In a day’s time, Varllee paid Jakannes just over the border, with no words, then he turned and went the other way. It took ten days to return home. He brooded for three more, pacing across vast fields of unharvested grains where most of his new farm animals were either dead or looking at the same fate. His parents, his aunt, sister, all had died, leaving him stranded on this struggling farmland. He’d found someone to love, but then he was alone again as fast as it began. Animals were no company. Except for the mule, which had never been given a name, and which Jakannes believed he never would give a name.

On the third morning, as he was putting out a bucket of water for the last of his baggadooks, he stopped to contemplate their long, old necks easing over the lid, and he wondered how many times more they could suffer the movement before they broke like rotten branches. A chilled mist, heavy and low, was migrating across the prairie, breathing into clear sky to make way for a season of snow that was slowly approaching from the south. A quick breeze passed through, rustling the bagadooks’ downy white fur, and he wondered if the pink patches of skin missing in tufts like that ever made them cold. Cold enough to die? Or will death be the ultimate cold; the absence of any and all heat? His skin prickled, and he shivered. It was now that he made his decision.

Overstocking the pens with hay and water, harvesting the crops thrice and plowing the land four times over the next few days, Jakannes saddled up the mule, spent some time refurbishing his travel boots, dusted off his old crossbow, took to the road and travelled to Eslasta town. The horizon sits ruler-flat in these parts but for hints of far away mountain ranges unsettling the line like dimples. The trip took him three days and two nights, the skydome wheeling from blue into black, into blue again, then the first stains of civilization began to suggest themselves like some loud hooligan, not yet seen, but soon to be insufferable.

Then, over the top of hillock and slope, the city rose into view — a sprawling architectural attempt at nostalgia. The creators and designers could not help themselves with an insincere Lajentan flourish, missing the mark of the old transcendental aesthetic by a tragic mile. All so cheaply made, trying to be something it could only ever want to be — the threshold of giving up marked by a jarring shift in aesthetic as blunt as pure necessity; copper, tin, thinwood sheets for roofing and sandstone for walls, boringly unpretentious slabs of granite for streets, dipped along the edges for sewerage — then as a decorative afterthought; coloured bulbs hung bunched like fat grapes, silk streamers in the provincial yellow and blue colours, mist-maker machines on standby disuse until night. Eslasta town. Jakannes guided the mule around the final bend of the road towards its gates.

As the sun hugs the bleeding horizon and the gossiping birds are shocked into silence by the sun’s abandonment of them, a mass of nocturnal people begin to trickle from their homes until few become many, thriving through the city streets beneath thickening night, which here seems to fall faster than anywhere else in the world, to wake those stars which survey with cosmic indifference a nightlife infested with sex.

We see the brothels are the first to open, as the sky undresses in shades of red to reveal naked twilit sky. Then the Dens fling open their doors for those who would even desecrate the brothels with their savage grinning laughter, laughter that spreads, catalysing raw urges and aggravating it all into the light of a blinding perversity to which the street lamps erupt in answer — time! it’s time! The Brothels and The Dens are the tamest of the worst Eslasta can offer; as the glittering void overhead is rinsed of any cloud or moonlight there may have been, the streets seem to grow darker yet in anticipation of the city’s sub-subconcious. Far antipodes of need are soon to emerge; the “Backdoors”… They ease hidden entrances open by a sliver, only briefly, to permit categories of misfits for which the Brothels and Dens have no place, no service to provide. In unpopulated, hidden places, not even rats around, just scraps from the day, mouldy food and the smell of stale piss… figures walk through those hidden entrances at night. But, at night, never are they seen.

And so the pregnant remain at home while the otherwise electrified breed through the streets. One twelve-hour long tribute to the collective subconscious, back to ego driven behaviour upon the morning, oscillating back and forth to the rhythm of day and night. Such are the capital cities of Newnetta.

Passing the eastern checkpoint of Eslasta, which is a purely functional gap in the city fence occupied by a pragmatic barricade and more than a few guards making noise together somewhere out of sight, Jakannes wandered on through, leading the mule by the reins and down the thoroughfare. Twilight was just now giving way to deeper night. There were no shadows. He walked past tall houses with empty eyes of windows gone pale with frost, milky yellow, refracting the light of torches kept in squat cylinders with conical caps protecting lamp-flames from the wind and rain, all lined up along either side of the road like children, like this mid-year’s round of bastard sons and daughters ready to be deported to the Garjian Frontier where they would die defending the very lives that gave them their own against neighbouring horrors. He thought of those children, grown into combat-conditioned adults, and how they are the only thing keeping real life terrors on the better side of a bad dream.

Entering a deserted intersection, Jakannes glanced up at a high cable strung between two corners. From it hung a sign. He followed the direction in which it pointed, mumbling to the mule, telling it things no one could know but him, and it. And so beneath him were the stones, and before him was the way, and at the far end of it was a massive crowd of people. As he drew nearer, he slowed to watch.

Bodies drifted on a rhythm-tide. Voices cheered, eyes flashed looks, fingers lifted clothes. Beastial selves prowled forth to writhe in time to separate sounds trancing in from every side to meet at a discordant centre, clashing in one giant roar. Women and men without clothes talked to each other with their bodies first and words last. Shop windows, black with silence and gloom, framed long benches where bodies arched their backs against each other in a tangle of too many limbs as a sudden flash of blue fire forgot the night sky of its blackness, canopy of smoke going blue, then red, then pink to green, blue again — pale human skin made a sequence of colours. Hands waved in the air like a field of spastic grain stalks, heads hung low, an absurd humidity clogging the air.

A few eyes turned towards him, blinking. Brows creased. Amused smiles tried to break out, but were too uncertain of what they saw to form fully, so remained frozen half there. Jakannes ignored them. He looked up and searched for the next street sign. It hung from another strung cable, displaying nothing but the shifting hues on its colour-washed face.

Just now, hearing footfalls behind him, he turned to see someone strolling upon their merry way to join the thriving crowd. He reached out and seized their arm as they passed. The reveller swung around, recoiled, froze. They proceeded to look Jakannes up and down. A look of disgust, or pity, something in between. Then they seemed to look him over again, visually interrogating him this time — Jakannes in rags, dark green pieces of cloth wrapped about his body, muddy travel boots, fingerless gloves, leather all creased and peeling, the mule standing dumb and complacent behind him. At last, some eye contact. ‘I see you have clothes on,’ the reveller said.

Ignoring them, Jakannes asked, ‘Where’s Tarn street? I need to get to the Backdoor on Tarn street.’

The reveller’s eyes went wide and they shook their head. ‘You need to do what? Don’t ask things like that. Come, be proper animal instead. Take that off. Be proper animal—’

‘What? Animal…?’

‘See, I… Uh. You aren’t from around here, are you? See: I can tell you’re one of them… town people, aren’t you?’

Jakannes hesitated. ‘Yeah. I am. From half a day’s walk past Avvy — that way.’ He turned and pointed west. ‘Long way back,’ he said.

The reveller glanced over their shoulder at the noise of people, just for a moment in which Jakannes saw “It”… the “Moment”... when the dancing spectacle of life widens the spectator’s eyes with its girth to plunge deep into the soul with intent for the ever-longing core of being human, to make it animal, keening, bucking, curling around the passions it breathes, releases, breathes, releases in an eternal rocking motion.

A deep, lustful breath, and the reveller looked back at Jakannes. They said, ‘Why in all the Pit would you want to go to a fucking Backdoor? You really aren’t from here, are you? See: if you want to taste the proper night, then that’s proper, proper animal, right… but the Backdoors?… You should start here if—’

‘You hear me? Just tell me where it is.’

‘But, see—’

‘Do you even know where it is? Just tell me where it is. Or even any Backdoor.’

‘I don’t understand. Why would you—’

‘No. Just tell me.’

The reveller’s eyes slipped past Jakannes and lost themselves somewhere far away, their expression clouding over with confusion like ink, eyes darting back and forth between contradictions, warring. Seeming to resolve upon something, the reveller pursed their lips. Sighed in pity. Maybe in disgust. ‘Strange thing to ask,’ they said. ‘But. See: I have no things against a male and his doings in the night, be what they be, but. Just… see… okay, fine.’ Their shoulders gave in, and they gestured left. ‘Go down the thoroughfare. Past all the crowds. Then turn right when you see the sign for Street of Tairr. Two intersections later, go left where Road of Allassidy is. Keep going until you see the Fountain of the Golden Orgiesma. You’ll know it when you see it… Deep Pit, why am I telling you this?… TEll no one we spoke. You don’t know my name. Turn right at the fountain, there. Go straight for a while and you’ll end up in a square. It should be mostly empty. It’s surrounded with old pillars. You should see an alley with steps going down, I think. It gets dark in those alleys. If there’s a bench, sit on it and wait. Now, listen, see: this is important.’ The reveller leaned in. ‘If no one comes to collect you in exactly ten spans, you leave.’

Jakannes blinked. ‘That all?’

The reveller nodded.

Jakannes turned to leave, but they took hold of his arm. ‘Ey. Don’t ever ask how I know it.’

Shaking the reveller off, Jakannes turned and walked the other way, leaving the reveller to watch the back of a man in green rags and his mule in a city full of naked bodies.

It was just now becoming apparent to Jakannes that he’d be spending the whole night in Eslasta. Maybe longer. So he took some time looking for a temp-stable to leave the mule at. After some asking around, he found one in a dark, empty corner of an even emptier square. A small and bent keeper, who behaved like he’d been caught out on something even though he hadn’t done anything upon Jakannes’ entering, emerged from a chamber to see what his customer wanted. With hunched back, the keeper took Jakannes around to the stable, unlocked a pen and then stood aside. Jakannes ushered the mule into the enclosure and handed the reins over. Watching the keeper fumble with the reins, he tried his luck by asking, ‘How do you get into Backdoors?’

Hesitating, the man quickly tied the reins onto a hook and glanced Jakannes, just once, then stared at a bale of hay instead. ‘Why?’ he said.

‘I need to get into one.’

‘But why…?’

‘Because I… want to?’

The keeper fidgeted. ‘Okay that’s not how it works.’

‘Too bad. Tell me.’

The keeper pressed his lips tight. ‘Well. You find one. And you wait. What can I say.’

‘For what?’

The keeper looked up at him and blinked, just once. An answer was not forthcoming.

‘Fine,’ Jakannes said. He paid the keeper, made sure the mule was penned according to a list of pedantic requests, then left, leaving an uncertain stable owner to watch from his doorframe an evacuated city square, populated only by vagrants sitting slouched against empty stands, sandstone pavers littered with discarded protection and confetti two nights old blown like petals, squashed food smeared underfoot amid the day’s market-driven chaos, layers of scum darkening already shady corners, and the back of a man with no friends, walking away.

As Jakannes went on through gridlike streets, the festival’s noise rose, louder and louder around every corner, more present, until colour bloomed everywhere against the masoned walls, his ears throbbing from over-exaggerated tunes — he was again among the Night Crowd in sound and heat. He moved through them as a constant force of his own repellent solipsism, working his way around bare skinned trancing bodies when they would not move aside for him, drawing in stares like bait past a school of fish. Breaking clear, he strode on, feeling curious eyes on the back of his neck. When he’d followed the directions the reveller had given him, he emerged into the large, square intersection he’d been told about.

There was no one around. Not a window was lit. Not even faintly. Was everyone asleep, or were these buildings abandoned long ago, leaving black windowpanes and unopened doorways as empty as the dreams they’d once harboured? At one end, a small alley split the monotonous face of tight-packed buildings in two. Walking over to it, he peered into its depth. A short flight of steps made of loosely bedded stone led down to a floor grown moist with fungus and the reek of sewerage. A short way in, off to the left, a bench sat against the wall. Jakannes went up to it. The wood felt cold when he touched it, sprinkled with the droppings of birds and mice. At its foot was a slab of stone set higher than its neighbouring pavers, but only merely, and cleaner by only a cloth’s wipe. He sat on this slab rather than the bench, and waited. He waited for something to happen. For anything to happen.

A span of time snailed by.

Nothing happened.

And another span of time.

On his fingers, he had traced exactly ten spans against the pulse of his wrist, and when it was over, he got up and left the alley. Outside the entrance, he turned to look back into the dark corridor, taunted by the feeling that he could have missed a detail, some heretofore unseen piece which would fit everything into place. But, as he stood there looking over his shoulder, nothing resolved itself.

Biting his upper lip, he turned and walked back into the vastness of the empty square.

Nearby he saw another bench, slightly more ornate, as if someone had put a passing sentiment of flourish into its make. A weed was growing around one of its legs. Suddenly he noticed the weeds all around. Everywhere, the grass was dead. He could still see into the alley from this point, so he sat down and watched. And waited. For something. Again.

At the precise moment he’d settled, his clothes having ceased their rustling, the empty square having asserted its silence once more, and nothing else was moving; Boredom and Emptiness came to sit beside him. One to either side, they lazed and spread themselves across the entire square. They knew they owned it.

‘Why are you here again?’ Jakannes asked.

Boredom stretched. ‘Sheer accident. Or for a purpose, maybe. Depends on your view of the Modality. What have the Big Thinkers been saying lately?’

‘Leave me alone.’

Immaterial, they may have laughed, but no one else would have heard them. And Emptiness had no voice, in the first place.

‘But you’re already alone,’ said Boredom.

‘I mean it,’ Jakannes snapped. ‘Go away.’

Boredom turned to him, threw a languid arm around his neck, then withdrew it at the last minute, finding this highly amusing. ‘Well, first, you have to go away.’

‘Well I won’t be,’ Jakannes said.

‘That’s fun, for me…’

‘Well I mean it. Why don’t you just leave.’

‘What? Us? Without you? Leave?’

‘…’

‘Be fair! You can’t reasonably just tell us to leave, not right now, not here. Look around yourself, fool boy.’

‘Leave.’

‘Happy to. Just lead the way.’

‘No, I’m telling you to—’ Jakannes stopped talking. He could not, and would not, give these two Incarnations anything to work with.

Before long, Boredom was bouncing their knee. ‘You’re the one who called us here, so… Makes sense, but. This place is terrible… Come on, let’s go back to the city center! We never do anything fun. Join that party crowd? You’re always moping around like it’s impossible to feel alive anymore. Well it is, you just ignore it, so that’s on you silly boy.’

‘Shut up and die.’

On the other side of him, Emptiness suddenly began to cry — no sound, just head in hands, shoulders bouncing with sobs.

‘Idiot,’ Boredom spat, standing up to pace back and forth. ‘You lazy, bored dirt sack, look what you’ve done.’

Jakannes said nothing. He did his best to monitor the alley in silence.

Getting nothing by way of provocation, Boredom sat back down, then conjured four sticks, three dice and two yards of wool, then proceeded to set up an entirely invented game, which apparently involved stripping to your underwear and hanging from a pipe with a finger up your bum, after which the loser of said feat was then the first to roll dice to see how many times they’d have to tie how much string around how many sticks, following a two-three-five-seven pattern and back again sequence of rounds of truth or dare using a “truth-sensing charm” to determine how many times the answerer was considered to be a lie, putting everything into an honest-to-insincere intentions ratio vastly skewed in favour of insincerity, thus forcing the truth-or-dare answerer to participate in one of two possible sub-meta-games as punishment, one of which was a miniaturised version of political warfare so nuanced in its rules that it made no sense to Jakannes.

Once again getting no reaction from Jakannes, Boredom began to wonder aloud instead about the most meaningless topics they could think of. Emptiness had stopped crying now, and was staring into the ground at nothing in particular, eyes depthless orbs like painted-on eyeballs. Vocalising as loud as they could, Boredom was trying to figure out why is it that good actions and bad actions seem to exist, if goodness and badness can’t be found in those actions the same way that the colour red can be found in an apple and be agreed upon by everyone at once. ‘Or let’s put it like this;’ Boredom was musing, folding a piece of paper into some formless shape, ‘all you have to do is ask people why they wouldn’t send a child to die. They will say it’s “bad”. Just ask anyone around here— actually no, Newnetta is a terrible example, a terrible example, you send children off to war. Let us ask anybody else in the world, okay? Ask why they wouldn’t send a child to die, and they will say it’s wrong, why?, because it’s bad. So suppose I ask them why it’s bad, they’ll give me a set of reasons. Oh, “it will cause harm to the kid.” So on. So we shouldn’t send the kid to die because it will cause it harm. Well what’s bad about harm? “It’s pain.” Well why shouldn’t we cause pain? “Because it’s bad.” What’s bad about it? “It’s…” Oh. We’re going to go in circles. My question after thinking all that is,’ floundering aimlessly with their hands in exasperation, ‘why do people still act on those things? … You’re not listening are you?’

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

The silence from Jakannes was a clear no. So Boredom began to ask Jakannes, in a rhetorically conversational tone, why Magic Dreamers who die believing that something exists contrary to the fact that it doesn’t exist can suddenly be the reason that very thing pops into existence the moment that the people who study that Dreamer’s belief meditate hard enough on its supposed existence to “manifest it”.

‘And why would this happen when the existence of the very Thing that is manifested ignores all rules of physics?’

By the time Boredom was only half way through whittling this problem down to a further hundred little sub-problems with meta-problems attached like jingling bells of confusion, Jakannes’ understanding of logic seemed shaken.

He did his best to ignore Boredom’s attempts, refusing to pay any attention in a monklike effort for half the night, remaining bored and empty himself, tying these two incarnations from the Emotive Plane to the present, just to spite them and waste their time. They probably had better things to do. He was stretching them thin, pulling them down to one more inconvenient place among millions of others they could be in the world.

Meanwhile, nothing had moved. Moonlight glimmered in the moisture in between the grids of pavement stones and in splotchy patches of dampened paint. There was the smell of early-forming dew — but it was dew without the sweetness of promise and possibility that comes with the morning. Here, there was only introspective stasis, and a hollow rushing of blood in his ears. So he sat and waited, stuck between Emptiness and Boredom.

A rat flashed its shadow across a pavement stone. The shape of a bird carved upon a rooftop darted into the air, flung away in an arrowshot. Emerging: another rat. Or a cat. Rats so lithe they could be cats. Maybe cats. Or…

Jakannes sniffed as loud as he could. The sound broke something — something that was not there until he’d broken it — and now, as the motion of his breathing sounded loud as a whetstone, he started to feel himself becoming lost, having forgotten the point he’d come from; found instead stranded in a freezing tundra as vacant of landforms as of purpose, his psychic feet slipping on the ice of… what exactly was he doing here again?

Down the alley, at the peripherals of his perishing interest, something seemed wrong. Squinting to see, he scrutinised this wrongness.

Somebody was walking in the alley.

Boredom and Emptiness began to disintegrate around him. ‘We’ll be back again, don’t forget it,’ promised Boredom, and vanished.

Jakannes sat to attention. Leaning forward, he saw how the person in the alley hadn’t noticed him yet, and was walking towards the bench in the alley alone, their steps quick and guilty. They sat down, and proceeded to wait. Jakannes rubbed his face. It felt colder against his hands than it should have. He continued to spy.

Neither the man’s character of face, nor his expression, sketched clearly to Jakannes’ eyes. It was too dim. But he could see how they sat slouched, hands in their lap, and with their gaze directed to the ground as if something too horrid loomed above them, present only to observe and mock, and they could not look up face such an awful thing.

Jakannes counted ten spans. Which became twelve. Then thirteen. He waited for something to happen.

Nothing happened to nothing.

Not until a sudden sound like metal rods skidding together. The man slumped. For a while he hung like that, until the weight of his head finally dragged him down. He dived limp into the pavestones. There the man lay in stillness.

Jakannes glanced around. Had anyone else seen it? Maybe some cats had. Or rat-cats. But in this square was not one, not a single, not a lonely dark figure in any shape or shade but him. He watched the tops of the roofs around him. Not a silhouette but a crow. He watched the sky. Nothing but the void. He watched the alley. Another man had appeared. A tall-but-hunched figure dressed entirely in black with an abnormally long head. Accompanying them was a silence of a second kind. Jakannes had to stop breathing.

The figure in black stood over the body. They seemed to contemplate its shape for some time. They crouched, only to contemplate it some more. Then, taking it under the arms, they lifted it back onto the bench to sit limp and heavy like a sack of sand. Jakannes watched the figure hold the corpse’s head against the wall and do something to it. When they were done, they put something they’d stolen in their pocket, turned away down the alley, and fled back into the darkness. They were soon vanished.

For a while Jakannes breathed, merely. Finally he clenched his jaw and got up, and walked across the square, descended the steps, moved carefully down the alley down, into its enclosing chasm, and approached the bench where the corpse had been left. The head was lolled back against the wall. A piece of metal poked out from its forehead at a slight angle. As Jakannes peered closer yet, he could see the corpse had no eyes. Glimmers of puss and blood stained the pallid skin around its eye-sockets. The eyes were stolen, empty of thought. Jakannes wondered what the man was thinking when he died. That very last thought before the end of thought.

The corpse stared eyelessly up at the night, head at an angled, morose in vacant contemplation — or maybe loss. Of life. Jakannes wondered what it was seeing in its death, if death could see. One day someone will find out what happens when you die. Every day, people find out, but for nothing, because they can’t report it. His father, his mother, aunt, sister, beloved. All found out. For nothing. But Jakannes wouldn’t have to. Because he wasn’t going to die.

Becoming grave, Jakannes addressed the corpse as he made an announcement to whoever would happen to overhear it. Looking directly into the black sockets, he said it. ‘I will never die,’ he said. ‘I will never die.’

The sockets stared, at nowhere in particular.

‘What,’ Jakannes asked it. Then he followed the direction of the corpse’s stare, which was up behind him, to the top of the alley wall.

Up there, beneath sagging gutters, an open window gaped toothless, missing its shutters. Wind groaned, whispering. Jakannes felt his soul begin to sink; as he gazed into that void square of shadow, something was gazing back into him. Suffocation…

Jakannes blinked, turned away. He glanced down the alley where the figure in black had gone and wondered if it was him. One final time, he observed the dead man on the bench with the shard of metal jutting from his forehead and his empty eye sockets. Then Jakannes turned and gave pursuit to the figure in black.

Down the end of the alley, past unused bins, displaced pavers and gutters clogged with twigs and leaves, there was a small archway to the right. Jakannes went through it, and after descending a short ramp, followed the corner going left. He found second-wave style housing runs in a lane stretching away from him in great screaming length, doorways and windows pressed up against each other, stack after stack after stack. The end of the lane was no end in sight at all. Jakannes set forth regardless, keeping close to the walls. Shutters hung on rotten hinges that swayed at the breeze. Poorly designed drainage pipes ejected no waste. Further and further down the lane, the housing runs contracted inwards like closing walls. Up ahead, a silhouette in black flashed from one side to the other, out of sight; Jakannes had no time to realise he’d even seen it. And now it was gone, apparently unaware of Jakannes. Crouching low, he chased after it.

He could hear his boots thumping on the pavers, so he stopped, pulled them off, held them in one hand and jogged on the balls of his feet instead, his grimy, soundless feet. Coming to where the figure had passed, he peered around the corner of grey, peeling plaster. He could see the back of the figure moving away at an unhurried pace. Over his shoulder, he could see where the one in black had come from: a short, dead-ended lane. A bench sat at the end, and a body slouched on it. It was too dark to see if it was alive or dead. Another?

Jakannes ignored the corpse and slipped around the corner, ghosting the figure in black from a distance. He lost track a few times, the apparition vanishing beyond corners now and then, leaving empty laneways and scuttering night vermin, only to later flash upon his peripherals as Jakannes took random routes in hopes of seeing them again. Jakannes found them again and followed. After stalking down an avenue, the figure came to a stop before a high wall of greenery. Jakannes ducked out of sight, sidestepping into the cover of an abandoned corner-shop.

Most of the outer wall of Eslasta is a giant hedge of Steffabbis Vine, towering up high, held in place with pillars of granite around which the branches clutch. Diamond shaped leaves black-green and hardly shining hide thorns as long as your arm, that are strong enough to puncture sheets of tin. “Hedgewall”, they called it. This portion of the Hedgewall was deserted for now; the pruners, trimming growths all day, four per yard, were either in bed or on the streets revelling.

The figure in black went up to the foot of the Hedgewall and crouched, reached into the leaves and pulled them aside in a remarkable feat of agility. Suddenly there was a hole in the wall of vine. Then, ratlike, they dropped onto all fours and slithered in. Jakannes waited until they’d vanished, then crossed the road and crept up to the hole. Squatting, he pulled one of the large leaves aside and peered in. In from all directions, thorns jabbed out from the clusters of branches and deceitfully welcoming leaves, and the hole, which elongated into a tunnel, receded away into blackness. Jakannes gazed into it. No telling where it went. He dropped flat and began to crawl nevertheless. If he was to get anywhere with his mission in this city, he knew he was going to have to follow his nose, no matter where it led.

Cold grit grazed his elbows and knees as barely visible foliage closed in from all sides, strangling his freedom of space. The darkness ahead said stop, the chill from behind said come back, the slowly constricting walls around him said you are stuck. Without regard, he crawled on anyway, with only his will to sustain him.

The tips of thorns sensed his presence. They began to close in and brush along his skin. Then they grew heavy, hanging to drag their slice-edge widths down his back. He stopped, pressed lower to the ground and slithered onwards.

Cold corners of the world’s distances did he crawl, crawling and crawling. Until he could hear a far-off hum — the hum swelling into a muttering of mouths, the muttering becoming words. Finally he crawled out the other side. When he stood up and brushed dirt from his chest and legs, he looked around. Already he was beginning to feel dizzy.

A swarm of people with apparently ascetic sensibilities had taken up residence across a huge abandoned yard of old pavers heaped in four-by-four stacks, where they lounged on couches, lazed spread-eagled across benches, sat cross legged with cushions upon carpets from all corners of the world, spoke slow, gibbered-up words, with pipes in their hands and a faint green haze in the air around them all. There was the smell of burnt leaves and powders. Everywhere Jakannes looked, dazed ascetics were all muttering to each other about disconnected concepts — but it was as though the weight of entire dimensions were in their words, the sounds snaking forth from smoke-plume breaths as they fanned into holy linguistic being, content to only be, and strive for nothing more. Nearby, a man and a woman were sitting side by side. They stopped watching their morphing thoughts projected onto an invisible plane laid out somewhere before them, and turned their heads to see the newcomer. In their eyes, Jakannes saw a thick glaze. Orb mirrors reflecting some incomprehensible play of truth too complete for this physical world to yet understand. Including him. Jakannes wondered if they knew anything about him. Did they know he would never die?

Looking around, he said to them, ‘Someone dressed in black; did they come through here? You see anything?’

They stared.

He asked again, but they just blinked at him, lids all slow and heavy. Jakannes gave up and walked away, searching for someone else to ask.

Nearby, an old pillar of blackish stone stood, leaning just off center. Three people were walking towards it. Jakannes watched as they found a spot on the ground and sat in a circle beneath its presence. He wondered if it meant anything. Approaching the three companions, he stood just outside their field of notice and waited to be acknowledged. Eventually they glanced up at him. But only for a moment. Then back down at pipes they’d pulled from pockets, pinching flaky powder from small satchels and packing it into the bowls of their pipes. One of them muttered to their friend, holding something out between their fingertips. ‘I have some left. Hold it out.’ Jakannes watched them drop something in their friend’s bowl.

‘Never mixed these before,’ the friend said.

‘Neither.’

‘Has anyone?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Then have some of mine as well. We’ll mix together.’

‘Alright.’

The first one held out their bowl and let their friend sprinkle flaky powder into it. ‘I wonder where we’ll go,’ they muttered.

The third friend held out their own pipe and received the substance also.

Jakannes cleared his throat. They stopped packing and looked up, directly into his eyes this time.

One of them, who wore a green rainponcho despite the fact it hadn’t rained in a long time, was not currently raining, and was not predicted to rain, said, ‘Yeah?’

‘A person dressed all in black,’ Jakannes said, ‘they come this way?’ He turned and pointed at the hedgewall he’d crawled from. ‘Did anyone come out of there?’

‘Besides you?’ asked the green rainponcho man.

‘Yeh. Other than me. And all dressed in black. You see anyone like that?’

‘All in black…’ The rainponcho man glanced at his friends, each in turn, questioning them with raised eyebrows.

‘Yeh,’ Jakannes said again. ‘The guy’s dressed in all black. Completely. Head, feet, hands, neck, body.’

‘Like, you mean, Pequerogran-type total black? Like that guy over there?’ The rainponcho man pointed over to a Pequerogranese man with slate black skin and red hair sitting with his back against a stack of pavers.

‘Yeah like that a bit. But that’s not him. Didn’t have no hair like him. He was dressed in black clothes. Had a long head. Like a rat or something.’

‘Oh. Him.’ The rainponcho man turned to look at something far away. ‘Him,’ he repeated. Then looked down at his lap again and went on packing his pipe.

Jakannes waited, standing there in silence, unsatisfied. One of the others spoke up, obviously irritated with him, without doing the courtesy of even looking up from where he sat cross-legged among a mess of paraphernalia. This one was bald, and had no shirt. His skin was nearly as pale as snow. ‘What Respanne means,’ he said, ‘is that he went that way.’ He raised an arm and pointed with the mouthpiece of his pipe into the distance. Jakannes looked where he was pointing.

Beyond the community of ascetics and over a field of untended grass, watching over them was the silent midnight shade of a cliff stretching the entire length of the western side of Eslasta. At its feet were a set of steps, tiny at this distance, that ascended to a small square entrance. And just now, entering, was the one in black.

Jakannes wondered who it might have killed on its way there. Feeling a sense of sudden unexplainable panic, Jakannes abandoned the three ascetics without another word and took flight after the figure.

The three exchanged glances as they watched the poor man go.

‘Do you feel sorry for him?’ the bald one asked.

Thumbing his pipe, the rainponcho man stared. ‘I suppose that I do, but only in a way.’

‘He seemed reserved. Or blocked. By something.’

‘Speech issues?’

‘No,’ spoke the third one now, a small hunchbacked man who had up until now been silent. ‘I know what Respanne’s saying. He seemed unable to speak freely. To be free.’

‘From what?’

‘Who knows.’

‘Sad.’

‘Deep sadness, yes.’

‘Get over yourself. Give me that.’

Together the three lit their pipes and laid back.

Hurrying over the loose grey pavers underfoot, Jakannes dodged groups of ascetics where they were sat or laid passed out, until he broke free of the mess, and jogging across the field of grass, he approached the stairs. They were simple granite cuttings, larger than he initially thought. He leapt up them one by one, reached the square entry way and entered. When he broke through into darkness and stopped to look around the chamber, he found himself among the council of gods.

Giant slate statues, staph-infected with moss and crumbling like lepers, stood in a sombre circle, feigning communion. Jakannes counted twelve. They looked forgotten. They looked dead.

There was Love; and there was Hate, sneering at her. There was Grief; there was Joy, smiling upon him. There was Lady Shame; there was haughty Pride, laughing at her. There was Compassion; and there was Hostility, eyeing her. There was Faith; and there was Fear, looking away. There was the Dgannel the Giver; and there was Egontanu of Greed, watching them all and seeing nothing in particular, but wanting everything nonetheless. There was no light in here, but for the moon and starlight washing in from a drafty opening far above.

At the feet of the god of Greed stood the one in black.

They were looking up at the statue like the architect considers the structure. At the sound of Jakannes’ feet padding the floor, they turned. Slow, with the fluidity of a cat. They contemplated Jakannes for a while in silence. Closer now, Jakannes could see how every part of their body was clothed in so much black material that no skin was left exposed. He could make nothing of their shape, but for a hunch, large limbs, and an elongated heavy head. They crossed their arms over their chest and spoke; a seethingly thin, weedy voice muted from behind layers of cloth, words snarled more than spoken. ‘What is it you want?’ they said.

Stunned, and feeling his feet go cold with uncertainty, Jakannes managed to speak. He got straight to it. ‘Are you Aese Asheel?’

They uncrossed their arms, clasped their hands instead. ‘No… Why?’

‘Do you know him?’

There was a pause. Then they admitted: ‘I do.’

‘Isn’t because you might have killed him, is it?’

‘No.’

‘So where do I find him?’

Chuckling, like sticks against stones. ‘Why do you seek to find him? What is it you want?’

Jakannes shook his head. ‘Just tell me.’

‘These are outdated,’ the one in black said, changing the subject. They looked around at the statues. ‘I am un-surprised by this. You know why? I do not; I am curious. But I can guess. Your place left praise behind them, long ago now, to sex instead, and now—’

‘Stop talking.’

‘I—’

‘I said stop. Why were you—’

‘I only began—’

‘I said, stop talking.’

‘All the—’

‘Will you shut up.’

Finally, the one in black stopped.

‘Will you stop talking so much,’ Jakannes said. ‘You don’t speak well, anyway.’

‘My apologies. I began this speak last night ago.’

‘You saying you came to Newnetta just last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘You came here to kill those people?’

‘No.’

‘Then why?’

‘What are you talking of?’

‘The alley.’

‘When?’

‘Twice. I saw. Why’d you do it?’

‘You are asking so many questions at me.’

‘No shit. What I want to know, is why you came here to kill people.’

‘“Want”?… You “want” to know this? Do you know I have love for the word “want?” Tell me, what do you want? Can I ask this?’

‘I don’t get this. I don’t get it. This is all… I’m not staying around for this. You seem fucked up.’

‘What is it that you want?’

Jakannes felt his chest begin to grow hot with a level of frustration he hadn’t felt in a long time. ‘Ye deaf or something? My question was where I could find a man named Aese Asheel.’

‘Sad. You will never tell me what you want?’

‘What I “want”? What I want is for you to tell me where to find Asheel, and then I’ll stop asking questions.’

The one in black inclined their head, then let it fall, nodding it up and down in a couple of slow, contemplative nods, the overly methodical mechanics of movement making it clear to Jakannes that he was not talking to a fellow human being. Something crawled up his back. He could hear the stranger’s grin as they said, ‘Fine. What you want, I will never see. But. I will fun you.’

Jakannes blinked. ‘Fun me?’

‘…Humour you.’

‘You don’t know what you’re saying. Don’t know how to use words.’

‘No, not yet.’

‘You’re bent sideways in the head.’

The stranger in black chuckled. ‘Be silent, and I will humour you, now.’

Jakannes waited.

After a measured moment, as if waiting for a certain amount of artificial suspense to be built, the stranger finally said, ‘On the Street of Yarri, find the twelfth home facing the outer wall.’ Then without another word, they skirted around the spot where Jakannes stood. As they passed, something in space and time broke, the world seeming to stall as a great vacuum swept past him, leaving a chasm gaping in its wake. Jakannes’ felt his soul fall in. He found himself in nothing but nothing. Not even a void.

When his soul resurfaced, it was as if something had gone missing back in there that he could not relocate.

Shaking the pressure out from the front of his head, Jakannes turned to watch the figure in black exit through the opening, descend and then vanish. He clenched his jaw. He wondered who was going to be next, who was going to be eyeless and dead.

Addressing the chamber, Jakannes declared that it would not be him. He would not die. He looked once more at the statue of Greed, seeing for the first time a pile of hoarded objects dumped its feet. The other statues had no such gifts.

Full of derision and scorn for arbitrary rituals, he snorted and left the chamber.