 
Avola's Peril

by S. Michael Choi

Published at Smashwords

Copyright 2015, S. Michael Choi.

This light novel is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real characters or events is purely coincidental. The moral right of the author to be accredited this work is affirmed.

Cover photograph creative commons licensed, Jerry Polence, www.polence.com.

The use of this CC photo does not constitute an endorsement by the photographer or model of this work. The fair use of Square Enix Final Fantasy character "Fran" does not challenge Square Enix's legitimate copyright of its character Fran and the Final Fantasy series.

PART 1: PRINCESS OF BLADES

I.

Blood begins everything. It's a windy world, the magickians have already proven the existence of other universes but we can't reach them, we can't communicate with them, only know ours is for whatever reason swept with abnormally high velocities of wind and we call our land Windworld or Hastur. But it isn't an especially windy twilight (only the dim second sun, the one that rarely sets) when a young fellow in hooded leathers is seen pacing quietly down the souks off old Caracosa. Unseen eyes notice him, unseen teeth are bared in what would be a smile if the intent behind the expression were not dark. But four or five shadows suddenly separate themselves from the general darkness to follow the obvious outsider, which turns out to be their mistake. Later rats and dogs are seen scurrying around with bloodied muzzles and jaws. Somebodies have met their first blade-dancer. But you already know all this. You already know also that the "young fellow" is a girl. What you didn't know is what the young market toughs didn't know, that on the windiest islands of all, the ones whipped by frost and burnt by magma, the hardest steel was forged and the most deadly knifework invented. You would go your whole life and never meet one of these people, until you did, and then you wouldn't necessarily live much longer after that. But Caracosa didn't care in any meaningful terms: the blood and offal would just flow down into sewers and subsewers and probably more lives in the forms of rats and snakes and cockroaches would be sustained than in the declining population of that useless species, humans, who were declining in any case and barely sustained by the final king, the last king, the king in yellow.

Her name was Avola. The theory and numerickals behind her past I leave to avouts or magickians who know everything of course and say she's a statistical impossibility. But every single person in Windworld is a statistical impossibility, if you really think about it, myself included, so we know her story and her story in particular for whatever restless reader keeps their attention to this tale. We know it's the year 11738 in the 12th millennia of the rule of the king in yellow. We know he is functionally immortal. We know the aristocrats in their finery are also decaying but ageless. We know the empire is declining, that the rule of law is fading and that fewer and fewer imperial guards are recruited every year out of the freeholdings and agricultural gardens that surround Caracosa

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa.

But I am Scribe IV, as of yet having unearned a name, fourth generation of the family that serves the king in yellow and as per imperial instruction I record the perils of Avola, who was born into the Isles of Wind, Avalon in particular with sharpest avalonian steel her companion since childhood and knifework her practice since she was toddling around at age six. It's here and only here on those distant misty mountains that survival amidst the fanged sealions and mantis crustaceans depends on the absolute sharpest of blades, and the legend of Avalonian steel is such that not a dozen of the finest blades from the mountain tribes or even a dozen's dozen gross from southern blademasters can purchase one. Nobody knows the exact composition of the ores, or why the immersion into frozen seas meeting hottest magma creates steel that can cut through inferior alloys like a knife through butter. We know only that less than a hundred of such blades a year make their way in trade onto the mainland as the Isles of Wind retain their fierce independence, however few in number, and we know that few who meet a genuine blade-dancer live to tell their tale. But on the mainland itself the King in Yellow holds final law, and breaking even the faufreluches code "a man can be any profession except that of his parents, but must be one of his grandparents'," repeated me as Scribe IV to follow my father Scribe III, who was—in the proper way—the grandson rather than the son of Scribe II. We are yet unnamed and ignoble, our title is our appellation, but when the order came to accompany Avola on her questing, even a blade-dancer of her twenty-ninth year could not oppose the direct command of the King in Yellow, and despite her disgust at seeing my thirteen-year old self present himself, she permitted me to squire, but of course, once again, this all you already know.

(What you don't know is what I had long planned for when I inherited my father's position as Scribe and keeper of the books of Magick, for the Magickians themselves cannot specifically retain or categorize what would be an impossibly powerful monopoly. By long tradition, only the unmagickal categorize and maintain the archives of such things, but in our long histories, the processes have become so ossified and ruled by tradition, that actually I was to inherit only four or five hours of work a week, yet with all the titles and prerogatives of a royal servant. No one can penetrate the mind of the King in Yellow but he raised his signet ring, and that is where the story begins. The blood of street ruffians flowed into the souk sewers and then eventually back into the ocean from which all blood of human and other living beings originates. Yet our story is already covered in bottle flies and intestines and eviscerated thugs, but a blade-dancer had left her misty islands, almost undoubtedly forever, and I squired her for seven years about the country as she engaged in whatever task circumstances had forced her to take on, and that which the King in Yellow permitted. About the imperial grounds, the ageless but superannuated nobility had found absolutely nothing to be of slightest interest anymore, and possibly for them this was all just an exercise in amusement, for somebody finally had managed to be original, and their fates drew even the flicker of an eyelid which in these days represented, after some three thousands years of endless repetition, an actual sign of respect that something novel was indeed about to happen.)

My training was in the storage and categorization of books and you excuse my lack of style and shut the scroll as you will. The problem with apprenticeship into becoming a Scribe is that I am trained in the writing of the 'Abstrack,' or the non-magickal summary of a magick, or the categorization schemes that have taken their place into the etiquette that defines courtlife. The magickian in black desires the tome Z, places his request in the year 11714 and fifty years later his request is granted, this by the byzantine and obstruse regulations which define courtlife and reflect politics played several hundred years in advance. When your life is functionally endless, the durations of time in which you request changes are measured in centuries and millennia. The immortals in the Court of the King in Yellow do not often concern themselves with unregulated peasants, the freeholders, the freemen, the associated imperials, or even mortal servants such as I. We are replaceable to them, even less than an assigned number. Perhaps only the slightest widening of a yellowed eye reveals some hint of amusement that we have, unknowingly, repeated what our great-great-great-grandfather once stated, two hundred years ago, and finished the line of a joke that is five hundred years in the stating. But, despite this state of affairs, I do not envy the King nor do I the court of decadent counts and barons and dukes who pay their respects and carry out their rituals and can barely stifle the yawn of infinite banality at having achieved, lost to the mysteries of time, their own near-immortality. Somebody, perhaps mostly out of a sense of amusement, ordered me to present myself to the bladedancer Avola, and I accepted this order, for that is faufreluches: the common must obey the imperial servant; the imperial servant must obey the nobility; the nobility follows, unquestioning, the orders of the King in Yellow. His actual name and face are known only to his inner-most circle. These select few give a glance of their True Faces to the next concentric circle. By accident or incident a commoner or two has once stumbled upon or seen an actual half-duke or bastard offspring. But in dim Caracosa, our skies perpetually covered in ash and our wind-swept world, the law runs through and defines all etiquette and behavior and remains inviolable as issuing forth from authority. Blood had been spilled in the souks of Caracosa, and I was other-nominated to squire Avola, and report on who and what she did. We start with her art: the art of the blade. In the Isles of Wind a few scraggly settlements exist among unfarmable basalt and scraggly salt-grass. Once a year the mantis crustaceans invade the islands to breed, and here amidst crab or giant shrimp-like creatures with shells three inches of chitin, four in ten children die before their fifth year, whether from disease, loss to the seas, winter's bite, or the creatures themselves. Those that survive are already proficient blademasters by the age of six, using razors to find their vulnerabilities between joints and hold themselves off against even a dozen of the dumb creatures. By adulthood, a freeholder of the Isles of Wind carries the two blades and the punjil stick on the left upper-arm and can spin the weapons in such a variety of ways that the blade itself seems to be dancing on the hand or forearm and hence the term 'bladedancer.' Armed with even a single razor of four imperial inches, any adult Islander can take on an armored troop of the Imperial Guard or cut an oliphant to its knees or land a throwing knife to within half-an-inch at thirty meters. In this way the Isles of Wind retain their independence despite their harrowing and poverty-ridden existence. Yet every once in a while a fisherman or adventurer is ejected off onto the mainland, and they do not normally find it hard to survive an existence on the mainland or indeed are quickly recruited by either the souk gangs or the Guard itself or any of the minor kingdoms on the periphery. Yet the King in Yellow had ordered this one to be watched, and having shed blood in the city herself, she was commanded by imperial signet to accept a squire, at which point I left my soft and comfortable existence within the castle itself and became entangled with the life of the twenty-nine year old, Avola. Her life was tragic; it was filled with bloodshed; she killed over fourteen thousand in total before her final death, but the King has recorded this record be written, and I record it and I fulfill Imperial command.

Man still holds sway over Hastur, and the imperial city of Caracosa stands on the shores of the lake of Hali, and to the distant east the mountains of Demhe rise, and to the west are the oceans from which the winds blow, so powerful that they are typical generating waves of thirty meters and on occasion of three hundred, and in the Palace of Caracosa in the King in Yellow awaits and rarely blinks his yellowed eyes, and the nobility in their tatters wait, and the humans who have not received the gift still live out their mortal lives of eighty years, and there is legend of the dark elves and rumor of where the royalty have earned their immortality and stories of a greener and brighter time. I talk of blood-red skies and storm-tossed waves but of course the sun does shine from time to time and in verdant splendor it is said the Isles of Wind are the most beautiful place in the world. But after presenting myself to the bladedancer, I squired her as she made her fortune in the declining world, and I saw her bladework with my own eyes, and I in time became less and more than my father and my father's fathers before me. No, I have shed blood, too, in time, and joined in the rivers of blood that soak our land, but everywhere now the clouds of ash become more and more relentless and the sunny days grow fewer. The land dims. We are entering a new age soon, but I record nine years of Avola, and her bladework amidst the farmers and merchants and brigands and ex-Imperials who lived and died by their own steel. It is the pleasure of the King in Yellow that I record his demesne for the folly of man now amuses him and perhaps is his sole and remaining pleasure. The extant, the boundaries, the social classes, the faufreluches and its degeneration provide him with his sole and last remaining amusement as the final successor of the dynastic line, and he would have me write of the battle of the three hundred first, as three hundred dead amuse him ever so much more than the first five Avola killed, only because they had become so confident in their skills and reputation that the slaughter by a singleton and her squire only elicited the greatest of eldritch laughter rising to the heavens where the gods dead to us or hostile reward only murder and rapine and child-slaughter. It is this battle he most eagerly desires me to describe if it occurred only in the fourth year of my squireship and where I first drew blood in a sea of blood and all the blood that fills lakes and flows in rivers and channels down to the sea and brings with it perhaps a few more fair days before the ash from the unknown lands to the far far west brings the tidings of war, invasion, another species, and the eventual fall of the House of Caracosa. The twin suns of Caracosa sink beneath the lake, the shadows lengthen, strange is the night where black stars rise but stranger still is lost Caracosa, songs that the Hyades shall sing, where flap the tatters of the King, must die unheard in dim Caracosa, song of my soul, my voice is dead, die thou, unsung, as tears unshed, shall die and dry in lost Caracosa.

II.

Blood begins everything. As Imperial rule declines and the nobility scheme amongst themselves and ignore their duties, and the rule of law fades, the bloodgangs that ravage the countryside grow more bold, and arose the clan of the three hundred, brigands and bootleggers who as one final act of savagery desecrated a village and then delimbed a young heidy after ravaging her mercilessly. Left alive, tied to a stake, the sight incensed Avola and drew from within her that which had always existed, the art of the ploy or the desire to kill so strongly that it awakened planning and meticulous preparation. She stalked the three hundred and in their drunken revelry noticed their unconscious tendency to run a regular track, to repeat in an elongated oval a path of destruction over which the commoners had attempted to regain their livelihoods.

Two months we waited, and then, fresh from looting and devilry over the village across one river, the terrified villagers of another, fortified but completely powerless awaited, and here she secreted both herself and I, seemingly easy targets. Drunk on alcohol, mead, raw potato white, the brigands of three hundred believing their name and reputation that had begun to surround them, proceeded to the second village and sated for once, actually delayed their sack as they slaughtered the menfolk and decided what fresh atrocities they would carry on the women and catamites.

I was seventeen.

Amongst this crowd of three hundred slumbering and mead-blind, suddenly Avola slipped her bonds and with a razor slit eighty, nay ninety throats before the alarum was raised, and even then, two hundred against one blade-dancer could scarcely believe the speed with which twin blades went flick-flick and caught one's attack and parried it against another, a pair of smaller knives thrown with dead accuracy as the two hundred swayed and saw double or triple, both from their drunkenness and then from the alacrity with which the bladedancer ran through their numbers. In the confusion of night and fire and sparks and smog, Avola slew and slew and slew for she was incensed at the chunks of flesh and offal that had been dug out of the atrocity she had seen, and I suddenly in my manhood picked up a blade as well and joined our blood-bond and finished off the wounded and even fought against these grown men myself. We slew and slew and slew and blood flowed and soaked the soil and flowed into the river, into the dark river which flows into the sea from which we all came. I can say nothing about this event except that it was when her name was finally known far and wide for she was the bladedancer who avenged the rapists and torturers of women, and scarce four or five who somehow managed to escape the massacre spread the tale of the girl whose blades spun like fans, and the knowledge of the avouts and all the magicks of the magickians could not scry how many souls were dispatched to Hades that night for the killing had become so cyclical and synchronous that a single blow might slice through three bodies or more, and I saw red and cut throats, and though the Imperial Rule was fading, here under the signet of the King in Yellow the bladedancer restored order to a farming plain, and leather and chain and cut up bodies were strewn everywhere to be scavenged later by grateful commoners, and Avola asked no payment and paid no quarter.

The point of the story, of course, is that this moment marks when the Imperials' new strategy of relying on paid mercenaries and licensed hunter-killers had become the new accepted _modus operandi_ , for the nobility had grown too decadent, fashion-crazed, and intrigue-filled to care any longer about the world outside the city walls, and the souks were crumblings and the buildings everywhere turning to dust, and all over was the dust, the soot, the ash from the rumored kingdoms to the west, but now the _legend of Avola_ had begun, the prayer-call for villagers in need, and reanimated skeletons were walking the earth, and the elves dark in the deep Demhe were renewing forth out again, the fair elves of legend who had once owned Hastur when it was a land of forests before the humans had combined magick and avout and built such devices and enchantations that the five-hundred-year skill of an elf bowman was nothing against a newly born mortal lad with his charmed crossbow.

As every mortal is told in his early education, humanity all it has to the King in Yellow. Once Hastur was a forested land with skies of blue and deep dark forests. No human could ever assemble a village of more than two hundred, but suddenly a flurry of elven arrows would disrupt the peaceful lives of the fishermen or agriculturalists, and it was said that even humans would strayed too deep into the forests would live out their lives as slaves or miserable hunting practice for elf children, repeatedly sewed up and set "free" again to be hunted down as useful practice. Millennia upon millennia passed in this fashion, the ten-thousand year or 'era' being the scale of reference as elf kingdoms grew or faded, and tribes set up new emperors or spent lives in contemplation within their world tree. But man, with his eighty years on earth, was never a match for eight-hundred year old elf, until deep on a distant sandy southern island, a council was held in the deepest of secrecy, and the great liberator, the King in Yellow, although once a prince in yellow then, laid out the foundational plans to claim the world for ourselves. Gnomes, the secret tinkerers deep in mountains, were contacted and apprentices sent to learn avout. Magick, which flowed in almost all elves and only some humans, was refined and refined and refined until a race of human magickians could almost always perpetuate itself. Meanwhile the elves having grown arrogant in so many eras of supremacy, did not even notice to themselves the strange shrines set up in the forests, believing it some useless and worthless human religion or undertaking. On one day, seven hundred years after the first class of magickians had learnt to extend their lifespans and after generations of human laborers had sacrificed their lifespans to extend the project, the science of avout and the mystics of magick were combined, and across a hundred undersea basins, the human airships rose, enchanted with wards of protection and armed with harpoons of sharpest southland steel. Hunters became the hunted, as human airships rose too high above the reach of even the elvish bowmen, and laid down incendiaries to scorch the earth itself. Horrible poisons were used, to create in generations of elves six-legged monstrosities or other such crimes that have burnt now in dark elf race memory. The tree of life itself was assaulted, and in a climactic battle, the yoke of the elves was shaken off forever, how sad the passing of the First Age, how tragic the end of the fey, but within the burnt core of the last elvish council, the secret of immortalities was taken from the fey race itself, the prince in yellow became the King in Yellow and all of the first council were gifted with the lifespan of eras. This all man-child knows.

The problem of a "revolutionary beginning" is that of course every man and woman everywhere supports the nobility, and the basic facts of history aren't under dispute. We know the fey folk once lived across the land of Hastur; we know the land was once forested almost completely, a sea of trees dark and mysterious, and that humans were just sport for the long-lived elves who were fair and gay and light-haired and filled with laughter. Human legend still contains stories of immortal feasts and bells deep within winter forests, as the hunter approached, the entire scene would disappear, leaving the hunter wandering in circles for what seemed like hours, only to return to their house to discover twenty years had passed. There are innumerable variants of legends such as these, and we know also that the defeat of the elves has driven them into the Underdark where now they sit and plot amidst obsidian and garnet, having lost their world and knowing that their tree of life has been razed to the roots, but uncertain when they will recover the central island or lost Caracosa. Did not their gods Kali, Basheer promise them that the age of the elves would return again? Or did now their legends proclaim that the gift of life, their eight hundred years to man's eighty, was always the sign of divine favor? So how did man reverse the coin? Where did the airships come from and how could science and magick be combined in such a fashion that elves with their enchanted bows could still not take on a blademaster with counter-charms and gunpowder? Yet the land of Caracosa continues to decline, and the suns grew more dim, and everywhere there is the nameless portent of war, for the king in yellow is in decline, and the nobility grows more wretched every year, and though laughter echoes through the halls of the old central castle, still there are dim visions of a new city coming into life across the lake, a new city that only some can see, the very young and the very old, but others in the prime of their life laugh and call a mirage.

The problems of Caracosa are legion and multifaceted, but amidst all the tumult of voices both glad with joy and dead with sorrow, we know that the once proud ranks of the Imperial Guard are decimated, and that only bounty-hunters and contract killers maintain orders across vast stretches of the imperium, and that the totality all amounts to a sense of senselessness. And here today I repeat that under faufreluches, I had the library of magickal tomes under a new organizational system, one in which I would do but four or five hours of work a week, but the order of the king in yellow came and I squired out in the wilderness for some seven years, seeing such blood and intestinal spew spray out in such quantities on our dim earth that I suppose all in one sense a sense of comedy grows. An eighty year old man in Imperial armor? Walking dead tending fields? It would seem all manner of abstraction and the Weird has sprung up in our yellowing days, and I admit as well I await the fall of the House of Caracosa without especial care or sentiment, despite what favors I have been shown by the King in Yellow and the nobility that plots amongst itself, waves its fans and seeks—desperately—any new entertainment or amusement in a world that to them, of course, has grown completely grim and humorless. The celagos were squawking, yesterday, that actually this year brings a bumper crop. But what it was watered with the blood of thousands dispatched by men in black, gunslingers, or the witching crew? Black-suited women on enchanted broomsticks: this has what has become of the once proud towers of Caracosa, and our city seems more and more infected with obscenities these days, amidst halls which echo no longer with the pitter-patter of the walk of children or the games of the youth. Whatever gold can be derived from the empire goes simply into further castle-building, for there is no more concern anymore for the education or edification of the youth, just the protection and the warding spells and the rumors that the gnomes too are assembling a vast and underground army, and that the dark elves grow more bold every year in their plans for vengeance, and the cycles begin again in this, year 11738 in the age of man, after the fair-haired elves were sent reeling into exile, and the wind-swept isles of Wind were closed to outsiders, and the fisherfolk and mantis crustaceans crawled ashore from blackened seas, under blackened skies that speak speak speak of the soon arrival of fire and lightning. The elementals are coming. All this all can scry.

But it had begun, after all, with Avola and her whirling blades amidst a sea of fire-spark, and her learning the arts of deception and trickery and the loss of value amongst a world which had lost them already, decades ago. I had gained an audience with the king in yellow, for such had been my accomplishment in the wilderness years, and for my sins, I was to learn further about the plans of the high lords and the dukes in their estates under faufreluches. An ironic expression crossed my face, for what I was to be told I had already learned many years before.

III.

Blood begins everything. Avola the blade-dancer is dead, and her body burned as per custom of the demesne of the King in Yellow, and I am recalled to the palace to be feted and feasted, and yet, as out of a goblet of pure diamond I drink blood-wine, and taste mantis crustacean and dune worm and the most rarity of rarities in cuisine, the cuisine reversed and mirroring the diet of commoners, carib bean before the bufsteak, and dinner to end in salads and greens, yet the houses major and minor detect in me "an attitude problem," and ask me, in ever so versed and polite terms, "what ails you?"

"Faufreluches custom permits me open proclamation at this point," I reply. "Not even the four great Houses with their public names Davios, Khan, Mook, or Forestt—although we all know these are mere terms of convenience—may oppose the declared Guest of Honor."

The sergeant of protocol assents.

"Repetition annoys the great and high lords above, but faufreluches left me the library at Caracosa with my two hundred house imps and six million copper a year. I am expected to be grateful to have traveled the realms and squired the most renowned blade-dancer in Caracosan history, having seen blood and strife and the flesh of humans lying like steaks and cutlets on the ground. But, is it not obvious that with six million copper a year as per my birth-position, I could have seen just as much of the world by my own propulsion, irregardless of having known the great Avola of the Blades through forest, dale, field and underdark?"

The duke of Mook smiles first, unfolding black lace gloved hands to reply in stentorian terms. "But how long does the fourth Scribe, third assistant bookkeeper believe he would have endured as librarian, abstrackter, and tome scribbler? Surely you have seen such sights beyond all mortal measure, and known such subtleties that would have escaped any or all that travel amongst us?"

I stand up and seize the moment. "Yes, your sire, in fact I know that there is indeed not just the four houses Davios, Khan, Mook, and Forestt, but also the House-in-Being."

Suddenly a dead silence falls amongst the feast hall. Is there the slightest of hand movements amongst even the lords, a nervous jerk of but two-tenth of an inch, but revelatory.

Mook again smiles, broadly, "Librarian, you have read your texts too well."

"Kill him." A whisper.

"Who so spills the blood of an imperial servant reveals only his hand in treachery," speaks a high lord of Davios.

"I have further announcement," I reply.

The dinner is hushed.

"To the east, the gnomes who liberated man now turn against him. There is secret compact."

"That is the nature of your revelation," asks a bored lord of Khan.

"We are all universally aware that the King in Yellow—finally—reaches the end of his near immortality. The skies grow dark wish ash from the rumored lands beyond the western sea, the sea we cannot cross because the winds always blow so strongly in one direction. Yet I think there is another possibility: our land is not flat. If we cross the sea of trees to the east, and then reach the sea of mountains Demhe, as all travelers report, to cross one range is only to see another, yet higher. To cross that one, one sees only yet another higher ridgeline. Skeletons litter the sea of mountains, for nothing grows there, and no life can be meaningfully be sustained."

The lords exchange glances and suffer my continuation.

"The solution is simply mathematickal. One man with a mule can only travel thirty days before he must turn back or leave his skeleton amidst the rocks and granite cliffs, the scree. But if three men set out, after two weeks, two can turn back, giving the last a full load of supplies, and then that man man can continue on for another month. If we simply extrapolate these numbers, an expedition of some sixty or eighty may be able to send a single man or pair of men as far as six months deep into the mountains and thus reach the other end of the world."

Laughter amidst the lordships. "Our land is flat." "Our land is curved like a bowl." "Folly." "He proposes an expedition."

Davios replies. "Your proposal is no more fantastick than the proposal that we re-populate Hastur with the people of the Isles of Winds. Or was it last century that a scribe suggested we meld our blood with that of the knomes and create a new-race of stocky and rugged dwarf-men. What makes you think we do not already know that new alchemickal reactions are being developed in the Underdark? Why do you not understand, that at a merely stripling of a man, twenty, you have barely begun to understand the yellowing of our world is irreversible? You must live another era or two before you can begin to understand...but no wait, you don't have that luxury. Even another ten years' wait seems eternity to you."

"I hear and understand, my Lord."

Khan speaks up, lord of the south and the barrier pines. "As a child, you speak of finalities and absolutes. There are those who call for a raid south to green the desert once and for all, but that too is fantastick thinking. The dune worm is as critical to our ecologies as the pierce-bird is to arctic fisheries. No one can finance an expedition to the east as you describe, and no tecknologies exist to sail directly against the west wind. Even the airships are grounded, their functions relegated to a priesthood which has forgotten its avout."

"Yes, my lord."

Forestt, who had been silent much of the meal, contemplated what we now ate, pheasant in mandrake and pomegranate sauce, aubergine, and fillets of young deer. The servantry scurried about, silent, and infinitely submissive.

"Librarian, perhaps I of the nobility may be able to render assistance, if that is your truest wish. Or, possibly, if you were to beg unceasingly to a return to your Scribeship and your two hundred demonic imps and your books, you might even in time regain that, but you have tasted the life of the hunter-killer and your hands, too, as you admit, are stained. I think you future lies in the south; or for a time at least you will remember Caracosa. But there will be no assumption of the throne of Yellow. Even Davios knows this."

(Was there a blink?)

Forestt continued. "We are in agreement mostly in terms of the creation of songs and the playing of new games. The rise of the Knome Messiah or the whispers that the firesparks from the west have grown more animated, almost lifelike play merely into prophecy of our need for novelty rather than world-shaking reanimation. Behold the skeletons pulling the plows that living men once drew across the ground. Observe how the character of the hunter-killers grow more dark and their complexions more troubled and swarthy. We want to know more about Avola, less about you, Librarian. What lay deep in her psyche?"

String musicians, who had maintained a soft and relaxing melody throughout the servings of first, second, and third course, now switched their song to match a general change in mood, as new conversations began, and the houses spoke amongst themselves. I looked at the great fireplace, where logs of giant black wood were barely consumed as they filled the hall with heat, and the enchanted glow-gems gave off their radiance of reds and yellows. I was being offered time to collect my thoughts, and yet I remembered Avola's body most of all, her muscle-taut physique, our lying together. But fortunately at this time the servants, long my allies as librarians and the kitchen never fight for turf or supremacy, outdid themselves and brought out a tasting platter of plover eggs, deep-sea squid, bird's nest, whole-eaten half-hatched, the blood of reptiles, and an exquisite roll of seven sweetbreads spiraled into an indescribable roll of multiplying tastes. It afforded me the opportunity to expound on an entirely different subject.

"My lordships, of course I will speak of Avola and her five years as hunter-killer above the scorched earth and then two years in the underdark, but our very cuisine itself offers itself commentary on the nature of society. The peasants, even when they feast, even they get game or bufsteak, eat as so: salad, main dish, bread, and if lucky, sugars. We reverse this, as per long-established custom: the carib bean and blood wine to begin, then the sweetmeats, the actual filets and scallops of stringy flesh-cut, sauce-poured creations, and lastly, the greeneries for those who partake. Does nobody else understand the significance of the reversal."

The lordships seem mildly interested, but some are already letting their attention drift.

"The reversal represents the hidden desire of the nobility: to return to the primeval state."

But all along the long dinner table, the conversation had already evolved into separate groupings of discussion, and my moment in the spotlight had ended.

With regard to the dinner to mark the fall of the greatest bladedancer and bounty-caller in Hastur history, there is probably endlessly more than can be written. But my fingers weary at this moment, and it is a topic to which I may or may not return, knowing only that the coincidence of the funeral dinner coincided with the celebration of Liberation Day, the annual year-tide when Man celebrated the end of his slavery to Elf, a custom that was celebrated in Hastur with the wearing of masks and a carnivalesque of reversals and temporary relaxation of the faufreluches, the only fortnight of the year when a lordship in yellow might walk unmolested amidst the poorest hovels of the souks and wake up the next day with only the headache that comes from cheap alcohol. Eight days of celebration awaited, followed by no less than six further days of revelry and pardons, debt-forgiveness and spectacle. These are things I feel compelled to record, although again not at this particular moment, standing as I am at the blade-edge between the dinner of the nobilities and the street parades of the guilds and trades and even better the semi-legals and brief glimpses of notable crime lords who might otherwise be shot on sight. There is only one Caracosa, and so regulations that empires of many cities enforce cannot be enforced absolutely, and even the skeletons in the field are given rest although they do not weary, and purple-haired knomes might be seen preaching the doctrine of the Messiah, while war-birds circle in the clouds above, and the drift of ash takes on at least temporarily a white glow, snow, hoarfrost, abdication.

Amidst this city which had been designed as a city of canals but whose canals flowed only with blood and spoil and offal, at least year-tide brought the dance of masks when, precisely, the very fact that you did not know to whom you spoke permitted you the freedom that was otherwise lacking in a caste system rigid and unyielding and in which a man might suffer for the crimes of his fifth grand father above him, revealing as it did weakness in the genetics of that mortal, and condemning the name of his family to shame. All happenings were recorded in the central books, and the librarians in the cowls walked the archives with hushed voices: it was what I had known in my childhood growing up, and in the dustiest of archives encountered the strangest texts that allowed me to relate the most fantastic of theoricks or theories, as yawn-inducing as they might be to the nobility. Further, though I was yellow-sick (ordinary humans who contact too long the near-immortals experience nausea and headaches for some days after), amidst this year's year-tide I thought I could hear the approaches of some and another, couriers from Forestt or Khan, each of whom were known to have their own peculiar approaches to things, and not so much the Davios-Forestt-Mook dynamic which had long been understood.

Four houses: four dynastic regimes. Four different histories that inherited from the band of thirteen that had burned the Tree of Life, the Willow, with stone-burners paid in blood from the gnomes, and then forever ended the slavery of man to elf. Yet each of these four houses represented not just a difference of aspect, but of outlook:

DAVIOS, first among equals, the Prince in Yellow, holders of the western territories and the fisherfolk, the original men; sea-skiffers of 30 meter waves and the blow-striker, the yoke-unyoker. Free of speech and free of wandering. Senior to all yet beset on all sides, bearers of sword, and battlers against the leviathans and jonas-whales, the sun in yellow, the blazing star, the upholder of right and wrong.

KHAN, keepers of the southern wall, the pine barrens that keep back the shifting dune, dune-worm ryder and keeper, half-cat and half-human, horse-rider and dromedary dweller. To live and die upon the back of a horse, and hold themselves proud as free beyond the law, vagrant and drifter yet tactical and rescuer of lost causes.

Judgeship of MOOK, gate holders of the Demhe, mysterious and secretive. Dwells on the surface and in the Underdark, direct liaison to the Gnomes, yet distrusted amongst the four. Knife-workers and alchemists, symbolists and semiotick.

FORESTT, giant-blood and silver-blue, fewest in number yet deepest in promises. Offers me another intrusion into the Underdark but may not be able to fulfill such whispered words of promise nor yet takes responsibility for the extraction extrication. Balance-holder and ice-rider for three hundred kilometers on sledge or ice-oliphant. Completely happy to be completely aloof. I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hare or feather in the clouded in the cloudy mixtures of memory, yet the eight days of fête may yet evolve into a full fortnight, where amidst echoing stone passageways of Caracosa I see visions of the love that dissolves into smoke or fog, and recall an earlier city. There was a gnomic passage way all the way from Demhe in the east, gated, to the island of Avalon in the western sea: what does this imply for the catacombs beneath our imperial city? Yet either signage apart, I tarried amidst crowds of revelry, firework, and the clanging of gongs that marked the changing of guards but also the passage of hours as each determined day of fête signified the alteration of position and rank that became, in turn, our off-stage call to play, in part, king, daughter, and fool, where masks danced and the commoner's position was known to everyone, actually, to have been the best fate of all, not us, not our imperial duties, nor even the nobility in the declining keeps. In the souks, in the souks I saw the trades occurring, but not fully join in the carnival, for it was wiser, actually to speak to masks openly than to faces in coded allusion. There was no crime to speak to an empty portal: this was the first law of Davios, if I whispered into a darkened passageway that hid only lovers seeking privacy from the red glow of half-night, than nobody could consider that an indiscretion _per se_ , although I wasn't absolutely sure what secrets were demanded at this point, or even amidst the churning crowd.

Caracosa bid me stay and remember its city-ways yet again, Forestt promised financing for new adventure to the east; Davios wanted to know more about Mook who waved fans and hid behind veils of black lace and intricate etiquette that even itself refused to contemplate; formally in squireship to Davios yet the ones most capable of understanding at all that Davios was only a prince in waiting, that he would never, ever, impossibly ascend the throne of yellow and displace the king whose name we feared to name. Chiricon streets turned and twisted to reveal the broken red tower, and on the shores of the lake of Hali, a new city begun to emerge, seen only by the very young and the very old, and even the animated skeletons that plowed the pastures and gardens nearest Caracosa stopped in their labors to observe the half-existence, half-non-existent city that held promise and peril. Amidst the turgid crowds, I let float in mood that was neither exuberant nor entirely goaded into its reverse. What I thought—about this odd period, this non-final year-tide—was that although we were celebrating the fall of the greatest bounty-hunter of history, Avola of the 14,000 kills, at the same time the days after the dinner were not so much about the noble houses as the guilds of the faufreluches, who demonstrated who really held the streets during the time of reversed social order and the jester made king for the fortnight. I was looking for—love? It came in whispered tones or a half-sweep of a dress across stone, through passageways dim and bricked over, and then the souk alleyways leading to the darkest of unlit streets, yet I found consolation only in an imitation of what I had known with the princess of blades. It wasn't so much that I cared for the re-entry into Demhe; it was that I knew it called me, as death calls one, and as one becomes healthier and healthier the closer one lives in its embrace. "Go south, go south," yelled the bearded librarians, hoary in the age-white, but dune-worm and barrier pine held little appeal for me, even with whatsoever scryed mystic visions of the sea of sand that swept over the civilizations that melded temple into lost oasis. I knew in my heart entry into Demhe was inevitable, it was just a question of when and after how long, after the wrinkles in my life had marked me in our radiation-saturated world, one of those who longed, so sadly, for continued life, or to fall, flower-like, at twenty-two having never known anything beyond the march of days that continued endlessly endlessly endlessly like a waterfall, like the tide of time itself which presented its face to me, ceaselessly, as the prisoner's guard, smiling only in that our relationship could never be reversed: I would never be time's warden.

My belief is not really so much that the fifth house, the house-in-becoming, will become; as any child can understand, Davios will never inherit the yellow throne; but even beyond all this, my thoughts tended to the idea that actually it was the age of the mass effort after all, and in the purification awakening channels that were spreading across the demoscape of man itself, we could see already the lineaments of future war between the gnomes become knomes allied with the dark elves, their unearthed elementals, and the elder gods, and man after the fall of the house of yellow, organized in rite of purification. Skeletons in church vestments? Who could of thought of such sacrilege? But the eternal problem was that yellow could not become white. White could become yellow, but yellow could never repurify itself from its pristine purity, like snow, and the stink of humanity itself assaulted my nostrils like so much vulgarity and lust for material goods. Between sweet bean cake and yeartide bakeries, I wandered the souks and alleyways and revered of passages from lost-forgotten texts, the lost lane-end, the lost passage, the forgotten word.
PART 2: YEARTIDE

IV.

As every human-child is taught from birth, for twelve times twelve-thousand years, man lived as slave to elf. No human in his eighty allotted years of life could hope to rebel against the fey folk who lived for eight hundred, and our stories are filled with the constant legend of the mysterious feast in the forest which disappeared as one approached, the man hunter who fell asleep and awoke one hundred forty-four years later to discover his own grand-children dead, or the deadly elven arrows that would slice a human patrol to death long before they could even discover the source of the weapons. "Never to forgive, never to forget." Every year at yeartide the ritual is re-enacted, the wearing of masks, the re-telling of the story, the rise of Kain, who reclaimed the land of Hastur for Man, and how the Tree of Life of the Elves was burnt to the ground with the use of gnomic stone-burners, and the elves forever banished from windworld, to be driven deep into the mountains they once disdained, and their own legends turned against them.

Elf Legend: three brothers, Lillith, Kain, and Worof, burnt their sacrifices to the Creator God, Lillith the Hunter, Kain the Fisherman, and Worof the sower of the seeds. Of the three sons, the offerings of Lillith were accepted and thus Elf acquired the Forests, the Tree of Life, the land of Hastur, and eight hundred years of lifespan. Kain the Fisherman barely pleased the Father Creator, and his lifespan was set at eighty years, to inherit the liminal lands, the scraggly terrain, the dead hills, the rocky barrens. Finally Worof the sower of seeds acquired the curse from Father, and with his eight years only was transformed into Dwarf, the half-man, the liver-within-bogs and caves, the kobold with luminous eyes, the half-ghast. And so in this way Elf justified his rule over Man, and an Elf child of some seventy years was easily a match at sword or bow with even the most skilled of Men. But Kain, even in his mayfly existence, was not so easily settled with his lot. Plotting with the gnomes deep within the Underdark, Man acquired stone-burners and avout knowledge. He gained technos whereas Elf was satisfied with wisdom and philosophy. The mathematicks of catapult and the technos of Airship allowed Man on the Day of the Unmasking to infiltrate all the elf encampments, the Tree of Life itself, and liberate Man from Elven Yoke, leaving us the liberation time we know today. Man acquired, through killing the Elf King, the Throne in Yellow, and the noble houses themselves acquired a near immortality, even as all the forests were cut down, and the fields cultivated, and villages and towns spread across the land. This is our inheritance. This is our Foundation Story. We understand now that even the will of the gods can be forced, for technos and the avouts and mathematicks permit us dominion over the darkened elves, exiled to the Underdark, and the four noble houses protect the four cardinal directions, dune shift to the south, icefield to the north, eversea to the west, and the charnel house of endless knife-like ridges to the east, utterly impassable and gateway to the gnomic world.

This is Hastur. This is Caracosa, the windworld, the forgotten world, the cursed world, the world of ash and smog. Every year at year-tide eight days of celebration begin, and the wearing of masks disguise the hidden transfer of information, as guild and thief-house discuss what the next year will bring, and the nobility walk amidst the poorest souks of Caracosa, completely unharmed, yet all aware of the underlying trend, the disintegration of the house of man.

It has been some thousand years since any have seen the King in Yellow.

I spent this year's Yeartide in relative solitude, content merely to observe or to loosely participate. I had known previous celebrations in my childhood, but it was first since my return from the squireship with Avola, the queen of blades, and I felt yellow-sick, the contamination from too much contact with nobles, and too little with the ordinary folk, the commoners whose wisdom really held all the answers after all. A boy-child of no more than seven, wearing a cat mask of silver, approached me among the tunnels and warrens of Caracosa and pointed out, "but why don't you play a game? Why don't you join in festivities?" The common people know far more than the nobility realise. Already the Awakening occurs in the country fields, and skeletons pull plows whilst blest by Adventist rectors. The drumbeats of further war are coming, for the gnomes, whose tunnels reached as far as far Avalon in the islands to the west, are unearthing elder gods. They have located the physical body of an elder god and are putting into effect through dark ritual their own attempt to claim the earth. Kain displaced Lillith, but Worof will displace Kain. The Dwarvan city of Anchorr is mere legend: gnome is the son of dwarf, but knome will be the son of gnome. Knomics is the new philosophy of the emerging underground movement, and the stone-burners lent to the humans have never been returned nor the promises of eleven thousand years ago fulfilled. Once again the world spins towards war.

I do not know fully what my responsibilities are in outlining what is all common knowledge or the realities of the fortnight that have passed, the celebration of the life of Avola, or the movement now to completely ignore the houses Noble and join within the armies of rektors that assemble on darkling plains against the movement of ignorant forces, for the total strength of the knomic armies cannot be estimated. If a tunnel exists all the way out to the windward islands of the west, then how deep does knomic strength go? If the barren pine wall to the south has been breached—as goes the rumor—how much longer until wandering dunes are taking over productive farmland to the south? Would it also be possible for the ice to advance even as the dunes do; whilst water encroaches deeper from the west, leaving us in an endless spiral of declining territory? Only the call, clarion, to war, sounds out, for if you are losing, then you may as well lose in climactic battle than whittled away piece-by-piece. Human territory is falling. The rektors are chanting their prayers to a single god, but deep within the fire earth, the gnomes have their god physically present in existence, a heart of stone beating, fire being animated into actual living creatures. We cannot stand endlessly against such magicks, nor are the old airships capable of flight anymore, one or eleven, the sword and bow-wielding human armies, the primitive matchlocks, the stone-burners, the copies of dwarvan steam tank, against living fire, blue fire, whirlwind, the dark elf ranger battalions, and the knomes' flying contraptions. On cobblestone and in stone alleyways, amidst the graystone and twilight-lit half-night of a red-sun's scarce blood light, I watched the festivities proceed and detected the same gaieties I had known from an earlier age. But now, having squired for the bladedancer, I spent much of the height of the festivities merely hunting down the supposedly now scarce khat leaves and wondered if there was any truth to the supposed street wisdom that even paprika would be scarce next year. As the guilds wandered and the revelers wore their masks, what I thought of was how yellow-sick one became with too much exposure to the nobility. Yet the judgeships and the eminences grise had their way: so too could I.

Maybe it was about the boy in the cat mask; or perhaps, after all, the sign of the horse had risen, and under the constellations that had been scryed by astrologers, we were searching for hints of the future. But between a sudden ache that overtook my dull and wearied head, and as well the booms and blasts of revelry, I was overcome only by a sense of concentricities and circles, the unknown and the parasitic. "You don't get it. You completely don't get it!" insisted a commoner, and the flurry of masks concealed one guild's attempt to ascertain the intentions of another. "The nobility is powerless! They feud only amongst themselves! We, the mecha-trade union are building steam tanks that can roll across the cracked earth and blast apart all gnomic invention. Why even seek hidden magick or the unworking techniks of long-ago lost period? Support, now, strongly, steelworkers and the forgers of new metallic chariots that will take the struggle deep into the caves of the traitor gnomes and blast apart their hidden compartments!" But I was not with certainty. I knew there were passages so deep, so multi-layered, that beneath one level of habitation lay another, and below that, was a gnome clan that rejected even contact with other gnomes. Nobody could exactly measure the extent of the third race, and I wasn't immune as well to the preachings and rektorship of the gnome-friendly. "Build an alliance with the surface gnomes, and we will renew the old friendship of Man and Gnome. It is not the Knome that is the enemy. It is the Nothingness in all that we fight." And I heeded those words. But I did not participate in the endless carnival, as it extended, again, by fiat or by will of the people, another four days, another ten. We could not escape carnival this year, because the yeartide's blood-debt to Avola had not been paid. We had erred.

"Librarian!"

"Yes?"

"You wear no mask."

"I have wearied so much of them."

"Know this: there are sightings now of Avola the blade-dancer, raised from the dead. You did not witness her death. You merely saw her sink into the swamp. It was a gnome invention. They have her. They have revived her. They are copying her as we speak."

"That is sick lie."

"Return yourself to a proper mask, and you will be troubled no more."

But I looked left, and I looked right, and the techno-guilds were still at odds with each other. I wanted no part, this time, in this year's yeartide, and the feuds were both public and private all at once. "Listen, all Human, all blood of Kain," proclaimed the Speaker at Twelve-Era Square, amidst the turgid flow of humanity. "The Plan is simple. We construct the steam devices, the infernal machines, and spray Recian fire into the tunnels themselves; we pour in fire to fight fire, and with our enchantments, we can win this war. We will never flag. We will never stop fighting."

Hawkers of foodstuffs and carnival toys made the loudest calls, drowning even out this year-tide's proclamations.

"That is lie!" screamed a Man in a blood-red mask. "Metal war against the cave-dwellers is impossible for they have all the metallicks. It is Faith, and Faith alone which will unite us and bring us to victory eternal over the menace."

There were waves of discontent, uncertainty amidst the crowds which neither gathered nor dispersed. The switching of masks indicated the switching of sentiment, blood-red replacing sky-blue.

"Worof is our god, too," proclaimed a dissenter. "We should simply worship Worof, and our struggle will then cease." But a knot of bystanders started pummeling him, and blood would have been shed had not blood-crime been especially forbidden during the year-tide, punishable even to a third generation.

A Rektor stood up. "There is but One G-d, the Creator G-d, and He is G-d amongst all the multiverse. Bow your knee before him, and we shall sweep away even a hundred who stand against us. Faith in the Rektorship, the self-assembling group. Do not be fooled by the guilds!"

The guilds' guards took open offense at this remark, and amidst the turmoil of people surging, the revelers and drunken, guards were seen scuffling, carrying away the worst of the brawlers, and seeking to seize the statue areas around which tents of the rich merchants had been assembled, to crown the Lord of the Festival.

"We Unite! We Unite! Never to Forgive! Never to Forget! One hundred forty-four thousand years of Slavery to the Elf! We are the Free Men, and We will Never Submit to the Yoke of the Gnome!"

But then, fortunately, the anger and rage passed, and the year-tide resumed, as it should, to quiet dislocation and exchange of information amidst knots of people. Too many years of slavery: this fact was never denied. Man would never ally with Gnome, and the Dark Elves would never avenge their Tree of Life which had been stone-burnt to its roots and could never be revived.

"Join us now in a game of Yeartide," said the Boy in the Cat Mask. "Come, I will teach you a new game..."

In my years away from Caracosa, what I had failed to understand was the increasing and unceasing sophistication of the common culture as the houses of nobility fell into decline and ceased their meddling in human affairs, allowing commonfolk, ordinary people to develop a rich and variegated culture of their own. Amidst human beings with no noble blood whatsoever, a rich new folk culture had arisen, powered primarily by the guildshop of the doll-makers, whose enchanted creations grew ever more sophisticated and lifelike every year. Furthermore, games-designers had taken the simple dice and divination-yarrow games of childhood and created exciting new entertainments that could occupy one for hours, or with a group of friends, for weeks on end. The old game, king's chess, could be played in competition against an animatronic doll who could almost always make you just about fail to win. The standard game of 46 cards, their four suits and two jokers, had been expanded into a three-hundred card game that involved an endless circularity of green defeating yellow, yellow triumphing over red, but red burning green with the slightest of ease. Green: go, yellow: caution, red: stop at all costs. As I learned the new rules and pondered as well the semioticks of the newly popular "300" game, I also drew breath in with an intake of surprise and wonder at how mysteriously magickal the enchanted machines had become, leaving you lost for weeks in some desert-world of liquid flowing metal and dune-worm that could be ridden, as you staged hit-and-run raids against other players who were also searching for you amidst the endlessly shifting sands. "I had no idea! I had no idea!" I exclaimed, and there were smiles all around for what I was taking shock at was only the most already discarded and joked about of inventions, and already the lead playmasters and game directors were releasing—completely for free—even more sophisticated card, yarrow-stick, doll-player entertainments in which even thousands could try their luck, bet silver, or merely ride the endless spaces endlessly trading or merely observing, socializing or creating entirely self-contained universes within the game-world itself. Caracosa, released from

faufreluches, had become democratic in a sense, more about whether a young eight-year old would choose the ascending doll-maker guild to seek his fame or fortune or whether an eleven-year old apprentice would even choose to restart her specialization as a base one, as the new sweets and rush-canes from the south islands permitted the creation of sweetmeats which had long been the reserve of the nobility only. A world could be changed by spice: what a thought. The only thing indisputable was that the difference between a city-wide hit and a complete flop was oftentimes the subtlest of details, an animatronic king-chess player with wide eyes but somehow always almost drove you to almost-fail enjoying massive and widespread popularity, whereas puzzled, the mathematikans who had created the perfect Mechanikal Turk could not understand why they saw no return on investment, and in trying to reach the perfect reached the imperfect, the imperfection seekers found the perfect, it was mystikal, it was what the frost giants had wanted, the languages guild seeing no new entrants this year, nothing to offer, no new jobs, no new apprenticeships at the barrier pines, and each individual in return seeing things completely differently, and with different expectations, dreams, recommendations.

How do I summarize what was happening? The point of carnival was always the inversion of things, the high made low and the low made high. Yet with rumors of war and the sparks flying in the air, long ascending doll-makers guild now saw itself in a turmoil of grief and rumor turned against, its hyperanimatronics useless on the actual cracked earth, the steel and blood crowd ascendent, a heavy armor solution, an acid-resistant base. The infernal machines, the steam-tanks, these had been copies of ancient dwarf design, ten tonnes or more in weight, powered by alchemies of infinite heat-source pushing extreme high-pressure ice-water into flash piston-movement, and then, "boom!" a might blast three hundred meters away, the hard-core philosophy, the driller philosophy. Metallic-Guild had demonstrated a mighty drilling machine that could power through solid rock at 10 meters a second, showing the power of the people, the imagination unleashed, the ability to take the fight not merely in surface and near-subsurface but deep into the bedrock itself. They were fools. I had known two years in the Underdark, but the only thing they asked me was, "what Avola's time there like? How had she changed?" with the stories unanswered and those years, those months and days that lengthened when one had no way of knowing time, searching, searching, searching, listening, listening, listening, all warfare ambush, all tunneling counter-tunneling, and the quick patter of soft-leather clad dark elf feet on stone, to reveal the runes that were evidence that myth was true, the dwarves were real. Did human \+ gnome = dwarf? That was the standard claim. But human females disdained male gnomes, and the few gnomes who bore half-human children were outcasts from their own community, existing a liminal existence, selling their bodies in the souk, or laughed at for their over-large hands. We were a mixed race, cat blood in the south, frost giant in the north, and all the infusion of rumored dark-elf mixing back in the elder days, predating major god or even titan, to delve deeper and deeper into myth, whilst my recommendations to investigate the Avalon event universally agreed to be a complete non-starter. "She had been scapegoated, she had been scapegoated!" I cried, but my tears were answered only with the wearing of silver-tin masks and the revelry continued, and the latest fad now was heavy black velvet cloth and the advent of death-aesthetics amidst a tracktor built entirely of bones. The "bone-horror" they called it: a un-living creature a hundred meters of length, capable of reassembling itself out of the bones and fragments of other creatures, and ridden only by an arch-rektor himself, accompanied by thousands of the faithful, the undead in their clerical robes, the blessed archers, the steam-tanks. Such an army had never been envisioned in all the imaginings of all the libraries of the world, including the mythical ones; union of the holy and the profane, and accompanied by man who had conquered death and triumphed over life, but faced now the Underdark, knomical science, their aerial contraptions, and living fire. Rumor spread faster than truth, a sighting of just a raven became inflated through conversational intercourse into the mass thousand-fleet raid of reapers, which bore the insignia of the god in red, the knomic god. They wanted knosis: direct communion; we offered the alternative of a god unknowable and elucidic: mono-God.

Of all the stories handed down through all the generations—even those of the elves, who disdained the records, it was part of their downfall—nobody had ever imagined that horrific mass army we assembled, a creation of heaven and hell where priests blessed animated skeletons and the living fought harder than the dead. I found myself chastised, despite an entire childhood living amidst the stacks of tomes and libros that constituted the Great Library of Caracosa, and scribbler IV, I knew nothing would provide guidance for the clash that would take place, the plain of skulls, golgotha, the originating battle. I knew that preparation were far too hasty, for we were being driven by mass sentiment alone, but those I counseled patience to scoffed at my words.

"Librarian, get back to your books! You are living some delusion of nobility's plays and the 'contact improvisional theatricks' which is children's hobby. We assemble the army of doom and take the battle to the underdark, we root out the evil to its core." But my tears, my pleadings, none of my advisements could mean anything against an idea whose time had come: there were not gods; there were no spirits and multiverses. There was only the One, the Mono, the Father Creator. The children of Kain were re-arming themselves for another scorched-earth mission deep into the warrens of Underdark, but I could do absolutely nothing at all to delay, stay, or even suggest better preparation for my own bloodfolk's lust to thrust deeply into the terrifying spiral of ever greater self-destruction. Nothing could stand, all believed, against Man who had conquered Death. Our legions assumed the colors of black and white only, and neglected that strange alliance of the blue and yellow that had always somehow managed to maintain a tenuous balance, however fragile and precarious its balance had been.

The Arch-Rektor stood on his dias lifted high on a fluted column above the millions that had assembled, that had run out of every nook and cranny of Caracosa to hear the speech that would mark the longest Yeartide ever known to Man. Around stood the hooded cowls of his high priesthood and Arch raised the Ankh, a circle above the T that stood for Unity, One-ness, Godhead, and the Mono. "Children of Men!"

The crowd stirred.

"Do you want Total War?"

"Yes!"

"Do you remember one hundred forty-four THOUSAND years of slavery?"

"Yes!"

"Never to forgive!"

"Never to forget!"

"Do you want Total War?"

"Total War!"

"Their is only One God, the Creator God, and We are the Rightful Sons of Kain!"

"Total War!"

"We will burrow into the warrens!"

"We will smoke the bandits!"

"There is no God but the One God!"

And the crowds were ecstatic once again: Year-tide was not eight days, it was not fourteen, but it was nineteen days in total, the longest ever recorded in history.

"Children of Men!"

"Yes!"

"Do you know the _Legend of Avola?_ "

"Yes!"

"See now, Her Squire, the Librarian, Scribe IV, here present amongst our midst."

Suddenly I realized I had been had. The Arch-Rektor's minions had conveniently located me next to the tents of the richest merchants of all, and at a hidden signal, all around me, grabbed hold of me and raised me above their shoulders.

"Librarian! Librarian! Librarian!" The crowd grew ecstatic with war fever.

Arch-Rektor faced me directly as pointed beams of light highlighted me amidst the yeartide mob of millions.

"How many bandits and gnome criminals did the blade-dancer kill, Librarian?"

I was crimson, but forced to admit the truth. "Fourteen thousand."

"Louder, Librarian! Louder!"

"FOURTEEN THOUSAND, SIR!"

The crowds grew frantic with joy at the realization that a single human being could kill fourteen thousand bandits and enemies. They became convinced almost to a totality that the ceremony could immediately cease and that they could rush to battle instantly. Only the temple guards kept the crowd in check using bludgeons and carpet-rolls to spill no blood, as per ancient custom, at Yeartide.

"Then we shall advance to Victory Immortal! We shall never flag in our efforts."

What I wanted to point out was that eight thousand of Avola's kills had been the city of Kef, poorly sited and with only a few exit points that our allies among the gnomes, human-friendly tribes, had sealed off. It was hardly "Avola's tally," but legends had a way of growing, and she was, after all, the one who sealed off the final passageway, dooming eight thousand to asphyxiation. War in the Underdark had been smog-ridden, hopeless, helpless, terrifying, exhausting, demoralizing, and in the end, disturbing to the psyche, destructive to reason and the senses. But at the next signal, the gleaming drill pansers of the Metal-workers' Guild began their stately procession, and at the sight of so many magnificent instruments of war, all Son of Kain's hearts began to beat at once, and the mood began to intensify. It was time for the guild-masters to make their move.

"Wait!"

A stir amidst the crowd. One of the Rektors tore back her hood, revealing the red hair so common to the isles of wind, and pure-blooded human. All amidst the crowd were stunned, silenced.

"I demand pause in this wild-driven process."

There was shock, horror, terror in the crowd. Dissent within the ranks. The Arch-Rektor, still holding aloft his ankh of authority, turned his head and assumed an expression of the utmost disgust. "What is your complaint, Acolyte Rektor?"

"Rumor of the gnome's Infernal Contraptions is no Lie. We cannot simply rush into battle even with our great drill pansers and our steam tanks of three inches plating. We must seek an answer to the Reapers and Falkons which the Knome Firefleet deploy. Land forces alone will be charnel-fodder if we do not control the air."

Amidst the crowd, then, Valentine, the Master of the Steelworkers arose, finally, for his moment had arrived. "Then I provide the greatest solution of all."

Once again the crowd was silent. Amidst three million, the sound of a pin dropping could be heard. Steelworker guild journeymen brought forth palanquins which were hooded and veiled, and six million eyes strained to see what was carried forward, even as the procession of drill pansers and steam tanks lay still.

"Master of the Steelworkers," proclaimed the Arch-Rektor. "Display us your answer to this challenge legitimate and rational."

The Steelmaster nodded at his head, and with a subtle gesture of his hand, bid his journeymen to throw back the clothes. Once again, yet once again, a gasp tore across three million throats.

"Behold, Children of Men! Behold, Sons of Kain! We have taken examples of the Gnomes' Infernal Contraptions. Behold! The Reaper! The Falkon!"

And there, for the first time for commoners' eyes, what had long been legend or dismissed as the ravings of mead-drunk village idiots, the Gnomes' most dreaded inventions: aerial contraptions, armed to the hilt, and flying far beyond the range of even enchanted elvish bows. Reaper. Falkon. Self-directed flying machines, and the stuff of legend. There were easily a dozen, in various states of destruction or disrepair, but in their totality including also at least two barely damaged ones.

"Children of Men! Sons of Kain!" boomed out the Arch-Rektor. "No Knomish devilry can match the cunning our own proktors, who have taken down or seized the Enemy airwings even while we patiently waited our time. The Reaper! The Falkon! Behold, nothing more than mekanical devices that we can control, that we can force down, and now, with it in our hands, can be studied by our most learned avouts and even the house of Logick." He was handed the first device, Falkon, a small aerial craft no more than four imperial feet in width, and showed it to the assembled masses. With the ankh now handed off to a protocol monk, the Arch-Rektor took his right hand, and ripped off the airwing's cowling, revealing a tangled mass of wires and metallicks. "No magick, Human! No curse or enchantment! No Knomish devilry that burns the hands of Man who dares to touch this device. There is nothing in here that we are not already replicating in our most advanced laboratories! The Knomes are helpless!"

The crowd roared. It was drunk with the expectation of six weeks' victory. The gnomes would be flooded with poison gases, and they would have no chance for even a minimalist defense.

"Knome Legend Two, the Reaper!"

This was a more grandiose design, and two Apprentices were required to bring up the aerowing, although even then they struggled and almost slipped as they mounted the stone steps up to the dias of the Arch-Rektor. The display, however, was once again the same.

"Children of Men! Sons of Kain! No magick! No curse or enchantment or steel so cold it burns Human hands!" And with a gesture, the Lord Kantor ripped off the cowling, revealing once again only wires and tangled metallick devices of infernal design. The crowd roared. Lifting up a kukri knife, the Arch-Rektor plunged his blade deep into the contraption. _But did not strangely the Falkon quiver for a second, as if a tenshi or living creature_ , _a bird-girl._ It had to be a trick of the eyes. In any case, blue blood did not come spurting out of the Falkon, and another childhood rumor, a story to frighten children with, was shown to be destructible after all.

"You have been told that the Knomish Falkon is an indestructible weapon of warfare, that the knomes can bombard us from the skies without any danger to themselves. Beams of green light shoot down, and poof! a human patrol is wiped out. But these are lies! Damn the gnomes!" The Arch-Rektor raised his Ankh.

"Damn the gnomes!" cried the crowd.

"Damn the gnomes!" repeated the Rektor king.

"Damn the gnomes!" cried the crowd.

"Damn the gnomes!" shouted out the Arch-Rektor.

"Damn the gnomes!" yelled the turgid crowd, surgent and infected with battlelust. Yet even now the ceremony did not flag.

"Master of the Doll-maker Guild!" called out the Arch-Rektor.

The pillars of light aimed at the sky now swiveled and cast their intense white brilliance on the Doll-maker pavilion. The Guildmaster, as per custom, wore his Mask on this day as on every other day, a privilege reserved for the guildmasters alone.

"Yes, Arch-Rektor?"

"Unmask thyself."

"Such is your command."

Silence again, the sound only of a man coughing, a child's cries quickly hushed. Then, the sudden intake of breath as three million took in a lungful of air all at once. Platinum-blonde.

"The Guild of Dollmakers is at the service of the Rektorit" called out the voice, which was the voice of a woman, and a woman impossibly fair, platinum-blonde in hair, and elf-white as in the elder days, wrought through stereoscopic and lighting effect to seemingly almost dazzle at that moment. It was nearly unheard of, of course, to see blondes in these days; and this one had not the slightest blemish on her thirty-odd year old features.

"It is the wish of the Rektorit that the Guild of the Dollmakers cease their clash with the Guild of the Steelworkers, and swear fealty to the coming Alliance."

"Then the Guild of the Dollmakers swears fealty to the Guild of the Steelworkers, and the clash of the guilds is over." And all over the three million citizens of Caracosa, the entirely-staged feud of the Dollmakers to the Steelworkers was at that moment finished for eternity, although of course it had always been an invention anyway. I felt overcome, finally, at that moment, and tears flowed like a river from my eyes, for I discovered now, finally, finally, finally, that I loved Man after all, for He had finally discovered the truth behind the ossified conventions of faufreluches, and the commoners, finally, finally, finally had learned what the nobility had known ever since the beginning of time. I bawled as a child or newborn, _and I cried even much more than I had at the death of Avola, for I loved Man, I loved Man and the Commoners as they had finally gained the liberation they had sought for so long. The power of the nobility was broken forever, and the Rektorit had become the new Rulers of Caracosa and Hastur, from the barriers pines to the south to the frostlands in the north; the endless waves from the west to the knife-ridges in the east. The Commonfolk had awoken, and feudalism was broken forevermore._

One final basilisk carried lengthwise was brought to the Arch-Rektor, upon which bones lay, a clear and unanimated skeleton. Movement from left and right brought the Rektors in their cowls closer, obscuring for a moment a flurry of activity, and then before the eyes of three million onlookers, the Arch-Rektor raised his ankh one final time.

"By the powers granted by me through the one and only Creator G-d, the Mono God, the single G-d. I bid this skeleton of man to come back to life."

And before the eyes of three million onlookers, the skeleton shuddered, the bones seemed to sweep as if disturbed by wind or external motion, and then suddenly, terrifyingly, assembled themselves, crouched, and then rose up, picking up a sword of sharpest steel.

"There is only one G-d, the Creator G-d, and by the powers granted by me by that G-d, we have regained the powers once monopolized by nobles in their decadent dress. Once dead, you are now here a soldier of Man, returned from death to fight for Life and Love."

Once again, only I and a handful knew. It was the technik of the Dollmakers. There was no re-animation, no magick, and no resurrection. But the People wanted to believe, and Yeartide finally ended.

So that was the yeartide of 11738/9, the great nineteen days yeartide, never to be exceeded, never without parallel without history, unless, in that abstract sense the very first yeartide, the liberation, lasted seventy-seven days of celebrations and then, in a years to come, there was another one of forty-four days although that's a matter of definition and scholarly dispute since a respite after a catalysmic battle or temporary but apparently permanent ceasefire that happens to coincide with a yeartide, bells tolling across rektorits, does not constitute a formal yeartide per se, although once again I'm becoming pedantic again, and trying to categorize things that are in the end unclassifiable. 11738/9 marked the great changeover because feudal order finally collapsed, the staged guild-war was shown to be puppet-mastered by secret alliance between the Dollmakers and Steelworkers, the commoners seized power, the Awakening began, Mono became the universal religion of Man, and though the ceremonies began with a funerary rite for somebody who actually wasn't dead and ended with a resurrection that was not actually a reanimation of a skeletal body, nevertheless the history of Caracosa contains this key switchover year as the beginnings of the final era and though haze and smog and ash and smoke obscure my memory as much as the passing of time and the confusion of memory and loss, still I was capable of understanding the abstraction behind everything and in particular what constituted carnival and what constituted yeartide.

The "deep function" of carnival was multi-fold, of course. It permitted a societal release valve, of course, allowing commoners once a year to don the privilege of masks, to make fools of those who ruled them, and to invert the social order in an expression of mead-fueled revelry. By ancient and unspoken code, anything could be stated during the time and anything could be done, and if that shy girl who never responded to any advances or compliments of her beauty at the marketstall suddenly and orgiastically slept with a dozen strangers on the season, no one would ever talk about it outside the time of carnival or face opprobrium harsher than the judgment that would befall any girl losing her honor outside that period. For centuries upon centuries as well, carnival allowed people to exchange opinions, to define where the following year would go, to decide things and make confessions and ascertain where genuine feeling lay, even as contradictions permitted in the way everyone knew the nobility to ruthlessly take right of monsieur over the peasant girls, or the merchants to offer their "bargain sales" that disguised actually a ruthless exploitation of actual producers or laborers, while they collected their silver and consolidated the power of their monopolies. For me, returning to the city after seven years in the field, the memory endures forever, being in a sense both first and last, yet containing as well the repeated encounters with the Boy in the Cat Mask who somehow always managed to find me and my own discovery of the incredible entertainments the common people had devised in those years of separation, the doubling upon doubling of complexities combining at the same with the revelation of all the dollmakers' craft as Caracosa geared up again for war, and I grew to understand that a team of three hundred workers were at times trying their utmost to gain the tiniest fraction of advantage over another similarly sized team, and that micro-differences defined what was the talk of the entire city or what failed miserably as lacking a certain unity of immersion such that doll-crafter and card game succeeded wildly for one season, but ball-game in courtyard crash-mixed with contact improvisationals resulted in nothing but the stifling of a huge yawn of boredom as the citydwellers grew ever more sophisticated in what they demanded as "fun."

It was an odd word.

I am being far too librarian-like of course, discussing everything in the abstract when of course what you want to know are the exact specifics of Caracosan culture and citylife to the last limit of detail. Very well. A dollmakers' "black-dressed maid doll game," the Teaparty, entry-fee only a handful of coppers, permitted city-dwellers to temporarily take control of one of the animatronic creations for an hour or two in playing with such toys divert themselves with other tea-party players in a game that had no point but proved immensely popular and even changed fashion in the souks. A steel-worker's attempt to divert the people with a board-set involving building metallick tracks across a simulation of Hastur proved completely disappointing and returned no silver to the investors until ironically three years later a girl from the dollmakers' guild reinvented it with pretty Animal-Trains and then supposedly immediately earned her master's mask straight from her apprenticeship and skipping the seventeen years of traditional journeyman's work. Things either had the "completeness" or they did not; there was no in-between. Further, the common people, the people I had never known, valued just simple kindness, joyful communication, games of pedank or courtball, allowing a stranger to simply join them in their midst, and being at times the only inhabitants of Caracosa to actually know who Avola actually was. They used words like "love" a lot, "food." "Did you love her?" was the question they kept asking me, although I could keep a meadhall entertained for some hours with stories of her contradictions and her little quirks, her odd little customs that defined how she could tame and ride a wolf or sweep unnoticed through an entire crowd of bandits she had battled, hooded, just a few months prior, because she had begun to resemble herself the banditry she battled. "But did you love her? But did you love her? But did you love her?" they kept asking me, with faces smiling and in crowds confrontational. "Love?" I responded. "That's completely meaningless in the faufreluches way, the squire serves his blademaster, and you're simply too young to understand." (A pause, while the crowd considers this response.) "Look," I stated boldly, "if you're a proper squire, you _anticipate_ what your blademaster needs, even before he or she knows she needs it. You have the blades polished and the leathers well-oiled, and in time, she grows to become good at what she does because you've prepared for her already the cross-bow bolts that will be necessary in a forest trek or the sharpstone needed in tunnel-battle. And we spent two years in the Underdark and everyone is crying to go back in, but it's all disaster anyway, no tears are going to stop this wave."

"Ah, join the Fellowship," they stated. "We're off to smoke the bandits."

The boy in the cat mask kept managing to find me, even as the crowds assembled into legions and rektorits and he kept trying to get me to play a new game or help with new design. "You'll be sorry, you'll be sorry," he said over and over in words that haunt me now, years later, in an echo that sends chills down my spine. My memory is somewhat confused—so many years have passed since that yeartide that never ended—but I recall him introducing me to some new petank game, the rubber game quickly passed between players within a courtyard, and also casual eruptions of sport within the commonfolk who had assumed control of their destiny and found time also for game within all the preparation for broad-front warfare. It was the Awakening. There was no stopping the march of history, which consisted of mass movements now rather than individualistic action, and though I liked to go sit by myself alone by the night shore of Hali, to see on its still surface the reflection of the great sea above, even here cat boy found me to ask me, "what are you doing? What do you see?" And I confessed. I thought the constellations looked differently, on the still surface of the lake, that seen directly eye-to-eye. "Don't you think like perhaps on a different solar system, on a planet far from here, maybe there's only one sun, but many gods, and maybe human beings don't breed with cats or fight the elves and though they have their own problems too, maybe they haven't cut down all the forests, and maybe they drive chariots they call Gremlin Greens and this sport is called drifting and they play card games too and talk about imaginary universes and the skies are blue there rather than red, and the waters are clean instead of black."

"Librarian," (I didn't notice, then, how he would know my name, "you say the strangest things sometimes."

"Well, maybe you're right. I'm not always sure that the things I say follow each other in the way they should. It's just so disconneckt."

"Don't worry! It'll work out! But I do think you should learn more about the games and why and the how. Because it's nice to live here in Caracosa and put down your copper in the gambling dens and play cards, everyone's doing this now. Don't you like Carte?"

"I guess so."

"So draw some pretty pictures or help out with Carte teams, or take up petank and get some exercise. If everyone's heading out to the cracked earth, you don't have to get up and follow them."

But I was cynical. "Like they're really going to give me a choice."

Cat-boy threw up his hands. "It's not a question absolute of choiCE."

I breathed out my exhalation, burnt some khat. "Well anyboy catboy, I have a question for you. It's been some weeks now. Everyone else has taken off their yeartide masks. Why are you still wearing yours?"

You already know, you already know, you already know. The soul sickens, and I would love to describe the intricate rules of king's chess which in my childhood was played upon a board of four by four squares and contained only tile pieces but in the accelerated world of city time had evolved into a six hundred and forty by six hundred and forty board tended by the game hall's tenders and involving group play of sixteen or seventy or some countless number of factions, pieces enchanted by themselves upon command and inflicting on each other damage taking into account such qualities as terrain, range, distance, race, type of unit, unendingly, and with each game hall competing with the next for which entertainment would seize upon the most players and building a commoner's a culture, a khat-filled den of clicking tiles and cards being shuffled and enchanted animated pieces making clever remarks as they seized key terrain. It is not the place for this. Nor do I contemplate the life _that could have been_ , had it been within my ability to remain in the place and join the games-players and lose myself in the world of simulation. King for a year and fool for the rest, or fool for a yeartide and then king for the rest. Who to know or care, or who to fail to describe, or what to claim that the nobilities climbed into auto-gyros and disappeared into the islands of mists, the lost islands, the place where they would never age and never feel another emotion again. I wanted to become blank like the sea of Hali, or sprinkled with stars uncountable, union with cosmos, or ever here to be able to find within all the tiniest rules of what was or was not possible those intricate patterns of dress that defined within each subculture that own subculture's subculture. But the towers of Caracosa were already crumbling, and if the king in yellow wanted to take a boychild in his arms and ease his own passing with sacrifice, as the city crumbled into the sea and the mirage-city of Ythill next to near Aldebaran became real, realier than undeniable, and all became insane and war-mad, but I lack energy or desire even to describe such things, and even also to decide what should or should not have been, happiness without sorrow being not happiness and sorrow unleavened with joy never so piercing to the heart. It could have been, yes? This was the happiness? To wander into bathhouses of the warmest water, to have one's hair poured upon by pitchers, and to sink beneath rose-petals to forget the outside world. Yes, this was our bliss indescribable, but nobody really paid much attention to the gnome-whores in the souks and all were contemptuous of the house of khan, and the physicians tended the sick in the sick-houses, which in any case became all the more necessary as the sickness became general and the mirage-city of Ythill grow to replace fading Caracosa. I wish to say that which I wish to say which is that which I stated, but I attempt here only to describe what had faded in graduated steps as clearly and distinctly as padded leather boots wandering down stone step-by-step-by-step. Avola had been a fighting girl, a girl who loved to wander the mountains with her knife blades, and I had seen rushing rivers and gray stone, and I had known nature in its own communicative way. The mountains had their judgment for me: pursue me, seek me, drive ever eastern across the knife-life ridges, or, failing that, go south, breed with the cats, brush your fingers across the tomes that have gathered such dust or become like hammers to be used against the witches we detected our midst and proclaimed as practicing such forbidden abominations that we needed to tie them to stakes and proclaim them scapegoat. Nobody would ever investigate the Avalonian mystery, and nobody would lift a finger to reawake the case that had started it all. But I was a man of Aldebaran, and the windworld Hastur, and the embers of firey mountains grew more animated and lifelike by the day. The boy in the cat mask had said, of course, "I wear...."

PART 3: WAR

V.

Twenty-four years have passed since the long Yeartide, and the year is now 11739, and I am still Scribe IV, ex-Librarian of the lost city of Caracosa, forty-four years of age and middle-aged with my left arm from the wrist to past the shoulder blued and cracked by acid, yet still alive and embittered, if disgustingly aged and wrinkled in skin, and a veteran observer now of twenty-four consecutive years of war. The people's war, the war without nobility: we had not known at the time that it was an endless war, but it evolved into the endless war, and it war on every lip, and it was in every language, and it was that marks our skies from the flaming elementals to the sky to the seeker-reapers amidst the clouds to the tunneling machines of the Underdark to the acid pools of the fiendish knomic design to the burnt and wrecked cities and the scorched fields and the desert sands breaching the barrier remnant to the south, and the cracked glaciers of frost giant warfare to the north. Nobody has escaped it; nobody has escaped the great batterings of ocean waves to the west, and fire and wreckage and terror is everywhere without respite and without rest and no end to the relentless hatred that fills every heart. I, too, have learned to hate the son of cain, and barely know the reasons why I record our martial history, for it is known to everyone and it is known to you, and I think only of the boy in the cat mask and of the stars where maybe a more paradisical world than our exists, Aldebaran, cursed world, hated world, murderers' world.

You will forgive me, son of cain, if I adopt a somewhat wearied and even at times hostile tone in this, the final section of the chronicle of our tears and blood-soaked universe, because the desire to entertain you or to provide you with respite has died in my heart, just as the words of the cat boy, "I wear...," proved as meaningless in the end as his advice "stay thou in the city of Caracosa and participate in the games again and again and again," as impossible to follow as to reply against the feather in white left on your table, your morning's greeting, your reminder that the menfolk are busy at the front while you do nothing but face the blank facelessness of meaningless tasks against a sea of faces now that have become the masks we once assumed in festival. Warfare with the nobility included the privileges of the nobles, but now with the final departure of noble blood and the rumor that the elf-queen, guilds-master of the doll-crafters was indeed in power in the end after all, yes, now, yes finally now we cursed sons of cain begin to understand, we begin to see and comprehend the bloodied bars of our prison, and see through the passage of time renewed or time recycled how pointless, futile, and endless was our exercises and hollow the laughter that had arisen in our throats at yeartide, liberating ourselves from nothing more than the benevolent agonies of the noble-born, the eternals, and the mask-wearing guildmasters who guided our labors and specializations in rigid faufreluches. Allow me to end this analytical theoreticks, however, and proceed simply to outline everything that occurred after 11734/11735, the "yeartide that never ended," as some would say, the wolf-howl of soul destruction that was sounding across the universe as the auto-gyros whirled up and the king in yellow departed and the house of Caracosa fell into the lake of Hali, lost demesne, lost happiness, and lost laughter and joy in a world resounding with bolt-fire and acid spray, digger drill and mine explosion. Our devices infernal, to be brief, did not work.

At the Battle of Golgotha, on the Plain of Skulls, on what became known as the Plain of Skulls, the twelve legions of one hundred forty-four thousand men each, all races having six fingers, twelve being the organizational principle, one million seven hundred thousand twenty-eight men in total met, as they say, "total annihilation," or at least functionally so, 99.8% casualty rate, although in fairness this meant approximately a third died, and two thirds straggled back to the city of Caracosa in tatters or in broken-down wagons or in bands of twenty or thirty, beaten, defeated, bloodied, and completely, shockingly, devastatingly different from the proud legios that had issued forth. Again, you will pardon in advance my lack of attempting to "dress up" these words in finery, for not issuing you wondrous stories about the speeches and bravery of such-and-such individual, and how individual X carried out such a praise-worthy act of heroism, but return simply the simple facts of battle as they occurred and none can deny, and nobody can attempt to fool anyone else anymore. Twelve legios issued forth from Caracosa against the Knomic heresy, fronted by dwarf-designed steam tanks, three imperial inches of supposedly impenetrable steel, the lich-type monstrosities of animated bones ridden by rektors holding aloft their ankhs and the animated skeletons-that-were-not-skeletons, human armies resplendent in bronze armor, the "mass movement," the "popular movement" that was going to save us all, humanity "liberated," all sins forgiven, all purification begun, all diversity accepted from the nearly complete feline of the south to the obtuse stone giants of the north, the brigand-brigades of fishing folk and souk, and the judiciary of Mook's lone snipeshots, specialists in night combat. What was the nature of a legios but one gross thousand of men supported by one gross of tanks, twelve Bone Horrors blessed by Rektors, a handful of attached cat-riders or Recian nest-destruction units, proceeding, bizarrely, almost parade-like, as if almost knowing, straight through the passes to Demhe, and falling, as if absolutely everyone knew in advance, directly into the gnomish trap.

The gnomes had been among us. They had been scorned as prostitutes and for their overly-large hands. The judiciary of Mook's science could never been perfect and the definition of dwarf, half-man, or gnome was never quite absolute.

At Golgotha, I was there, attached to the unofficial Legio XIII, the "Night-mares," the cavalry that nobody else knew how to integrate into Man's army, riding horses only of black although lately these days what everyone is calling black seems to have heavily liberalized these days even if I get ahead of myself here. I'm sorry for diverging bitterly into the present, but as they say, "when you close your eyes, all horses are black. Or is it, I'm so sorry, when both suns have set...yes, that's it. That's it. You're still riding all black horses they only appear to be fully so during the night which when you should be operating anyway. Sorry for my misunderstanding.

Anyway. At the Plain of Skulls, Golgotha, Man, the Son of Kain, led his Twelve Divisions in stately procession towards to the forests and hills of Demhe even as Caracosa physically receded behind them and the city of Ythill itself seemed to quiver besides the shores of Hali. Where once had existed known pools of acid and desert-cracked sand, there appeared now to be only a relatively featureless plain, but the gnomes were devious in their designs, and they exerted only the slightest of efforts to hide what was an absolute death trap for our Expeditionary Twelve. Twelve Popular Legios of Man integrated with steam tanks of five imperial tonnes weight attempted to drive forward directly over a mere meter's worth of sand that delicately hid pools of the most horrific and extremist acid, the trap so cleverly designed, so devious in its constitution that actually the first vanguards of vehicles only weakened the coverings, such that we were completely surrounded and deep into the passes and lake territory before the horror of our situation sank in. (I'm sorry for the word, but yes, the features of our situation were simultaneous to the action of the actual vehicles, and there is little that can erase the sight of a bronzed steam-tank slowly settling into acid-mud, as the inhabitants within scream as their flesh is being stripped away by sulfuric steam, and the Plain of Skulls is _still_ today littered with, of course, some three hundred thousand human skulls as the acid has generally worn away what the carrion birds were not able to pick off, and there has simply been no time to recover body or limb.

I was there. Legio XIII, the cavalry, the Unlucky, led by Rektor Lawrence, did not take such heavy losses at this particular battle, but our rescues did not quite total those of the khan cat-riders nor the hammer-wielding stone giants who feared acid above all, and the animated skeletons may have been somewhat at an advantage against acid, but they were less lucky against the next phase of the gnomic assault.

The gnomes, who may never have been quite as tactically brilliant as Humans nor ever so creative and genuinely advanced in their alchemies are our Human counterparts, now revealed their that flying contraptions, the Reapers, that had been "accidentally" landed on Human Freeholdings, were only those technologies they chose to reveal as not even approximating their second or third best designs, but only their fourth, their seventeenth, their absolute throwaways which were being used as toys by their children. A flock of night-birds circling distant in the sky now approached what would of course be a carrion-feast but these Reapers turned out to be fully armed, fully three-vectored "sky-dancer" quiverers that jutted forward... _then flew in reverse._ They bounced above a knot of huddled armored humans, drew fire from enchanted bows, and then flickered away faster than a human eye, bringing down another wing of Reapers which rayed down green beams that in totality appeared a cathedral of terror-light. It was a sight magnificent if not for its terror: seven hundred thin beams of pencil-thin green light that jutted down, and then jutted down again, whilst the screams of the humans rose, and the bronze-armored knights began tearing off anything, anything that would slow them, as they trudged through mud and acid-pool, and imitated the untrained peasant militias without gear or heavy weaponry, scoffed at, but now suddenly far more survivable in their charnel-house of Golgotha. The weak had become the strong; the ceremony of Yeartide had evolved into the abomination Night of the Beams, and in this terror of smoke and darkness and confusion and screams and clamor and alarum, the magnificent and proud Twelve Legios First Awakening Army dissolved into a mob of fleeing, terrified, unordered, disorganized, self-shooting horrific nightmare of complete and utter chaos.

My leader, Rektor Lawrence the Unlucky, commander of the Legio XIII, the Night-Mares, observing what was happening immediately disregarded the pre-arranged order of battle and instructed his sub-commanders to separate all cavalry into groups of two or three or at maximum four and to _at all costs possible_ rescue and extract any and all Rektors, acolytes, and other such members of the religious order that would be necessary to rebuild our forces. The disaster had arrived: there could be no expectation any more than the First Awakening Army would exist in imaginable form in the future, and the tactical command he issued was for extrication even if it meant treading over the bodies of fleeing warriors or peasantry or even if it meant forgoing the opportunity to catch the odd gnome warrior caught in an odd crossfire or raining down fire-bolts on an exposed militia. The command, in other words, was "disperse and extract at all costs," and our horses pressed down on their bits in their eagerness as they understood what was about to happen and reared back in absolute yearning as we quickly exchanged battle-information about where we could press forward, dragging me along even as XIII's historian and lettered scribe, and not, precisely speaking, a combatant.

We rescued, I believe, about four out of five of the Mono priesthood, even, as I wrote, about a third of our forces were completely last that day and a further third suffered crippling injuries. I can never forget the cries of screams as acid burned away at human flesh, and as I have just now merely written, the Plain of Skulls is still littered with bleaching human bones on the cracked earth, and it is a reminder of all whether passing through forward or back in retreat of the costs and blood of that horrifying day. Nothing grows there any more. No attempt to heal the land or soak it in blessed water causes plant life to germinate, and we must, simply, walk over the bodies of our fallen comrades on the day the Army died, and the forces of Man were sent reeling back to their city, as as much demoralized and devastated as they had been exultant on their initial sally forth from the city by the lake of Hali.

Timetable at this point becomes somewhat pointless. Obviously, in the immediate aftermath a city-wide panic began as everyone believed that extinction was imminent and the gnome-rock golem armies would soon be marching through the streets of Old Caracosa. However, the gnomes, it turned out, were almost as surprised as we were by the monumentality of their victory, and it had seemed that they had mostly prepared further and further defense lines east of the lakes of acid and deeper into their caves, and they were unable to capitalize on the complete destruction of the human armies even if at that point perhaps only two hundred cat-riders of Khan, thirty-odd frost giants from the north, and Legio XIII the Unlucky were the only organized defense remaining between them and the unwalled city of Caracosa. Militias by their own instinct put up barriers walls and improvised defenses, but the actual events that occurred immediately following were of course of a nature that disturbs my sensibilities yet must be recorded in their own way.

In the "Flensing Time," in the devastation aftermath, self-directed human militias rooted out all communities within the city that maintained household shrines and eradicated any or all references to polytheism or any heresy to the Mono. Further, some Rektor of disturbed sensibilities drew using his own hand an outline which indicated what the maximum hand size was now permissible among human-blooded, and in this way all gnomes or half-gnomes or quarter-gnomes whose hands were bigger than this Rektor's (whose own hand, I couldn't but notice, were a bit over-large), were simply put to the blade without trial or any investigation of their family history or loyalty. Blood again flowed within the city of Caracosa and once again the canals that should have carried water carried blood and offal and tripe, and intestines were left to rot in the street and the rats and dogs clashed, and Mono purified itself, there could be absolutely no deviation from the one and only truth path of Mono, and the Ankhs grew everywhere, placed on doors to ward away evils only the inhabitants could see or erected such as to proclaim a belief that the family perhaps in truth did not feel so deeply in their hearts, but knew to be the only possible salvation if their hand exactly matched the maximum permitted size. Further, the Guildmaster of the Doll-crafters, the Elf Queen, the blonde, took the Guildmaster of the Steelworkers, still masked, to the very basilisk upon which sacrifice had been made, and there before the grim faces now of the almost three million, tore off Valentine's delicately-crafted metal mask revealing a face pure in its human features, red-haired, but frozen in a look of absolute disbelief and shock. Before the united citizenry of Caracosa, the Elf Queen slit the throat of the Steelworker's Guildmaster before our eyes, and the deputy guildmaster of the steelworkers on bended knee swore fealty to the Queen, and the steelworkers forever lowered themselves to the true battle-masters, the dollmakers, and the hierarchy of the commoners was once again changed. No tears were shed for Valentine who brought us to such disaster, and his body lay there unclaimed and unmolested except for the ravens which pecked at it until it eventually disintegrated on the monolith leaving behind only a stain of black.

VI.

A period of chronological confusion begins here, for of course in the immediate aftermath of Golgotha, feelings were strange and outlier, and much happened simultaneously that even an assistant third bookkeeper cannot precisely record what event caused the next, or which new regulation forth from what new gnomic incident. It's clear that the Guildmistress of the Dollcrafters enacted the new regulations by which any fertile woman who normally gave birth to but one child a year was enticed, prodded, and ultimately regulated to take such potions as the enchanters had crafted, giving birth to two or three children a year even though this was tiring upon the body and a form of service we should never forget to the fair sex.

The Gnomes, although agog and magog at the enormity of their victory did not even at first realize the extant of their overwhelming strength at the Plain of the Skulls, and no gnome army issued forth out of Demhe even though at the time they possibly could have sacked the very city of Caracosa itself amidst its confusion and squalor. Rumors finally began to die down, but their infernal flying contraptions grow more bold in their onslaught, and a mission was flown even over our city, striking fear deep into our hearts, but leaving behind, on that occasion, no bodies. Worse, perhaps, were the Gnomes who emboldened by their victory on the surface organized themselves into fire-teams of twenty or more, emblazoning on their leathers a strange saturnine sign and calling themselves 'the Rangers,' who would cover the earth again with forests and reclaim the legacy of Elf.

Our Elf Queen, however, was one step ahead this time. Whereas before we had lived largely on wheat-grass and cob, the avouts of Caracosa borrowing a page from Knomic philosophies, had determined that actually the strange purple-berry tree provided as much nourishment in a single grove than an entire pasture of wheat-grass, and yarrow stalks, which were once mere tools of oracle pronouncement, became a staple of breakfast, noonmeal and dinner. The purple-berries were quite foul to the mouth, but at least the lands became to some degree covered more in trees, useful cover for a freeholder caught in the fields when an infernal contraption buzzed across the skies, and then yeartide arrived again, subdued as were all yeartides after the final one, and once again the Elf Queen took her stand upon the dias, but carrying the Great Ankh aslant, and addressing a crowd that had now by custom knew to express its deepest fears and feelings.  
"Son of Man! As all know, the Gnomes have assembled a mighty army and are trumpeting to the skies that they will soon sack our city and slaughter us to the last woman and child. But we have been hard at work at our own devices, and we will this time, it is certain, spring upon them a trap of such devastation that Golgotha will become remembered as only a minor skirmish upon the field of war."

The people stirred.  
"All our times have come, here but now they're gone."

A peasant woman, fat in face, and squalid because the enchanted potions add weight to women, cried out, "But what of the Gnomes' Infernal Flying Contraptions? My youngest fell this year! We have no reply."

Elf-Queen and Mistress of the Doll-crafters nodded. "Seasons don't fear the Reaper, nor do the Wind, the Suns, or the Rain. We can be like they are."

"We have no reply to the Gnomic air drones. We are but sheep before the wolves."

The Elf-Queen nodded to the subordinate Steelforgers.

"Behold."

A giant airwing thrice the size of anything ever before seen in the air with the exception of the long ago obsolete gas-bag ships was now trundled out and displayed before the eyes of the masses. "We call this... Raptor."

Human lungs inhaled as one.

"Our own avouts, thrice and ten times stimulated, have created an airwing _upon which a human being can fly_. There is simply no answer the gnomes have to our new command of the skies."

"But how many Reapers can the Raptor destroy? How can a manned vessel hope to deal with a swarm of gnomic contraptions?"

"Our current estimations are that one single Raptor can eliminate no fewer than three hundred Reapers at once. Moreover..."

A metal shutter was rolled up with a loud clang, and a giant steam tank was rolled out, but with such elegance of form, such economy of metal use, that it seemed divinely crafted, as of divine design.

"This is the Ess200, or 'Birch.' Lend me your eyes, Son of Man."

At the signal, an entire wing of Gnomic Reapers, captured and painted in Human blue, took off from an airfield upon which pennants fluttered. As they pirouetted and then circled around, demonstrating that they were fully under control of their Human ground pilots, the Birch almost as if a living creature, swiveled upon its bearings, trained its two tubes at the aerowing, and then let loose with a tremendous crash, two mighty missiles upon a pillar of smoke that rose high into the sky and then exploded with the force of twin suns, day turned into an even more intense day, and where there had been buzzing airwings, there was now only smoke and fluttering shards of metal.

"Do not ask, Son of Man, for further demonstration, for these are but the least of our new inventions, and Gnomic death-hold of the sky is no more."

And the crowd was silenced.

"Yet I must interrupt!" proclaimed a man, this time. "This would be twice Yeartide where the high council calls us to war, and our hearts have wearied some. Doubt exists where once certainty held sway. The Rektority says there is but one G-d, the Creator Father, and under His name we were led to war, and yet we saw the Guildmaster Valentine avatar of Father Creator slain on bloodstain, and We are now told that the nature of Mono is not Mono but Mono with the Guild-Mistress Elf Queen as our Commander. Which is it? Is G-d Man or is G-d Woman? Do we follow the rule of the clean, straight, true, correct, logickal dictates of Man, or are we devious and sly in the ways of a WoMan, hidden, reserved, deceptive, and secretive?"

The Arch-Rektor and the Guild-Mistress of the Doll-crafters exchanged looks. The Elf Queen spoke.

"Valentine is done. Here but now they're gone. Love of two is one. Here but now they're gone."

The crowd stirred, became restless and here was the crux moment, here was the decision, the coin flipping in air for freedom or fate to be decided. Only the Elf Queen could relent...and relent she did, sealing our fates forevermore.

"Very well, Sons of Men. As all of you know before the Battle of the Plain of Skulls, our greatest designs were shown—yet this led directly to those among us who waver to whisper into secret portals or talk mysteriously to celagos that flew off to directions unknown. Yet you seek our greatest weapon of war, and we must present it."

There was a disturbance amongst the acolytes, for this decision was deeply troubling, remembering as they did the past. But the decision was not a decision after all, was it? The children of Caracosa would not march off again to war with shiny polished bronze metal machines nor the promises of "Recian" fire that would smoke the tunnels of the gnomic and insane. To be bid once again to sally, even amidst the certainty that the Gnome armies were already issuing forth, and that their advance Rangers were flitting through purple-berry trees, instructions were whispered amidst the priesthood, and a final palanquin was brought forth. There, upon the dias on which the three million viewed as one, the covering was whipped off to reveal...strange creatures of green and blade.

"To the Twelve Legios of the Second Expeditionary Army, to the Frost Giants of the North, and the Cat-riders of the South, to all blade-dancers amongst us, and the free Gnomic that we trust and honor as equals, we display: Gremlin."

Two creatures, homunculus man and homunculus woman, stirred in their brocaded palanquin. They were creatures bred for war, not social display.

"We have crossed the bloodlines of a thousand species to create a new race amongst our midst. Three imperial feet tall, yet containing within them all the speed and deadliness of an Avola, the tunnel-crawling talents of a Gnome, the accuracy with bolt of an Elf, and the swordplay of a trained Imperial Guard. Do not be deceived by the tiny size of our new warriors: they are the greatest danger ever conceived against the Gnome, and even their God Worof is trembling in the Underdark."

"Twelve Legios will again sally forth? One gross thousand men and women to take up the bronze and the blade, to fight _yet again_ against Gnomic invasion?"

The Elf Queen smiled. "Forty thousand men and women every day, forty thousand men and women every day, another forty thousand coming every day."

And once, yet again, the final doubts in heart of Man were stilled, and the Legios sallied forth, but this time, the day was ours.

Across the darkling plain, past the Plain of Skulls, in Gilgamesh, on the Plain of Jars, the uncountable swarms of gnomes sallied forth, for they were not three million, nor were they thirty million, but they were three hundred million in number, but in the craftiest of twisted imaginations, they accepted simply what their proud Ranger units had reported back: the Human freeholdings are now overrun with trees, their metallick factories lie idle, and the Humans are defeated already in their hearts. We will advance now without mercy, and God Worof is returning to life, with his heart beating deep in magma rock.

Gnome Banners saw before them simply what they had seen before: the Twelve Legios, the irregular XIII, the polished bronzed Steam Tanks, and the contingents of Frost Giant and Cat-rider they had handled so stunningly and devastatingly before. Their hearts were gladdened, for what they had feared was a doubling or tripling of our numbers, but to deal simply again with what they had already devastated to almost the last man, appeared to them to be merely child's play. It gladdened even further that our Twelve Legios now contained teenaged boys and even barren women who had filled out the ranks even as fertile Human Woman was required to produce two or three children a year. Seeing the obvious outcome of the battle, they sallied forth from their caverns and abandoned even the warnings of their shaman commanders to follow strictly battle-plan. "Huzzahhhh!!!"

The day this time was ours.

Whereas the Guildmaster of the Steel-workers had always fought amidst an armored group of his hand-picked warriors, our Elf Queen the Guildmistress of the Doll-crafters chose to lead our forces from the front, and when the army of Men and the army of Gnome clashed, they did so only so that the uncountable number of our new racial creations, the tiny three-foot gremlins with right hand holding a repeater bolt and the left simply a metallick blade then jumped out of their tiniest hiding nooks and surrounded even the impossibly large legion of the gnomic masses. It was, to their point of view, the nightmare reversed. Now suddenly the most evil and vile looking of creatures, strange reptilian monsters containing no human blood whatsoever were amidst them, slaying and slaying and slaying as their left blade arms grew coated in blood and the repeater bolt took throat after throat. There, at the very front of the Twelve Legios, the Elf Queen fought with her enchanted mithril blade and her armor of shining white silver, her head bared to the white sun, and the dark elf allies of the gnomes grew troubled and terrified at the knowledge that their fore-race still lived. Elemental fire reached for the skies, but our Birch200 blew away the aerowings with as much speed as they could take the air. Gnomic cries reached the heavens, the lamentations and pleadings for mercy were heard, but no mercy was given. Gnomic blood soaked the earth and flowed in rivers across the land, and it seemed indeed as if their purple blood was soaking the soil of the earth deep into the deepest reach of the Underdark. A great slaughter was underway, and yet I witnessed with my own eyes, fey spirites as of legend join this battle, tiny sparks of light that fought against the Gnome firefleet, and these were at once creatures of legend and present yet within us before the final battle of the Elf Queen. Her proud, unhelmed head rose at the very front of the armored legios, and XIII raced across the battlefield to prevent defilade of XI and then to engage a weak spot where the gremlins had encountered an especially battle-hardened unit of Gnome Rangers, I saw the dark elves on the horses of midnight and their soul-stealer swords of blood red tremble for they had long believed the lies of the gnomes and thought in the deepest corners of the heart that none of the ancestral kind remained. Troubled and disorganized, they contributed little to the battle that raged, and while frost giant rose heavy hammer to smash down the gnomic tread vehicles and cat lancers could run through five or seven gnomic bodies at once, there was no battle such as anywhere the fair head of our elf queen was at the very point of maximal return, no clash of steel and bronze where the sparks flew and it seemed now the heavens themselves finally returned their favor to man and the surface dwellers, for rays shot down from the heavens but they were not the rays of the Reaper drone.

It is recorded that a drill panser hand-selected amongst the bravest, bored down through three hundred meters of solid rock to locate a control room of the Gnome's ground pilots, and there, surprising these barely armed battlers-from-afar, slew them to the last man. It is seen by eyewitnesses multiple that boar armies of the Mook saw direct combat for the first time since they had long perfected the art of the tunnel collapse or long-distance snipe shot. It is rumored that the trees themselves moved as birch became purple-berry and purple-berry burst in a flood of spray poisonous to the gnomes but harmless to the human, and that a battalion of Gnomic Rangers, heavy on wolves, disappeared into the darkness of a copse and were never seen or heard from again. This was the climactic battle of Gilgamesh, on the Plain of Jars, and we slew and slew and slew until our arms wearied of the sheer number of gnome throats we slit and thin gnomic leather we pierced easily with glaives of cheap copper. From the complete and utter devastation of our First Army, we had turned the day to the complete and utter devastation of the gnomic Main Force, and indeed of course, later records reveal that had we at this point pressed the attack and charged directly further deeper into the Underdark itself, it is extremely possible we could have actually reached the council of the Knomic Order themselves, and slain their god Worof. But my heart sickens and has sickened, and I grow weary now of the details that remain to be chronicled, for the complete and utter devastation of first battle and then to the complete and utter devastation of second, afterwards, warfare grew ever more sick and conditions for all, human, gnome-kind, and all variants in between or diverse, drew ever worse, and if it had been, perhaps at the speech of the Elf Queen that finally Caracosa faded completely from this earth to be replaced by the dead city Ythill, perhaps then it is mercy that at this battle too the Elf Queen, fell, victim of a poison dart, carried off to a medical tent, and through our joy at the devastation we wrought was utmost, it was still at the same time leavened by the last and complete fall of the very last of the nobility, leaving Scribe IV, assistant third bookkeeper, possibly one of the few and only claimants to any of the old order. I grow sick of this world, and can barely keep my quiver at work, yet I record as one final mercy that the Elf Queen's death was at least painless for came the last night of sadness and it was clear she couldn't go on, then the door was open and the wind appeared, the candles blew and then disappeared, the curtain flew and then He appeared saying "Don't be afraid."

That is of course all that can be written about the Golgotha, and the only odd matter of record is whether it seemed that the city of Caracosa itself seemed somehow to dim or recede from reality, blur, while Ythill on the far shore of Hali became slightly more real even as strangely the red moon, the third moon or was it fourth for whatever reason always seemed nearer to the onlooker than the city of Ythill itself. I write mostly to record "the way things used to be," for the son of man has himself somewhat strange in these endless battle years, with of course the women all bloated from the strange potions they must be fiat drink to produce four or sixteen baby-children every year and just recently, seeing a young lad who resembled who looked quite like the way boy children used to be, I had the briefest chat but his head quivered and shook in the oddest way and he agitatedly stated, "but I'm so nervous, I'm so nervous!" and wandered off, and things just aren't the way they were, we had seemed to have had even some days of almost blue, and the land was not all red-cracked earth and purple-berry tree and was it not always yarrow for breakfast and yarrow for noonmeal and yarrow to sup. All the goods and manufacturers seem cheap and flimsy these days for all materials are being diverted to the war effort, and rubble lines every cityspace and all freeholdings are covered with twist-vine and kudzu, and man walks with lowered head now for this is nothing but another battle, and following that, another one, and if we succeed in inflicting greater losses on the enemy this year, that will only be followed by a resurgence of their efforts the next, and voices are calling for a third great army to be assembled, but in nobody's hearts are any joy or longing for the apocalyptic final settlement that will bring us to the beating heart of Worof and allow us to unearth their undead god forevermore. Strange too is the way in which the cat-eyed gremlins scribble and scramble across the blasted rocks and bricks and the way they watch us; I wonder at times if they have not been gifted with more intelligence than the magicians who created them realized, and even if they are jar-born and alchemic in nature, still it would seem that their strange animal-like calls disguise a sort of laughter, a laughter for man for they are inheriting Hastur, not Man, not Gnome, not Cat-rider or Frost-Giant, but the gremlins, the little green-skin reptilian gremlins who can digest anything and slay a gnome for sport and not effort and everywhere there is nothing but ambush and mine and slaying and mutiliation of body to strike ever greater fear in all the faction that combine and recombine in such strange and unpredictable ways. Khan stands disgraced for they stood down for an entire year, and Mook is today rarely seen while the Frost Giants have retreated away to their deepest crevasses to await a brighter universe, but I do not think things will bright; I do not think this pattern of relentless advance and retreat, atrocity and counter-atrocity will ever stop, and that is what sickens the yellow soul, even as one Gnome Banner betrays its kind and joins our ranks, or it is rumored that the Dark Elves finally make their move and issue forth in their dark horse, red swords aglow and soul-stealing. There is time to write perhaps of other and smaller battles, of the day the gnomes set their contraptions to kill without any guidance whatsoever and spinning dervishes of steel and blade whittled through the farmlands, no quarter shown to children, no mercy shown to woman. Was it not so long ago, actually, that the records identicated that a peasant girl of fourteen would lay down in the fields with a nobleman and later brag about her exploits? Today, such an act must be recorded in the judicial annals and the "perpetrator" branded with the sign of the signet declined on his cheek. Or did we not laugh more, trust others more, hold weddings in the open air without the air being full of such nonsense as that the Guild of the Potionmakers, now, finally, most powerful of all, will be releasing into the air such alchemies as will inspire us all to further fervour in our declining spirit of war. Or perhaps the greatest atrocity is that now the gremlin legions in leather are being trained to advance reluctant human soldiers deeper and deeper into the Underdark, as human souls tremble at the unknown fates that await them, and it seems that all is Underdark, all is Underdark now amidst the land of Hastur ruled by the mirage city of Ythill, where the skeletons work and play and carry out a hollow mockery of civil society. These are the changes that are wrought and which no pen has recorded before. But the candles flicker, and a knock comes at the door, and I weary too of my labors for the great massacre of the Rangers is answered by the poison gassing of the cat-riders in Helm's Crevasse, and one might tumble a bit with a girl whose cheeks are whiskered and whose rump carries the stump of a tail, but the moments of fey like beauty where an eight-day sprite are seen dwindle into mere legend of legend. Where did we go wrong. Where did we go wrong.

My vision grows dim. My skin is wrinkled now and aged, and my left arm burnt by gnomish acid to take on a graystone blue that is not the cerulean of the sky giants nor the twinge of silver-light but the mark of those who have suffered grievously at the hands of gnomic assault. I sing of younger days, when even in our cursed land still man greeted man with the opening words "friend," and none thought this odd or sarcastic, nor did our man-to-man greeting become "have you eaten?" as even yarrow grows scarce and khat is to be found no more.

This scroll becomes filled. I have completed the mandate imperial, now twenty-four years ago, to relate the _perils of Avola_ , yet I find myself now in the fallen time to find my responsibilities more towards the few who are born today normal and not through the potionmaster's will six-limbed that they may carry more bolt-repeaters and swords of weakened bronze, and to record there was a time when man's head did not flicker and jerk-tremble in such odd fashion that the eye itself cannot record its position. Our society, before the war grind, was one more trusting and replete with eye-contact, and we did not think that two holding hands must be attempting to bond-form without council permission nor were the vat-born skittering and scattering around our alleyways giggling, it would seem, at us; and the skeletons in their vestments once directly took our orders rather than now, in ash time and fire, increasingly merely seeing past us, as if realizing that their era-time has begun. The third Legios army reassembles, but its ranks are full now of the delimbed or war-burnt, the acid-sprayed or tremblers, and again it seems we will attempt to solve the problem of the attrition war by direct and final assault into the Underdark.

I do not think it will succeed.

I am writing this amidst the stone-walls of a half-cottage, not far from where the imperial library used to stand, and outside the gate my half-nag, black only at night-time neighs and rears slightly, and flies buzz and rats scatter for the tiniest of yarrow-stalk crumb. All of normal-kind is diminishing to be replaced by accusation of treachery or stares of envy or hatred that one might have a bowl of potato-white whilst another uses stumps of hands to seek out the older loom spindles, the ones that were manufactured correctly by the doll-crafters and not the new ones that are highly priced yet last only a season or two before they must be replaced. All efforts are being diverted to war. All materials are being diverted to war. The Reapers still buzz in the sky, but in whispered corners it is said sometimes that they are there to watch over, they say, mostly us, that we not in gremlin-hour and ash-fall declare revolt against the council or the last of the guild-masters, and perhaps months may pass through the cyclical cycles before we see again a fine cat-rider or one whose height carries a trace of the north giant, and ever ever ever grows so more rare the red hair that marks a pure human. There are no more blondes.

Having reached the end of the scroll, I record now, in the tiniest of strokes, that there comes a knocking, a faintest knocking at the door. I might have requested amanuensis, but we know that such regulations and avout abstracktions barely exist any more, and when I open the door, it is, of course, Him. And he wears no mask and the mask's lips move and say, "come, for the third battle is not yours. You will ride no more with the XIII." And so I gather my scarce belongings, and pack foodstuffs as will not spoilt, tack and press-meat, a handful of glowsticks, a single blade though my arm can scarcely wield it, and we bridle up Nag for a final journey east. The days and nights pass. We pass Golgotha, the Plain of Skulls, and make camp by hillside to see glowing eyes in the night that blink and then scurry away. The flocks of birds in the sky may be reaper-bird or they may be true carrion-crawlers, but it scarce matters as a tumble of flies buzzes about, following us as we go. And there, finally, past Gemorrah, the Plain of Jars, where humans now even eat the earth to derive scarce nutrition, on the swampland, I see a figure in skin greened through the process of undead reanimation. Her figure, despite all these passage of years, remains quite familiar to me, as do the punjil stick still attached by binding of leather to her left upper arm and the two knives she bears as she did in life. Avola. There is a stiffening or tightening in my groin, and I realize that I have become...turgid. And is there not or is there not a gleam of yellow in those eyes as they turn to meet mine.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Enjoy this free ebook? Read more at:

My debut work, Harajuku Sunday (2011) went as far as one of the top New York City agents who found it just shy of publishable and recommended some changes which have resulted in a split into two smaller works: Harajuku (+): The Summer That Never Ends (2013) and Sunday Rewrite (-) (2015). Both can be downloaded here:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/307180

Although now the original text has been divided into two modified parts, the work still remains a coming-of-age story about a young American expat in Tokyo, being caught up in a cocaine and champagne milieu, and eventually coming to terms with his reduced circumstances.

If you are disgusted by stories of overly rich born-to-money finance scions and their hangers on, my next book was called The Korean Flower (2011) and can be downloaded, again, completely for free:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/112372

The story concerns 200 Japanese girls studying Korean in Seoul, various classicist Germans, who said what to whom in which language, and features an ensemble cast of characters including one talking green elephant.

My third light novel would be Fenworld (2014) which can be downloaded at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/474636

Despite being the "light novel" size of 33000 words, Fenworld has been the quickest out of the gate in terms of reader issued copies, although in a sense it's light sci-fi and light entertainment. Description: In the year 2471, a 74-year-old man begins writing his memoirs... the world has survived extensive glaciation, but how will the global power New Atlantis survive the GEIST onslaught? Which white walker mechs will battle what Geist abomination, and what is the true story of the culture hero Genevieve? Science fiction with a Happy Science twist, and revelation of the end days.

The fourth light novel on Smashwords is City of Ghosts. (2014) Perhaps because of its subject matter—zombies, post-apocalypse—this book exceeded all three of its predecessors in download numericals and global reach.

<https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/503276>

As always, I thank the hard-working Smashwords.com distribution team for their hard work, programming, and editorial oversight. If you enjoyed this work, remember, "reviews and ratings are the lifeblood of the author," and the formal publishing industry has indeed promised formal contracting and sponsorship if enough copies are downloaded. Tell your friends, rate these works on Smashwords or other review sites, and allow the creation of a further extended series set either in the Ghost, Fen, or Windworlds!

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