Chapter 21: Falseness

Even when the forest had closed back around her like a soft green veil, Violet’s fears refused to dissipate. She found herself scanning the woods ahead, her eyes drawn to the places where shadows gathered; the gaps beneath raised tree roots and hollows bored by woodpeckers and beetles. Each pool of blackness suddenly seemed sinister beyond comprehension, filled with terrible potential.

Violet was so busy looking out for demons that she nearly ran headfirst into a deer. It was standing amidst a cluster of bushes, hidden nearly up to its shoulders in pink rhododendron blossoms. Violet was close enough that she could have reached out and touched it, but instead took a quick step back, alarmed and mystified all at once. The deer hardly seemed to notice her presence, its gaze focused on the flowers, as though contemplating a lavish breakfast it only slightly wanted to eat.

“Oh.” Violet murmured, and nearly apologized out of reflex. She’d never seen a wild animal of the deer’s size before and was momentarily taken aback. At first glance the deer was fairly enormous, taller than her and with great spade shaped ears that slowly flicked and stirred the air. It had antlers as well, crowned with a great many sharp, bony points. But behind that parade of features, the list of things that a deer ought to have, there rose a strange diminishment of a sort that Violet didn’t grasp at first.

Her gaze turned to the cat, which had stepped well off to the side, a bit like she had upon encountering the demon only a little while before. The cat didn’t look afraid, exactly, but between its shoulders Violet could see a growing clump of black fur beginning to stand straight up.

A part of her thought about asking but quickly realized the cat had no clearer notion of what was wrong than she did, their respective natural instincts going off like the alarm in a bank vault.

Violet looked back to the deer and for a dreadful moment was certain that she would see something dark and impossible swirling out from behind the boundaries of its form, but the deer remained listless and vague, and its eyes….

Violet had seen pictures of deer before in books. They’d been drawn with ink and done up in paints, and there the deer were always in motion, clearing fences or prancing through sunlit meadows. Their fur rippled, their antlers glittered, yet the artist had only ever given them little black dots for eyes, and something about that had always frightened Violet in a vague, unapproachable way.

Looking at this deer now she suddenly realized that the artist, long gone and forever irretrievable, had been both wrong and right in their approach. Wrong because surely the deer they had used for reference back then had not been so unavoidably off kilter…and right because this one was.

The deer’s eyes were large and dark, framed by long, almost human-like lashes. Whatever light or perspective or liveliness there might have been in them at one time or another, all of that had been scribbled out entirely.

It left only a blankness to the deer’s eyes, but the void wasn’t akin to death. Violet had seen dead birds and dead mice before and, being curious, she’d examined them closely enough to see what death actually looked like. A dead animal’s eyes were glossy and blank, but there was also a finality to them. The deer wasn’t like that. It would stay alive for however long it could, moving and breathing, but not like a living thing either. Where the deer had fallen was a halfway place, uncanny and unreal.

That was it, Violet realized. Everything about the deer, from its motions to its horrible, blank eyes, reminded her of a doll. Something that resembled life but clearly wasn’t.

She stepped back next to the cat, trembling.

“What happened to it?” Her voice was faint.

The cat took a long, slow breath and exhaled even slower. The fur between its shoulders hadn’t settled.

“Do you remember how I said there was an edge to the air?” It asked, and Violet recognized a smooth, surreal calm to her companion’s voice. The calmness was definitely manufactured but she made herself embrace it. Anything to still the tremors rolling out from her center.

“Yes.” She mumbled.

“I’m getting it again,” the cat said. “…Even worse now.”

Despite herself, Violet took a quick glance up at the sky, but of course the clouds were thinning and there was much more blue than gray. No storm this time to mask the wrongness.

“Like a demon?” She asked, and knew immediately that she didn’t want the answer.

Mercifully, the cat shook its head. There was a rising strangeness to its motions now, like it was being absolutely sure to do everything just so, in such a way that it could be certain it was acting normally.

“Cat?” Violet asked, then snapped her fingers when the cat didn’t answer. It jumped and glanced quickly up, eyes uncharacteristically wide.

“Not a demon,” it said hurriedly, then slowed back into a more assured pace. “It’s like a radio station almost, but I cannot tell where it’s coming from and I don’t know what it’s saying. It won’t let me listen.”

“It? What does that mean?” Violet asked uncertainly.

The cat blew out a breath.

“I want you to take a look at the deer,” it said, ignoring her question. “Don’t get too close, just tell me what you notice.”

“Why?”

“Because you need to know what this looks like.”

“What is this?” Violet pressed, but only earned herself an annoyed look.

“I have a notion,” the cat said. “But I need you to check. If it makes you feel better….”

And suddenly the cat was atop her rucksack, resting comfortably between her shoulders. Violet sighed as it leaned over to look at the deer ahead, whiskers tickling her cheek.

“You won’t have to go too close, just take a look at it. Tell me what you see.”

Violet wasn’t sure why the cat couldn’t have done this itself but stepped forward anyway, moving with the utmost caution.

Perhaps this was a lesson, like the ones the cat had taught her back on the island. It was more serious than those, this one had an aura of dread that she hadn’t felt back home, but….

“What do you see?” The cat repeated, breaking Violet from her thoughts. They were a few paces from the deer now. It was still puzzling over the rhododendrons, or at least looking at them. Violet felt a sudden pang of sympathy as she wondered if the deer even had the capacity for confusion.

“Its eyes are wrong.” She mumbled.

“And?”

Violet took a deep breath and made herself focus, looking away from the deer’s face. Its body was welcomingly normal, covered with a uniform layer of coarse brown fur that melted into white as it reached the belly and legs. None of it seemed abnormal to her, the deer wasn’t limping or hiding any terrible injuries. On the contrary it seemed to be in perfect health.

“I don’t see anything.” She said.

“You don’t smell…?” The cat began to ask, then shook its head.

“What?”

For a moment her companion was perfectly silent, scanning intently. Then, slowly, it drew itself straight.

“There,” it said. “Along the spine. Do you see the threads?”

…Threads? Violet stared, certain for a surreal instant that she was about to see seams and needle marks, the hints of manufacture…but of course the cat had meant something else.

And soon enough she saw.

“What are those?” Violet asked, and though she managed to keep her voice calm, nausea roiled within her.

Along the center of the deer’s back, progressing in a straight, even row, there were tiny reddish tendrils poking free from the animal’s fur. They weren’t very noticeable, barely an inch in length, but once she saw them Violet could only pick out more, dozens and dozens. It reminded her of what happened to potatoes that were left out for too long.

None of the threads were moving, mercifully, but the mere sight of them protruding from living flesh was enough to make her feel ill. She took a deep breath and began to back away, not caring if there was still more to see.

“What you’re looking at is a parasite,” the cat said. “The deer was careless and paid the price. Now it will be eaten up from the inside. You, on the other hand, know what this looks like and can hopefully avoid it.”

Violet continued to retreat, only stopping when she bumped up against a tree. The deer didn’t react to her departure, only snuffled softly into the rhododendrons and then ponderously twitched its ears.

“Is there anything we can do?” Violet asked quietly.

The cat vanished from between her shoulders and reappeared a few yards off to one side, slipping free from a shadow cast by an overhanging branch.

“No,” it said with a curt shake of its head, “that one is beyond help.”

“But…” Violet stared helplessly at the deer, made false by its affliction.

“It doesn’t know what’s happening. There isn’t any pain to this.” The cat said, and thought Violet knew that was supposed to be reassuring, she could only grimace.

“I wish we could do something.” She said miserably, but the cat offered no answer, only continued northwards.

Violet shuffled in place for an unhappy moment, then followed. Out of the corner of one eye she thought she saw something drift through the trees, several feet removed from the ground, but when she went to look, she found nothing.

The rest of the morning’s travel went slowly enough that by the time Violet stopped for an early lunch she felt quite tired. It wasn’t a physical fatigue, for the land was relatively flat and the going easy enough; instead Violet felt exhausted mentally. Her thoughts swirled, so full of deer and demons and malign influences from beyond the bounds of space that a headache began to prickle along her temples and behind her eyes.

The cat observed her wordlessly as she sat crosslegged at the base of a birch, her back pressed up against the lichen streaked trunk. Violet chewed listlessly on a dried apple and stared back.

“What?” She asked after a bit, her mouth full.

One of the cat’s ears twitched.

“You’ve always had a very particular look in the back of your eyes when you get scared.” It said.

Violet blinked. There was something in her companion’s voice she didn’t especially like.

“No I don’t,” she said defensively, then faltered and huffed. “…What kind of look?”

“I’m not sure there’s a name for it. Isn’t that becoming a common theme for today….”

“I don’t like when you do this.” Violet muttered and tried to go back to her apple, but it was unappealingly tough and held so little flavor that she began to wonder if it would even be worth it. A sharp fragment of seed had become stuck between her front teeth and she pushed at it with her tongue, only succeeding in getting it to wiggle back and forth without dislodging.

The cat looked up into the sky, absorbed with its own wonderings.

“I have to describe this the long way,” it complained, speaking only partially to her. “The look you get is one of…resignation, I suppose. Like some part of you has already decided that there are terrible things in your future and you are not likely to survive them.”

Ordinarily, Violet might have denied this in its entirety or simply set to ignoring the cat until it settled on a more cheerful avenue of conversation, but the events of the day had left her tense and unhappy enough that she waded right in.

“What do you care?” She asked sharply. “Weren’t you just saying that everything is supposed to fall apart anyway?”

“There’s a difference.”

“No there isn’t.”

At this the cat sighed, annoyance and sympathy dueling for prominence in its pale eyes.

“People are not bound by their circumstances,” it said. “Just because the world and the wider universe is destined to fall to ash someday does not mean that you need to puddle up and—”

“And wait to be eaten by wolves.” Violet grumbled, cutting the cat off with a disinterested flap of her hand.

“Exactly,” the cat nodded, unfazed by her growly glumness. “At any moment you could meet with a terrible fate, for this forest is uncommonly dangerous…but you shouldn’t obsess over it.”

“I’m not allowed to be afraid now?” Violet asked sourly. She knew this wasn’t what the cat was driving at but didn’t care. She wanted to be upset, if only because it felt better than being frightened.

But her companion shook its head patiently, refusing to let the matter go.

“Oh no, I’d encourage you to be afraid from time to time,” it said. “Just don’t partake in useless fear, like fear of the dark, or the unknown as a big blanket object to encompass everything you haven’t experienced yet. Being blinkered may yield dividends back home but out here the meek are eaten first. Embrace uncertainty, Violet. It’s healthy.”

With that, the cat, obviously in fine spirits, sprang up and trotted out across the clearing they’d stopped at the edge of, disturbing a small cluster of pale, fluffy moths. They turned a few ragged circles, disoriented by the sunlight, then fled into the more certain darkness of the woods.

Violet looked down to the remnants of the dried apple and then tossed it into the ferns with a sigh. She knew perfectly well what the cat had been trying to say, but none of it made her feel even a little bit better. Uncertainty continued to chew at the bottom of her stomach.

Ahead of her, on the other side of the clearing, the cat suddenly sprang free from a low cluster of bushes and executed a surprisingly acrobatic leap through the air, front paws outstretched, claws glimmering in the sunlight like little sabers.

It swiped at something, a sun bright flash of orange, but missed and fell back to earth, passing the apogee of its jump. Undeterred, the cat tensed to try again and suddenly the air around it was full of color. It had disturbed a resting swarm of butterflies, Violet realized, and she rose to her feet, eyes widening.

It took her a moment to realize that there was a noise to the air as well, not strictly physical but rather a hint of something, like chimes heard from a long way off. Somehow, she knew immediately it was the butterflies producing this sound. They had begun to swirl into a contiguous cone and as they flew Violet realized why she hadn’t taken notice of them before. The sides of their wings that faced outwards were mottled, brown and green and the very faintest yellow, a forest in of themselves. They’d been resting against tree trunks and even as she watched, Violet could see more taking flight, entire sections of what she’d assumed was bark stripping gracefully away from oaks and aspens and chestnut trees, joining a growing swirl of fractured light and color.

The insides of each butterfly’s wings, tightly closed when they were at rest, were dyed a deep reddish orange, ochre and blood and sunset all at once. They flashed and blinked like bursts of flame in midair, only visible for an instant at the height of each wingbeat.

The cat leapt again and again, like a frenzied dancer at the climax of a performance, and Violet could see a delighted, almost human grin on its face as it slashed its claws out, the butterflies parting effortlessly around the danger. Her companion wasn’t really hunting, for there was no prey to be caught, and the butterflies hardly seemed to notice its attempts and wildly slashing claws.

Violet leaned into the sound as she walked further forwards, eyes skipping back and forth as she tried and failed to track individual butterflies through the gathering swarm. Velvety wings batted at her face, but the insects did not stop or take the slightest notice of her.

It was a song. The butterflies were singing.

She let herself fall into the wingbeats and the flashing, teasing hints of color, and right away she could hear a thousand individual notes all blurring together into a seamless, crystalline tone. A hint of some greater picture beyond immediate comprehension hung ascendent in the far distance, but thought Violet tried to grasp it she could not shake a great and overwhelmingly complete sense of individuality. The butterflies were there, she knew, their colors were there and so was the pattern they were pursuing, but each insect acted alone even as it followed into a seamless and ever-present swirl.

The contradiction in this was so complete that Violet felt herself jarred from the place she’d gone and in an instant the song was faint and small, reduced to something she might hear for an instant on a breeze and then never pick up on again.

Violet took a pair of steps back, enough to pull free from the butterflies, and then sat down and felt a sudden immeasurable sadness, though for what she did not know.

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Seeing her do this, the cat made one last attempt to snag a butterfly, failed, and then padded over, stopping just short of her shoes.

“I don’t think I’d like to be a butterfly.” Violet said.

“Neither would I,” the cat agreed. “…You tried to connect to them, didn’t you?”

Violet nodded.

“Is there anything in this entire forest that I could actually talk to?” She asked.

The cat considered for a moment, then offered an amiable shrug.

“There’s me.” It said.

A tiny smile crept onto Violet’s face and her companion glanced back to the birch, where her rucksack and notebook still lay.

“Shall we continue?” It asked.

Violet began to nod, then hesitated.

“…Cat?” She asked.

The cat settled dutifully back down.

“I know you’re only trying to help me,” Violet said. “But when I’m afraid it always really does feel like I have every reason in the world to be. And I know I wasn’t entirely right to be afraid of the woods or even the dark, but all of this feels really different. Like I should be afraid of it no matter what.”

The cat was silent for a moment, a strange expression crossing its face. At last, it nodded.

“There is a possibility that I was being a little bit cavalier.” Her companion allowed, picking its words very carefully.

“Cavalier?” Violet asked.

“Unconcerned. Which I’m not…and I shouldn’t ever give that impression, especially not after you’ve seen something upsetting. Remember that, um, even if you have no real reason to be terrified of something, like the dark or…wolves, I will be here for you. Always.”

Though the cat was making a great effort to sound noble and strong, Violet could tell that the poor thing was treading in unfamiliar territory and beginning to stumble over its own words. She smiled and rescued her companion from its obligations with a nod.

“I know.” She agreed, and saw the cat just about melt with relief.

They continued onwards at a gentler pace, but though Violet felt slightly better she still kept her eyes peeled and her notebook close at hand as the forest began to thin. Once more, the pale tracings of a lost world became apparent on all sides.

Violet had been expecting more trees, yet instead found herself passing crumbled houses and the echoes of roads like fading scars cut across the skin of the world.

On a whim, she found a chunk of pavement the size of a fist and tossed it through a dusty pane of glass in the second story of a sagging, old house. The window had been done in a perfect circle and was reflecting amber with the coming sunset. Violet’s projectile put a dark, jagged hole through the center, yet the pane itself only shivered, made weirdly liquid for a split second, cracks like a spiderweb done in ink shooting all across its length.

The cat observed this small act of destruction and laughed when Violet turned away and quickly found other things to look at. It had been an impulsive thing, to throw the stone, and now she felt quite bad, though no clear understanding of why accompanied this regret.

It wasn’t like the glass or the house belonged to anyone. Nobody was being hurt by the further degradation of a set of ruins, yet still a part of her sang with remorse. It had been needless, and now some small thing that had previously been intact was now reduced to splinters.

Entropy, Violet thought sickly, then looked to where she was already past the half shattered window. It stared blankly down at her like a ruined eye or a smashed moon, holding neither accusation or forgiveness in its depths.

“If I had a pile of stones and the hands with which to grasp them, there would not be a window left in all the world.” The cat proclaimed.

Violet frowned faintly but had no rejoinder. After a moment her companion vanished from its place beside her and spent a few minutes walking along the roofs of the broken houses they were passing. The buildings here were smaller and packed more closely than the ones they’d passed near the river, and Violet found herself examining the curious features that differentiated them.

Some of the houses had very small front gardens, all overgrown with ivy and sunflowers and scatterings of lank, hungry looking weeds. Others had no front garden at all and were built close to the street. Their paint had peeled and crumbled into nothingness, and that left the neighborhood looking as though it had been dusted with ash.

“Your house didn’t have an attic, did it?” The cat asked from where it was walking a very specific path along the broken spine of a gabled roof.

“No.” Violet said.

“Good. Attics encourage complacency.”

Violet didn’t bother to ask what that meant, only looked ahead of herself. It was growing late in the afternoon and she needed to find a spot to set up camp. Someplace indoors, for she didn’t want to end up sharing space with something like the deer…or worse.

The neighborhood she was walking, with its rows of ruined homes, curved off to the west and Violet exited with a hint of relief. Then she found herself eyeing the woods ahead with even more trepidation. The shadows would be deepening soon, pooling into avenues lightless and terrible.

An image came to her mind, alternating rows of forest and town. It was all connected in some way, Violet knew that, it was just that she wasn’t heading in the right direction to be walking over a road for the entire distance.

For a time she passed through uninterrupted trees and picked her way past thorn bushes and through ferns still tickly and damp. It was as though the dawn had never ended in a lot of the forest, for the canopy reduced the sun to a deep, amber bolus, shaded by what seemed like miles of leaves. Shafts of light so thick and dull Violet thought she could reach out and grab them pierced through gaps in the foliage. When she examined them she could see motes of dust and dandelion seeds like lost parasols floating unhurriedly past.

She caught one of the seeds in the palm of her hand and spent some time gently turning it over with one finger. It was interesting how small things could catch onto the air with delicate prongs and spreads of natural design, yet something much bigger could not be swept off the ground but by the biggest gust, and even then only kept up for a moment.

Violet let the seed go but some element of it had been damaged by her handling and it spiraled unevenly towards the ground, lost amidst the grass. That was perhaps the fate of all seedlings, she supposed, for no matter how pretty they looked in flight they could hardly take root in midair.

This put her thoughts to what a tree would look like if it grew while flying, and then perhaps even a forest. She imagined a colony of aspens afloat, their roots trailing behind them like lines off of a sailing ship, green and yellow leaves whistling in the wind as they parted clouds and maneuvered thunderstorms.

Then Violet thought about flying herself and it put a tickly thrill through the bottom of her stomach. Things would certainly be much easier if she could take leave of the ground and step up above the treetops as though borne by an invisible staircase. Then she could spread her arms like wings and simply glide north until she reached her objective, bypassing every troubling thing in the whole world.

It would be an adventure of the sort she read in storybooks, where nobody got hurt and even if the hero was scared from time to time he quickly recovered himself and marched bravely on. Of course, the heroes were usually clad in great suits of shining silver armor and were marching off to….

Violet furrowed her brow.

“Dragons aren’t real.” She said, and though there was firmness in her voice, it wasn’t complete. After everything else she’d seen, the old certainties of the world no longer seemed as absolute as they once had.

The cat glanced back at her and laughed.

“Yes,” it agreed. “No such thing as dragons.”

It was a little later on, with the sun in terminal descent and the shadows thickening even further, that Violet came across a chainlink fence. It was not very tall, barely up to her chin, and had been so overgrown with vines and thorns that it seemed nearly solid. What hints of metal that remained were corroded and hung limply beneath the weight of a growing occupation of thistles and nettles and long dandelions capped with impressive crowns of silver fluff.

Sparrows hunted through the tall grass at the base of the fence, and the setting sun had made silhouettes out of them, each bird rendered featureless as though carved from obsidian. They hopped and bobbed and pecked carefully at the dandelion seeds, taking care not to devour any of the extraneous silver topping.

The cat cocked its head but made no move to pounce and for that Violet was grateful. She could hear little cheeps and chirps being made, the birds communicating with alacrity as they worked. They seemed be divvying up swathes of ground to go through. One bird leapt up and spread its wings to frighten back a fellow that had come too close to a promising thistle. Yet no malice showed, the birds were as brothers vying playfully for some common prize that had taken on new significance through competition.

The sounds they made, the songs they sang, all of it was blessedly, remarkably normal.

“There’s a building over there, on the other side of the fence,” the cat noted, pointing with its muzzle. “We should look at it before the sun goes down.”

Violet tore her gaze from the sparrows and rose onto the tips of her toes to better see over the fence. There was indeed a building, several buildings actually, lined up in a row not too far away. The ground between her and them was largely flat. It was as though a road had been made a quarter mile wide for no discernible reason. Black metal lampposts, each sitting upon a square bollard of cracked concrete, punctuated that flatness but gave off no light.

The buildings themselves were similarly dilapidated but still stood upright for the most part. They all shared a common construction, square and squat and made of concrete. In past eras they might have been colorful, or at least not bleak, but time had stripped any panache from their walls and now they sat hunched and dying. One corner of the nearest building had torn away like a curtain falling from its rings and Violet could see streamers of long, green vines creeping away to colonize the inside of the building.

She made her way around the fence and passed over the flat ground, feeling the familiar hardness of pavement beneath her feet. It was crumbling here too but had held up well enough to prevent the growth of any trees. Instead, Violet walked over moss and stretches of lichen so brightly colored it seemed to glow in the evening light.

There were more colors than she’d seen before, indigo and red and green curling together with yellow and a snowy, ashy white. Little stands of vegetation had been raised and twined together, crooked and strange to behold. Flowers grew as well, but Violet found them unpleasant to look at for reasons that she couldn’t quite grasp. It took her mind a moment to fully catalogue the subtle abnormalities. She was looking at orchids with broad, glossy leaves and white-pink petals that curled open, yet they were off kilter and malformed. In some of the blossoms there were bundles of interwoven stamens, in others the petals had come mottled with red and blue and green like the veins of a poisoned person. It seemed as though many flowers had attempted to grow in the space allotted only for one and now they had become fused.

Violet turned away. The door to the building was glass and had once revolved, but now most of the panes were gone and the mechanism had rusted. She peered through and into the dimness beyond, scouting the shadowy topography of a great open space (a parlor? Did buildings like this even have parlors?) but none of it made a great deal of sense and she went for her lantern. The cat trotted into the building without hesitation, ears perked and whiskers twitching.

For a time Violet sat back, lantern in hand, and simply listened. Then, from out of the dark, came a muffled sneeze.

“There’s nothing in the front room,” the cat reported. “And I don’t hear anything else around us. I think this place is empty.”

Violet crossed the threshold, crumbs of ancient glass crunching beneath her feet, and then wound her lantern. Immediately the darkness parted, accepting a ball of white hot light to chase the nearest shadows away. Yet where the room around her became known, the mystery past the far edge of the lantern’s limits hardened into a blackness so complete that it held no promise of ever being breached.

The front room of the building was an open space scattered with broken furniture. Chairs and end tables were still arrayed in neat rows, having fallen to pieces in their own footprint. Piles of what looked to have once been books lay moldering beneath forests of pale blue mushrooms.

Above her, the ceiling was patchy and strange, a crooked, not altogether present network of thin aluminum rails having once supported panels of glass shielded lights and mineral fiber ceiling tiles. The tiles had disintegrated in much the same way as the chairs and lay thick upon the floor in off-white drifts, like a synthetic snowfall.

At the back of the room stood a great wooden desk behind which sat more chairs. The whole thing had been consumed by a great fuzzy drift of reddish mildew and Violet edged around it, following the cat through the nearest doorway, shadows dancing before her lantern light.

There remained a tenseness and Violet kept her notebook raised high, just in case, but the cat sounded no alarms and though she sometimes heard tiny skitters and other noises made huge by the building’s emptiness, her companion never reacted and so neither did she.

It was mice, she told herself, and the twitches of the cat’s ears meant that it was only marking them out for later.

In the space past the front room were small enclaves filled with steel filing cabinets. Violet could see the ones closest to her, but in the half light at the edge of her lantern they loomed up and up, made undefinable and strange.

A few had been toppled over and one had even split along the seams, piles of folders and papers reduced to a soft grayish mush, now fully consumed by lichen and fungi.

In the center of this new room was another large space, though not nearly as open as the front room had been. Here there were desks with wooden walls standing between them, though only some were still fully upright. Much of the roof seemed to leak and anything beneath those leaks had been eaten away by moisture and time.

A few were untouched, however, and sat beneath fibers of fallen ceiling tile and skins of mucky gray dust. Briefcases lay scattered alongside mugs for coffee and tea. It spoke of a tranquil order to things as they had once existed, yet amongst that long dead normalcy were traces of malignancy. Here and there holes had been punched in the wooden walls and things torn apart.

Bookcases had been ravaged and Violet saw more than one cubicle filled with shreds and twists of crumpled paper. Upon the far wall of the room she came across what had once been a wall mounted portrait. The glass lay about it in fragments and the picture, nearly as tall as her, was canted to one side where the steel frame had been bent by some terrible stroke. Yet enough of the portrait remained that Violet could see its contents, even through a haze of water damage.

There were two people in the picture, what seemed to be a man and a woman, gone from the neck up. Their faces had been obliterated, the back of the portrait frame hanging in shreds.

A part of her felt fear, but it was hard to translate the unease into direct threat, if only because of the dust. Nothing had crossed this room for a long time. She was certainly observing the legacy of troubling events, but they had been over and done with for longer than she’d been alive.

Eventually, Violet found the stairs.

“Hmm.” The cat’s attention had wandered and Violet followed its gaze to where the steps led further down, below ground.

“No.” She said firmly, and took the stairs up to the second floor instead. The cat smiled to itself and followed.

The second floor held mostly file cabinets and offices. The offices were arrayed along the outer edges of the building and though the windows were dusty, the setting sun provided enough light that Violet could turn off her lantern. It was all more of the same, a tableau of decay and ruin. The whole building had probably looked rather nice back before….

Before what? Before the demons had gotten in?

“I don’t see any sigils.” Violet said, breaking the silence. Her voice sounded hollow in the midst of so much empty space.

The cat had stepped up onto a half collapsed wooden desk and was playing with a brass mount that held one solitary and very fancy ink pen. It stirred the pen around in a small circle.

“Hmm.” It repeated.

“You think they would have had them everywhere…I mean, there’s so much stuff here, even if it’s all broken now.”

“There’s a reason these people are no longer with us.” The cat said, then sent the pen flying with a swat of its paw and went off to find something more interesting to play with.

Violet furrowed her brow, faintly troubled, then returned to the stairs and traipsed up to the roof.

The roof door was rusted and opened only reluctantly, its hinges offering a grating squeal that set Violet’s teeth on edge. Immediately, she was reminded of the cottage and the approach of the floating thing with the horse’s skull…but the cat slipped out onto the roof ahead of her and immediately pronounced it clear.

Much relieved, Violet squeezed through the half open door (she could not shift it any further) and stepped into the ochre light of a dying day. The sun was huge and orange upon the far horizon and had melted the clouds into ingots of copper and bronze.

The sunset even lit up the roof, which was surprisingly well vegetated for a concrete expanse, great spreads of lichen giving rise to small flowers and shrubs. Small lakes were puddled here and there, in places where the roof had begun to sag inwards, and though Violet avoided those spots for fear of falling through the concrete, she could see water striders balancing delicately upon the sunlit surface, as though suspended just above a pool of liquid flame.

At the edge of the roof was a raised concrete lip that came up to Violet’s chest and she went to the northern edge of the building to look out across the forest. It had been the northwestern corner of the building to have collapsed, and though a part of her felt slightly uneasy to be standing so close to the edge of a very sudden drop-off, the ground beneath Violet’s feet felt sturdy and she looked very deliberately away from the building’s crumbled edge.

The cat found a comfortable place on the very edge of the lip, its front paws barely an inch removed from open space. Together, they gazed upon the pale track of roads and yet more buildings spread across the edge of the world. It was all beginning to coalesce, Violet realized. What she’d been passing through was only the outskirts of a greater belt of civilization. Tall buildings loomed on the far horizon, cast in stark relief by the sunlight, and more electrical pylons as well. She could not see extremely far, for the building was only three stories high, but still Violet felt nearly omnipotent, blessed with a great trove of knowledge.

There was not the Glow yet, that was still well beyond sight, but perhaps once she reached those tall buildings then she could climb to their roofs and see her objective directly.

It was a pleasant thought and she retired from the edge of the roof feeling rather grand. Briefly, she contemplated going back down to one of the offices and setting camp there, but the thought of spending the night in a dark, musty room was unappealing enough that she decided right there to camp on the roof.

It was outdoors, sure, but that didn’t mean much when she was several stories removed from the ground. The view would be pretty, Violet told herself, and set her rucksack down before any part of her could begin to believe that it might be a bad idea.

“Are we overnighting here?” The cat asked, taking note.

Violet nodded. The sky was clear but for a few clouds and she didn’t believe it would rain. Soon enough she’d be able to see the stars.

The cat offered no reply other than a shrug.

“I thought you wanted me to spend more nights under the stars.” Violet said.

At this her companion smiled.

“It’s just that you’re being very brave as of late. I like it.”

Violet rolled her eyes, yet couldn’t help but feel a little bit proud nonetheless. She found her quilt and blankets and set them out upon a thick and fairly cushy pad of dry lichen. The rain of the previous night seemed to have all run into the various lakes that dotted the roof’s topography, and Violet entertained herself by watching their ecosystems from afar.

There were the water striders she’d noticed earlier, and a few dragonflies as well. They zipped from place to place, wings a silvery blur, but soon took their leave as the light began to fade. The sparrows by the fence would be doing the same thing, Violet supposed, then went about her own preparations, drawing a few sigils in crimson chalk before shouldering the roof door closed. It squealed and scraped and groaned, doing everything it could to protest her motions, but eventually she got it fully shut and stood back, feeling proud…if a bit out of breath.

Satisfied that her campsite was secure, Violet lit her lantern and fetched a can that felt fairly heavy. This proved to contain peaches in a sweet syrup and Violet couldn’t help but smile. It probably wasn’t extremely healthy to have nothing but fruit for supper, but her mother wasn’t there to dissuade her and Violet dug in. The cat had gone somewhere, probably to hunt, and she supposed it would be back before too long.

Reflecting upon this for a moment, Violet was surprised at how…unconcerned she felt being by herself. Had she been in the middle of the woods she might have still felt fear, but now that she was in a secure position, surrounded by light and sigils, she felt perfectly fine.

Violet finished her peaches and lay back. The sunset had collapsed into a faint glow, the night gathering around it. There weren’t any stars yet, but Violet could see something else prickling along the edge of the sky.

Sitting up, she traced it, her eyes traveling slowly north. It didn’t exactly surprise her to see the Glow coming out so early, she was nearer to it, after all. What she felt now was a sort of amazement as she put together what she was seeing. Where before the Glow had been but light, now it seemed to have a greater physical presence. It was faint still, barely visible, but the northern horizon was already darker than much of the sky and Violet could see something like a fog there.

She stood in place for a long time, watching as the Glow manifested from a greater dark, or…no. It was always there, the dark just made it visible. It wasn’t an extremely important realization, Violet supposed she’d known that, even if only in the back of her mind, but it made the presence before her seem all the more incredible.

And then it was overhead, lighting the sky in streamers that swirled and rippled along invisible fault lines like great heavenly banners marking some divine cause.

She tried to listen, to see if there was some quality of the Glow she could pick up upon. Perhaps she could contact it early and not have to travel the rest of the way. But though she stared hard at the light as it curled around the stars and seemed to encompass the swell of the rising moon, it was as though she were trying to speak to a stone.

Or maybe she was going about it the wrong way. Again Violet tried to focus upon the light, the fact that it was always there, but still felt nothing. As much as she’d tried to reach the Glow, to see what communications poured off of it, no voices rose to touch her mind. There was only the world and nothing else.

Violet retreated to her blankets and lay back with a sigh, feeling troubled even as she watched the sky turn azure and the stars become faint by comparison. Her mind turned back to the earlier explanation she’d given herself, that she was just doing it wrong. Perhaps this was the equivalent of her attempting to speak to the bees using her mouth instead of…whatever she’d done.

It was a strange thing to try and ascribe logic to the act of communication. Even describing human language to herself felt bizarre. And the Glow was beyond bees or butterflies or even the cat.

Perhaps she would need to speak to the very source.

Violet sighed again and turned her lantern off, dispelling a small cluster of pale, fluffy moths. She watched as they drifted off, then closed her eyes. Though she half expected it to show up and beg once more, the horse skull beast made no appearance.