Left behind. Shay blinked unable to trust her eyes as aeons flickered and pages turned - and with it changed the age around. Quietness waved at her and she breathed aided by Calm, her heavy breath was the loudest thing. Moonlight shone in through the broken factory ceiling. She could taste the rust in the air and as she glanced upwards to the still standing loom-shrines with their eightly limbs, the smell ran down from them. Now and then an obsolete spray of a long broken mechanism spurted out a metallic vapour, a moisture.
∞
There were laser burns all over, from the weaponry of Panzjrah or similar. As she looked back through the peeling temple doors she had just entered through, even without her standing on their precipice, the world was flickering through versions of itself, as pages held and released by their corners. She checked again the ceiling and there - ancient moonlight glowed statically. The sky and its world at odds.
∞
She was looking for any message from Lay’d Payn, though all she found were strewn fabrics dry and crisp, crumbling into dust when she touched them. One of the loom-shrines was stuck in a loop, quietly spindling nothing into nothing. She crept to the back of the temple-factory trying not to disturb the silence, hoping to find the ladder Argus had chased her to, and she was sigh-pleased to see no horizon waiting, only walls as should be. The ‘generator’ that she had climbed up and hid within, had moved somehow closer to the ladder. It leaned with crippled posture: a deeper puncture or wound had been gored into its stomach and left the thing half toppled over, forever clutching frozen at the impact.
∞
The ancient moonlight lost itself in dents upon the surface of the loom-shrine as Shay passed, and she held her hand up to it, perhaps in compassion or madness. It was terribly cold, and the dents had been made by fists and kicks no larger than hers, filled with what may have once been pillows and now were bushes of feathery mould. Surveying a moment longer the deepest wound, the hull of the shrine was thick as her arm was long. She crept no longer but ran towards the tunnel, unable to imagine what strength was once required.
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∞
Her sighs echoed as she climbed down the ladder, glad that the entrance or exit was still there. Her feet thudded dull against the rungs - and pages after the moonlight above left her, and there was only darkness in the returned deep. Her foot was feeling strong, her shoulder barely stiff at all. Blueish light pulsed from below and Shay saw the abrupt end of the ladder beyond her feet. She watched the softness below, how far was it, could she make the fall. A stale smell was greasing upwards, and she held in a tickling cough. She listened until she could bear it no longer and feeling secure jumped into the open tunnel below, for the last rungs were all bowed-broken, cambered or slippery.
∞
Spaced far apart were mushrooms pulsing luminously, suspiciously spaced - as might torches be to light a path. The mushy stumps of their kin were trampled over, decomposing in deliberately swept piles to the sides. ‘Who would-could be living here?’ A path for all too human tread.
Going to the end of the tunnel she searched for markings identifying the location, alas finding nothing discernible. She turned to the ladder and managed to see the slices of Argus’ broken sword. Imitating for a moment his swings accounting for his height, she then had regained her bearings. His swings having been swung from ‘there’, and so she walked in the opposite direction. She stopped a moment, knowing she could perhaps turn back to The Club, and her heart with Grief was sore. Alas she must press on and return deadlier, or so the tenseless-Timelessness flows.
∞
Eventually, through stretches of thankfully uneventful tunnels, she smelt the bakery on the same road-above as her shop. Walking under the entrance to their ovenry she heard head bakers struggling with one another over the exact measurements for a coronation-worthy fruit pie. Eight berries just did not seem enough, but none could conjure a better solution.
“Larger berries, then!” one yelled. “Larger!”
∞
Having at last reached the ladder to her shop and knowing her path was yet far from over, she still held onto a sense of relief. Holding on as it tried to leave. A tunnel, a page and age, a ladder closer to Woid and Serib - and that fragile thought familial lingered - and Grief there somehow had no say. There seemed only Hope asleep. She turned her head to meet the unwelcome thud or echo of struggling footsteps, scraping and dragging she thought, coming from the bakery’s ladder. She rushed up her own ladder slower than she would like, dry tea leaves rattling in their jar.