Our designs. Moonlight eventually disappeared as they descended the bony ladder. Serib still was dizzy and strained from her efforts in the loom-room keeping the flames at bay, and more so having waded all this way over strange terrains, thus Shay took great care with her during the descent, worrying each thudding footfall on the rungs would slip. Woid was already at the base of the ladder where all was glowing shaken by lit candles or torches, and he looked out from the glassless windows of a dead-cell office or similar. Bulbs were struggling to flicker, powered by wires already cut. The flow all slow. Bright sands poured glittering from leaks in whatever roofs there be, as they glanced up to see not one roof but many in geometric torment, unable ever again to as one conjoin.
∞
A chasm waited for them as they followed the scuttling beetle 'Dromiya'. The inside of the grandclock had a nutty smell, of whichever rich woodland its materials once were from. This deep tree made hollow and filled with moving parts, dripping with recent ink, the gizmos of copper and silver floating through jarring movements far from harmony; almost stellar in size to our mite-y three. Plundered of its gold these once-pendulums and almost-weights nearly swinging into each other repeatedly, never again able to chime it has been said and again.
∞
The sporadic candles described with their shaky light what inky liquids had flooded the deep, as our three scurried (copying Dromiya) along a worn pipe. This place was meant for no feet to traverse or climb, though abundant with moving shadows enough, that our Shadows taking turns with heavy-strong Serib in their arms made better than most the way. The poor girl had been panting as she tried to keep up. Dromiya had some stickiness to the end of their legs, even using their mouth on occasion for gripping across trickier gaps. Shay almost slipped at one point, unable to take mind or eye off of it. The ‘path’ inside Guar’dezhan was long as the wooden world above already traversed, and when Serib’s legs were sore all in the knees, our three rested for who could know how long.
Dromiya did not reply to their request in words but in its static stances afterward, posing, standing on its front or fore legs in combinations, its pinchers clacking towards the swallowed heavens in ritual or communication obscure.
“I’m glad of that!” Woid whipped dramatically. “I didn’t want to be the first one to give in…” and he slumped down heaviest of all.
They laughed somehow, huddled together into some microgroove of wood that the titanic maker of Guar’dezhan likely never saw. Their loud words together, unsettlingly so, did not echo through the disjointed deep.
"How can it be tiring, just going into one shadow and out of another?" Serib asked Woid, while Shay kept watch.
"From carrying you here and there! All muscle under that robe, ey." Woid joked, and the two them had a brief arm wrestling tussle. "Tough as old boots."
∞
Together again at last and inseparable now our three, or so goes the Hope against the Despair. Shay's guard relaxed as she watched over Woid and Serib instead, chatting and dozing off. Childhood stood next to her watching too, layered over grandclock scene the smells of her parent's shop now hers. A table of candles and spiced porridge stinging pleasantly.
∞
Though it was not cold, Serib later tried to keep her aching knees warm.
“I could do with setting a fire…” Timeless as things now be, her joints were already stiff from journeys she has not yet begun.
Her spirit here and body elsewhere, asleep on Ehl’yiteth.
Woid smirked and Shay blurted out: “Umm…” - advising then a fire would do too well here in such a wooden landscape. Serib moaned about the candles and torches they had passed.
Dromiya read a book while waiting for the three of them, antennae instead of thumbs, having apparently concluded its unknown task.
∞
Still chuckling Shay took off her mask and her hood fell to her shoulders, and there her real face without other disguise was clear. Thinking of fine views out of open windows she helped Serib give her knees a rub. Shay’s skin was losing slowly against the persistent props long needed to hide her identity should she ever be caught, and her mask removed, her hair damaged from constant covering and dyes. Woid stalled - staring wanting and even needing to say something, though just as he perhaps had courage to reach for his mouth and remove his teeth that concealed his own secret visually, and altered his voice enough, Shay wore again her hooded mask, and our three set out.
∞
Eventually there was a downward slope of grainy lines in the wood, vile with jutting splinters thick as spears. Shuffling along and between these, Shay saw the webs of spiders even tinier than they now were, and beetles laying eggs by snakes short as thumbs, these slithering into tunnels their own size. Unsure what to make of this and these, leaving the slope a little way behind, Serib paused in a changed scene, having come to what was almost a room in structure after so long an endless chasm. She rested her hand on a large, oaken-carved desk, while Woid leaned against the same bulky thing, and Shay spoke:
Stolen novel; please report.
“The Dam’e’s desk?”
They were in a tiny iteration of The Club and black sand was piling up around them, falling from a tortured above, spilling even from cracks in the tiled floor behaving more as sludgy water may. Never filling the room more than it previously had. The doors leading up to the pantry where many cakes and tea once were had and tunnels under Imirka were both sideways, sliding open and closing as mouths in the practice of a difficult phrase, their corridors filling with black sand.
∞
They searched and wondered, noticing the way back was blocked by sudden dunes, filling entire walkways that moments ago were vast. And so this puzzle continued along the only direction left to go, finding similarly contorted versions of The Club, the museums or factories all abandoned; Shay’s shop and the shuttle stations - busy or not. Some had an excavated look to them bare to their foundations and insect workers there indeed were brushing ash and dust aside. One version after the other. Some could have fooled anyone and some only no one. Constants the same and variables rearranged. All lit by lamps left in haste.
“With bones showing…” Serib said, our three passing on saw unfinished fabrics draped over what they perceived as scaffolding bars.
Peeking out of one draped window they saw those bars, aligned as cubes it might be read, repeating out into oblivion 'smaller and smaller'. The furthest cold barred cubes were woven over with taut tapestries, and the threads of the closest were reaching this way. The scaffolding obeyed no laws Shay was aware of, reaching through walls and floors though in inscrutable ways, damaging not a thing. As though all else was built atop them. The Spatial Dimensions themselves, perhaps - visible only when one has eyes even smaller-than. All the more with Time their monarch missing, lost or murdered.
∞
“Stinks like rust, this sand.” Woid grabbed a clump of the damp stuff, crouched and held his hand to the nearest lamp. “Or blood.”
The sand was black perhaps or a darkest possible red; blood trying to dry. Serib too filled her palms:
“Time is dead and She has killed them…”
Carpeted stairs zagged down to our three, spiralling then upwards in helixing glory. They could hear a terrible thunder and thrashing of hail against fragile windows above. And the riser-faces of the steps spoke without sound to them, dripping words:
“Time is dead and I have killed them… we seek to be totally clean of them, of Duality and all the Old Royalty, the Old Loyalty and Old Reality, of which I am among. Was among. We are in the valley between such things… navigating with our hearts where minds once reigned, and reigned too long. Reigned to such usurping heights as Fate’s designs. How cynical they fell believing that Fate was greater than Will; their actions betrayed a question their words were hiding: what faith had they in their own Truthdom? Witness. I reconcile Love and Reason.”
∞
Dromiya, Steward of Guar’dezhan, without so much as a chewed word or trilling rattle left our three clueless at this section before the steps, to discuss something with an octomni in a different distance that was navigating the air well as water. Shay stepped first onto the stairs, her prosthetic leading the way, its hand close to her sword and her eyes scanning for wires she or Amneshay would leave. Woid appeared at the top of the stairs and Serib followed close behind.
∞
Windows shook unstable against the icy rain. Not a thing could be seen through the trashed glass. The layered scratches. Human Nature trying to get out, Nature trying to get in. More frequent flashes of lightning illuminated the dark Observatories - Woid and Serib looked at each other.
“You’ve been here before?” Shay asked them; indeed these were the Observatories of Argus Ynoptes, though much befallen into disrepair and silence.
∞
They were careful to pass through all doorways together, yet each they went under and left behind made not a touch of difference to the epochs. The great storm and chittering glass remained and each room was empty of life or lavishness or any practicality. Merely holding their places. Doors opening onto ceilings. Stepping through their heads would spin to find the floor swung to meet them. Furniture of no clear purpose too large for the rooms they were inside. Shay worried they were stuck in another all-looping loom-room. Stairways leading upwards intertwined with those that were winding downwards. Serib leaned on walls and her friends for balance, drifting and drained, her journey longer than these pages have seen.
“I do not know this storm.” She focused on the rattling windows. “It is not my thunder. Darker.” Nor did it belong to her master.
As though pulled or travelled from another land or lineage, the lightning tinged with many different colours and temperatures, their thunders having no rhythm with the forked lights. Woid sat ahead at the top of some stairs waiting for the other two to catch up. He was scratching his now invisible fingers into the thin, threadbare carpet, and he wondered how far his mistake with the illusionary powder would spread. All above him was open, and countless staircases sprawled as a maze, another 'geometric torment' visible only when lightning dared. Through all the dark he searched slowly:
“The colours are vile.” He said once Shay and Serib were level with him and he fluffed up his collar. “Sloppy joinery.” He nodded at the doorframes, thrown together by amateurs in a hurry; casings thicker than the jambs. “All throughout. It all leads back here.”
Shay felt a blow to her gut, a succession more into her back and head with speed she could not react to. As Gargarensyr’s finishing kick heeled her senses in half and she fell without whim or wit through a splintering banister she saw the solid net of The Ersecutor entangle Serib and Woid. Our designs.