrible and uncomfortable, as she predicted.

Her father rests a hand on her head as he speaks to a man she recognizes from somewhere. The man expresses admiration for his daughters, and he accepts it with a grin and an affectionate squeeze of her shoulder. Lise has no patience for it so stands silent and unreceptive.

She keeps returning to her mother’s first words to her following the ceremony. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Something about the question edges her existing frustration on intolerable, and she’s said hardly a sentence since. Her irritability suffuses her, thoroughly scouring every incoming thought from her mind.

The man leaves them and her father leans over to whisper to her mother. 

“Lise, come with me.” He says, turning away. “We’ll go see the burning.”

The burning… She hesitates, and he ends up dragging her along until her feet catch up with him. “We did sacrifice earlier though.”

“Yes, this is the last sacrifice of day. You saw the procession’s beginning, yes? Well, I will show you the end of it.” Reluctant, she lets him pull her through the crowded street, his grip firming on her sweat-slick right wrist.

Lise can’t imagine a more uncomfortable experience than this solstice has been. The dance, the unbearable heat, the jostling throng. She is learning an aversion to sweating altogether. She wants to go home, sit in a cold bath, in the dark, in silence.

He speaks over the din, “Just ahead, Li. We’ll go up top the Veris building to get a good view.”

How are you wearing your cloak right now? Her head hurts, and her steps are stumbling. By the time they reach the three-arched entrance, she is swaying and her vision is blurry. Blind in the relative darkness, she falls to the carpeted floor, crying.

“…heat sickness, or…” Someone is saying. 

“…she’s never…”

Shaking her, shaking her, shaking her. “…water. Lise! Drink this water! It will help you feel better.”

She blinks and, barely aware, drinks from his upheld cup. She chokes on it, coughing up as much as she swallows, but soon gets the right drinking rhythm. It feels cool, down her throat and into her stomach, she feels it cool. A burp or two later and she is decidedly more conscious.

“Are you feeling better now?” Her father asks, kneeling beside the cushion she was lain on.

She nods, tired.

“Are you able to get up?”

She considers, then nods. He helps her stand, and, with a hand on her arm, helps her walk to the lift. He chats with the woman who keeps the Veris building, while she leans against the rail—watching the man who turns the winch to raise them, his bare arms wet and bulging. 

Lise watches her watch him, bemused. How her father knows anybody he knows she doesn’t know, and this woman is no exception.

Why does she watch him? Why does he turn the winch?

Where am I?

The lift clinks into place, settling to a smooth stop. The winch-man opens the gate for them to exit, and rests back on the bench, breathing heavy. Lise follows the stars of her father’s rolling cloak.

This floor seems some strange sort of eating and viewing gallery. There are no walls but the cylinder for the lift, the ceiling upheld by a series of carved pillars circling the room—between which bound interwoven iron balustrades. A bar wraps the side of the cylinder opposite the lift’s exit, where a dimple-faced woman serves refreshments to the guests. 

She hadn’t expected… well, she hadn’t expected anything, but this still surprises her.

Some of the people lounging hail the woman her father knows, and some hail him as well. The couches they sink in look particularly plush, and Lise wants one for herself. Instead, while the woman lingers on others, her father waves delay to their calls and takes Lise to the balcony. Lise looks back, longing for the cushions, and accedes to his will—as hers is wilted for the time being.

The balcony he takes her to overlooks the east end of Opis Luma—rendered this solstice a severe mosaic radiance.

They tower above much of the city, but for a few buildings which scrape higher. Each crack filled silver flashes under the pounding light, bouncing off to spear through her eyes to tear out the other end and end her—or so it feels.

“That structure there…” He points east and slightly south. “Do you see it? The one which looks a bit like an upturned cone?”

“An upturned cone?” She struggles with that for a moment. “Do you mean pointy side up, or the other way?”

He chuckles, “The other way, Li.”

The other way… She squints, trying to see past the gleam. “Yes… I think I see it.”

“It has some small circles lining its sides.”

“Yes. Yes, I see it. It’s kind of a weird blackish purple color?”

“That’s the one. Keep an eye on it, I’ll go get us something to drink.”

“Alright…” She watches, enduring the pain.

On the street, leading up to the peculiar structure, she catches sight of the procession making its way. A train of wooden boxes, six people each to bear half as many bodies per box. All who perished in the past year, preserved, to be unfettered at last. She can’t make out the individual bodies, but she knows their presence there. The distance physically seems no matter, for in her mind they feel closer—closer, even, than when she danced among them.

“Here you are.” Her father returns with a chair for her and for himself, before beckoning the dimple-faced woman with their drinks. He takes the drinks and hands one to Lise after she’s seated herself. “Are you ready to see something new?”

“I don’t know. It depends.”

“Oh yeah?” He laughs, taking a sip from the tall glass. “Depends on what?”

She peers into her own cup, the sickly pink substance it contains not appealing her. “…I don’t know.” The opaque syrup smells as pink as it looks. Dark and unfathomable, her expression is reflected disfigured on the drink’s surface. “When do people die?”

“Hm? What do you mean?”

“Do people die when they stop moving, or when they disappear?”

“It depends,” He says, and, anticipating her mirrored question, adds, “It depends on who you ask.”

“I asked you.”

“Alright, alright, settle down girl. Don’t get short with me.” His tone is playful enough but the warning is serious.

She didn’t mean to ‘get short’ with him—she doesn’t know what it means. “Sorry.”

He draws a long breath, gazing over the city, his eyes scrunching in thought. The procession moves along, the last box slipping into the conical building before he speaks again. “You won’t hear me say this about many things, but this is something best asked your mother—she knows death better than I. But, I think people are only dead when they no longer return. Take that as you will… I don’t know. Death is a strange thing, Lise, and as you get older you will find it ever more difficult to pin down. But again, I am not the one to ask about death. Life? Absolutely, I can tell you what it means to live, what life is.”

Lise doesn’t understand much of what he says, as hard as she listens, but she thinks she feels something in his words. However, it doesn’t develop beyond an indefinite feeling.

“Alright, no more questions for right now, it’s about to start. Watch the top of the building.”

She looks up from the trail of people now surging out of the structure, all order left within. The roof ripples and begins to unfold, peeling back. Revealed is a broad disk of glass which, as soon as it is exposed, seems to suck the light from the air around it. The people are running now, fleeing the strange building.

Lise can’t pull her eyes from the sight, the city dimming to dusk around it. The silence so absolute she wonders a moment if it hasn’t sucked away sound as well. The world holds its breath, shuddering. A slow shine comes streaming from the circles marking its sides. Without thinking, she covers her eyes for a fear which creeps over her at the relentless brightening.

Drink wetting her lap—she feels it hot on the backs of her hands, and sees it through them, through her eyelids. Silhouette by deep violet glow, she sees dark finger bones and the delicate tributaries through her body, until even those are rendered translucent. Terror transfixes her as it does not cease. A moan or a wail, some sound from down her throat, involuntary. She can’t stop it coming out. Crying annihilation. It is going to blind her—it will kill her with light.

All at once, darkness.

— 55 —

Between Strand

\//\\/

Lise wakes weeping, hands pressed over her eyes. The acute fear of that memory lingers. She quakes from cold or crying or both, trying to pry her hands away.

“Lise!” Pelanea is at her side, gripping her right arm. “Lise, it’s alright! He’s not moved again. We’re safe!”

Her palms come away wet and she sees the girl’s pale face in the yet dazzling light. She struggles to draw herself out of the memory, the smell of burnt death pervading. “I… I’m fine. I’m alright… What’s happened?” She is shaken but she can’t let herself stay shaken. “My chest…”

Pelanea turns to look at something Lise can’t see, “She helped me close the wound.”

“Eclait?”

“Yes…”

“She helped you?”

“Yes… Something strange happened, I think, and I was able to make things change by thinking. I don’t know, Lise. It was strange. I… I feel strange. Is this the undermind?”

“Not exactly. I’m not sure…” She answers, distracted. The scars on her chest are resealed the same silvery-blue, though swollen less than they had been. “…How? How did you know to do this? What did you do?”

“I don’t know—I don’t really remember it right. Eclait reminded me more than I knew.”

Lise rises, dripping mud, looking about for the other woman. “Where is she?”

“Searching out a safer place to make rest.”

She nods, and, trying to cast off whatever remains of her memory, looks to Bente’s clay incarnation. The earth solidifies at her feet and she steps toward him, regaining her balance with each stride. A thought and the hardened clay cracks and slides away; the still soft melts off after it. In a cradle of mud—his ashen skin colored patchy black by a film of silt—Bente looks small, trembling. 

The turning light slows, and stops, and dims. The buildings fade away as breath on glass, cooling. Darkness brings with it silence; followed immediately by a scream.

//\\

Lise staggers, sinking ankle-deep. It pins her still—and she knows an eternity in that suffering. A statue in Pain’s name.

“Lise!”

Every muscle clenches. She falls beside Bente. Soft earth’s embrace.

— 56 —

****’s Body

//\\

From her place in the cart, supine, Lise looks up at Eclait. “You wouldn’t happen…” She says, gasping, “…to have anything for pain?”

The woman grunts with exertion, “I wouldn’t. Sorry.”

Lise closes her eyes, practicing patience. The pain will not kill her. Drive her mad? Perhaps, given no respite—and, well, she can’t rule out a slow death, or the pain keeping her vulnerable to a quick one… The pain will not kill her this moment. Drive her mad? Probably. She feels powerless, caged in her own body. Impuissance… I can only practice this bitterest patience.

“How long until the next town?” Pelanea asks through her panting, pulling the cart alongside Eclait.

“There is no next town.”

Lise’s jaw clenches, There is no next town…

“What?” Pelanea begins to panic.

“It’s The Dwelling or death now.” That silences her utterly and Eclait sounds satisfied to leave it that way.

There is no next town… How long until the next respite? How long must I practice patience? In that thought, she finds an unconscious assumption. Will there be a next respite? The thought terrifies her. What if there’s no respite? What if this pain never abates? Since being wounded she’s known only decline. If there’s a limit to my patience, and none to my pain?

I can’t think about that. I can’t think about it. Stop thinking about it. It serves no purpose to think about it. Stop. Stop… I just wish the pain would stop. I wish everything would stop. I wish everything would cease. She feels the recurrence but can’t cork a torrent. I want to cease.

Under Death’s nulling gaze, all this flailing is cast void.

She feels the pull. That ever-present desire—lurking in that deepest crevice of the mind—comes creeping forth, beckoning. Pain is her jailer, keeping her confined to wakefulness. But always another way lies in wait—a fiendish escape. She might follow the desire down the deep, and emerge free. She might follow and forever follow. To beg of the jailer; biding for a respite which may never come—or to Death’s domain seeking true release.

As she feels her mind pulled down (drawn out curled round reddened iron searing) another part watches, detached, (blisters suppurate and pop, sizzling) marveling at how her mind turns in on itself, (writhing, cooked flesh comes away sticking) horrifying and curious at once. 

She ends it, I will talk to Akota before acting on these… I cannot see well enough past these bars. The part of her which observes comes to the front; the part which suffers is relegated to the back of her mind.

The moon makes its journey across the sky, marking the cycle. Just before reaching its apex, it catches the world’s shadow, and, without wavering, relinquishes it.

She breathes a painful sigh, feeling a fraction more herself—but a new fear is budding in her. She is shaken, feeling fragile. It is unsettling to acknowledge, and her sense of urgency folds over on itself.

Lise comes back to herself, “Can we stop a moment?”

“What for?”

“I need to relieve myself.”

Lise longs to cleanse herself. It is a mild discomfort beside the pain, but a discomfort she might alleviate. Her hair is matted and oily, and dry and brittle otherwise—and she can only dab the last drips with nearby stones and leaves so many times before she regrets the indulgence of soft paper. Not to mention whatever other odors remain to be discovered beneath her mud-crusted clothing. Hygiene is a luxury she misses dearly.

Grotesque as she was, at least she’d kept clean—now she can’t even claim the semblance.

Another cycle passes, and another, and she is suffocating. She is begging sleep again, envious now of the gift she’s so long taken for granted. Even as Pelanea complains of cramps and can hardly move for her exertions, Lise resents her ability to rest.

The terrain changed with the passing of three cycles—no longer the black, rain-soaked flats; the cart rolls over hardened hills, packed dirt cracked by the cold. Dusty white trees stick out on the land like fattened ticks, heads embedded in the surface—leafless branches, short and feeble, protrude from bloated trunks. Lise recognizes the trees, though stripped of fruit and leaves they appear malformed, the wretched semblance of their daytime complexion.

She is a different being herself since day’s passing. How different her view had been, riding to The Dwelling two years ago. Wistful is an understatement. Not that she’d been of particular cheer back then but she longs to feel even that dubious enthusiasm for her future. 

Sitting on the edge of the cart, she plays the cold-cracked skin around her fingernails. Picking at the dead, back against the fire, she looks upon the land with still pools for eyes, breath brume on the water. In her examination, a memory leaps to the forefront of her mind; a memory of running alongside the cart Akota drove, laughing freely at some absurdity he claimed.

She longs to run and laugh as she once had, if ever brief, and be unburdened by this relentless weight. I would be satisfied to walk and smile, but even to that pain bars me. At some point, this vessel ceased being my own. Rather, ceased being entirely my own… Was it ever really mine?

— 57 —

Coming Around

//\\

Pelanea comes to sit beside her, looking over the bleak landscape. She breathes, and Lise can hear the weight behind it. “Do you think he’s been fiended?”

It takes her a moment to understand, “Bente…” She glances back at the man lying fetal in the cart, quivering and staring. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Then what? Why is he like this now?”

Lise shakes her head. “I… You saw those uncanny buildings?”

“Yes.”

“It had something to do with those. I don’t understand it well. I grazed it a moment and…” She pauses to bite down on a budding yawn. “…I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the experience beyond a kind of undoing. He was in there well longer than I, and I can’t imagine what effect it has outside what is already clear to see. I might see better what state he’s in if I managed to sleep.”

Pelanea ponders that, then says, “My dreams have changed again.”

It catches Lise off, “What… Oh, really? How?”

“I’m not sure how to say it—it changed when I fell from the cart. I think I did something, or something happened then, because after that I haven’t died anymore. I feel like I feel better, but I’m uncomfortable about it. Last time I slept I dreamt of my brother again, but it was like we were just sitting back to back. I didn’t feel him die and I didn’t feel like I died either.”

She struggles to wrap her addled mind around that. “That sounds… a positive development? I can’t say I know what it signifies, really, but I would go so far to say it’s better not to be experiencing death regularly.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s what I thought too. I don’t know, though. I… I don’t know, I get this strange feeling. I think Pelezel is still… alive. Or, perhaps it is his spirit reaching for me through Harmony, but I feel that he still…” She trails off, troubled. As she struggles silently, her face compresses, and tears come slowly trickling out. “I… I don’t know if I’m fooling myself for grief’s sake, or if what I feel is real. It… hurts.”

Lise watches her emotional unfurling and doesn’t know what to do. She fidgets—opens her mouth to speak and stops herself—considers attempting an embrace and stops—opens her mouth again, “I’m sorry you’re struggling, Pelanea.” Even as the words come out awkward, painfully aloof, she keeps on, trying to press past. “But, I’m not able to think properly right now. I haven’t slept, and I’m in terrible pain. I’m sorry, I wish I could help like I said.”

“Oh…” Pelanea nods, and her expression appears strange as she rushes to wipe away the tears. “Of course… I’m sorry, I’m asking too much.”

Lise holds her sigh, “That’s not… Well, I’ve thought of something that may help—” Having said it, she strains to make it true. “‘Understanding isn’t to be hurried. Understanding is to be waited.’ Or, in how I would apply it to you, trying to force an understanding on events will only delude you further. Let what exists precede understanding, and understanding will follow.” Or something like that…

“I don’t know if that makes sense. Just, maybe treat it like a kind of puzzle to solve—that might make it easier to process.” Lise persists stubbornly, floundering round her mind for something that will satisfy. Fast, the flow of her thoughts drains away; she is desiccated, and she flounders. “I don’t know…”

Staring, the dark. Silhouettes on the hills. Dashing between trees. Black in hue. Dying in blue. She sees silhouettes on the hills.

“Lise…?”

She blinks a few times, trying to extricate herself from the night. “Yes?” 

Pelanea looks at her concerned. “You just sort of trailed off and started muttering.”

“Ah, yes, sorry about that… What was I saying?”

“I couldn’t hear much. You were just muttering about darkness or something.”

“I’m very tired… Sorry I couldn’t be of use…”

“It’s fine, just lie down. You look about to topple.”

Pelanea cradles her head and eases her to a smooth rest. She leaves her alone then, going off to rest herself.

I’m useless. I can’t even alleviate the pain I’ve done. I am cared for instead by one whose brother died by me, whose pain is at my behest. A friend, she thinks me. She thinks me a friend, the fool. She thinks me—the fool—a friend. Fool, we are… but friends?

Every time she comes near to sleep, she breathes deep and pain exhales a waking curse. When at last it happens she does not recall falling asleep.

\\//

Lise awakes atop a raised stone platform whose floor is chiseled a serpentine pattern—never revealing the head, moss creeping along the gray scales. Mist shrouds all but the immediate area.

She is seated in a high-backed chair, elbows resting on the rough table before her. On the table, tea steeps—spice: home redolent, rendered uncanny to this unfamiliar space. Her mouth wets for it.

‘I’ve seen it.’ She says, but Lise has eyes for the tea.

‘As have I.’ She replies, reaching for the cup.

‘I’ve seen where freedom is chained.’

Lise takes it, and in trembling hands examines the powder-blue porcelain, broken, and run-through silver. Her tears fizz and pop where they fall. The flowers etched on the cup are worn and filled in dark. The smell transfixes.

‘It looks as a platform amid the mists, eight-sided.’

‘Ah, yes,’ She says absently, ‘I’ve seen it.’

‘Shy, the serpents which roll over it.’

‘I agree.’ She drinks of it.

‘I see it.’

— 58 —

Concerning Retrograde

//\\

Pain wakes Lise. The cart rattles, jostled side-to-side. She rolls half off the edge, catching herself with a flung foot. Pain transfixed in a precarious stretch to protect her chest. Her thigh burns as she strains to push herself back onto the cart without her arms. The cart is shoved again. Her leg caves. Spine grinding against the cart’s edge, her knees hit the hard ground. Biting tongue.

“Let off me! Off me!”

“Eclait?!”

“Let off!”

“Shut up, dimmy.”

“Ow! By Harmony, let off me!”

Lise interrupts the tumult with a bark, “Stop!”

It takes her a moment to register the silence following, half-expecting not to be heard. Another moment to collect herself. She struggles to her feet, a steadying hand on the cart, and turns to face the three. Their faces are too dark to make anything of them, backlit by the fire, and bodies a splay of limbs turned uncanny in silhouette—tangled in their jockeying for control of the one of them which had a hand on the cart opposite her.

She hobbles around to them, keeping balance by the cart, and by the fire’s shifting light sees it is Bente who jostled it.

“Why?”

Her question apparently serving as permission to move once more, they come away from each other.

“I don’t know, I just woke up and they were already fighting. I tried to stop them but–”

Bente cuts Pelanea off, “You!” He points a finger at Lise, “Yooouuu!” The anger in his eyes reverberates through his tremulous motions.

“Why?” Lise repeats—this time to him alone, tender.

His face undulates, flickering through pain and rage and despair in rapid succession, cycling back through before settling as a twisted compromise of the three. At this, she shifts, sensing his violence near. “You!” His voice comes forced out, and as his eyes trace confusion, his yet outstretching arm quaking, she sees the fractures. “You did this… to me! To me! Did this!”

Again she sees the conflict cycle his expression, and she thinks he is going to lunge. Eclait seems to think the same, moving forward to grab his arm. Instead, his knees buckle and he drops, weeping, and from his open throat a long, unbroken bellow rips. Watching, stricken, the three stand round him, trying to align an understanding. He bellows for help. From the empty night resounds harsh silence.

Collapsed between them, he curls into fitful sobs, finally coming to a sleep more restless than the last, leaving behind questions and the strained quiet he created. It is none of them but the rasping crackle and skitter of the char-black firewood caving which lances the silence like a tensed boil.

“I need to sit down,” Lise sighs.

Eclait listens but doesn’t speak as she and Pelanea puzzle over the Bente situation around the fire. Even when they cast a question her way she remains as she is, a slight shake of the head, watching with peculiar eyes. Lise notes it, but is too preoccupied with Pelanea’s relentless questioning to make anything of it. Despite her refusal to contribute, in this, there stretches a strange, delicate line between the three.

Pelanea lets up when she realizes the limits of Lise’s own understanding, having retread the path from cart to light and buildings, to their split ways, to what effect the malevolent structures might have done him. And the why. The same why Lise asked of Bente himself. Why target me?

“All I can conceive of is that he blames me for the buildings.” She pauses to think over it. “I don’t suppose we should expect rationality from him right now.”

“What you say is true.” Eclait speaks for the first time. “But the way you say it ain’t.”

Lise shakes her head, “What? I’m not sure I catch your meaning.”

“He does blame you, and he isn’t rational, but his blaming you isn’t irrational.”

“You’re saying he is right to blame me.”

“Justified.” She corrects. The tone Eclait had taken is not hostile, but that of speaking plain. “You led him there.”

“I didn’t tell him to go into the buildings. I did the very opposite.”

She shrugs, “I didn’t say you did it on purpose. I said you did it. And there’s still the man.”

“The man?”

“The man who was there and then was not.”

“I didn’t see a man—besides Bente.”

“Hm.” Eclait purses her lips and says no more. 

Lise is left with herself in the silence.

— 59 —

The Dwelling

//\\

“It’s nearly midnight,” Pelanea says, glancing up at the moon as she and Eclait draw the cart. “I’ve never not been in Kellean during a solstice.”

“I’m glad to be gone of it,” Eclait says. “Kellean’s a piss house.”

“What? How could you say that?”

“The Kelle says I can say what I like. The Kelle is all I like about Kellean.”

“But the people… Your family?”

“They’re all the same. And as for my family—I don’t like them, and they’re not from Kellean anyhow.”

Pelanea huffs, “Well, I love my family.”

“Good for you.”

“You don’t have to be an asshole about it.”

“Watch your mouth or Harmony might take it from you.”

“You just said Kellean is a piss house!”

“I’m not beholden to Harmony.”

“…Well, Lise, you liked Kellean, right? You love your family?”

Lise blinks, looking away from Bente’s fidgeting form. “What?” She’s only been half-listening. “I don’t know how the two are related.”

“The girl is just doing the whole Harmony thing—wanting people to be like her.” Eclait cackles.

“What’s wrong with wanting to relate to others?”

“What will you say to Lise if she don’t like Kellean? What if she don’t love her family?”

“Well, I don’t know…”

“What if she’s like me? In this circumstance that turns you the unharmonious one. Ever think about that?” She cackles again at Pelanea’s stricken expression. “Shit, it don’t have to be hypothetical. What is it, Lise? Do you like Kellean? Do you love your family?”

“I didn’t see much of Kellean. How I feel about my family varies.”

The two are unable to respond immediately, grunting and puffing as they drag the cart up a hill. Lise is going to try walking to lighten their load when Pelanea growls and starts to heave with renewed strength. Eclait, laughing, matches her effort, and they crest the hill. Their destination winks on the horizon.

The Dwelling is an azure jewel; the black of night an austere dress for which this effulgent brooch was chosen. A dome of triangles of triangles of triangles—cobalt in dark, cerulean in light.

Pelanea and Eclait gasp for air between cries of glory and glee. Lise feels their elation yet cannot mirror it for several reasons. For one, as they stood aside to marvel, the cart kept rolling and now she is left grasping for a rail it lacks. The other two turn to yelling as they realize too late. Lise grabs the edge of the cart with her disfigured left hand, pressing Bente’s unconscious form against the near vertical cart bed with her right.

When she is aware of herself again the cart has gone halfway up another hill, and Pain has come crawling from her cavernous chest to scream in her ear. It drifts to a stop between the hardened hills. As the sky rolls over her, she finds in the vastness an equal weariness. Gaping, it sucks away Pain’s scream in its indomitable rumble, and Lise’s care with it. Left is Lise and her pain, and a terrible tiredness of spirit.

“Lise! Are you alright?!” Comes Pelanea, calling.

Bente shifts under her limp hand, and she pulls her arms in, cradling her chest without touching it. She can’t bring herself to reply and looks up at Pelanea’s concern with no more than lidded eyes.

Eclait sees to Bente while Pelanea pesters her. “Lise! Can you hear me? Are you alright?”

“I don’t know what alright means.” She says. “I don’t know. I’m wrung.”

The desire to NON comes without compunction now. It is the most natural thing. Down and down. Lise remembers a glimpse of blue, a destination sighted, and draws back from NON.

\\//

Lise floats. She is with the stars, gazing. Watching the world floating. 

To remain here…

To remain…

To remain there…

Her thoughts follow her descent. She retrospects with starry eyes. Wanting to live above the world, to walk the tightrope between planes—yet down and down.

If, in reality, The Dwelling was a brooch on night’s dress, in the undermind it is the centerpiece of the world’s diadem. From either side of the dome wraps a city teeming with pinprick diamonds.

Lise drifts gently down, arms extended. She alights the cart, and the hills obscure the city. Looking upon her companions with the same dying gaze, she knows neither hope nor despair—in their place a curious emptiness opening. Expecting nothing, she is prepared for anything. It is with this in mind that she perceives change.

Pelanea is manifest in the undermind as near humanoid. A cluster of bone-white geometry, fragments shifting pale pinks and deep greens, twined in the shape of the young woman. Lise watches with dull interest as she takes up the cart, alongside Eclait’s spark—which appears slightly diminished—and they take to trudging again, the color of her head shapes turning from pink to scarlet and spreading to her shoulders.

Bente is a dim light the size of a woodball, and she almost cups him in her hands by instinct. She draws her hands away, and a new understanding settles over her. He looks like he’s been chewed at by fiends, the surface of him tainted with a patch where no light emanates. She can hardly maintain her detachment. 

I’m sorry, Bente. I should have tried harder to convince you. I should have gone nearer and seen the structures for what they were. I should have… Her lamentation collapses in on itself, hollow. What use to you are my ‘should haves’…

In that undoing, she recognizes a pattern. ‘Who benefits by your suffering?’ She knows Akota’s words and struggles with them. She distrusts the ease they permit. (So brash) should she brush off responsibility?

No… she comes around, it’s not to brush off responsibility, but to not be so blinded by blame as to miss what responsibility I can take… She hesitates, or something like that… I need to talk to him more. More than ever… What relief it is to remember once more that Akota awaits her in The Dwelling. She can persist on that thought alone, for now.

— 60 —

Domebound Dimmy

\\//

Lise sits on the cart, willing a sphere in the air, she turns it cube, and a second cube phases out from it, spinning within as the first remains fixed. She makes the first transparent and divides the second by two—splitting it into many which bounce around inside the first. Splitting and splitting until it is as a pool of liquid coloring half the limpid cube black. She releases the first and catches the obsidian prism it contained in her hands. She takes a bite and purses her lips at the distasteful tastelessness.

Bente’s tarnish undulates, creeping over his candescence. 

She deliberates a pattern nonexistent. A motion she might repeat. Can she expect similar results this circumstance? What she will not do for a moment’s prescience. She’ll settle for a semblance; so she deliberates a pattern nonexistent. A singular motion she might repeat. Will she deem the outcome better this circumstance? What she will make of a moment: prescience. This semblance of a semblance; she deliberates a near pattern. A similar circumstance in which she might repeat. Might similar circumstances create similar results? She makes of a moment a semblance of prescience—similar circumstance, same input. She deliberately manifests the semblance of pattern—and in doing, ends another.

Taking Bente in both hands, she draws forth a memory.

—83#5••Wea•ego••—

Bente stands before The Kelle, head bent, begging begging begging mercy me mercy please. “Harmony, I say! Harmony!” He dissonates. “It was her, I say!”

Terrible—terrible tearing—tearing terror—terror terrible—terrible. I feel my flesh folding and folding and tearing and folding. Sensing skin on skin which skin should never skin I feel my skin on my skin and feel my flesh folding and folding and tearing and folding. Fibers snapping filament splitting folding and folding. Hands on me tearing and folding.

“By Harmony! Harmony me, mercy me! I am folding and folding!” He atonates. “Take her! Me? I’m innocent, me! Take of me this tearing and folding, I beg! Take her for me!”

The Kelle ripples, veil shimmering. Lise under her (its) gaze. The Kelle ripples, veil shimmering, undoing as she moves. A gray slate chiseled labyrinthine faces her. On sight she finds her eyes lost in its lines. It spans perception’s breadth. What…? Slow to realize, Lise knows present in a memory. How am I–

Immersion breaks.

\\//

Lise gasps, falling back from Bente. Fuck! Oh fuck! What was that? She staggers, hand to her head.

The cart rolls along.

Bente’s tarnish undulates, encroaching on his gentle remnant. Lise watches him dim and despairs. I can’t… I can’t save him from that. What even is that? She knows fiends, but this is a different creature.

‘No!’ She bursts, ‘No! Damn despair!’ 

Damn despair to NON. She trembles. Think you fucking fool!

Her mind races round and round, staring at his dimmed glow. There seems nothing to grasp, nothing to explain, solve, resolve. She sits on the cart and stares down her impotence—frustration’s acid-burn stinging her tongue. She knows nothing of this creature which has folded and folded Bente, tearing and folding until he has…

She knows fiends, but this is a different creature. She knows nothing of this creature. She knows it is not a fiend. She knew a moment of its undoing, head submerged in gray and feeling its manipulation. It works strangely—different from fiends, which consume of its victim and make of them a multiplication—it seems not to feed and has yet to beget as fiends do. Folding and folding… there’s something about that folding.

She’s not felt such lucidity in… she isn’t sure how long, and she is loathe to leave it. Her mind is sharp, this frustration a grindstone. I CAN resolve this. I feel it, I know it. Climbing…

Folding… Why folding? Why not merely tearing? Why folding and tearing? She realizes this thought threads fine, flimsy, but comes to resolution the same second. It’s all still there.

It’s all still there. His mind. When fiends consume, memories are often diminished if not near vanished from the mind. A fiend tears away… this creature folds, and the tearing is a byproduct of the folding. One eats, the other kneads.

Lise blinks and sees Bente anew. He isn’t dying, but coming undone. She’s known this but understands it now. Understand it better, anyway… Well, probably understand it better, she allows. Then comes the cruel—she understands but can do naught with her understanding. As impotence precedes frustration, from frustration she produces motivation; from motivation, understanding. Come, action. From understanding comes action. No, and she laments the impotent end of impotence, my understanding is limited—and so my action follows.

Faced again with impotence, she can take up despair or frustration. She casts aside both as illusions. Impotent illusion, illusory impotence. This new understanding, from which she can extrapolate no action, may yet expand to actionable. And as they come upon The Dwelling, she resolves, Understanding this much is enough… for now.