Chapter 2 - Forgetmenot

And she wouldn't have it any-other-way, as it brings about my own pained-madness, and yet she is delivered into tranquillity and serenity of what is myth, and⸻or what is faerie⸻I think.

To act on my preface I had found myself in a forest clearing. I had chained myself by the gaze through a campfire's heat. I was close enough to the fires to singe my eyelashes, yet faraway enough that the cold lashes of southern wind turned the back of my shirt into an icy slate.

'In a lacuna of bone.' I was in the forest clearing for one sole reason. 'In a lacuna of bone.' I had found myself running away from the old blackguard molesting the outskirts of town before the frontier. 'In a lacuna a bone.' I had already found myself enraged-and-weeping.

This snow-swept night had brought a darkness which alluded me. My primal sense of watching a fire burn and lick up embers in the dark.

I could feel intensity from the pine trees, towering over me as if to measure my worth. Belting treeline hid tall silhouettes well, albeit doubts me being ne'er only tall presence here.

Sat back down again after my hearing pricked at the sound of a feigning rustle. Gravel shifted beneath, bringing my knees cross-legged.

My sombrero's curving horizon falls against my eyes. My coat and gambeson break-fast in the wind. My entirety feels it.

The perfect-peace and calmness I held in contrast to my autophobia. I grasped the reality in this hinterspace because of how peaceful it was, but the inconceivable wall in which I can fade into was like a held-in pain.

A simple corona and shining, shimmering gloss emitted from the greenery of the pine trees were in contrast to the darkness. The aesthetics and anguish of the world were hard to swallow in my constricting throat.

With each pulsating swallow, each consecutive gulp strikes at each heartbeat, I was throwing stones down the valley between two ballooning lungs, and down the sprawl into my stomach. Enjoying the thought of my liver, and my spleen, and my kidneys and my panacea all fighting my own self-inflicted poisons.

I wallowed in the after-taste of coffee liqueur, and its means to cause me grief and satisfaction, it shames; it shames; it shames. The coffee liqueur was like the moon's idiot face which perverts on-high, with its stolen sunlight, pervades, and excites implicit questions you and I know no answers to. As to why I even drink this kind of liquor was a question which still lingered over a decade.

I was reminiscing with the sprawl in my arms shooting through my blood's⸻⸻acidic. Tensing my muscles into what you'd call disgusting and unnatural, or irregular even. An irregular change in a world where change is regular.

So, there in the bach I resided. The antennae of the watchtower loomed over the front porch, and the bleakness of the dark horizon started rising. The sun in this sunless world was already fading, and I raged against the covering blanket. A deep gust, and flurry of showers, signifying an oncoming storm.

The bach house was a traditional, although shapely unconventional facade of a Spanish villa. A Spanish villa I'd regard as old as my grandfather, and as elegant as my grandmother.

This scene before me lacked the noisy, obtrusiveness of modernity, like the abstract shapes and splashes of pastel colours you'd find back in the city. If I could describe as to how I felt about the first world war against brutalism, I would.

Comes about the change of everything dieselpunk slowly malforming into a disgusting beast and parasitically divulging itself into any Latin-European building it could find. This Spanish villa was no exception.

I fear the significance of the dwy, and the looming dark clouds above. I fear it shaping and bringing wroth into my home. I fear as to how it's storm grey had swept the off-white colours of my Spanish villa, and had changed the outlook of the range drastically. The range now resembling an old man's face in anguish.

For I was caught in the never-ending spiral of my condition, I cling onto. Decidedly forgetting in order to trudge forward had only brought wroth into my domesticity.

Now, the futility and instability of it all has captured and frozen my innate being still.

Somewhat downtrodden by the empty space somewhere in the corner of this home. I wondered the very hallways of my home to drive away my self-reluctance to become a recluse. I am.

The obscure and wonderful sorrows I felt in my waking moments were fever-like. Dream-like.

'Am like in a trance...' This I repeated many-a-times in disbelief. Yet in my waking moments, the days in which I raged throughout the morning only in turn to fear the sorrowful night, held me still, and felt no passing emotion through me.

I saw outside my window the noisy miner again, and she made no sweet sound but perverted the fornication outside my bedroom window, her very own garden to rumpus. Brought very little glimpses of happiness which trickled away at every recall.

Come about my seeing of her, I feel lead in my stomach heavy enough to drag my entirety down. I trudge back into the hallways from beneath my bedroom doorframe.

My image is captured still.

In closed eyes, in the darkness she remembers us and this very moment, then in the darkness I could sense you had turned yourself towards me, gazing at my presence.

Lush tang of lychee and barley eroded the strutting bridge of my nose.

I closed my eyes and twisted to crack my neck in the sensation, eyes watery from a lack of sleep I was deprived of because of work, and now I was offering my senile being to be sacrificed to the exotic and the unseen.

Her green eyes traversed with easy glances over the plains of the kept land barred by boring hedges, giving many thoughts for the individual blemish she oversaw and governed over.

Not a single delight kept her from showing and licking her front teeth, glossing her overbite simultaneously.

I was now in an interlock of time and space watching her with swooning eyes.

Admiring her, and her teeny-weensy flaunts. Giving way to a new outlook which caught my inner-being to become all the more alive.

I prose romance, and with selective conciseness, I poetically and adhered my heart's palpitations with my arrhythmic words.

Enamoured with her, as if she was the warrior princess from the tapestries before, my cock was angry for her.

A lack of sleep had me dreaming wide-eyed. How could I tell her? If not tell her then I'd spend my time beside and alongside her until she understood what I was after.

And if she were to decline me? Deny me? Would I take the plunge? To show my zealousness? Even if I was intertwining in competition giving rise to jealousy? She would want that wouldn't she?

So, I showed my resolve, I spent my time with her. I brought myself to sit opposite of her on the bed. We gave each other sideways glances, exchanging the shifting of our heads, tilting and setting our heads back avoiding face-to-face but our eyes ever locked-on, and longed.

Her hair is lavish and ravishing, brushing, caressing, clawing through light gusts. My jaw tremors at the thought of speaking life into what was before us.

My fears of being the first to speak, and to enact upon what was before me was a downtrodden feeling but was flourishing, was blooming, and transforming into what I'd been yearning for since I was a lad.

When every single glance was every awkward eye contact: a need to ask for a chance. To give me a chance.

Who was I but a boy? I sought you out for means of bettering myself, at a loss for words when you took me under your wing, made me swear allegiance to some clandestine powers you said one day I shall possess.

Of what was marked, and was most impressionable, and was most memorable underneath the verandah of some café in-between the first avenue, and the first initial crossing around the corner to the east, and a town ahead of the Western Gate Bridge.

Sun rose from the south-east, unlike how most literature read the world from right-to-left, and how you read 'Reading' as: 'Red-ding' made me wonder what part of the world I was or where you came from?

Remember when I came to you sullied, distressed and not alarmed by how bleak you dressed that day?

You told me I'd be better for it if I just kept my mouth shut as the world's looming shadow came around the bend to close the day off. Yet the sun came again, up on-over this sunless land.

O how romantic this feeling, watching a bird glide-by, as we watch passer-by, and their cargo riding along the traveller's path. As mildew and string rises are distinguished from cut grass, it pesters our noses.

I watch caretakers trim the sidewalks, the bare grass now coloured lime thanks to caretakers' meticulous-ness.

The cut grass clings to the soles of feet as we cut from the yellow gate and over the green bridge and onto the sidewalks. Benches where many would sit-on are vacant, and I stood distanced to observe the empty space.

Your hand takes my shoulder turning me towards the horizon, leering at people, and cats, and birds Egyptian-walk in the oncoming cityscape shoulders. In the same sky, in our peripheral vision, we notice clouds part in the sky like chased sheep.

How happy were we when the clouds parted, then joined again merrily? Abruptly I said, 'I saw dogs litter the beaten ground before their kennel, still wrapped by the chains around their neck.' Killing the moment, I exchanged varied frowns with you.

We watched another from afar. I gestured to the Noisy Miner sweeping by again. Yours and my interests piqued. The bird swooped again, and I caught a glimpse of a small pub in the city centre.

You were talking about the many bars from long before, the drunks coming out of the side passage and loitering in the back as I pointed it out, it was the topic of our enlightening talks of new beginnings.

Clean shaven faces of young, distinguished men by the beards of old, they're watching, us watching, watching beings depart as if dreaming, oncoming workers passing-by all trance-like.

Certainly, you paused, the desperate kind, you continued, you and I speak ill of, it was a matter of mutuality we both benefited from, inside that same apartment room where that same verandah attached, we returned confining and confiding, we killed God and demons.

I told you dumb poems that were feverishly written and love came out of our lusts. What can describe 'moonlight-bathed' in the same effect as 'sun-kissed?'

Mocking me when I tersely blurted out a romantic prose, how I felt about you I began to understand from the short stories I read, the words needed to elaborate and elevate the mood.

You, too, read those same short stories and told me that my mannerisms were similar, but in terms of appearance you'd think I'd be handsome. My accent and tone distorted your impression of me.

Travelled from across the ocean, your sister-land called me and here underneath that same verandah, sitting on an uncomfortable metal chair with poking fleurs, sun rose more from the south now, well past Spring.

'And is this one of the many reasons as to why you are so adamant in your becoming of a wartime consultant?' The blonde girl with the tall, complementing ears pricked up and surveying towards me just as her green eyes did. 'Is there no such thing as a routine to have you in bed before midnight?'

She did not know as to how I functioned as such, and as anyone would I carry my character like a farmer boy carries a pail of overflowing water hurriedly. I looked at her, and my face already said tersely, I am on my way to carry myself, and to sell myself no-short, one way or another! Is how my sour face betrayed me.

Her small smiles, intoxicating as they were, close to addictive that you'd make her laugh as much as you could, her eyes told a different story, reflecting my own face with her iris I felt anxiety rush behind my back in a wave of heat.

'Girl, oh how I do have my gripes with you...'

'Oh...you do?' She giggled whilst her hand covered her mouth. Her regal character emitted a pleasant vibrancy in which I couldn't put my finger on. Her tails fanned and waived behind her to betray her being honest. Her small, confined, concise, close to reserved gestures filled me with glee.

'...And just like the ending of Endymion-

-ever since believed⸻, that I in place of the woman in Keats' poem am so constant and so kind⸻, yet my lover she leaves me for another-

-even so, when the passion is gone...vitriol takes its place.'

Although choice was⸻: a choice was made, but yours was mine, and mine was yours, and it was blind-choice.

'But then God exists.' The very image of it sticks to me like wet paper clinging by sweating skin, and I fail to remove it every time it sticks to another limb.

At times I am able to remove it, it hurts like peeled skin and I grimace at the thought of my own being relishing its removal.

Like a parasite it sticks to me, like a parasite sticks to the scalp of a bat: takes control, pours its being into it, and self-destructs in small, careful demolitions.

Having slipped and fallen through the bracken and have immersed myself in the tangled boughs. I tell myself better to have bit my tongue, clenched my teeth, and cut my lip.

I'd regret the loss-of-opportunity: for I am amongst the many-willow'd, many-mansion'd, and many-winter'd.

In my blocked eyes, now overseeing a new papery landscape greater than it was before in my early years of writing down critical directions as to how to run a division. Or the adultescent dreams I prided myself in my failing intellect.

The new model, and its need which arises in driving resources with a careful eye as I replace and replenish inventory and manpower in my gaming of logistics. All this was now gamed in back-and-forth letters of sincerity and acknowledgements.

I felt no need to look at the letter now. I knew the contents for the wax seal was from Kincaspen, and the reaching nobles of its rim. The other wax seal signified San Fortares with the Bow and Sparrow:

'I have spent my late nights wondering about where all my known individual entities are right now. Wondering what if we all were to return to Eden? Back to a time and place, when and where, we were all accomplices and familiars.

The familiarity of it all. Nothing new. All things the same. Although now all things are of that vague familiarity. Makes all our endeavours into this problem of mine illustrious and decadent.

Decadent as writing personal letters in red ink. Made it all the more marked and memorable.

Yet, these written red letters bring me no closure.

Nothing pleases the addiction, nor does it appease it any further.

So, I write this letter to you Tinsley, to let your little brother know about the truth about our operations.

With kind regards truly,

Garrett Graham.'

I did not like the contents. Inviting as it may the idea of just knowing. Albeit, I know things. I felt the sacrifice of time and memory between the gaps of the journey.

My mandalore visor in the corner of my room on a mannequin set, in the corner of my eye, glistened.

'Not now my dear friend...'

It was as if that very corner of this room was haunted or somewhat distant and warped from reality, and it was only that corner of the room which was wanting my attention, then it dawned on me that there was work to be done, and I'd have to simulate the twelve to thirteen hours of required work I was so accustomed to.

My attention now was towards the pile of written leather with a single missing bound book. This did not alert me or give me any hindering thought; I just knew as to who took it but as to why specifically I would not question it.

Angels' choral rose above the mountains, the treeline was being shaved early morning, and the religious fencers with their flamberge shaped rapiers and parry daggers practice with their unified hoods, or troubadour hat-shaped helmets and visors watching me reckon my eyes upon their church.

'Inland-Imperials.' Rapiers in a flowing motion, combined the shapes of rivers running themselves into fords and sounds, flowing movements, parry daggers' hilts followed in jarring, vibrating hummingbird motions.

Pauldrons sculpted in bastardised, perturbing imagery, the merging of two faces passing another, mutating and mangling their faces into armour, and in noticing that their chests were bundled, chained, iron plates, and pleated skirts running along their waists with greaves rising from the knees like teeth.

Footwear were like socks and sandals but at the toes were metal rose petals, artistically refined into parodies of Samurais'.

Their gauntlets lined with the same fleurs of rose-gold petals, and their fingers were bound to rings of teeth.

And their eyes were blocked, where their lips should be where blots. For noses and ears were as plain and poorly shaped like caricatures of what were meant to be noses and ears.

This feeling grows distant and indifferent. A familiar indifference which stems from fatigue.

In the hinterspace, the many-winter'd know a mountain from afar is captured and framed, but in reality, it's its towering scape which is rather far-fetched.

Now I ask myself what had brought me here? To reside in this office space, to now relive my mere memories of a distant Spanish Villa?

Having me trek this career path, and watch my steps repel me from the edge of the ridge, to then seeing the beauty of The Steppes.

Smile faded briefly, hearing faint talks with other intellectuals and simpletons jab at the old-new implausible ideas experienced before. Each insinuating idea, like, 'We should raise taxes.' Or 'We should lower taxes.' I hear all this through a closed window.

Sometimes I hear the good old anti-capitalist's outlook, undermining the good work our forefathers have done to replace war with the daily battles ongoing in business.

If current events could be eased and slid into talks, rile up simpletons to actually persist on matters involving the Black Library and Intelligentsia. Though, how I could was a matter of timing. Do I wait until both parties slip and fall? Or do we wait until it's too late to stomach?

To the bundle of written leather, checked the paper leaves with the flicking caress of my thumb as I drove along the ridges, smirked at the thought of a missing manila folder and written leather, then chucked a handful of unfinished letters into the hearth fire.

Treading out into the hall, with weak gait by the right-slant of my body, and a slouch of my back I can feel my metal prosthetic arm bring my weight to my right, I battled the weight by defaulting my posture in a slant which hurt my rib.

Right hand in the cusp of my pants and belt, I faded the breadth of my silhouette in and out of the pillars and arches of shadows. It was a wonder which brought my attention into the shades of brown. The ancient hall made me angry.

The change in stories of stained-glass windows, the marred carpets and vinyl and the etching of light which failed to hide peepholes into rooms. A lacklustre décor of historically defining moments, from forefathers' call of duty, to the bloodiest battle atop the hill of the War of the Blossoms.

I felt a slight belch in my stomach when I remembered the milestones, and the Asphodel which carpets Hades; the dead feeding upon it. Flowing out the birth pains of war's entirety.

The fleurs faded with my silhouette, the engraving of runes and names were now lost and dependent on whomever remembers without fail. Tapestry's loose tail flaps flourished the covered road into the glade and out into the courtyard surrounded by hedges following geometry to a Tee, an agonising aesthetic devoid of imperfection and creativity.

I breathed in cold air, feeling it whirl throughout-within my lungs. For I finally reached the gate and into the great outdoors.

With the nougat's gummy texture popping in my mouth. Pfks!

And I had found myself residing in one of the small apartments laid aside the incline of the Greek-Latin Steppes once again, before the central plaza and the plateaus where first-light breaks north-east, tarnishing the azure horizon with its yellow pastel radiance.

The sun washes over the hills, then comes sunset, clips and dips slowly hugging the bastardised Gothic Gibraltar cityscape.

Inside the slit a congestion to pass through crowds. There was a single outlying staple in the middle of the plaza people gathered round.

Nothing but the sun was as captivating when you see the selected reeds amongst the colours in the residents' front gardens, and it flourishes.

I wistfully collected fragments of memories of me lying in the dense brush of barley, and a face blurred by the heat and haze of the same sun.

The same summer sunset colours washed over me, and blocked the world yet again.

Can you hear and see people changing pace up and down the ridge before the Steppes? I hear the Pope in Rome through the scopes as tinny sounds rebounded in desiccated whirrs.

I trudged on through the narrow street, it splits like an artery for a bit before the central plaza west of the city's centre.

The Steppes made the trek in the summer sun all the more draining. Specks in closed eyes, the summer sunrise's gradient colours washed over behind closed eyelids. I trekked a little blinded by my dispassion to even look at the world as is.

I wanted to keep my eyes closed for the remainder of the day. Managed to find a means to kill time underneath the verandah of a small coffee shop, there were birds and a cat picking at the piles of fruits rolling and swaying before the edge, and within the gutter.

Meringue's citrus-y smell rang, a tell ready by the neatly arranged bouquets of the sugary-egg-and-flour dessert, and by a shout of baker's delight as the oven's steaming canopy shot the bells with gusts through the grooved piping. An innate beauty came from its enigmatic nature of what was steampunk, and what was diesel-punk in our urban landscape.

'I need more coffee...' I said, still distracted by the birds and the cat playing-toying with an apple.

Skirted around a small group huddling outside parted by the wisps, wading whaffs of heat coming from the side window into the kitchen.

Before the counter, I ordered within a hot two minutes within a parting semi-circle of people, shouts over hubbubs, and I croaked and my hoarse voice finally got through to ask for a simple short black.

'Tin-ze-eley!'

'...it's Tinsley...' came me murmuring my name, lips not parting.

'Tin-ze-eley!' Somehow they never get my name right.

I came in the coffee shop with an empty mug and came out of the same coffee shop with a meringue instead. I had failed at a simple task of more coffee, yet succeeded in another delight.

I continued my patrol of the adjacent sections of the Steppes finding things that were both peculiar and neglected. The abandoned prefabricated homes, to the makeshift houses you could say were for 'informal dwelling.'

The brutalist design of these makeshift dwellings were what made authority rampant in this area. You know there was heavy authority here since a police precinct was erected not long ago.

There was a place, in which I sat quietly amidst barley. A little far, on-over the valley, little past the central park plaza.

It was a reserve before one of the skirting farm ranges.

An ugliness flourishes in hinterspace, in hinterlands, and in the hints in the back of one's mind: an image of a country we're trying to form into our own.

The bracken had already taken what was abandoned and tarnished. Brushes consumed the unmaintained structures before beaten paths into reserves.

Those who wander are lost. Roads are now infested with weeds. Pine trees' hairs thick enough to block out the sun's light.

The sickly blights hidden in the tall grass. Their scaly bodies withered and conformed to the grass' clumped body.

Rain after rain: mud and the overgrown increasing weights dragged mucks of hill's incline, merging and soiling into spurs.

The bracken too had taken on those newly formed spurs.

Roaring seas buckled the joints popping the hinges off the rust bucket's right side.

Panels swung open along its edges cutting into an adjacent panel which was already weakened earlier by the pressure of waves against all sides of the coral reef bed.

Winds whistled through mouse-holes where old piping ran along the floor and into where the old steam room used to be.

A lack of proper oxygen could be sensed as margins once separating catwalks from machinery were now distinguished by bodies of water sloshing crude oil and bursts of waves pulsing through gaps in the hull, all in a delayed, syncopated rhythm from the outside rushed laymen and custodians.

Splashes of water tore through the bush and the brush taken aback. All it took was an ugly turn in a single day with the dead grass peeled back revealing what was already there hidden.

None top-dressed land apart from the estate, the sea consuming close to ten-thousand hectares of it.

Marred by black sands clearly swayed in by waves, first like bees in a swarm being smacked about by heavy winds yet still magnetised to their homing scent of home.

Whirling washes all into patches of land like unwanted weeds dug up alongside bundles of wheat.

Fences which dictated what land was owed and of the other's domain now merged in hurled fence posts, frayed wires, splinters and lobbed and tossed hay bales gone, owner wept for the estate's labour. Patches of hay scattered like breadcrumbs, some wild animals pestered the employees trying to save what they can, whatever was lost though was given back to nature, same goes for the hay being gnawed on.

Dashes of what once were the salt river flats which derived from the rains of past winters sunk into numerous cracks along the riverbed. Trails of seawater sloshed foreign gunk between the cracks.

Patches of moon-whites, and the hazing-yellow blots of the old river remained. Some clear spring water resided in the mounds made by the sudden torrential snowstorm.

The dam was clogged by the same snowstorm. Last week it overflowed and spread the water's weight against itself, cracked then engorged its mass against hairline cracks-imploding, causing widespread panic as people were evacuated to the highest point.

Everything just went to shit.

Though the dam was small, the damage done to the river flats were now being inspected: I was pinching soil, smelling it from splayed fingers, the top-dressings were products from the estate and the bottom layers were its by-products.

I shifted the weird granules between my fingers, eyes far-yonder. Clearly none poked a ten-feet pole into the ground annually to check their foundations.

Whoever was the foreman could've been a hero, though they couldn't be blamed for such a disaster, there was no incentive to do such a task.

My dogs scouted the perimeter of the range. They sat nobly to indicate their task finished.

Not only this patch of land was done in. Most of the housings close to the cliff or protruded out for a better view of the seaside were all consumed by the sea. A block of houses decimated. The landslide suggested over fifty people dead or buried alive somewhere.

An event such as this should've had a margin to enable a personnel from a government body to rub-out a letter of housing removal.

Clearly the peculiar snowstorm behind us was the perpetrator here, it was only a matter of time. As for the sea? It's an all-consuming thing.

Now, this place we now call a part of The Dins is just another tourist attraction for other victims of a similar fate. All passing through to find a future in the cities.

There was a screech over the spurs of hills. The belting treeline hugging the hills' edges. Killed the airs for a lack of song, none heard, but there was droning.

Albeit, been damned by a dead country. I stuck a measuring stick into the top-soil, hawking over the murdered dirt.

I looked over my left shoulder, a gust of wind ran into my face. The palliasses in my wagon smelled of varnish and burnt lacquer.

My attention returned as I pulled the measuring stick up, and recorded the staining dirt on the over metre long mark.

The measuring stick now smelled like wet dog, mildew, and string, all replaced by the pestering, feigning chaff.

A grunt left my throat unconsciously. I felt the groove of the measuring stick leave the fat of my right thumb, and I raised my head to watch a herd of cows pass over range, watching me, watching them.

The ugliness wasn't without beauty to compare. If we had one but not another, how can we say what is beautiful or ugly?

How can we separate pains from pleasures?

Then again, even the foolish find pleasures in pained-madness. Their hurts and hurting were as prickly and tall to witness, and as many as the pine littered alongside beaten paths.

Now, I wonder what last words cows would murmur before slaughter...

Ghastly voices and winds came over the hills and in-over the shape of the spurs. That's when I knew that it was over. The controlled fires were done, and literally dusted.

When the South Island gets unwanted wildfire: dead-dry-burnt brush, and the unceasing cold winds and torrential rains complement another, are problems for others.

Just like a dry-icy desert, like a snow-capped landmass continent, finding unfrozen, melted ice without asphyxiating pathogens or preserved plagues makes defence and civil support in rural and remote areas all the more tougher. Men came into the forest with sacks of dirt to cut the oxygen out of the fires.

Behind the arborists, a fire brigade followed Inland-Imperials with their religious attire of iron and long-cloths. Their iron pauldrons and spaulders were flat and round, and their shoulders were engraved with the liveliness of a boy tugging on a starry kite.

Their blocked eyes were replaced by the metallic face of a dead king.

Their right breast was Socrates taking in the face of Caligula, merging into a familiar silhouette of what was disturbing yet intriguing.

A man spoke with bated breath under his balaclava, observing me with Inland-Imperials and their Sedition Subjugation Squad just behind this man with a balaclava.

'Improbable work.' I looked up from my measuring stick and gave a pained smile. I knew where he came from. I knew he came from Anda Liuga, and I can tell he took the 95 Route to get here given that he was accompanied by Garrett's old company. Bad Company.

The man in a balaclava laughed. He expected good airs from me because he knew where I was heading next.

'They're planning to plant new sprigs here before winter. Although I doubt there'd be...any good top-soil...this side of the country.' The balaclava man drawled out the important parts.

'There'll be an introduction of new insects and fungi coming from the Department of Agriculture, and the association overseeing the arborists.'

'A university is delivering results alongside the government...' I thought to myself, that this man stopped his sentence mid-way for effect.

'...and governance?'

The balaclava man was intrigued. It wasn't peculiar for universities to deliver on research, but it was peculiar in the speed of how they attain funding, and how consistently they deliver on their promises.

'Unsurprising results, although intriguing enough to disturb and annoy the more un-inclined.' I grunted at my own remark.

I had this Mendicant in the corner of my eye, balaclava with or without, he had this look on his face which was both a pained look of concern, yet the eyes which was fiery. Disconcerting eyes as disconcerting as a dear mother's eyes when displeased.

I was worried about my well-being as the smells grew stronger, the Inland-Imperials, and the arborists, and the fire brigade came along and conjoined with their section.

The Mendicant, a faint silhouette of a smirking line drew on his face. The curving of his lips, into the bulge of his left cheek. A wave of his hand to his companions marked the end of the day, and for that, going home was its own reward.

As quickly as they appeared before me, they disappeared with traces of heavy footing in the agitated dusts of the beaten path.

Leaving me with something which toys with me my very own questions, or do I live-let-be and return home?

I remember standing at the tip of the protrusion. My movements traversing the slope was by means frolicking and clumsy.

Existing in the surmounting force of laments. Over the dreary landscape transforming itself before we reach the first edge, the first ridge, and the ravine which serves as the impasse.

Our adventures have seemed to wane.

Trekking over two hours of country road with a rut sack over my shoulder, burdened by the lingering dredge, and the floating sheep overhead. Fluffy and careless, hovering sheep.

My dogs were ahead of me. The wagon was hauled by my stock horse.

The winding road were the spurs, the turns creasing ceaselessly, narrowing into the crest and up on over the hill. Green hills shedded with patches and trimmings where the plows lead themselves through. Hoofprints of horses printed out of the way of the freshly ploughed field.

Wind caressed my cheeks. The coldness bit my nape, and the valley of my throat engraved.

As the weather picked up on my presence. Cloud spitting at me. It let me know it'd rain on me later today.

Local farmhands came by on horses. Stared at me oncoming. Took worn glances back and forth with me.

Afternoon's warmth settled, as the evening chill fought the sun's warmth, I imagined dogs fighting on beaten ground, a Doberman, and a German Shepherd cross, berating another in growls and bellows and harsh barks, 3 degrees of separation barred by gate.

I ate my biscuits, my artisan crackers and the warm, disgusting soup in my flask I dipped halved biscuits into a hole as large as my fist. A bird cried out, swooped against the shining curve of my flask, gawking at her own reflection. She began to peck at the flask, and she enjoyed the tinny sound as she pecked.

I dared not shoo her away, company of any shape or form was welcome, unless it may be demon or the Devil himself then I digress.

I had only began at the break of dawn today. It's my turn to look after him, I told his brother-in-law coming out of the apartment block's gated entrance, through the metal-cutaway side-door.

I felt a scowl overhead reverb as a man's rancid retching rang out from the disinfection. Coughing fits rang throughout the courtyard.

There was a cold chill as men flowing in and out of the double doors flung right in, flourishing their scarves and jackets out into the pockets of air from cracked vents protruding their cylindrical, tapered throats through the brick wall, shapely blocks of bricks missing here and there.

A pestilence captured men to follow into the confining area of this once-king's court. Coughing fits rang throughout the courtyard.

Another Sunday afternoon, and Alex is lying in his king single bed having a coughing fit. Where-as the scene of two Collies acting sentries, and a horse to boot, bolstered the harsh comparison. Have I ever told you about the brilliance of Michael Angelo?

About the Statue of David, in his gracious appearance, the small detail, unnecessary trivia: about how in ancient Greek-Latin Roma, it was believed a not-so-well-endowed young man was seen as a self-controlled and well behaved lad? Although, it showed fear, the fact in which David faced Goliath in Michael Angelo's perceived guise of him, he is honoured and glorified in the display of his courage. David's courage.

I had spouted nonsense before the old man, and was sure to compare myself to David, and he was, well...the old man did not take heed, for he had not been exposed as much to a simpleton.

'I'd write you down for sedition.' I spoke myself into the room, and I appeared beside him, with an inviting whisper, both secured the entranceway thrown stretched shadows.

I drawled out in my head, 'You are a nightmare of a man.' Hoping he'd see the fire in my eyes as I watched him watch me.

I'm looming over him, yet he is still surveying carefully with his eyes. Oh, he doesn't know fear...yet. I'm waiting for the light of his eyes to return to him, then he'll know.

'I have noticed lately, the moment-to-moment kind of people tend to say goodbye the quickest.' I said in a tone of desperation. Alex just gasped and wheezed listening to the darkness looming over him.

'They blot their lips as they pass by the older generation, you know, the ones who molest younger women with their eyes. I hear suffrage is gaining traction lately. I hear that we're growing a generation of young men who truly love their mothers.'

Alex's eyes just blinked as slowly as I got my point out. Well, to his credit he sure knows how to listen. Until he wants to make me hang on his words.

'I've still yet to know what happened to my brother, Alex. I heard your first-mate George threw him overboard. I heard you got him on the know which rid of him.'

I said to him, 'They pulled in another monstrosity inland. A big catch they said 'ed keep them filled for about a week.' A question lingered for the both of us. 'The cargo manifests had the names of infamous funeral homes laid into 'em in watermarks. Manifests logged with bearings and coordinates over actual official names. The Maritime office suspects smuggling operations under your nose. Or...under your name.'

I quickly brought out the pamphlets and images of young men's portraits centred. Their names, their lives in counted in years lived, and the poor obituaries which offered no closure. There were seven funerals held this past week alone. Seven families were left grieving and in mourning.

One-by-one, a boy would say goodbye on the rotary, and then you wouldn't hear from the boy for a week.

Six of the boys said they were okay, and that they were just having an occasional tomfoolery for their school holidays. When I called the homestead,they all said the same thing the journalists said. Journalists under the Ministry of Propaganda's payroll.

Only the wet nurses actually said something peculiar, separate in feeling. The last one, the seventh, was huffing and puffing and was heard screeching and turning around the bends late at night, skirting in rural country.

One of the maidens offering themselves as townbikes in the nearby settlements told me that my brother had passed through by carriage through the town square. He was asking questions about the boys.

Oddly enough, all seven bodies weren't even in their caskets. Caskets were empty and sorry sights were those funerals. Somehow a beach-side holiday and fishing a river got us missing kids.

A lot of people were fearing asphyxiating pathogens, but they weren't in actual South Island country. Albeit, its a common fear, a common misconception now. Roads to those lakes and rivers are closed off now. I hear local businesses are suffering from that.

The morticians, and coroners too, were contacted but they never responded. So it's becoming all the more suspicious as more and more questions arise.

After that great catch, six secondary college boys all committed group suicide, and one more drove fatally into a ditch into shit-creek. Next thing, a few months later, another parade fell on us once again. 'Don't you think it's fucked? You know!?'

'If only...' Alex drawled, if only everyone had a memory as soothing as we did in our childhoods. Remember how we once sat under watching the cows graze in our small pasture before the glade? Many-willow'd and the bracken before the small creek, in which Nito would call Shitcreek, because he had driven his new carriage around that same bend which breaks into spurs. The front wheels of his carriage had spun out and met a terrible end.

Sometime ago Nito had fallen into a desirous fever before his unfortunate demise and had been fighting his insomnia's demon, his hysteria's demon, all manners of demons. I understand his means, I think. Be away from family and friends for so long tends to make one's outlook of life unwieldy. I am starting to feel those same effects too.

The captain of the ship let it happen, watched it transform the contours and

shape of his titanic. The Matilda shifting herself before the stagnant lights, let cascading shadows follow themselves in.

He saw the world close itself off and the roaring, raging sea was heightening. Felt his silver years again when he was up to no good. Marooning the Matilda like this reminded him of the time he spent in the islands, remote and far in-between, stealing and reselling goods while marooned in different keys.

Thirty months in sea for the season. And thirty years he's been at this. At the ripe age of 56 he was going to break off into the sunset, last he thought about his woman and his children, and the faces he barely remembers.

'Oh, how could I tell you that I was sorry for all of this? That what I had done was not for the sake of us surviving in the storm, but for denying us and the cargo safe passage?'

A slight wheeze, and a bit of a choke on his own spit, Alex rested his head deeper into his pillow to lay his eyes on the ceiling, abruptly chuckling, 'Truth hurts, but-' he coughed and wheezed, '-It killed your brother, like the boys, all the same.' He'd rather see me angry, confused and greatly scared of this outcome more than the conscience left to us because of the consequences few good men knew of, yet let evil men do.

Drawing away from the darkness, I set my eyes on Alex's abreaction, and I noticed my own abreaction. I have decided that this man before me is to abscond; to decamp; to die. I come about. The absurdity of this will not purify me; it will not wipe me clean; this will not purge my sins and punishment.

'What more could I offer, but my life Tinsley? You were like a brother to me, albeit I was the one to stab you in the back like this. I was the one to never tell you my intentions.' A while before Alex could feel the acid shoot through his veins. I levelled my eyes with his, to let him know I wasn't the brother he thought'd wait in bated breath in the darkness.

With Alex's remark I decided it was time to place my entire weight on his abdomen, lurch forward, and clamp my hands around his neck. Rising from his bed, the dimple and depression of his king single bounced-back, and as both entities rebounded, as one stood over the other, the air was replaced by the desiccated whirrs of a gutter-vent.

If there was a truly good reason to say that, 'a country truly is ugly.' To say that is to say that the people which make up the country, too, are ugly. The reason must stand that you must have observed the land on a day-to-days basis, without lulling, with hands and feet being fastidious, comparing daze and lacklustre to products of strong work.

As reason must stand, I feared that the more indifferent types truly see the country as ugly. Maybe because the weathered tend to adapt more than they look; they are never somewhat timid or forlorn either.

Yet the day just wanted to be different. It rebelled without a care, and it was as stubborn as it was piss.

Today: heavy rain with an overcast, the weatherman said on the radio, 'Bring a coat today. No, as a matter of fact: bring a coat everyday.' For within this ugly country we experience four seasons. Four seasons in a single day.

It was a pain already if you worked just across the street from your apartment, and it was worse if your travels required the use of trams and trains.

If travel requires the use of Route 95, you can kiss your punctual-ness goodbye.

I now part ways from one of the many paths a dead man should tread. In my navel-gazing, I imagine myself trudging through the gore, and sinew of the trench.

,,Skull Knight watched the Angels shrivel and twist, every contortion turned into distortion. Malformed and twisted into the demons he always despised.

And his mother loved these angels with how their beauty resonated with then sun's radiance engulfing them. The same radiance which blinded them.

After a brief wave of his hand for Byleth's snicker, Skull Knight moved on towards the small gate which was waist high and just as wide as a horse's broad shoulders.

His long cape flowed with him into the small gate while his armour, as he crept low, screeched and scratched at the cement and gravel road.

After adjusting his scabbard from the annoyance of it being caught onto geometry and the sound of hard leather scraping against gravel, he had turned his metal skull face towards the narrow bridge where there were no safeguards, or anything to hold onto dear life with.

The bottom was a raging river heading into a whirlpool being absorbed by a deep dark cavern. Known as the abyss.''

Riding on horseback, sharing a single winding wide road only by moon's grace can we travel within the blanket of night.

To my right, just moving a bit farther up than me, is a man who could be regarded as fast around the bends rode a draught horse, and behind me, as far as the stretch of the road allows before he breaks off in and out of the dark horizon was a man on a stock horse.

I had acquired the night's solemnity by force, and I felt chilly, and unresponsive to the presence of my new companions.

Their abrasive movements riding their horses acting slightly sour. Reaching acclivity. Their own twitter-light fades. The light of their lamps fade too.

The road to Bright was intricate in its twists and turns. I am having various optically distorted visions of the road, 'If this is fatigue or some kind of divination, then I must be dreaming.' After looking over my shoulder I saw Scorched Earth, and an overwhelming fear washed over me.

I am not without the wakeful relaxation that comes with closed eyes. For I am now covered in fears. It shames; it shames; it shames.

I am self-possessed to break away from these two trotting men. I am without a doubt now caught in some mania in which I cannot both survey or diagnose.

The two men looked on-over their shoulders, then looked at another, as the other who was once behind me passed around. They began speaking their secret language. Slang between two vagabonds, I understood their concerns, the demeanour I posed.

'Where did this man come from? Is he not like the Sombra?' One said to the other, as the spirit of the world befell upon us. Seeking comfort in truth as to why I had suddenly appeared without any sound. Appearing absurd.

'Arses arias. Did he not come from East Maangata? He was with us departing the range before the outer-wall night market.'

Taking side glances at me. The two men nodded. The two men smirked, 'Abyssinia!' They hollered, then trusted their horses to gallop into the farther part of the Scorched Earth which was afforest. Plucked off from our sombre little band.⸻⸻⸻

I awoke in a desirous fever. From a dream of me trying to sleep away the tryst I once had. I confide with a friend and a stranger, and I lose feel my aching limbs come about as the acid in my veins shot.

I hear the old fascist song play in my head. The progression followed suit: Acid. Acid. Acid. Bleak.

The choral composition piece had these words placed beneath the engravings. I was caught in an asphyxiating twist and began to choke on the lyrics. For the composer knew no other words to describe his piece. I was enraged by what was allegorical, and by what was profound.

In a dainty cabin room, I was remembering the letter from Kincaspen which has been floating in my mind lately. Back of my shirt shifted, and I felt sweat adsorb between the thin veil of my shirt and bed linen.

When I awoke finally with purpose, to strike my inhibitions down, to clasp the water in the cusp of my hand, and splashed my face. I still felt fatigued. I knew that not even 4 hours had passed. I saw what was deathly before me.

Deathly looking piece of shit I tell him, 'Fuck. You.' Slowly but with conviction, because, I knew that I wouldn't have it any other way. Knowing who was familiar before can have its acid. This melancholic face who was without end.

My knuckles hit the closest argent thing. Felt the impact's powdered crush. I had become sentient of the rhythmic heat which whelmed and wash through my arms, as I stood looking sallow yet embraced in fluorescent light.

'Fuck this feeling...'

The night had seen her fair share of troubles, and now she watches a cold, sallow man weep before her feet.

For the alcohol had brought me warmth, yet the rocks still stayed cool as they soothed my tongue, and my drunken-ness had kept me still.

I sat at the edge of my bed. Bloodshot eyes kept careful watch of the electric fan surveying the room, the cool air made the coldness of my glass create cushion of water in-between the clench of my hand.

Only the light from street-lamp into the slits of window blinds pierced through.

'La la cuna.' I let a new word slip through my lips. I tried to read the feigning, and slippery caricature adapted from the stains on the wooden blocks laid out as a trafficked-puzzle. On the floor the stains did not repeat. I felt cold anger ring out from temple-to-temple in my head.

'Lacuna and la cuna work so well together.' I assured myself.

As a random image stays lodged in the back of mind, it was the image I once pursued: the image of the country I am trying to form, perhaps its the country I deemed to be a utopia. I truly desired this, and still the very possibility of it becomes alarming as the realisation sets after falling fast like chains into my cupped hands.

The world falls into a deep, decrepit calamity, there was a need for organisation, an application of self in which was redeeming, and deemed life saving for both me, and life saving for you.

And here I sit at the edge of my bed, and before me is the floor? I imagine it to be the abyss, and now I ask myself as to how to traverse it, I answer, 'A bridge will do.' I imagine.

You follow a path which dares you to seek out that very gleaming contour of the black kettle you watch boil to the very top⸻overflowing onto the intense coil radiating an orange glow⸻to the mountaintops of Giants and its lava brewing brim, where the hinterlands are unforgiving, and bringing you to trudge through 4 and a half inches of snow, you fear crevasses to exist abruptly, cautioned by the passing mentions old men in the village down below.

You follow the mountain slopes, hoping, tugging on the double braided rope between you and a jutting sliver of rock. You wonder what this could mean for you to accomplish what has been done before.

There was a need to call it in. You were tired, you did not believe the trek in this biting cold was worth it, yet you trudged on.

The surface was uneven, nerves struck cold, an acidic tinge enveloped within your collar, you could feel the warmth of the sun against your neck as the adrenaline ran through you.

This, which is my very own, image captured of its staining waters and crude oils, the snow, the light mist, made the very landscape creep like a cold, cruel and tantalising kind of agony. The acrylic base before the gauche applied upon it. A canvas and you were the articles applied upon stone-skin.

A disparaging landscape which was home to no bird or greenery. This was a sight to behold. Breathing it all in.

You⸻strong enough to even kill a brown bear without breaking a sweat shoving a pike down the bear's throat⸻treated the innards after like a knitted ugly sweater.

Laughing at memories of old jokes, reminiscing a time which divided men alike, like sheep from goats, you remembered the war, the mandatory military training, the raid shelters and the game of Marco Polo in the dark waterways of past excavated arteries.

'I still shake,' from the precognitions he had of an alternate reality, could still grasp into his deeply shoved down, suffocating memory, the tremors and its bellows. Imagining shelters as coffins, migrating in platoons sneaking underneath caving tunnel ways, hands and knees scraping, and rasping, against aggravated aggregate.

We'd grope for coat tails and the flatness of walls, our ears gambled with our surroundings. Children played Marco Polo in the darkness, someone forced out a chuckle, there was a light in the ever-encroaching darkness, and this memory served well until he realised its unattainable glory.

The artificial lakes. The large wooden pallets for catwalks. Makeshift boats made of redwood, carved into crude kayaks which hardly battled small tussling waves.

Remembered the doorbells of neighbours, the birdcage, and the tiger followed by pitter-patters, pulsating sharply close from the source, dropped stringy, bellowing airs, lowering, dispersed far from the source.

Red and yellow ribbons parades crowd to crowd, palettes of umbrellas blot the assembly ceilings with helium balloons beneath them.

Cyan, cadmium yellow, brick red, vanilla twilight trim deck sheets lined the walls around the auditorium. Simple portrait windows painstaking, poorly painted frames let's peek through to bricked streets stained with colourful chalks and pastes and oil-based paints.

Pearlescent tags poured through the curtains on stage, teasing in and out. Porcelain hands choked the Great Snake of Time as it arose from its paper-box slumber. Black sticks protruded behind the paper dolls. Children laughed, children cried, and parents felt the peace and serenity found in the innocence of children and smothered them as they should.

Stained wooden stage glistened faintly by candlelight, we let the flags fly, the ribbons flutter, and the lagoon lapped, if you look past the treeline, youth blossomed as young men pummeled and rushed another into the buoyancy of the dock, the pig skinned buoys keeping the pallets afloat.

Morning sun soft on skin, a couple minutes before noon, begotten young men close their eyes, standing, bathing, sucking in the pinkish-yellow shades beneath closed eyelids.

Kayaks, applied deeply against the coming of wakes, soared then depressed into calmness. Sands shifted ashore as children sprung from the water's surface and into the embrace of their mother stretching a towel into that same peace and serenity we talked of.

Dirt paths littered with balloons and ribbons, and the people loitered as they looked on as we looked on.

The makeshift villas, the longhouse, the trenches raised into slums and the platforms which fended the rocks from tumbling over the skirts of the land from the otherworldly appearing treeline of nearby hills, slated, marbled, aggregated and agitated by pestering fauna and the bracken.

Continuing to traverse through this snow-swept land, my errand to relay and mark out flooded roads and snowed in impasses, a newly born fawn had its stomach revealed to me, it played dead as if it's some sick joke until a small wolf poked and reared their blooming furry head from behind the fawn's valley-ing backside, gnashing teeth clamped hard on a long, rum coloured ear still attached to a piece of scalp, scrapes, and sinew; silky strands of arteries readily frozen.

I couldn't tell apart from my own bodily heat, conserved by thick brown sheep wool interwoven around my neck, serrations stitched into my cow leather jacket, as to how unforgiving this Heartland could be regardless of season.

Each trudge had me smoking out a plume in heavy breaths.

Once wooded country, now snowy wooded country. Pine trees were padded with snow, rising valley roads jutting out into spurs skirting mountain ridges, barricades fending off the rotting blemishes of weed and bracken ridden country hills.

I continued my trek in holiday.

I guess my sad reluctance had a means to keep these memories still.

'You're lost within that head of yours again. Snap out of it. Stop trying to find an excuse for almost getting yourself killed or in deep.'

Albeit, it comes about, and it's always been like this.

I was having a hard time crawling on all fours up the slope. This snow-dune was having me relinquish my pack over the mound first.

How I was having a hard time trying to climb on over was giving me quite the fright. I shouldn't be this fragile.

I managed to slip up kicking in my right foot into the indentation and my right knee was in the eave. I grappled with the tension of the double braided rope, accidentally whipped my pack with the rope which slid down the snow dune.

There was a moment of anger seeing my pack be neglected. I was so arrogant I could not see past the danger below me.

Once that pack slid down to a halt, a slight tremor brought the pack's wraps down into a slit which then shifted its weight closer to what was unseen.

I was weary of this, and I was dividing my weight between each footing, bringing my torso to weigh in on my spine.

I could see a frozen corpse piled into a mound. Going with my weight, I let my belly take the full brunt of snow against.

I ran on over and hovered over the corpse. 'I got me my chalks inside my pack. Ugh! Forget my pack! Coloured charcoal. Coloured chalks should be in there. I'm gonna need red, green and black...'

I lunged myself over, the cold still biting at my ankles and legs uncovered cuffs in the wind. I revealed the contents of my pack, and clenched a handful of my chalks.

'Green is keen. Red is med. Black is bleak.'

I drew a crude X on the poor man's forehead. Slightly disturbed by the sight, this was my first time seeing the skullcap of a dead man.

I turned over the dead man's chin and saw his preserved face, still pristine, middle-aged man with his eyes closed and his face still I was revering.

That was when, even in footing, I neglected rain-snow which caused small plates of ice to form. Slippage occurred. I fell on my stomach. With my encumbered body whilst crouched over I could not extend my to reach for safety.

I slid down the dune and was following the fate brought to me by a passing mention.

Fear corroded all clarity within me. I began to imagine the stories of men falling to crevasses, their bodies slipping ever so slightly more into the crack.

I was winding up the double braided rope as fast as I could but my feet were just inches away from the now uncovered crevasse.

It was too late.

I finally slipped through.

My body caught. My lungs heaving. I couldn't breathe. Everything was heightening in my ears, I was feeling really hot.

I was trapped in the crevasse I was so frightened of. Hope was just as quick as my wits. I do not know what to do if I were to die here.

I know, that the more I'm trapped within these confines, the greater the chance of me slowly shifting and slipping through due to body heat against reacting ice.

My heavy plumes grew longer and larger.

The fear in my eyes made my pupils large, and the shimmering, glistening tinge of frost was blinding me, or maybe it was my body transporting blood all into my head so that I could think straight.

Our marked corpse came to life for only a second, just to slide down next to me, the dead man facing me. His body now too was sandwiched in the crevasse.

And then His Eyes Opened.

And all the blood in me were shared between limbs. I panicked. I was scrambling trying to get loose, making all the more harder for me to reel myself from this fate.

It was in that moment. Clarity in this subterfuge. I could hear the voice come from the dead man's throat a dry kind of agony. A voice erupted in varying chorus.

'Hello, and Good Midnight to You.' Spoke the disembodied voice. 'I Am He Who Resides In The Back Of One's Mind. Your Very Own Image Of The Country You All Presume, Perhaps.' And then from the rising, tumbling force of descry, in the abyss of the crevasse a portion of an incredibly large serpent's spirit emerged its head enveloping the dead man's body.

Fears newly awoken and impeding my understanding. For not knowing what was happening, and believing this to be an illusion was what held my sanity.

'Relinquish Cruel Thoughts, In An Upheaval Of Rising Words Comes Forth The Wisdom.'

I was becoming impatient because I knew that this power to parse and invest into the Serpent's language was temporary, and I was trying to deal with heavy mental fortitude to try and remember as much detail about the Serpent's language and its verbosity.

I cracked my collar and shoulder at the clasp of another's starry limbs onto the fat of my nape, I felt him loom over then he ever lowered his lips close to ear shouts, 'I Have YOU!' Then like receding waters on shore recedes himself back into his own weight as our shapes clashed, fastening ourselves together away from the gaping mouth of the abyss.

Simple Instruments Taken Up In Hand, their purpose replaced into awestruck wonder. Why people would do such demands, going great lengths just to attain power, and to offer themselves up into bondage with the idea that corrupting one's self with the most vile, most evil, and most insidious of things would bring them everlasting glory?

I did not expect this, nor did I expect this imminent change to mix well with my emotions.

Mixing me into the chorus and then the crescendo of a hundred voices screaming, drawling, and growling out, 'we are waiting, wanting, haunting these very corners of the earth just for you.'

Their sombre looking faces levelling their intensity, bringing you in to just look at them. Just look at them. How could you not feel awfully terrible for them? Where is your empathy?

A cold, cruel sentiment weaved into me, and this would go unnoticed.

I was breathy, heaving, and loss swirled in the pocket within. My eyes had seen their faces, like the many faces who revere God on the level below, as your body is rising and you are now in an out-of-body-experience tripping on your own hallucination.

I was welding these faces together into the crusty magma of obsidian forming.

Weld it thick, weld it thicker than any overlapping pool of hot metal could let you, you stir and pull back, stir and pull it back from the stretch of your arm and not so close to your chest. You weld those faces in, they are now the blemishes upon the metallic plane, and you whip them as you stir. Whip them as you stir!

Coming to, my body was reeling in and making my heart heavy. A cold wind blew on my face, the wind lost direction like it was aware and then it died against me.

I brought myself to my knees so that I may crawl.

Rescue came in The form of ingenuity. Stripped canvas and leathers stretched and wrapped onto long sticks of dead wood made into frame.

I was hauled down the mountain slope with the crudely skinned bear fur laid over to cover me. The leather and double braided rope tugged against someone's heaves and weight.

A Sherpa, who'd I'd meet way out down the mountain pass. Him, his sled and sled dogs. Into the village. And then to the village's port. To the Carper with coin bag in hand. Then finally the Carper's tugboat.

My snivelling nose was frosted with the cold bites, scarf upon balaclava couldn't repel weather. I was fearing I'd lose my nose if I sneezed it'd come off with a pop!

Without breaking breath the sled dogs lunged in-on-in their front legs past hind legs, past front legs. 'Mush! Mush!'

The rolling down the mountain side was dream-like. I was having heady images running through the back of my mind. Belting treeline, the brushes, the stockpiles we slalom past in and around.

Easing from the tension once the sled dogs burrowed their heels into the snow mounds before the entrance into the village, before the arching post, underneath it were other sleds and wolf-packs wondering on over.

Squinting to see the passerby, the oncoming crowd and the patrol, I witnessed the world shrugged and shoved off the change in the sky as the incandescent hues hanged in the air as if it were just a nuisance, underway went work, dreary may have been the commute, handkerchiefs covering their mouths and noses.

As the sun hit their eyes, the pink gradient was tinged with the yellow radiance. Fatigue arrived as drooping eyes, and body became luggage, and their sight were assaulted, piercing at the back within the inner sanctum of their eye sockets.

Encumbered and worn from working, the people soldiered onto the snow-covered ground drifting and parting on what little brickwork the snow made naked. Birds sang and chicks chirped. A train could be heard heavily singing to a stop, then a bellowing rise of a horn went off and a chug resonated.

Attendees, dog trainers, and other hands were whispering trying to not walk into each other as platoons parted into squads, workforce following unseen race lines along the ground beating the street with their leather boots.

Women shifting, scuttling and saying 'God bless you' as they blot their lips to each passing man who looked at them with weary looks, impassioned or apathetic due to being tired.

Parrots gawked at men with the brims of the hats blocking their eyes. Parrots harassed late workers on their commute to work.

Margins brought together as people crossed another diagonally and across the four-way pedestrian crossing.

A man broke out of his house in a desperate tone. Late for work I guessed.

People fell by, or went through them, they didn't glance or give thought, it was normal to them which made the me uneasy, being brought to my feet so that I could follow like the walking dead into the checkpoint.

Restlessness for perturbed individuals was the answer they were hoping to lobby themselves into, but fatigue makes people apathetic and disconnected. They wanted the day to not work its way into them, to leave them alone and let them be.

A man came bumped into them coming in from the outside, he went through the open double doors and his silhouette moved the shine off the painted brick wall, shooing white contours into shades.

It was a bridle man, and his tired eyes changed to shock, eyes which I could not match as the world around me began to close off.

A change in air was coming in, even the Victorian bastardised Spanish villas were stinking of this change in the air.

The patch of floorboards reflected the iridescent sky. The brutal fascist architecture could not withstand this phenomenon, as if the entire cityscape was in a stir, and buildings went either way wherever shadows envied another for light or disgust as lightning flashed giving a foreboding look.

The city now smelled of sharp and humid. Smelled like wet sand, watercress, beansprouts and the sharpness and nose biting effect of spring onion.

A hazy bridle upon us all.

The Carper could be seen standing against the arching tarpaulin beating against the wind. He squinted, laboured breathing puffed fumes reacting to the cold.

The dropping of an axe and the thunderous applause into the evening stopped. Something had gone awry after outside.

Carper ran his finger across the wooden railing. Rubbed the hook of the end, and pushed himself off it, fingers splayed against it, recoiled back into both hands. Hard, percussive drops of the axe's applause ran out into the evening again.

All three had strong gaits trudging along the stairs and into the actual first floor of the three storied building. Level 0 they called the first floor where the reception's installed.

A dainty towering shed and shack that's well over two-hundred years. It had the palliasses affixed like webs to the array of beams and crossbeams. The combination of tiled and tin metal substitute roofing could be heard from the flight of stairs as the axe drummed unsteadily, wind driving tarps to flap erratically.

Trio sat around the small wooden, round coffee table before the charcoal pit leading into the outside verandah. Hot coffee into cream cud whiskey was served into three concoctions.

I peered into the rain curtain displayed before the verandah. I observed the petite, long-necked birds dash through hailing for cover. Sign of the times. Thought to himself, 'Better to not be a part of the storm.'

Relinquished from the drawer beneath coffee table the map to get over the valley and back into Te Tahera, Carper checked over it, made sure what he saw in the past 60 years hadn't changed in its shape and form.

A Bactaggard just in sight. He was drenched and sparkling in the rain. His mask was watching on over the land, and his gaze was wading. His mask too, in the reflection of the evening sky was wading. Thinking to himself, 'Seems like even the sky had no power as night came. How peculiar. Its like I could figure out which is which.' The Bactaggard sighed.

To himself, slowly he was coming to an understanding, as to why his father worshipped the night.

The noise inside, and into the dining area, was blocked by a sliding door and a screen door.

Yet, with all this build-up I couldn't keep my eyes away from the magpies perched on the railings.

Then he got it. The Carper was handed the keys to the tugboat, and I was still reeling in the weather. He had grabbed me by the collar and began leading me down the stairway and into the outside with the Bactaggard surprisingly just behind us, watching our every move. I could hear him faintly try to omit, 'Take good care out there. The seas are rougher than she looks.'

I was bewildered by how he treated his words with such care and such intimacy.

The carper hauled me over the curvature of the tugboat's shell. I was recoiled from the slight impact, but the impact felt drastic because of my condition. Furthermore, my head drummed against the acrylic, he was punching in the key into the ignition. I could just see the Carper over the curvature of the boat shaking his head in dismay.

I tracked my eyes from the cuffs of my pants up to his face, he waved to the Bactaggard with a forced grin. The Carper said nothing and didn't even bother to gesture farewell.

The shell reverberated as its engine chugged. It hopped over a slight wake and the oncoming tides. I slid and jostled in the back.

Tugboat swayed in the wake and the Carper tried to keep the wheel steady, while comforting me as I was reeling in from the essence extracted from me like a wash of blood.

Light cracked in the sky. The fading silhouette of the Serpent's tail's cracking followed after.

Enraged and weeping, lashing out within the small tugboat I had been caught in the quiet and immobility, in frieze.

Exhausted with the wringing inside. Gasping whilst sloping against the rim, I moved aside from the Carper sitting on the stool which was the driver's seat, and held myself against the curvature of the contour.

Enraged again and weeping uncontrollably. I lashed out, whipping my head to the bobbing of the tugboat and I hit my head against the console.

Horse riding, the galloping eschews within the all-consuming darkness.

I could imagine sharing a single winding wide road only by moon's grace can we travel within the blanket of night.

To my right, just moving a bit farther up than me, is a man who could be regarded as fast around the bends rode a draught horse, and behind me, as far as the stretch of the road allows before he breaks off in and out of the dark horizon was a man riding his stock horse.

In my desirous fever I was sentient. I was engrossed. Enraged and weeping in my dreaming.

'I was coming here from the Ranges, or the Spine Of The Country, the name you give your valleys and the river which is in a manner speaking a Sound and Ford. There was bloated corpse floating along the edges of the winding roads jutting out from the outskirts, you know the hills and stockpiles parodying mountains? Alexandria! That's the one. The one you can see the sea in its blue hues.'

It was past noon, and cloudy, and there were strangers passing another by on the sidewalks, as the road was occupied by the mad and the well-off.

We were barred by a cobblestone wall, a stretch of sand, and a ditch, and then the waters below. An overpass could be heard side-by-side oncoming traffic as the hubbub grew louder and then suddenly despondent as a crowd enveloped.

The body just floated, face down, like it was hovering in the sky day-dream like. The man's scalp could be seen through the brush of his redhead. The tinge of his clothes at the seams just waved caressing through the contours of the current.

We observed, had our own crudely brewed ideas of as to how a man of such physique could have drowned, only to realise that the sea was an all-consuming thing, and it didn't matter how he died, but that he was just dead.

Just only, simply, merely just. A conforming, contour caressing creature embalming me, and taking in my skin. I watch my very legs sink into the water, and I watch the awful sea consume.

The water rushes into the lower deck, and the dainty, small bedroom now becomes another hovering seabed. Debris trying to shift themselves into rafts only to adsorb and falter and sway low into the opulent rising floor.

A cacophony of audacious yet abrasive sounds bursts in. I am now in what I believe to be intermittent.

And only now do I rehearse my former mate's words of wanting to die in his sleep.

'How quaint.' I found it arduous to even say it, because I could see this. I knew this to be a tonal split. Even if I were drunk this scenario would have shot me right back into sobriety. And I chuckled to myself again, 'Ah! Ah! The danger! The danger!' In my hysteria I'd chuckle to myself, and say, 'How quaint.'

I rolled my muslin cloth back into the seams of my neck, stretching and worming my head around to better suit the notch and dimple which kept my head on my shoulders.

The connection between me and Cathro was now drawn as a few crossing lightning bolts. Striking from the bay and into the town coming in through the trench. Into the apex of the crescent.

Violets and lilacs had a hard time flourishing into blooms as the sun was covered by clouds. And the few crossing lightning bolts struck again from the bay.

The crowd was then disbanded by dispatched officers, and we involved ourselves in the filing and making way back into civility which immersed us deeply in the domesticity of being just another passer-by.

Cathro saw this domesticity, I could see in his eyes him questioning how sheep-ish we all acted at the sight of a deadman. For Cathro he felt acid shoot throughout his arms. It congests and twists.

His gaze returned to the crowd, and his eyes had a hint of crystal gleam and glint. The smell of sea salt withered as oncoming traffic rushed, clapping sound and wind altogether.

A street filled to the brim with people caressed the walls whilst repelled by the narrowness of the sidewalks, people's shoulders repelled like magnets.

'The subtle dances to passer-by.'

I watched this all occur and I was slowly shifting into the sadness of my hands, and into my hands I fell into my own hands' cusps. Rubbed my eyes away the gleam and glint of crystal tear.

As we wake in our fragility, and in this scene which feels all futile. Cathro watched on the crowds dispersal furthered and parallel with the drawing sun. I watched him to in his squalor try to comprehend the absence of anything which could be regarded as duty.

'We found him. Yes, he was just a sight. No, no one called us into this. Well you have to understand, sir, we'd have to work with maritime on this. Yes sir. Will do, sir.'

The officers then galloped off as a squad. Nothing else to see. Cathro and I continued our trek of the suburb with heads resting in our own hands or inconspicuously pushed down into our own pockets.

'So, you got a good look at the bloated bloke?' I wasn't thinking about the corpse when they found him. I was thinking about how eager the Maritime officers were when the body drifted closer to the cobblestone wall.

You'd think the two lads who found the floater, yeah, would think something of it? No. They'd think nothing of it. Give it less than a week, and their novel schoolyard story will subside.

'I am tired, you could say exhausted even. Mind if I go back to the tavern and plop a dozen coppers for the night?'

Cathro took out his favourite confectionery: black liquorice. His pockets are big enough to have a harmonica in its breadth. Deep enough to house a sandwich.

Disappearing into the body of passer-bys, Cathro adjusted his coat to hide his gambeson, and brought the beak of his cowl forward.

Their old man's teachings applied in the most mundane setting.

Hmmmph. Cathro, thought to himself, 'only a moments look at the man,' and now he was at impasse at exchanging information which the fence.

Back Alley Movements, and Salon Fencers' Dancing Wakes are the Bare Necessities to Survive Nightcrawling, and if Sycrose's words were the final nail on the coffin then Cathro himself was the hammer.

They couldn't entrust this to anyone else? Cathro thought to himself. I was thinking that Sycrose wanted nothing more from me than just to act as his left hand man. Sensing how the opportunity costs, how much it costs can be measured with spreadsheets and men working vacuum tube machines. The Back Alleys did not ask for spreadsheets and vacuum tube machines.

What the Back Alleys did ask of us who nightcrawl, it asks for a lump sum of your time as the cost. Your time is your soul here, and your soul is your work's currency. You can spend time micro-managing a minuscule amount all you want, but it all amounts into your very own ultimatum. And that is why I left. All I had then were the Lost Boys, the Old Boys and the Foundations which held all branches of our department together. Sadly, like the parasitic roots of hiveminded trees all we have now is Ned and his minions of the night.

As a minion of the night, Cathro tussled with the ground, lowered his profile as he proceeded past bush to ramparts.

To strike at this hour was a timed window. Men tired, hungry and apathetic to their own cause. Sure, Inland-Imperials are goonish when they aren't their higher tiered counterparts, but Inland-Imperials are well organised and duty-bound. Callous as people, most impressive as persons.

To be heady would be alarming for them.

To rush past the open field as clouds dimmed moon, Cathro rushed two guards patrolling the dirt path returning from a checkpoint south-east of their location.

Leather-bound club, also known as a Blackjack, found the crowns of two guards. A thwacking hushed by the wind. No cry from the two men heard.

'You're heady. Twice this's happened.' Cathro grimaced at the sight. 'They'd wake up, all there senses jumbled. Just be happy they ain't dead.' Cathro's occupied hand tightened, the grip upon the leather-bound club.

'Beautiful,' Cathro, you got two with two short-swings. Powerful stuff. He praises himself, keeping positive. It is a lump-sum-full night and his soul was on the scales.

He slid down the bank and into the small crest, one guard over his shoulders. Tossed the guard into the bush, Cathro sighed for the violets were flattened under the guard's weight.

With Cathro falling into his reluctance, he followed the winding path of the eastern bridge, slid down the bridge's bank, crawled into hard shadows merging with his, shadows blotted into Cathro's silhouette, then slid his victim down his back into the bridge's undercover.

Up the bank. Don't be seen.

Flat plains were hell for movement. Too open to lay flat on the ground to crawl.

Scary to move so far in. Need to move fast. Crouch-run around the perimeter straight into the treeline then make for a detour back to the checkpoint, shadow a patrol with no light since wind is terrible for torches, and attached-to-the-waist lanterns don't open opportunities for shadowing. Although, Imps are gonna wish they had eyes in the back of their heads.

Shadowed a patrol leading them into a small side gate before the town's outskirts, and just before the eastern block into the slums. This was the staff kitchen entrance. The liveliest of living spaces, there'd be all sorts of hands, cooks and feasting guards.

Testing the waters a faceless Inland-Imperial ran his finger upon the contours of his faceplate. Cathro swept this Imp onto the ground and ran his rope dart into his jugular. Dragged him into the shadow of the gated side wall.

Imp's neck spurted, bellowing, Cathro's palm correcting the trajectory, his other forearm choked sound. Dragged the next Imp into the shadow. Cathro scuttled to surprise the next Imp, popping into a stand, Imp's jugular punctured then rolled himself and his prey into the brush as quick as he unveiled himself. Cathro dragged the corpse by legs into the shadow.

There're three dead bodies in the same spot. All lined up lengthways along the wall.

Screaming laughter can be heard throughout the canteen.

Scurry up to the roofs. Have means, have choices. 'Can we even scale ledge to ledge unseen?'

'Be hasty. The midnight is illustrious, unwieldy and demented.'

Alas, the decision was a race through the canteen, barged through door, entrance was a swing and dip into a boisterous punch to throats. Smacking Imps, aids and persons into silverware and kitchenware faster then the Head Chef can tell you to 'Fuck off!' Faster than a long serrated steak-knife swinging aimlessly, panicking to cut well and deep.

No Imp would swing broad lest they hit a mate or kill a beloved cook. Belly's full with love, said some guard coming in with dirty dishes on a platter. Same guard now lying on the floor with his face in the platter.

How could he reach the Imp in the walls? How could he slip past into the Back Alleys of this outskirt?

He should move up against the wall, take a breather in unnoticed corners, rush past the scouts lined atop the walls.

Break into the back alleys via Centre Road, and run down other patrols before he makes a break for it to the perimeter of the dark demesne.

'Checkpoint kitchen leads into Centre Road, there should be a town square, that marks that the eastern block is where it leads to the fence residing there.'

He carefully executed his plan, his disciplines were wired into him after all. With each swing of his club he remembered himself recoiling from the lashes, from the blows and from the flurries.

Slipping from shadow to shadow, the darkness of his cloak made him flourish and flow in and out.

A low hubbub could be heard underneath the wooden floorboards. The concrete structures clumped and shut the sound of air and made the voices encompass a stretch of the block.

'This must be Holloway Street.'

Single speckle of shifting light from a single light source, a silver glint in the darkness acted as breadcrumbs for nightcrawlers.

'Bearing sixty, hard right, keep left along the blemished wall.' Noting vague familiarity, a few more turns and he was in a blocked exit with a single window and a silhouette of a man in orange light.

As he emerged from the darkness and into the orange light, the world closed off behind him.

Cathro reached into his breastpocket to reveal a single pocketwatch with a faint glint which caught the fence's eye, in its intensity, intentions isolated involuntary imaginations inside each inner machinations of their minds, an enigma.

'Cathro de l'Putet. Or, Cathro of Foss Cliff. Many names, and yet still keeps the same face.'

The fence's teeth clenched signifying his seething. 'Aren't you supposed to be one of Garrett's lapdogs? I hear all-you's ran a small circle before Anda Liuga. Made a small dainty river town into a fortress.'

In the single white light which shot across from the street, Cathro poured out the pocket-watch, its chains, the fading copper-nickel reflected the single shot of light ray into its embedded crest.

'Magicked. It's magicked!' The fence roared. 'Am merry! Am joyous! To think you'd have stolen an artefact of The Black Library! The Intelligentsia wouldn't stand idle with this, they wouldn't have let you walk away with that, especially since the Black Library, its Custodians and the Inland-Imperials would have you wrung by the neck!'

'Yet, here, I am.'

Snap! Went the pocketwatch sliding then scuttling across the dainty, lacquered, wooden countertop. Its glimmering magicked self-wrote a small rune around it, faint but possibly consequential.

'You're expecting me to know what to do with this?'

'I'm expecting you to know who this is.' Projecting himself, Cathro' eyes were now cat-like, as if demon possessed or more annoyed. His eyes had a faint white light glint, like a lighthouse or spotlight was erected in his head, like he was searching for something between the pocketwatch and the fence.

'The Dieback. The Gap! Aaah. I see. You know too of the Darkwoods, of The Dins and all that crap. Is that the reason why you became a fence, because you have the Intelligentsia in the back of your hand?'

'Tch...! To think you'd use that weird voodoo shit on me. Just because you've got them ancestral Islander blood, that nomadic, voyaging, outlandish slave blood, don't think I'd forget about this. As a matter of fact I don't know who's soul is attached or feigning in this.' The fence reared his head, and Cathro caught the stench of a lie.

'You stink. Hmmm. I doubt you'd forget good business from a good recurring customer.' Cathro rummaged again in his same breastpocket, then out came a small corner piece of a pelvis.

'Whalebone.'

Smithied into a fine raider's dagger, it was sheathed in obsidian, its handle a metallic glaze of iridescence, and it for some reason, when Cathro held the knife from the scabbard, his hand was vibrating intensely.

'Aaah. A vibro-blade! Capable of folding six-to-seven-thousand times! Yes. Yes. Information and...and something tangible you seek.' The fence disappeared into the backrooms.

'Yes. Yes,' faintly the fence could be heard, blocked by an ajar door and an old Sunbather towel draped over the doorway.

Fence baldy returned with scrolled bundles in barley strips and woven flax ropes. Fence scratched his head, this was all he had for the price of information.

Whistling an old nursery rhyme, the fence grimaced. His balding head massaged what was last of whatever hair he had.

Caressing the barley ribbon, in Lyleman's tongue, Cathro's sibilance was pronounced translating the Lyleman words into Imperial speak.

'A Few Once Good Old Men. Outer Within, Inner Without. Close to the Skin, the Salt Upon the Mouth.' Intelligentsia perverted, and as perturbing as The Black Library's influence, this was certainly taken from underneath the root and the branch's noses. The fence may just be another scary man.

Rare to find scrolls unopened, you'd think these smuggled things would've already been used in the war.

'You're thinking I'm upselling weak shit.'

'No. I don't doubt you. I just find it odd, you fence, that you were able to smuggle these.'

'Yeah. My men were able to get to the Matilda before the authorities could scavenge whatever else was washed up ashore-'

-After a surge of flurrying sparks of instinct Cathro tossed a couple gold coins clattering and chattering unto the table, pushed the bundled scrolls into his breastpocket, nodded briefly to the fence.

'Thank you. We shall never let these discussions surface.'

Bald fence was taken aback, but he shook it off as another of his clients' weird quirks. He's a businessman in a back alley business for crying out loud! This was part of the excitement, this was part of the fun. The Intelligentsia and the Black Library 'friends' breathing down his neck was what he always wanted.

'Be a friend and show your face once a while.' Fence grinned, his balding head matched the glint of his teeth.

'I will.' And Cathro disappeared once again into the darkness of the alley's elbow.

In the act of turning the corner following the shape of the elbow, Cathro couldn't find his own shadow, believing to have returned into the hallways which lead into the small lounge where his four sisters, and three brothers were.

Inasmuch as demolishing the graveyard memories of what was once was, he found himself again on the verandah looking on his father lying on the steps drunk as his fourth brother was coming into this world.

'How was your real-estate speculation?' Cathro's eyes would ask his father the ever-lingering question. His father's response was always the same blank-eyed stare.

The same blank-eyed stare could be seen in the shadows, and its image inwardly captured Cathro.

Cathro's disillusionment of never tiring as he discovered the teeming beauty of night-life caught up to him like the abyss at the ends and depths of a horizon-edge. Or the pestilence brought wroth by rodents, and flying sea-crows.

Contrary to the ever-lingering fear delivered by omens of salt marsh and shore mud. As definite as a metallic downward swelter of storms.

Together with being inebriate against the driving curve of a cul-de-sac. Inebriated, yet clear and sweet.

He breathes in the crude perfumes from a bathroom window. He swallows the smell down with a hard, loud gulp, unbracing him from the his pestilence of death and despair. Becoming undone, yet clear and sweet.

Hearty and clean. Clear and sweet.

The tape was over twenty years old, and it was already suffering in rot. The music reverberated in crushing noise, whining back and forth sounds which faded and panned into and out from a soundscape of tinny, droning sounds.

This was Cathro's drug. His near nineteen minutes of dopamine hit. Desiccated whirrs permeated through his bastardised Stalhelm with a fishnet cover. He played that tape loud to the point his hearing had aged alongside his sensibilities. Clear and sweet.

Cathro doesn't shout as much as he does after waking up in the morning. When his ear canals aren't narrowed in, he's alright. Comes into the mess hall with drooping eyes, puffy cheeks and eye-bags. He looks into this interior world and only answers to his name being pronounced in a jarring way.

All correct, he tells me reeling away his unjustified frustrations which he reeks in. He's chewing on his words and he spares his breaths between long sibilancy. A drunk snake intertwining conversations into a series of hearsay.

Manning the cargo depot, the hangar bay just opens for draft air to make its way across aggregate. Sometimes magpies can be seen peeking their tiny, sleek heads through the ajar bay door.

Even as strong winds pick up stronger, shifting bundles of hay and bales across the aggregate, Cathro's desiccated music could still be heard permeating through his iron helm. You can still hear him chewing in the morsels in his mouth like cud.

Occasionally you'd catch Cathro daydreaming and snapping in and out of existence with a shake in his spine.

'Bones' haunted.' Cathro drawls in sparse heightening and lowering tones. Then he's back at hacking away at the ropes trying to belt the ropes into a proper tether for the tugboat. Crying out that reeling in a small tugboat was better than affixing a line against Tuanaki's bay's docks.

I watched the flutters of Lesser Wanderers randomly flow into succinct, abrupt flutters again and again. In the depths of my vision is Cathro's back lowering into the blue horizon. A whelming sight this Gothic Gibraltar cityscape. In many-a-ways I go about imagining dome skylines crushing underneath the weight of mortar shells, fragmenting as they impact.

Peacetime makes the well-worn wary, I hear Garrett telling me as he strikes the match.

Here I was watching the world under the cover of the great equalising darkness. I separate men to men apart. The world parts like watercolour wash breaking through the acrylic base of the canvas, bringing in a fading colour into the foreground.

I observe the women in the foreground of the yellow, and red tents blotting their lips as they pass by. Soldiers and their dead eyes still oh-so distant to what was even in front of them.

The women in their passing, with lowered chins drawl out, 'God bless you.'

'And God bless your soul.' I add a brief sigh of relief to their drawling...

'Only blood and fear ties this world together.'