For today’s free story, we venture into the schema of the end! In conjunction with the two promos being run about the apocalypse, beginning today, we’re bringing you a little extension, a little DLC as it were, of one of the books being run this month, Disappearance.

Photo by Joe Halinar on Unsplash

The Eden Stream came out of that period of time on Reddit’s Writing Prompts subreddit before it got too big and too unwieldy. Before it had a million plus subscribers, we used to have themed contests – this one came out of a contest where you got a title based on a random SF title generator and ran with it. It’s about the ruins of Toronto, long after the initial events outlined in Disappearance. There are elephants, expeditions, and fun references to Sneaky Dee’s. Enjoy.

Farsi squatted in the corner of the crumble of brick walls. A circular wind blew through the stepped stone canyon, but he stayed out of it, watching it blow brittle leafs and dried grass in a scattered, chaotic dance. Once he had believed that there were spirits here, buried amongst the leavings of a world not quite gone ancient. Once, but no more. 

Across the canyon, on the opposite brick wall, there was a spotted, diseased inscription that had decayed to read “MER ILL”. Descendants and descendants would call it as such, or perhaps as nothing at all; the sign had decayed even from when Farsi had been a boy, and he thought that, given enough time, the jumbled canyon ruin would swallow all the letters and leave the place as anonymous as the rest. A sprawled collection of tumbled-down metal, brick, and that curious grey rock that his father had named ‘cee meant’. Farsi did not know who Cee was or what they meant, or why that name had been lent to the flat grey rocks that the buildings were made from. His father may have known, but Farsi had never asked him, and now the time for asking was past. 

He knew the names of things but not why. He knew the true name of this weed-choked canyon – “Summerhill” – but he did not know what this name signified. He knew that the canyon was not really a canyon at all but actually a ‘subway’, a tunnel that ran on and on beneath the earth. He knew that this vast, collapsing stretch of buildings and breeze-blown kipple was “Trawno” but, again, beyond the name was nothing but smooth, blank meaninglessness. 

He thought of the ruin, the endless jagged peaks and fractal valleys he knew as Trawno, and wondered what would happen when the relentless crumbling of the endless days buried even the name beneath it. When all these things stood nameless, would they still be real? Would they become like the wind, wordless and feral, an invisible force set to howl ceaselessly and leave only silence in its wake? He suspected that this was so, and he knew that he was powerless to stop it. He would be powerless even with a voice. 

He stood and his knees popped loudly, like branches breaking under heavy footsteps. His contemplations were gloomy, but they were all he truly had now. He felt, as always, for the thick bundle of throwing spears lashed to his back. He wiggled his toes inside of their rough moccasins – wolf-hide, and comfortable. These were the material things that he could lay his hands on and call his own. His clothing, his spears; once, he could claim more, but those days had been carried off by that ceaseless howling wind. Before, his father had claimed, there had been even more. His great-grandfather had been of a time when anything that could be thought of could be obtained, a time when the collapsing buildings around him had stretched to touch the sky and the streets had been filled with more people than there were stars in the cloudless night sky. 

He stretched. Those moccasins, those spears, the rough hide clothing he wore to cut the early spring chill; these were tangible but mortal. His spears would be used, if not today then another, thrown through the air to pin food, or a wolf, to the ground. His moccasins would wear through and need to be replaced. His clothing would catch and tear, and he would have to go through the effort of curing and tanning a new set. He carried more than this, of course; he carried intangible things that could not be worn down by the elements or used up by his own machinations. Like his father before him, he also carried the Words. He knew the proper names of most things, if not everything. He carried within him the last knowledge of that old world, the one wherein his great-grandfather had been one amongst countless others. He knew the names of the streets, of the buildings, of the tunnels bored into the earth and of the scattered kipple found above it. He could name the creatures, great and small, that had taken residence in the place absent of humanity. It would do no good. It was useless to carry the names of the rubble-filled streets when he could not pass it on to anyone else.  

He walked along the lip of the deepest cut in the canyon, trying to chase away thoughts that were too grim for a bright spring morning. Below him lay a rustling craze of weeds and thick bushes, a wild overgrowth that hid twin metal lines that had been set into a bed of small, irregular rocks. He had come here to stalk the deer that sometime came to graze at the bushes and weeds. None had come by on this morning, however, and he felt the need to be away from Summerhill. Even in the sharp, bright sunlight the black tunnels that were set into either edge of the canyon seemed to leer ominously. The stories that people told held that ghouls haunted those places beyond the reach of the sun, and nothing that his father had taught him had ever caused him to believe anything different. 

He found the stairs that he’d originally descended by and climbed them, picking his way gingerly over an area where a wall had partially collapsed. At the top of the stairs was a small chamber littered with the dead leaves of the autumn past. The door to the outside lay on the opposite end of the chamber, and between Farsi and the door were a pair of cages. The bottom half of these cages were tarnished metal, while the top half were made of some material that looked like glass but refused to shatter like glass. Between these cages (and between the cages and the walls) were a set of metal fences marked with one point of egress, a gate that must have once rotated to allow entry but had long since rusted shut. He leapt over the gate with little effort and slipped out of the gaping door into the glaring new sunlight. 

He stood in the comforting warmth and thought about his next move. There had been no deer at Summerhill but that was of little concern; he was on the edge of a thick forest and game trails ran through it seemingly without end. He stepped out a little further onto the uneven pavement and spied to the north and south along the line of sight. To the east and west were a tangle of growth dotted with crumbling brick ruins. Between them ran the street his father had named “Young Street”. It was a very long road, his father had claimed; it ran south into the waters of the lake and north for kilometres until it reached a land that was frozen more often than not. Farsi did not know much more beyond that, except that Young Street did not look young. It was cracked along the entirety of its length, an unruly sea of pavement tossed and twisted by the predilections of nearly a century of deep freezes and subsequent thaws. It was cluttered with rusted, rotted hulks of metal, hulks in which he’d trapped small game when the food supply had run thin. Buildings loomed over the divide as well, scabrous-looking constructions whose empty windows glared mindlessly out onto the street. Farsi hated looking up into the buildings, those along Young Street or anywhere else in the ruin.  

His father, and others in his circle-family, had spent nights telling tales around carefully built fires. Amongst the collection of night-terrors were the wendigos, dark spirits of whirling claws and gnashing teeth who rode the wind through the shadowy forests to catch lone travellers unaware. They would skin them alive, feast upon their flesh, and then wear the skin as a clothing to catch the next traveller by surprise. They had once been human, his father had claimed, but they were ghouls now. The stories had given Farsi nightmares for weeks, and in those nightmares, he had often been surrounded by his own personal vision of the things, and they had stared him down with blank idiot eyes that gave nothing away and betrayed no thought or emotion. When he looked into the dead windows of the buildings, he would always remember the eyes of those dream-wendigos. He avoided the buildings, unless he needed shelter, or he was tracking game. The campfire stories of the wendigos and his father’s own sober teachings of the ghouls that lived in the subways had always seemed too alike for comfort. 

There was nothing in either direction and he picked his way north along the road, guiding himself by the needle-spire of cee meant that rose out of the ruins. His father had called it the South Point, since it stood at the southern edge of the ruins; it could be seen easily throughout the ruins and was in Farsi’s mind the earthly twin to its heavenly opposite, the guiding North Star. Farsi had always been privately amazed by it; even when the grandest of buildings around it seemed to be in a slow state of eventual collapse, the South Point seemed just as strong and everlasting as that North Star. He had never made the journey to see it up close, but from a distance there were no flaws in it. 

He turned down another road near a caved-in building of red brick. The cavernous entrance was framed by a cee meant arch that still bore a mossy inscription, partially obscured by vines. It read “Aspen Ridge”, which meant nothing to Farsi. Beyond, the clustered line of the forest began, with a pair of very tall, weathered buildings rising out of the canopy ahead. He plunged in, every nerve alive, his eyes bouncing from side to side in a constant search for movement. He passed the closest of the tall buildings carefully, keeping a wary eye on it. He assumed that it was abandoned, but such assumptions had caused him enough trouble in the past. He remained unmolested and came through into a place where the trees were thinner, if only just. 

There was a rippling series of pools of water in the center of the vast clearing. The water ran through beds of cee meant and cycled into a hole in the earth; Farsi often wondered where the water went, and how it found its way up into the surface world again. Today, however, there were a pair of deer lapping from those pools, and there was no room in his mind for wonderings. He stopped near a thick, hoary old oak and felt at his back for the bundle of lashed spears. He loosened one and brought it out, holding it upright and slowing his breathing down to a silent level. He hefted the spear, gauging his strength. He wet a finger and tested the wind. He felt a brief pang of regret for leaving his bow in the confusion of the week past, but there was no help for it; his sole means of hunting was through his spears now. He braced himself against the earth, feeling it resist his feet; the deep freeze of the winter still clung on with faint traces. He cocked his arm back, and in the instant before he went to throw a series of thuds and crashes arose, muffled only by the distance between his position and the source of the noise. Farsi was startled. Instead of throwing the spear, he held onto it and drove it into the tenacious soil. The shaft splintered in his hand and several wooden shards found their way into his palm. The deer were startled by the noise as well, and they bolted into the perceived safety of the deeper forest. Wincing at the pain in his hand, Farsi screamed a long stream of curses inside of his head that served to partially alleviate the sheer frustration that he felt at that moment. 

He picked the larger slivers from his palm, gritting his teeth at each flare of pain. The thuds and crashes continued in the northern distance, moving in a slow fashion along into the west. He finished picking out the splinters that he could see, tightened the lash on his back, and let his feet carry him away into the north. There was no point in going after the deer now that they had slipped into the denser tangle of trees, and he made a quick decision to investigate the commotion in case there was danger. He could hunt game later, and he had several caches hidden away from the winter that he could draw on if necessary. By the time he reached the northern edge of the clearing, the deer had completely left his mind, and curiosity over the noises had taken over. 

He picked his way through the crowded trees that ran between a condensed collection of decaying towers, making his way around impenetrable rubble and places where the trees had grown together into impassable walls. By the time he emerged out onto another major roadway – the avenue of Saint Clair, he recalled – the cause of the commotion was at least a kilometre away. He saw large grey shapes looming in the distance, shapes that were vague but familiar. He picked up his pace, picking his way through the rusted hulks at a near-run. The shapes ahead were loud but slow, and within ten minutes he had caught up to a safe distance. Throwing his usual caution aside, he climbed atop a nearby hulk and shielded his eyes from the glare of the rising sun.  

He saw them clearly – huge, powerful legs like tree trunks, powerful frames with thick bones, and that small, unobtrusive tail hanging down from behind. If he had been facing them, he knew that they would also have long, curled, wrinkled trunks hanging down between yellowed ivory tusks. They were elephants, a dozen from what he could see, their thick bodies swaying slightly with each step they took. They walked carefully around the hulks in the street and took their time, raising their heads every once in a while to sniff the morning air. Their steps caused the thuds and crashes, depending on what they stepped on, and their travelling along the avenue caused birds to burst into the air with startled squawking.  

He stood atop the hulk and stared until the elephants began to draw into the distance once again. He felt the sun beat down on his bare head as it neared its apex. The elephants were on the move again. He hadn’t seen them in transit since he’d been a small boy. His father had brought him to Summerhill on a spring morning that had been similar to the one he found himself basking in today. They had climbed to the top of the building that had housed the canyon, before the roof had collapsed to let the light and the wind in. The elephants had come along the scarred train tracks that emerged through the eastern forest, pounding out of the trees with a lack of concern for noise. His father had pointed down to them, shaking Farsi’s shoulder with his other hand. 

“There they are!” his father had shouted. “They come this way every year! Spring is here at last, my boy! Spring is here”. His father had trailed off, gazing down as the elephants had made their implacable way along the rail lines into the wilds of the west. “You can always tell. They come from somewhere to the east, some Eden where they survive the winter somehow. When they emerge and make their way through the city, spring is here to stay. Bet on it every time, Farsi, and you’ll never lose once”. 

Standing on a pile of crumbled rust, he could hear the voice of his father, excited and forceful. He watched the elephants following the stream from their Eden, a stream that had changed from that long-ago day. He wondered if the rail line had been blocked, or if perhaps some other natural passage nearer to their home had become fouled. On a whim he leapt off the ruddy pile and continued to track after them, his mind throbbing with each step that they made ahead of him. He passed a building with a curving saddle arch entrance that had once been entirely glass and was now overflowing with budding new growth. He saw that the elephants had reached Avenue Road, and he loosened a spear from his lash. He was beginning to get far afield.  

The elephant pack trudged along at a leisurely pace, and after twenty minutes Farsi was able to catch up with them. They stopped at a part in the road where the ruins thinned out and the gnarls of trees filled in. They curled their long, wrinkled trunks into the canopy, filching immature leafs and stuffing them into their mouths. Farsi took a rest along with them, shading himself beneath a tree across the street. Three thin cats stood in an upper window of the apartment building behind him, watching the elephants graze with twitchy intensity. One of the elephants raised their trunk towards the sky and bellowed out a long, brassy note. The cats dashed back into the darkness of the building, their startled miaos ringing in Farsi’s ears. The elephant that bellowed brought its trunk down upon its neighbour; this seemed to be a signal, as the rest of the pack shuffled slowly back into their walking rhythm.  

The strange parade continued and the road he knew as Saint Clair widened. In the centre of the roadway was another of those rusted heaps of metal, longer and wider than the others that were in the street. The smaller ones were simply “cars”, he knew, and these longer ones were “streetcars”. His father had puzzled over the terminology, since they both ran on the street. His father’s father had been old when his father had been born, and had died before he could impart any rigorous understanding unto his son. His father’s knowledge had been gleaned from a lifetime of observation and echoed storytelling, and if Farsi had ever fathered a son, he would have passed his accumulated knowledge along in the same fashion. Impart it to the wind instead, and let it carry the names of everything he thought. It was a sour taste, and he wished for a drink of water to carry it off. He wondered uneasily where he might find water. He had water stored in his caches, but he was out of his own part of the ruins now.  

The elephants will know he decided. They’ve made this trip for a hundred years. He gripped the shaft of his spear tighter. 

On the right side of the street was another building whose facade had once been entirely glass, much larger than the last one. It seemed as though a jungle were growing out of it, and the blossoming top branches of trees leered down from where they had burst through the ceiling. He kept a close eye on the shaky-looking structure; he’d known wolves and other animals to lurk in such places. 

“I told you!” a woman’s voice cried out from somewhere nearby. “I saw them! There are elephants up here!” 

Farsi knelt on instinct behind a metal hulk. He peered ahead but the only movement came from the elephants. He forced himself still, listened intently. He heard footsteps, hard thwaps on the cracking ground. 

“She’s right, Emerson,” a male voice spoke. “Looks like you owe her now”. 

“When we get back, maybe,” a third voice said, male and bassy. They were coming closer. He could hear more than three sets of feet thwaping on the pavement. Farsi considered the situation for three-fifths of a second and then crawled around to the rear of the hulk he’d been crouching next to. He positioned himself in such a way that he could just barely see a wide scope of area in front of him and waited. 

Presently a group of seven individuals appeared from behind the corner of the shaky building to his right. There were five men, dressed in tailored leather and wearing guns holstered to their sides. A chill ran through Farsi on seeing this; his father had owned a large rifle, but it had never worked in Farsi’s lifetime, and Farsi’s father had claimed that the last working gun had stopped functioning years before Farsi’s birth. There were also two women, one short and the other tall. The short one, who had soft, wavy white-blonde hair that glinted slightly in the sun, wore a light-looking rifle strapped on her back. The taller one, whose hair was dark enough to cross the threshold from deep brown to black, wore a similar rifle but also had a large pistol holstered to her side. Farsi clutched his spear and swallowed. The saliva seemed to have deserted his tongue, and the roof of his mouth felt dry and thick. 

“Alright, so where are we now?” one of the men asked. He was tall and bone-thin, and a feeling of superstitious dread welled up in Farsi’s stomach upon looking at him.  

“I’ll have to get the map out,” the taller woman replied. She approached another of the others, a balding man who was hauling a large leather pack on his back. She undid the pack and rummaged inside for a moment, coming out with a strange length of paper that seemed to gleam oddly in the sun. The tall woman considered the paper for a moment and then oriented herself to face south. 

“It’ll be that way,” she said, “down…” she considered the map again, “Bathurst Street”. 

“The sooner we get there the better,” the man with the pack grumbled. 

“Oh, love,” the blonde woman said fondly. “We’ll be there soon, I’m sure. It can’t be much longer”. 

“Maybe an hour?” the tall woman mused. “Maybe a little less. It depends on the condition of the city this far in, really”. 

“It hasn’t been bad so far,” another of the men said. This one had long hair, tied into a tail at the back. “I really thought we’d be another day or two getting here”. 

“The trip through the tunnels helped with that,” the thin man said. “It cut off at least a day and a half of travel, I’d estimate”. 

“Well, let’s take our time getting back, then,” Pack-Man groaned. “Those tunnels were terrible on my nerves. I could swear something was watching me the entire time”. 

“Something probably was,” Thin-Man replied, “and at any rate we cannot waste any time getting back, or had you forgotten?” 

There was a reproving tone in Thin-Man’s voice and the conversation died off. Farsi watched them shift and stretch their feet for a moment. Tall-Woman then gestured towards the south and they began to walk. Farsi edge around the corner to the right side of his hulk and watched them take Bathurst Street. He watched them until they were out of view, and then he began to think furiously. 

It came down to a choice. The elephants or the humans? The guns strapped to their sides frightened him, but at the same time there was something deeply curious about them. The elephants he knew. They were following their stream from Eden to Wherever. They would journey there, live, and journey back well before the snow buried the ruins for another long winter. These people, though, were on a much stranger journey. They obviously came from outside of the ruins of Trawno; their clothing, weapons, and demeanour were unlike anything Farsi had learned from his father or seen with his own eyes. The people of the ruins dressed much like Farsi, carried themselves like Farsi, and, when it came to extremes, would fight much as Farsi would. These people seemed like a word spoken out of time, a strange tether that led back through a century to the time of his grandfather and his grandfather’s father. They were more like the people who had built these ruins than the people would lived in them now.  

He decided to follow the people. He could not follow the elephants to their destination, after all; he could not see himself leaving the city. Even being this far away from his hunting grounds left him feeling somewhat odd. He waited for ten minutes after they’d disappeared and then began to pad after them, flitting from cover to cover like shadows from the circling sun. 

He followed them for an hour, waiting behind each bit of cover until he felt safe enough to jolt to another. Many of the buildings on the street were crumbled brick skeletons, and despite the careful distance he kept Farsi could see the group ahead swivel their heads to keep an eye on the shadows of the ruins. They were being cautious, and Farsi admired that.  

He reached a place where another road curved to meet Bathurst, and he caught movement to the right from the corner of his eye. When he turned there was nothing but the wind blowing across the collapsing facades of several broken storefronts. He stared at them for a very long time, watching intently for any minute change in the scene. Eventually he convinced himself that there was nothing, that he had seen the breeze blow a piece of kipple across the street. When he resumed stalking the group (who had gotten quite far ahead) he walked with the caution of a man treading on haunted ground. 

Twenty minutes passed; on his right, the ruin-checkered trees opened into a wide, spacious area cluttered with rusted hulks. There was a large building set back from the street, but a fence stood along the edge of the street and the building was too far back to make out any sharp details. He looked ahead and judged that the group he was stalking was about fifteen minutes ahead of him, and he stopped to catch a quick breath. He caught another flicker from the corner of his eye and this time he saw actual movement into the far-off building. It had been too fast to tell for sure, but it had seemed in that instant to be human-shaped. He was immediately off again, his heart beginning to thump uncomfortably hard inside of his ribcage.  

The group in front walked for another fifteen minutes and eventually stopped in the shade of a building separated from the buildings around it by a wide area of cee meant. There was still a sign on the building that read “BATHURST” and it looked very similar to the one in Farsi’s own hunting grounds, the one that read “SUMMERHILL”. He thought that it must be another entrance to those “subways”. He thought that must be the “tunnels” the Pack-Man had been complaining about earlier. A shiver ran through him, pimpling his skin. He began to wonder if these people were insane. 

“We’re getting close to Bloor Street, I think,” Tall-Woman said. Tail-Man looked around at the sky. 

“What does that mean?” he asked. 

“It means we’re not quite halfway there,” Tall-Woman said.  

“Fucker,” Tail-Man said. “It’s getting warm out”. 

“Oh, I think we’ll be inside before the sun gets to the worst position”. 

“Not if we sit here jawin’,” another of the men said. This one had a hard brow and a jutting chin. “Let’s break out the water and get moving”. 

Blonde-Woman reached into Pack-Man’s pack and brought out three canteens, their burnished metal surfaces glinting into Farsi’s eyes. He brought his arm up to shield his eyes and as he did so Thin-Man looked over at his position. Farsi froze, every muscle taut and on the verge of quivering. Thin-Man stared until Tail-Man nudged him. 

“You see anything out there?” Tail-Man asked. Thin-Man turned his stare onto Tail-Man and eventually Tail-Man looked down at the ground. 

“Just the wind,” Thin-Man said. “Time to move”. 

Farsi held his position until they were well in the distance, his heart pounding thickly. Had Thin-Man seen him? He weighed the options. Thin-Man had either not seen him or had seen him and had not wanted Farsi to know that he had seen him. Was there a trap being laid for him now? The wind blew around him, rattling a strange piece of black flake across the road. The skittering noise it created seemed to bounce off of his skull. 

What choice did he have? He could not follow the elephants completely out of their Eden, and he doubted that he’d be able to reach his own unscathed. There were people behind him. He couldn’t see them, but he knew. He had stalked enough animals to know when he was being stalked. The group ahead of him were being cautious, but they weren’t being cautious enough. It wasn’t anything that he could touch and say for certain, but it was a feeling. A certain drop in the stomach, a certain unnatural paranoia. The hackles that raised from unseen eyes. He darted away in pursuit of the group ahead of him after waiting longer than he really dared. 

On the corner ahead, the building (which seemed to take up an entire block) still bore a gigantic red-and-yellow sign that read “HONEST ED’S”. Beneath it, on a white banner that stretched endlessly around the block, he saw a sign that said “CO E IN ND G T LOS !”. He wondered over this briefly, trying to remember the last time he’d seen it. Six winters before? Seven? It had been just before the time of his manhood, he knew that. Back when a shaky sort of peace had held over Trawno and it had been safe enough to travel occasionally for great meetings. He had never been inside, though. The sign had once said “Come In And Get Lost”, his father had taught him that, and to Farsi it had always seemed like an invitation to death. Once in, you might never find your way out. His father had told him that it had been a store of some kind. Who would ever have thought such a grim exhortation would convince people to come inside of their own free will? Farsi stepped past it with light feet, wanting to put as much distance beyond it as possible. Let his stalkers go in and get lost. He would stick to the streets, to the light. 

By the time Farsi closed the gap with the group ahead they were by another patch of thick, dark forest. Another fence stood along the street, keeping the forest contained for the most part although here and there trees burst through the fence, slow jailbreaks with all the time necessary. Across the street, the brick houses had collapsed into each other, forming a solid wall of kipple and decay. There was very little in the way of cover here, and Farsi had to wait behind a tall spill of brick until the group was a comfortable distance ahead again. He felt exposed even behind the wall, and his back crawled uncomfortably. He began to walk down Bathurst again, but the feeling did not go away. At one point, just after he passed a ragged stump of brick with the ghost of some ancient paint scrawling across it, he turned around rapidly to try to catch whoever was behind him. In the distance he thought he saw a figure duck into the shadows but even his hunter’s eyes weren’t sure.  

Around him, the collapsed houses hemmed him into the street. He felt trapped between two equally dangerous unknowns. He remembered a bird that had found its way into Summerhill, before the roof had collapsed and exposed the rails to the sky. It had fluttered madly from wall to wall, squawking and flapping as it tried in vain to find its way out. It had run into walls for ten minutes and then had crashed into the floor. It had died gasping, its beak opening and closing at random. Farsi felt like that bird now. His breath came in ragged heaves, from fear rather than exhaustion. One of the long hulks, the “streetcars”, lay in the middle of the street, and for a moment Farsi considered crawling into it and hiding until all forms of danger had passed. He dismissed it quickly; if he hid inside of it, he truly would be trapped, and at the mercy of whomever was behind him.  

Twenty minutes later he was forced to seek shelter again, this time uncomfortably close to the group. They had stopped outside of a square, squat building whose sign was still attached. “MEDICAL PHARMACY CLINIC”, it read. 

“Should we check in here?” Blonde-Woman asked. Her voice was very loud in the silence of the ruins, and Farsi cringed slightly when he heard it.  

“It might be worth it,” Pack-Man said. “We might not have to go all the way down to the hospital if we can just pick it up in here”. 

“Put it out of your head,” Thin-Man said. “What we’re looking for was an experimental treatment and they would have kept it at the hospital, not some dirty clinic by the side of the road”. 

“I suppose you’re right,” Blonde-Woman said sullenly after a moment. “Something about these ruins just isn’t right, though”. 

“I’ll agree with that,” Thin-Man said, and something in his voice made Farsi shiver. They would have kept it at the hospital. The words clanged around the insides of his head. The hospital. He felt his breath wheeze out of him as though his ribcage were squeezing in around his heart and lungs. When they began to walk again, he seriously considered turning around to deal with his own stalkers as best he could. He knew that these people were crazy now.  

His fear pushed him into following them again. Within moments they crossed through another major, rubble-strewn intersection. The broken facade of some forgotten temple stood on one corner; on the opposite corner, a burned-out hulk of soot-blackened brick sprawled out into the street. The group kept walking, and Farsi ground his teeth as he followed them. There was more cover to hide behind in the street now. When he hid behind it, however, he could hear footsteps in both directions, both ahead and behind. At first, he could tell himself that he was merely the victim of paranoid imaginings; fifteen minutes later, as they were nearing the hospital, he could no longer fool himself. He could really hear them behind him, gaining on his position.  

The group stopped outside the hospital. They stared at it for a long time, silence settling around them like a heavy fog. The building itself, as seen from Bathurst Street, was unassuming. It looked like any of the apartment towers that stood falling into themselves throughout the city. Many of the windows were shattered, and some of the cee meant around them was chipped in strange ways. The entrance to the hospital was a gaping maw; scorch marks flared around it, as though it had been burned open.  

“Well, this isn’t quite what I was expecting,” Pack-Man said, breaking the silence. Across the street, Farsi hid behind a pile of cee meant that had piled up when a pair of thick columns had at some point collapsed. Pack-Man’s voice startled him, and for the first time he realized that he could no longer hear the footsteps of the unknown others. Even his stalkers had stopped in the strange silence that enveloped everyone around the hospital. 

“My grandmother was born here,” Blonde-Woman said. The words hung in the air; there seemed to be more to say, but the silence seemed to eat the potential whole.  

“Well, on we go,” Tail-Man said, and it seemed to jolt the whole group into moving. They picked their way tentatively into the shadowed mouth of the hospital and disappeared.  

Farsi hung onto the cracked remains of the columns for a moment after they were swallowed up by the hospital and quivered with indecision. The world had lost its sound, but he knew that somewhere around him his stalkers were watching the hospital just as intently as he was. He suspected that they were experiencing the same reticence that was percolating in his guts. The hospital was taboo, everyone agreed on that. The stories told of ghosts wailing in the halls, ragged demon-spirits missing limbs and spurting ghostly blood from their jagged wounds. It was an unquiet charnel house, a cursed place. Farsi did not precisely believe in the spirits of this place any more than he believed in the spirits of Summerhill, but he’d long ago decided that if there was a place that people avoided it was avoided for a reason. He thought of the stories of ghouls lurking in the tunnels – the subways – beneath the earth and shuddered. Offering up a prayer to whatever possible deities might be listening, he crept anxiously across the street towards that yawning, blasted doorway. 

He paused inside, huddling in the shadows and listening intently for the others. He could hear them in bursts, their voices echoing through the empty hallways. He could not quite make out what they were saying; they were far enough away that the echoes sounded like a jumbled collection of words. The entryway was large and dark, although the sunlight streaming in through the gap behind him reflected oddly off the walls and left streams of illumination in places along the floor. In one of these illuminated places he saw a dry skeleton stretched out, one arm bone reaching for a salvation that had never come. He swallowed hard, tried to push thoughts of ghouls and stalkers out of his head, and continued after his quarry. 

Outside of the entryway the hallway was quite dark, and Farsi had to creep along with one hand on the cold, pebbled wall. He navigated by sound, following the footsteps and voices of those ahead of him. Twice he tripped over thin, brittle sticks on the floor; the second time he had knelt and felt the dusty, gritty texture of century-old bones. Saliva deserted his mouth, and he felt a treacherous tremor begin in his limbs. He forced himself to push on, stamping down his fear with a desperate force. At some point he turned down the wrong corridor; the voices began to pull away from him, and after a time he could hear them only as faint murmurs from elsewhere. Eventually even that vanished, and he was left in darkness punctuated only by the windows in rooms that branched off the corridors. He longed to enter these rooms, longed to stand in sunlight and revel in the simple majesty of sight, but he didn’t dare. He was sure that, were he to find himself in one of those rooms, he would be trapped, and whatever lurked beyond his sight would be able to deal with him at its leisure.  

He came at last to a door at the end of a hallway. It was a heavy door, and it creaked open with the groaning pain of an age of disuse. The sound seemed to ricochet through his head and made him think that he could hear footsteps everywhere around him. Beyond the door was pure blackness, darker than anything Farsi had found in the hospital. There were no windows, no weak sunlight filtering through to cast strange, moving shadows on the walls and floor. Farsi felt his way forward carefully, his hands held out stiffly in front of him. The tips of his fingers brushed against a cold metal railing, and he froze, his heart thumping loudly in the black silence. He sent one questing foot out into the unknown and encountered the riser of a stair. After a moment’s sweating consideration, he began to crawl his way up the stairs, continuing to reach into the blackness to guide himself along. 

After twenty minutes of slow climbing, he found himself on a landing. He slid his fingers along the floor and found another skeleton. The dusty nature of the bones seemed to linger on his fingers, and he shuddered in the dark, trying to keep the scream bubbling up from his stomach from escaping through his lips. He stretched out his hands again and found the wall; inching his fingers along, he found the hinges of a door. A moment later his hand brushed across the cold steel handle. He gripped it, swallowed hard, twisted it, and pushed the door open. 

The hallway beyond brought a little more of the light back, enough so that he could put his arms down and navigate slowly by sight alone. He strained his ears for some time and then heard the voices again, faint but not far off. He followed them again, making his way slowly through the corridors. He kept one hand on the wall, for stability rather than navigation; his eyes were beginning to adjust to low light levels, and his comfort grew in tiny increments. There were more skeletons on this floor, and he stepped gingerly over each of them, not wanting to disturb their rest and thereby alert anyone to his presence.  

The voices grew louder until he could begin to clearly make them out. He entered a large hallway where a large counter stood sentry just past a set of heavy double doors that had been left ajar. As he crept past the counter the voices came so loudly that he at first thought they were in the hallway with him. He leapt over the counter and cowered on the other side of it, convinced that he had been seen and that the endgame had begun. Slowly he realized that the group was in the room nearest to him, the one just a few feet down on the wall opposite the counter he was hiding behind. 

“Ward rooms,” Tail-Man said. “For just after surgery maybe?” 

“Who knows?” Tall-Woman said. Her voice was tired and dispirited. “This place is gigantic. It’s going to take days to find it”. 

“Oh, I’m not so sure about that,” Tail-Man said. “If we split up then we can cover ground a lot quicker”. 

“We cannot split up,” Thin-Man said, his tone sharp. “We cannot afford to get lost and disoriented in this place”. 

“Why?” Pack-Man asked, his voice exhausted and frustrated. “There’s no one here! These bodies haven’t been touched since just after the disappearance!” 

“There most certainly are people here. I find it disturbing that you haven’t been paying attention enough to notice that”. 

Behind the counter, Farsi ceased breathing for a moment. They knew. He clutched his spear, although he didn’t know what he was going to do with it. He hadn’t stalked these people across the city to kill them. Had he? He was no longer even sure about that. Why had he followed them all this way? After a winter spent in isolation, had he been so starved for company that he would take shadowing a group of dangerous strangers over being alone? A nauseating wave of homesickness came over him. He wanted his father to be there, kneeling beside him in the darkness, telling him that caution would win the day and that he would pull through okay. 

“Do you even know what you’re looking for?” Thin-Man continued, some of the bright anger drained from his voice. There was a sullen silence. 

“Let’s not fight,” Blonde-Woman said soothingly. “Let’s settle down here for the evening and start again in the morning, when we’re fresh”. 

“That may be for the best,” Tall-Woman agreed. “We’re all hungry and tired and in need of some rest”. 

“You’re likely right,” Thin-Man said. “We will post watch tonight, though. I do not like the feel of this hospital. Too many old bones and too many new sounds”. 

Farsi slowed his breathing until he entered a stillness as complete as the plastic men that haunted the old beaten stores. He listened intently to them, every moment spent knowing that they would come leaping over the counter in the next. He steeled himself, fixing his father’s voice in his head and telling himself that he was prepared. They remained in the room. Their voices were low murmurs in the gloom. Tail-Man spoke loudly once and was admonished by Thin-Man. Beyond that were whispers and rustling, noises on the frequency of the wind that whistled redundantly through the nameless bones. The whirlwind in Summerhill he thought. Mer Ill, or perhaps nothing now. The journey began to settle like dust over his still vigil, and after a time it began to wear on him. Eventually his eyes drooped, and while he fought twice to remain conscious, he eventually fell into a nodding sleep. 

He awoke to a sharp voice, a shouted curse, and an explosive percussion that rang through the air like the drone of some demonic bell. His eyes flew open, and he swiftly recovered his loose spear from where it had come to rest on the floor. As he rose up over the counter a piercing scream filled the air. Blonde-Woman he thought. Maybe Tall-Woman, but probably not. He ran around the counter, flew around the corner into the room, and was three steps through before it occurred to him to wonder why he was rushing in blindly.  

A single oil lantern sat atop a dust-covered piece of plastic-framed machinery. It threw out a flickering, chaotic light that caused the scene in front of him to be bathed in a distraction of shadows. Tail-Man stood with his gun in his hand, standing over the prone form of Pack-Man, who no longer wore his pack. Two of the other men were wrestling Blonde-Woman against one of the raised beds that marked the corners of the room. Another, the one with the hard brow and jutting chin, had his gun levelled at Tall-Woman, who was reciprocating. Thin-Man was fumbling with his pistol, trying madly to get it out of the holster. 

He did not stop to think. He lunged forward and drove his spear upwards through the bottom two ribs of Tail-Man’s right side. As he felt it lodge in something meaty, he kicked the man forward and drew another spear from his lash. Thin-Man managed to unholster his pistol and fired a snap shot at one of the men struggling to hold down Blonde-Woman, missing cleanly. The shot distracted the man holding down the standoff with Tall-Woman; three-fifths of a second later he was dead, one of Tall-Woman’s shells having blown off the upper portion of his head. Farsi used his new spear to rip through the throat of the man closest to him. The other began to turn towards Farsi, to defend himself from this new threat, and then hesitated fatally as he realized that he had let Blonde-Woman loose. Blonde-Woman lashed her head forward and the hard part of the top of her forehead smashed into the man’s exposed chin. The man stumbled forward, and Farsi drove the sole of his right foot into the man’s knee. He went down to the floor with a heavy thwump and twitched once. Farsi loosened a third spear and hefted it above his head with the point facing downward. 

“No!” Thin-Man cried out. Farsi looked over to him. The man had his skeletal hands held out, and Farsi was repulsed. He thought of the bones littering the hospital, dusty and nameless, and he slowly lowered the spear. In the next instant he felt cold metal dig into the blind side of his head. Gun, he thought wildly. It’s her gun. His first instinct was to spin around, but he suppressed it.  

“Alina, wait!” Blonde-Woman exclaimed. The crunch of metal against his skull did not abate. He watched Thin-Man return his pistol to its holster with a palsy in his hands.  

“He saved our lives,” Thin-Man said. There was something sullen in his voice, a strange petulance. Farsi squinted at him, trying to catch the man’s eyes, but Thin-Man looked down to the floor instead. The gun moved away from him a nearly imperceptible amount.  

“Why don’t you speak up, friend?” Tall-Woman said. “Start with who you are, move on to why you’re here, and finish up with who else is lurking around here”. 

Nasty laughter sprang up inside his head. The Dees will have their revenge at last he thought. 

He began to raise his hands incrementally out from his sides, his arms stiff at the elbows. He turned the palms outward to show that there was no hidden weapon. He stopped when his arms were level with his shoulders, held them in that position for a moment, and then began to just as slowly crook his elbows and bring his palms around to place them over his jugular. He held them there for a moment until the gun was removed from the back of his head. 

“You’re a mute?” Tall-Woman said, incredulous. “You can’t tell us anything?” 

Farsi turned around to face her, keeping his hands at his throat. He locked eyes with her, and then shook his head decisively negative. 

“Great,” she muttered, jamming her pistol back in its holster. A keening wail rose up from behind him and Farsi spun around again, alarmed. Blonde-Woman was kneeling next to the corpse of Pack-Man, imploring him in an increasingly unhinged fashion to wake up. Thin-Man knelt to comfort her, and she swatted him away violently. Tall-Woman wasted no time in taking his place, squatting and whispering sharply into her ear. Blonde-Woman wept harder for a moment and then managed to get control of herself. They both rose to their feet and looked at each other warily.  

Farsi looked to each of them in turn. Thin-Man was regarding him with the look of a man who has discovered some new and fascinating artifact. 

“Where have you come from?” he asked, and Farsi caught the impression that he was speaking mostly to himself. “Were you the one I saw back at the subway station, I wonder?” 

Farsi nodded, and this seem to shock Thin-Man from his reverie. Thin-Man’s eyes widened momentarily and then he carefully recomposed his face. 

“You were the one hiding, then,” he said, his voice sharper, more in focus. “The others, though. Do you know of the others?” 

Farsi nodded. 

“Do they come with you?” 

Slowly, Farsi shook his head. Thin-Man grimaced. 

“Do you know where they are?” 

Again Farsi shook his head. 

“Damn”. Thin-Man seemed to withdraw into himself, considering this. 

“Why would Emerson do this?” Blonde-Woman asked, her voice as treacherous as the rotted supports in the ruins. “He kill…I mean, he killed”. She began to weep softly again and then cut it off with an angry swipe of her hand. She knelt beside the man that Farsi had nearly speared and grabbed the back of his head by his hair. A muted groan came out of the man. 

“Why did you do this?” she hissed. When he did answer immediately, Blonde-Woman smashed the man’s face into the floor with force. She brought up his head again. “Who put you up to this?”. Again, there was no answer, and again Blonde-Woman smashed the man’s face into the floor. There was a thick, wet crunch as the man’s nose broke. 

“Why did you do this?” she shouted. 

“Fuck…you,” the man croaked, and he began to laugh weakly. A gunshot rang out and a reddish-grey pulp soaked the floor where his head had been. Alina Tall-Woman stood over him, lazy smoke curling up from her pistol. 

“He’d never tell you,” she said, “and it’s obvious anyway. Ottonio is making his move”. 

“He wouldn’t dare,” Blonde-Woman said. 

“I say he would. Your father is ill, and his heir and guardian are sent on a fool’s errand to the great piss-all to find some mythical cure. Who was it exactly that put together this little expedition, anyway?” 

“Emerson,” Blonde-Woman said slowly. “Emerson said he’d found an article on this MK-3475 drug in…”. She turned to stare down Thin-Man. “He found it in your archive”. Her tone dripped with suspicion, and her hand went to the butt of her pistol. Thin-Man raised his hands in supplication. 

“My archives are open for all!” he protested. “He seemed to have nothing but good faith in coming here!” 

“Not all snakes are rattlers,” Alina Tall-Woman said, putting her hand on Blonde-Woman’s arm. “Sarri has roots that lead back to the Founding”. 

“Did you ever see this article?” Blonde-Woman asked. Sarri Thin-Man nodded.  

“I did, Ceeli, but…please remember that it was a very brief article, mentioning that a team at this hospital had begun trial experiments of the drug and that it was having some success. Beyond that, neither he nor I knew nothing”. 

“It’s here,” Ceeli Blonde-Woman declared. “I can feel it”. 

“I hope so as well, for your and your father’s sake, but it will take some time”. He stopped and his expression looked as though he was seeing the scene for the first time. He turned on Farsi. 

“Do you know anything about the others who were following us?” he asked. Farsi considered the question for a moment and then shrugged slightly. 

“There are others that live around here, though?” Sarri Thin-Man asked intently. Farsi nodded. “Do they live peacefully?” Farsi shook his head. “Would they come into the hospital to come after us?” Farsi shrugged his shoulders awkwardly again. Sarri Thin-Man rubbed his forehead. 

“I really wish that you were able to speak,” he groused. Farsi longed to grab the man by the shoulders, to shake him and weep and scream that he, too wished that he was able to speak. How was he supposed to be able to explain it? He couldn’t explain that his test of adulthood had included a vow of silence, a cleansing period of the voice to shed the poor approximations and fogged observations of childhood. He couldn’t explain that his father, as the Speaker for his crossing, was the only person capable of lifting this vow of silence. He couldn’t explain that his father had been the first to fall under the rusted, jagged pipe ends and glass-studded clubs of the Dees when their cries had broken through into the inner chamber of the home warrens of Farsi’s people. The home warrens of the Rose.  

He stared ahead and said nothing. He could not explain anything. The Dees had robbed him of explanations.  

“We should leave,” Sarri Thin-Man said. A note of fear had crept into his voice. Ceeli Blonde-Woman stared at him. Her mouth had fallen open slightly and the lantern-light played hob with her teeth. 

“We can’t leave,” she said. “We need to find this cure. We can’t leave without the cure”. Her voice shook, and Alina Tall-Woman put a gentle hand on the back of her neck, pushing through her blonde curls to find the warm skin beneath. 

“Sarri’s right, though,” Alina said, her voice soothing. “It’s just the three of us now, and Sarri has no training or experience with his gun. You are good, you learn quickly, but I’m the only one here who can hit a moving target at a distance”. 

“What about him?” Ceeli said, pointing at Farsi. “He seems to have some skill”.  

Alina uttered a short, barking laugh. “He does, at that”. She looked Farsi up and down, and Farsi felt uncomfortable, as though the strange, imperious woman was looking through his flesh into his soul.  

“Well?” she said, a challenge more than a question. “Will you help us leave this place?” Farsi nodded quickly. The walls in the room seemed to be closing in on him. He was acutely aware of the corpses sprawled on the floor. In time their flesh would bloat, rot, and decay. Small animals would rip and chew it, and the scraps would desiccate and wither away. Their wet bones would dry, and there would be four more dusty skeletons to litter the hospital. He shuddered and nodded again. 

“Then we need to be off quickly,” Sarri said, his voice hot and urgent. “I feel very strongly that every moment we are here is increasing our danger”. 

Ceeli knelt beside the corpse of Pack-Man. She smoothed the hair back from his slackened face and placed her lips upon his cold brow. 

“I’ll miss you,” she whispered, and then stood. She wiped errant tears away from her eyes. 

Alina went first, slipping out into the hallway with her pistol held tightly in one hand and the lantern in the other. Sarri and Ceeli followed; Sarri, Pack-Man’s pack strapped across his shoulders, prudently left his weapon holstered but Ceeli drew hers and held it in imitation of Alina. Farsi came last, his spear held upright in a loose fist. Alina’s lantern sprayed light throughout the hallway and Farsi found the effect disconcerting; it was as though the hospital were on fire, and he could almost smell smoke and hear the dull thud of supports giving way to hungry flame. 

They were halfway down the hallway when Farsi realized that the thuds were not a product of his imagination. There were a great many muffled thumps echoing out from somewhere not far away. Alina brought them to a halt with a raised hand. The thumps coalesced into footsteps; there were many footsteps coming up the stairwell behind them, the same stairwell that Farsi had edged his way up.  

“Run,” Alina whispered, and at this signal they all broke into a sprint.  

“There will be another stair way at the end of this corridor!” Sarri shouted. A skeleton caught Farsi’s eye as they ran by. It was sitting against the wall, its hands resting in its lap. It seemed to leer at Farsi, and he stumbled slightly. As he recovered his stride, shouts and clatter burst through the doors that Farsi had originally come through. He turned to run backwards and saw flickering torchlight outlining several ominous figures that were rushing after them. 

“Faster!” Alina cried out and then they were at the door into the stairwell. Alina threw it open and rushed through. Farsi threw one last glance behind them before following the others; there were still no details, but they held ragged clubs in their hands and their shouts were mocking taunts. He stepped through and saw a skeleton curled against the railing of the stairs. He slammed the door closed and squatted to break a bone from the skeleton; it gave way easily and he jammed it through the door handle in a makeshift wedge. He leapt down the stairs after the swaying, dancing lantern light, thinking If that doesn’t hold for at least a little bit this will all be over.  

They dashed down the stairs two at a time. Skeletons lay here and there on the stairs; hazards waiting to trip them and send them flying into the darkness that crept at the edges of the lantern’s field of light. Twice Farsi had to manoeuvre carefully to avoid stumbling and twice he could feel himself on the verge of launching himself into the waiting arms of the blackness below. Once Sarri tipped forward, his foot having caught in the rib cage of a skeleton lying lengthwise across six stairs; Farsi grabbed onto the pack and managed to rebalance the man enough to keep them moving. 

They arrived on a landing for the first floor, but Alina kept moving downwards, not even stopping to consider the door.  

“Alina, wait!” Ceeli cried out. 

“Remember your great-grandparent’s stories!” Alina replied, her voice diminishing as she descended ahead of them. “They escaped this way! There will be a hole down here, they had to blast their way out!” 

Farsi’s heart sank. We’re following old stories? he thought. Above them came a loud snap and the sound of a door crashing open. There were shouts punctuated by sharp commands, and then running footsteps began to descend the stairway.  

They descended two more flights and on the third Alina changed course, throwing open the door on the landing and plunging through. The others followed her into a Byzantine series of dark hallways, their walls painted a strange, luminous blue. They could hear their pursuers coming down the stairs and entering the hallways, but their voices and footfalls were muted and diminished. They took turns seemingly at random and Farsi became disoriented in the swaying darkness. Come In And Get Lost he thought feverishly. Ten minutes later they came to a featureless room that seemed to stretch on forever. Alina brought the lantern out into the room and a jagged, brick-toothed hole was revealed on the far wall. 

“It’s true,” Ceeli whispered.  

“It appears to be so,” Sarri said. “Which means that the way should be open from here”. 

They pushed onward into the ragged hole in the wall and emerged into a dark, cool area that echoed metallically. The place was filled with strange sculptures of metal and glass, meticulously designed and covered with a creeping rust. Farsi thought of the rusted slagheaps that littered the roads outside of the hospital and wondered if there was a connection. 

“This way!” Alina called out, and they swung left between two rows of the multicoloured sculptures. There was another jagged hole punched in a metal wall ahead, and from outside of that hole the light of the moon streamed in. They ran to the edge of this wall and stopped, listening. There were a series of thuds and the shattering of glass from far off. There was no sound to mar the immediate area. 

“Slowly,” Sarri said, and Alina glared at him before slipping out into the fresh night air. They emerged after her into a courtyard that led out onto the road. The road cut into a thick forest that was rendered completely opaque by the night. From their right, a mass of shouts came from around the far side of the hospital. They glanced at one another and made their way into the dark tangle of wizened trees. 

They picked their way along the uneven rise and fall of the pavement, glancing at everything with paranoid eyes. The trees grew through the last slumped remains of brick houses, but then the houses faded away and they found themselves carefully stepping through a gauntlet of treacherous roots. They began to hear shouts and the barks of dogs bobbing from an indeterminate distance behind them. Alina tripped on a thick root and the lantern shattered on the ground a few feet in front of her. She cursed, and when Farsi stopped to help her up a large crashing sound came from their left. Sarri fumbled for his gun, but it was a deer that came bounding through the trees. The deer did not stop to investigate them. 

“We need to get to the lake,” Sarri said. “If we can get to the lake – to a dock, preferably, we might be able to make it out of the city alive”.  

“Which way is south, though?” Alina asked, frustrated. “We don’t even know which direction we came out of the hospital in”. 

Farsi grabbed her arm. Alina stiffened and began to turn on him angrily, but he caught her attention with a wave of his hand. He gestured forward, towards the line where the ruined houses began again. He then pointed up, towards the sky. Alina stared at him, her jaw set and her eyes flashing in the scant moonlight. 

“Climb?” Ceeli said. “You want climb up and see where we are?” Farsi turned to her and nodded. He strode ahead, not waiting to see if the others would follow. 

The closest of the buildings was short and caved in, but Farsi was able to climb up it and then gain a foothold in the upper branches of a strong oak tree. He lifted himself carefully up into the top and found a couple of likely-looking branches to balance himself on. Immediately ahead and slightly to the left he saw the South Point, rising above the trees like the finger of a benign god. It was close, now, and Farsi spared a moment to wonder over this.  

From behind him he heard the calls of their pursuers, closer now. He turned himself and saw the flickers of torches flitting through the forest approximately a quarter of a mile away. He scrambled down the tree and landed with heavy thud onto the ground. He gestured towards the direction in which the South Point lay and took the lead onward into the trees. 

A few minutes later the trees melted away and they emerged onto one of the major roads. Here and there a particularly strong tree broke through the cee meant but otherwise the slumping rows of buildings held sway. Farsi realized that he did not know the names in this part of Trawno. He was in the nameless places his father had never taken him. Ahead of him, a blue sign survived atop a shattered, rotted gap in the building’s facade. “KING CLOUD” it said, and Farsi looked to the sky. The night-velvet was sprayed with diamond chips from one end to the other, without a cloud in sight.  

The sheer immediacy of the buildings standing along this wide road blocked their view of the South Point, but Farsi steered them down streets in the direction that he believed it to be in. After twenty minutes they could still not see the Point. They stopped in a wide field of cee meant covered in rusted heaps. There was a rickety-looking metal staircase leading up to the roof of a nearby building, and Farsi climbed it swiftly. It groaned bitterly in places but held his weight, and the roof was weathered but sound enough. He could see the tower, looming full in the near distance. He turned and saw a remarkably large crowd of figures streaming out of the forest that they had emerged from. They were moving quickly and would catch up to their position quite soon. 

He took the stairs downwards too fast and when he landed on the fifth step from the bottom the lower half of the staircase broke away and fell into an undignified heap. He was wildly shaking his head as Ceeli and Alina helped him to his feet. He broke away from their hands and dashed ahead, gesturing wildly for them to keep up.  

There were few trees in this place, and the road forked into two directions, neither of which led directly towards the tower. Farsi took the road leading away to the left without thinking, and when a road opened to the south, he directed them that way. The buildings grew in height around them until they blotted out the stars. 

“There are shadows moving in these buildings!” Alina shouted, but Farsi refused to look. The wendigos his mind babbled, the wendigos are emerging, they’re coming to rip us and shred us and eat us and take our souls deep into their blank idiot eyes and we’ll never get out never never never. The path widened into a vast stretch of pavement with the ruined stalks of great buildings towering on every corner. Against the sky stood the tower, seemingly close enough to touch. He stopped to try to figure out which of the two roads that led out of this grand square would be the best to take, but Alina took over and continued straight ahead on the road they’d been on. Ceeli and Sarri followed her without a pause and Farsi was left scrambling to keep up, his heart throbbing in his throat. The road narrowed and the buildings closed in until Farsi thought they were on the verge of collapsing on them. His rib cage felt constricted, and his breath shortened uncomfortably. 

They came to another square, smaller than the last, and Sarri pointed down the road that led away to the right. 

“There, right at the end!” he exclaimed. “Can you see it? The stadium, you can just see the stadium at the end of this road! The docks are just on the other side of it!” He took off running in that direction and the others followed him without question. Behind them, the roar of their pursuers grew into a din. 

“Why haven’t they given up yet?” Ceeli screamed. They want to sacrifice you Farsi wanted to say. They want to string you up and bring you to the Great Square of the Dead and leave you for the monsters that they believe wait there. You are their insurance. You’ve trespassed upon ground they – we – consider taboo, and to ensure that their crops survive through the summer they’ll sacrifice each and every one of you to mitigate your curse. He brimmed with explanation, but his lips remained sewn shut. 

They reached another square, cornered again by buildings that reached jaggedly up into the glittering night sky. They dashed through and came to another. And another. The gigantic structure of weathered cee meant – the stadium as Sarri had named it – rose closer, and so did the slavering cries of their pursuers. As they crossed the last wide stretch of road before the stadium blocked out the moon, Farsi saw that there was a bronze sculpture jutting out of the front of the structure, a depiction of several people staring out at and pointing to the road. He felt a chill run through him and touched his fingers to his forehead in superstitious dread as they passed under their gaze. 

A set of cee meant stairs rose up next to the stadium and their pace slowed down. Farsi paused halfway up to gauge their progress and saw that the crowd of figures was crossing the last roadway, less than ten minutes away. He took the rest of the stairs two at a time, ready to keep running until he dropped, but at the top of the stairs Sarri stopped and gestured frantically at the pack with his thumb. 

“The gun,” he exclaimed, “get the gun!” 

Alina tore the pack open and dug through. Farsi stepped to the edge of the stairs and stared down. Their pursuers were approaching the stairs. There were perhaps thirty of them, and Farsi thought that a great deal of them must have dropped out of the chase throughout the night. Those that remained were bare-chested and carrying a variety of sinister weapons. They slowed their pace as they began to climb the stairs, and in the light of the moon Farsi could see that many of them were grinning.  

They had designs painted on their chests; there were a few varieties but mostly they were a stylized cow skull with spiral eyes and a stitched mouth. A familiar design. One he remembered well from the night that he’d watched their people tear his people apart with vicious attention to detail. He closed his eyes and saw his father; his head being crushed beneath a rain of glass-encrusted blows.  

He pulled a spear out of his lash and held it aloft, shaking it defiantly. He then tore open his rough hide shirt to reveal the simple design of a rose with three thorns emblazoned on his own chest.  

The crowd stopped in their tracks. The wind blew with a keening howl around the crumbling cee meant blocks of the stadium, accentuating the silence that had fallen. One of the crowd, a heavyset woman with the cow skull slathered between two ponderous breasts, raised her studded club into the sky and screamed. 

“The last Rose! The last Rose!” 

Farsi bared his teeth, cocked his arm, and threw the spear. It flew smoothly through the air and struck directly between the spiral eyes tattooed on the chest of the heavy woman. She fell backwards, clutching at the splintering shaft of the spear with twitching hands, and bowled two others over as she went down the stairs. The others hesitated briefly and then clamoured up the stairs, their taunting screams echoing wildly off the ringing cee meant.  

Behind him there was a loud hissing noise. Farsi turned his head and saw Alina pointing a gun into the sky. A cloud of smoke trailed upwards from the muzzle and a green witch-light flared brightly in the sky above them. The people on the stairs below stopped and wailed as they saw the strange light; several of them dropped their weapons and fled back down road, screaming and sobbing. The ones who remained hesitated again and this time Farsi took advantage of their hesitation to draw and guide a spear into another of their hearts. 

“Let’s go!” Sarri shouted, “I really hope they saw that!” The others ran forward again, and Farsi followed them a heartbeat later, resisting the urge to let fly another spear. His lash was becoming scarce.  

They fled across a plateau of cee meant and on the other side they began a descent down an identical set of stairs. At the bottom they emerged onto a wasteland of pavement. Towers clutched at the skies around them and rusted heaps cluttered the grounds. When Farsi turned around to view the progress of the pursuit he saw the South Point, rising only a few hundred feet away to the north. Up close, it was just as weathered as any other slab of cee meant in the ruins. Superficial parts of it had crumbled away, and he saw that the glass in the bulge two-thirds of the way up the spire was shattered.  

“Are they still back there?” Ceeli asked. Farsi stopped in the middle of the wide, flat stretch of pavement and waited, watching the top of the stairs with a quivering tension in his muscles. Nothing appeared. He turned and shook his head. 

“Okay,” Sarri said, “Let’s keep going. Quick walk. We’re not out of this yet”. 

They resumed at a much slower pace. Once the adrenaline had leached out of their muscles the pain settled in, and it became a trudge. They could smell the lake, ripe with fish, but immediately in front of them was another wide roadway with a wall of rubble on the other side. Poking out of the rubble at regular intervals were cracked cee meant pillars topped with flat squares of ragged pavement. Rusted steel bars poked out of these squares haphazardly. The guardians of the lake Farsi thought uneasily. Sentries along the water. He swallowed painfully as they picked their way across the roadway. The ruins were wider, deeper, than he’d ever known. 

“We’re going to have to climb it,” Alina said doubtfully. “Are you in any sort of condition to do that?” 

It was unclear to whom she was referring and after a confused silence Ceeli stated emphatically that she was willing to climb anyone or anything to get out of the city. Sarri laughed. 

“I agree with Ceeli,” he said. “It can’t be that high anyway. Maybe ten or fifteen feet, less in spots. Maybe we’ll have the time to find the low spots”. 

“Maybe,” Alina said, but her tone remained threaded with doubt. They approached the wall and stopped for a moment to examine it. It was crumbled black pavement and the rusted, sharp ends of steel bars, like those that topped the pillars. Farsi looked it over and realized that it would be simple to climb; he’d been climbing through the ruins since he was a small child. He waited to see what the others would do. 

Ceeli approached the wall gingerly and began to tentatively find handholds. After she had taken four steps upward Alina joined in behind her, grasping on to outcroppings of pavement with a stern confidence. Sarri went third, sighing heavily before slowly hauling himself up the rubble. Farsi watched them climb and then stole a glance behind them. He saw a pair of figures in the distance, standing atop the stairs and watching. He stared at them, his feet feeling rooted into the ground. They would bear the sign of the Dees on their chest, the cow skull with the spiral eyes. It would be death to return, he knew it in his brain. His heart, his stomach, and his feet all told a different story. They felt connected to the wind, a long breath of wind that stretched back to the cradle-canyon he had squatted in the previous morning, a lifetime ago. He felt that connected wind pull him, tug him along the stream that led back to home. 

He turned and climbed rapidly, grabbing at the outcroppings in anger and gritting his teeth. It had been home. He did not know where he was going now, but it was not there. His feet were off the ground, the roots had torn. He stopped at the apex of the wall. Below him, the others were slowly picking their way back to the ground. He turned back at looked over the shadowed lines of Trawno. It looked now like the bottom of a rotted jawbone, broken teeth jutting out of a bleached line of bone. The wind whistled through it, wailing of lost days and mouldering dead. After taking all of the names, it continued to blow, naming nothing and filling the empty shells of the city with noise. Come in and get lost. He blinked and was surprised to find moistness clinging to his eyelashes and leaking from his eyes. He wiped it away. The city looked like a shaking old man’s mouth, stinking and cancerous. He turned and began to pick his way down after the others. It’s simply lived too long he thought. It’s outlived whatever natural time it had allotted to it, and now it’s time to move on. Fleas depart the dog when the dog dies, and this dog died long ago. 

The group said nothing as they walked away from the wall of rubble. They passed beneath the dead gaze of a thin tower; ahead was another tangled forest, but they could all hear waves lapping against a shoreline beyond it. They entered the forest and Farsi found it strange; the trees pushed and fought against each other but only in confined spaces. Wide paths of cee meant ran between these spaces like roads in miniature. The moon shone down and reflected off the paths, and the effect, after the wild panic of the chase from the hospital, seemed surreal.  

Farsi heard a rumbling mixed into the lapping of the waves, and it grew louder as they grew closer to the shoreline. They cleared the line of trees and found themselves amongst an odd collection of round rusted tables. The rumbling grew louder; to Farsi it sounded like every bee in Trawno had gathered and was flying towards them in a cloud. The cee meant stopped a few feet after the last of the tables and dropped sharply away into the black waters of the lake.  

He stared into the swirling dark waters and tried to recall its name. His father had taught it to him, had told him of the place, but this was the first time that Farsi had ever laid eyes upon it. It was massive; the water stretched out into the unseen horizon, lit dimly by the pinprick light of the star-spray above them. He groped inside of his mind for the words, but they were not there. They had faded away at some point and were now gone. The wind blew off the water, chill and scented with an unlovely scent of fish and decaying plants. He crossed his arms across his chest, feeling uneasy and exposed. 

Out of the gloom on the lake came movement, and it took Farsi a moment to realize that the slowly coalescing object was the source of the overpowering bee-buzz. At first it was an amorphous blob, but it formed into a platform that was floating atop the water, running along and creating waves in its wake. A pair of human figures stood on top of the platform. As they came closer to the edge of the shoreline one of them waved. Sarri waved back, and an exuberant laugh escaped his lips. It echoed through the night and set Farsi’s teeth on edge. He stared back into the odd little forest that they’d come through but there was no movement. 

“Saw your flare, sir,” one of the figures shouted as the platform came within a dozen feet of the shoreline. “I guess it didn’t take us all that long to get here”. 

“The timing worked out well, although there was a climb involved that I didn’t appreciate.” Sarri said.  

“Who are these people, Sarri?” Alina asked. There was deep suspicion in her voice and her hand had strayed to the butt of her gun. Sarri looked at her with surprise and shook his head. 

“No, no,” he said slowly, “they work for me. They’re assistants at the archive, non-political. Well,” he added, with a short laugh that made Farsi look at him sharply, “as far as I know”. 

“What’d we miss?” the figure on the boat asked. The buzzing sound stopped, and the platform floated towards the shore. It came in fast and there was a scraping sound as it ran along the edge of the cee meant. Sarri winced. No one replied, and there was an awkward silence before the figure spoke again. 

“You seem to be missing a few people,” he observed. He was stocky, powerful looking, with broad shoulders and a heavy brown beard. He saw Farsi and had a double-take. 

“Are we adopting the savages now?” he asked, and while he was putting on a front of bravado Farsi could detect a hint of fear in his voice. Farsi grinned widely, being sure to show his teeth. 

“He saved our lives at the hospital,” Ceeli said, sounding offended. “If it wasn’t for him, you’d still be floating down the shore waiting for us in vain.” 

The man managed to look ashamed. “Sorry, ma’am,” he mumbled.  

“Where’s Emerson?” the other man on the platform asked. He was thinner than the first man, although not by much.  

“He died a traitor,” Alina said sharply. The man’s eyes widened.  

“Wha-…I mean, how,” he stammered. 

“The whole thing was a setup,” Ceeli said. Her voice was tired, and her shoulders were slumping. “Emerson put the idea of there being a cure here in my head and lured us out here to get us away from my father. Ottonoio has probably already killed him and installed himself as Prime Minister.” 

“We could very well be sailing back into a trap,” Alina continued. The men on the platform looked at each other and Farsi could see deep consternation in their eyes. 

“Where should we go then?” the bigger one asked. Sarri put his finger to his lip and then leapt aboard the platform. It swayed and rocked with the impact, but it remained stable.  

“We can’t return to the docks, unfortunately,” he mused, “but we can go ashore about a day’s ride north of there. The ruins there are supposedly wild, but I happen to know a few people there and they might be able to aid us. At the very least we may learn some news as to what has transpired at home.” He looked out into the murky distance. “Hug the shore, I will let you know when we’re getting close”. 

The others followed Sarri’s lead and jumped onto the platform. Farsi felt sharp, shocked panic rise in him as the thing rocked. Ceeli saw the look in his eyes and took his hand. She gently guided him to one of the front corners of the boat and sat down with him. She continued to hold his hand as his heart slowed down and reason returned to him. 

“You’ve never been on a boat, have you?” she said. “I suppose not, if you’ve lived your entire life in those ruins.” 

The buzzing sound returned, and the boat began to pull away from the shore. Ceeli stroked Farsi’s hand and put her head down on his shoulder. 

“My grandmother was born there, you know,” she said. “My great-grandmother was pregnant when the disappearance happened, and they had to give birth in that…that hospital. They had to escape it too. Maybe the place is cursed.” Farsi bit his tongue to keep his laughter at bay. It was nasty laughter, and he didn’t want to spoil the comfort for her. Still, he saw in his head the Dees and the others chasing them through their hunting lands, and he thought they may have left you alone if you’d never gone in there. Maybe. He thought of his father teaching him that such things as the spirits and curses that the other peoples believed in were nonsense. Sometimes they have a point, father he thought. 

“I wonder whatever happened to the elephants?” she mused, her voice fading. He realized that she was drifting down into sleep, and immediately after he realized that he was following her down into that blackness. Exhaustion had crept up on them at last. 

“Where did they come from, I wonder?” she murmured. “Where were they going?” 

They came from their own Eden, he thought, just as you did, and I did. I don’t know where their Eden is any more than I know yours. I only know mine, and barely that. They were going Elsewhere, though, I do know that. There’s only one path to take from your own Eden, and the current of that stream only runs one way. It flows out, and you follow it. At some point, for the elephants, the stream turns around, and they go back. They return and wait for the snows to vanish from the world. Maybe that doesn’t always happen, though. Maybe the current doesn’t turn around for everyone. Maybe you can never go back. 

He longed to say these words to her, to stroke her hand in return and tell her all that he knew. He remained mute, however, staring out at the vanishing jawline of Trawno, where his own Eden lay slumbering somewhere over the horizon. He kept his words in the privacy of his own heart and closed his eyes. As he floated down into the crush of sleep, he saw the spiral eyes and the cow skull flare in his mind’s eye, outlined in red and illuminated in green witch-light. There was a strange keening sound in his memory, and he wondered whether the hateful design was laughing at him, or if it was just the howl of that undying wind. 

But wait! There’s more writing to discover!

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