Tock tick. Shay, Woid and Serib were stood together atop a wooden landscape too long unvarnished, difficult for their eyes to understand into features scalable and distances surmountable. The smoke of snuffed candles wafted toxic, forming massive clouds larger than should be. They were staring at a mite that only dust can see, though it was large as they were (or they, small as it). The mites’ eyes glittered in moonlight as it equally stared at them, showing off its legs and chewers. Serib could taste something sharp in the air, looking at it.
∞
“Is this a shaman thing?” Woid nudged for her to go and introduce herself.
“I’ve not seen bugs this big before!” She threw away his hand.
“They aren’t big.” Shay walked ahead of them both. “We’re very small.”
The dust mite gave them all a shrug before scuttling in the direction of a little house who knows how far away, made of long-dead cells accumulated.
∞
Shay turned and moonlight was crashing across the edge of a 'cliff' she walked towards - the edge of the grandclock-tall. Getting closer and more so - over its oaken edge she saw an alchemical room and wide-open window where drapes violet and crimson fluttered in Night's breeze, and a Shadow was climbing out of that same window.
“It’s you?” Serib tried to keep her voice quiet after blurting out.
“She… I… can’t hear you, I imagine. We’re too-who tiny.”
Woid, finding nothing to lean on, sat and let his legs dangle over the top of the cliff. It curved very sensibly for a cliff edge, for it was the crowning top of wooden Guar’dezhan. Looking down over the edge he saw the grandclock’s faceless front trying its best to chime. Weird as watching hills try to blink their peaks together, so large those mechanisms to his shrunken state. Alas gears were spinning by themselves wrapped by candle smoke, a moon-dial mountain stiff against unregulated weights and lake-bed springs. None of the parts were coherent with each other, belonging to different machines his best guess, the outcome of inexperienced hands in haste trying to repair what only myth or miracle can. The room was vast beyond, puffing and bubbling as do most alchemical workshops, more a cityscape to our newfound size.
∞
The three of them briefly watched large ‘past Shay’ hanging there at the window stuck in Act I - they were sure a bony arm touched her, another soul all the more stealthily hanging outside and unseen, just before she climbed down away out of sight from the window. Shay knew it must be Amneshay.
“I don’t remember that…” she rubbed her neck thinking where one of Amneshay’s needles could have jabbed her, as she took in everything else about the laboratory, the ladders, desks and chairs. The ingredients arranged into their piles and bottles: “This is just how I would set things up… all for my height.”
Guar’dezhan was gurgling somewhere in the wooden realm beneath our three, still trying to chime.
“It looks like your shop.” Serib announced. “But with all the shelves removed, in a far higher tower rather than in the market.”
“I don’t disagree.” Woid added. “Stealing from yourself?”
"You gave me the location." Shay faced Woid.
A door none of them had noticed until now began rattling; a key was struggling to find the lock. Shay instinctively, without really knowing why, checked her harness to find there safely the tea seeds she had stolen from this very room. Amneshay had taken them back almost immediately, and how or why Panzjrah had them at one point was not something she understood.
∞
The (to them) massive door was as an earthen range falling uniformly open, hanging almost totally off its hinges creaking wide though not a soul stepped inside, for one was sitting there in the Corridoor. Lay’d Payn sitting there, hooded and covered completely by her Gown of Scabs, a bloody drape it is, trying with her old arms brittle as twigs to roll the wheels of her broken-oaken chair. A breath of fresh lavender and rose accompanied her struggled entry to the room. A titan to Shay, Serib and Woid’s mite-size, though Lay’d Payn barely made any presence in her oaken wheelchair. As though it was once for someone else far larger, or she had to atrophy greatly since. It disobeyed much or most of her thrashing weakly at it.
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∞
Serib watched quite powerlessly as Shay too felt pangs to leap down and help.
Words scratched at their feet, reading words there left: “Though what help can you be?” and a crawling sensation filled the room.
The oaken wheels screeching against the floorboards was such a racket for their small ears to bear. Having finally scrapped and scraped into Amneshay’s lab, Payn’s shaking elderly hands fell limp by her sides rather than resting on the tallied arms that were sprawled too wide apart. Her face was not visible through her gown, through long crimson hair fell regal through what gaps there be. Dripping sanguineous and dark.
∞
The weight of her chair on the floorboards slight as it was made Guar’dezhan tilt slightly, a small earthquake for our three atop. More scratches were gnarled tiny next to Woid’s hips, near where he was sitting with legs over the side. He scrambled to his feet as Serib and Shay too rushed over, watching the living words:
“I would speak though you are small, and most sounds to you are as storms. Dearest welcome! Congratulations for escaping the accursed loom-room, and after - choosing the most uncertain of two already strange roads.”
Woid and Shay were uneasy while Serib jumped excitedly into waving hands. None of them could see how Lay’d Payn was writing or scratching these messages, some of which were already there, filled with old dust:
“Yes!” Scratched the older wood. “I know you’re jumping, Lightning Crown! I am sorry so few of the riddles I had you memorise were of use. So internecine is. Now along such tenses: all of you follow Dromiya, would you? With a bit of hurry; appearances to maintain! Never ever know who might be reading.”
∞
They all looked to each other and finally having decided none of them were Dromiya, they glanced to the only other living thing atop the eerie grandclock landscape: the dust mite scuttling into their dead-cell house some many grainy fields of wood away.
“In this! Mine labyrinthian of black holes… what sense did you think there could be?” the wood waffled.
“A little more than this…” Woid grumbled.
“There are arenas after this, prince 'of the stands'. Bordered places. Your part is as yet, part-way.”
Woid froze thinking Shay would read the same and though she did, she showed no reaction from her mask. Meanwhile his eyes were glued to the wood for what was next, though no further messages from Lay’d Payn he saw. Serib looked up at him, gesturing with her eyes that he say something to reveal his identity; how silly his secrecy seemed to her. Though Woid knew as Serib did not, that Shay was not ready to remember. He umbra-stepped unseen and ahead.
∞
Avoiding split-craters that lakes or rivers could fill, our three made what they thought was quickest route to the dead-cell house, doing as told ‘with a bit of hurry’. Other craters had their puddles rather than whole lakes or seas, filled with who knows what liquid; perhaps humid from Amneshay’s lab bubbling up from the worlds below. There are texts that tell of a sandy town of mites they visited when little Serib exhausted could not go on, though I can little elaborate on that here.
∞
Eventually they met with Dromiya, whose many-chimneyed house had a fleshy look, the shed segments stitched together by coarse hair. A gathered thing. Shay, Serib and Woid each paused before entering, the stale smell and micro-sights being not enough to halt them, but the thought of what versioned events awaited on the other side. Would they grow in size at best or worst in the vast of no longer measured Space appear somewhere else altogether? Thankfully (or not), no scenes changed passing through the fleshy doorway and in the hairy little house that was decorated by the torn spines of books and disparate pages, through the too-soft floor was a laddered hole to climb inside.