What’s more, everything in the tapestry intertwined down to the smallest detail. In Rome, every doorway was guarded by a cluster of minor gods—Janus for the passage, Cardea for the hinge, Forculus for the door itself. (Yes, they had separate deities for each.) A bride entering a new household risked offending these spirits or stumbling across the boundary, an omen of calamity, so she was carried, lifted safely over the liminal space. The modern custom (now fading) of carrying a bride over the threshold was not, as a modern critic might suspect, a patronizing gesture, like carrying in a new TV. It was an act of courtesy and protection.

That orphaned remnant is a tiny fossil of a world in which even the hinge of a door had a place in the cosmic order. You can still witness living echoes of that unity in southern India. There, a doorway is still a boundary with ritual weight; a temple is still a cosmic diagram; a festival still follows astronomical rhythms older than Rome. The calendar is not a scheduling tool but a cosmology. Daily acts—lighting lamps, tracing kolam patterns on the threshold—embody a worldview in which everything is connected to everything else.

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In the last century, television introduced a radically different world, one that resolved its conflict in minutes rather than centuries and then vanished without memory the following week, when the characters of a sitcom reset to default settings as if last night’s episode had never happened.

Even broadcast television, however, was a shared experience. Everyone consumed the same story on the same channel at the same time. The debut of I Love Lucy and the 1980 season of Dallas (wherein it was revealed “Who shot JR?”) were cultural landmarks. Even if you didn’t watch them, you still knew about them. Television mimicked unity with a weekly ritual of synchronized attention.

The proliferation of narrative mediums that followed—cable, on-demand, home video, asynchronous streaming, personalized algorithmic feeds—marks an epic turn of human cultural experience from something ultimately shared to something ultimately not.

People today don’t simply disagree about perspective. Increasingly, they occupy completely distinct realities. These are not as beautiful or coherent as the tapestries of the past, but they feel whole from the inside. They have their own founding myths, their own cobbled sense of the past, their own canon, their own obvious truths, their own idiosyncratic logic—and when something in them shifts (as it must), that shift is absorbed retroactively. Yesterday’s truth is not overwritten; it is retconned. How things are at this moment—or any moment—is how they have always been, and if anything changes tomorrow, it will have always been that way.

This presents a unique challenge to narrative literature.

Even the writers who fractured narrative most elegantly never fractured reality itself. Virginia Woolf could dissolve time and move seamlessly between consciousnesses in Mrs. Dalloway, but all her characters still lived in the same London. Philip K. Dick could destabilize perception so completely that his characters doubted their memories, histories, and identities, yet even his most hallucinatory novels unfold inside a single underlying world. His realities bend, glitch, and deceive, but they never deny the possibility of reality. In fact, these perceptual distortions require reality—otherwise, what is being distorted?

We no longer live in a continuous world, even a fractured or distorted one. We live in discontinuity: algorithmic personalized narrative, asynchronous consumption, unstable identities, contradictory beliefs, realities that recalibrate every day, every moment. Experience arrives in packets: self-contained, immersive, incompatible updates to a firmware that is never the same twice—not chapters in a single story, not shared episodes with no memory of the past, but whole epistemologies with no knowledge of each other. Modern life is not a tapestry; it is all the thread.

A literature erected on the presumption of continuity, of a world “beneath it all,” begins to feel nostalgic, even deceptive.

The first solutions extended unreliable narrators to unreliable everything: slipstream, branching timelines, multiverse worlds. They tried to capture what was lost but not what replaced it. Importantly, all of them still required a cosmos, just a fractured one.

That is not our world. There is no tapestry of all tapestries. There is no myth of all myths. All of us increasingly inhabit mutually exclusive existences, absolute within themselves, constantly changing but unknown to and irreconcilable with others. And this will only accelerate as technologies like generative AI, 3D printing, bioengineering, and their successors allow us—not to inhabit a digital or virtual reality—but to make physical reality conform to our personal myths.

If fiction seems paler than it used to be, it’s because it has not yet learned to inhabit this fracture, only to catalog it.

For almost thirty years, I have been writing strange, self-contained fragments—fables, tragedies, scholarly notes, diary entries from diverse imaginary civilizations that nevertheless shared a certain tone: ancient, mythic, lived-in. Each fragment was part of the same world, yet few of the fragments could coexist. Some described one sun. Others mentioned two. Some were patently realistic, others had ghosts. Some held magic, others machines.

Only later did I realize these were not the detritus of a failed novel nor the beginnings of a fantasy travelogue. They were an unconscious attempt to replicate the feel of the contemporary world rather than its structure.

Multiverse stories replicate the structure—and in a very literal way. What they cannot do, however, is describe what it is like from within. The moment you reveal a parallel reality, you immediately thrust the reader, from their vantage as observer, over and above everything. The reader stands outside the system, surveying every divergence from a single privileged point, in effect recreating a “higher” singular existence.

Multiverse narratives cannot escape the unity they pretend to dissolve because the viewer is never inside. They are always separate, untouched by the contradiction, watching related and resolvable worlds swirl beneath them in the tapestry of all tapestries.

(Movies about multiverses suffer even more. In fiction, a reader’s perspective is diffuse and shifting. A camera lens must always occupy a particular point in space.)

Orthogonal fiction is a narrative mode that describes a single, complete, self-contained reality that is persistently inconsistent—not because of unreliable narrators or shifting perspectives, not because of timeline splits or spatial plot devices. Orthogonal fiction isn’t multiverse fiction (there is only one world). It isn’t mosaic fantasy (the tiles don’t form a picture). It isn’t experimental fragmentation.

Orthogonal fiction instantiates the modern experience of inhabiting a separate reality by presenting a world that cannot reconcile with itself, a world that shifts without explanation, a world whose past, laws, and cosmology change while remaining wholly true within each moment. In orthogonal fiction, contradiction is not a problem to be solved or an illusion to be explained. It is the ontology. The world does not break; it simply becomes what it now is—retroactively, absolutely, and without apology.

Orthogonal fiction does not let the reader rise above these changes. It denies them the god’s-eye view entirely. Each passage asserts itself as the only possible reality, and the reader must enter it on its own terms, with no assurance that the next passage will remember. There is no meta-world to retreat to, no hidden architecture tying everything together, no myth of all myths. There is continuity but not persistence—of the world, of the story, of the self.

In each moment, the world is whole and complete, it has always been whole and complete, and nothing contradicts. All moments are this way, and since they are aware of nothing but themselves, the reader is forced to remain inside.

This is not as jarring as it might sound. If anything, it should feel uncannily familiar. We already navigate incompatible realities every day—personal, political, digital, cultural—each one complete while it lasts, each one rewriting its own past without ever acknowledging the change. Orthogonal fiction simply makes explicit what modern life has made ordinary.

It is already possible for AI to read everything everyone has written and identify “sophisticated” texts, not just those with proper spelling and clarity of prose but originality, pacing, and thematic recursion. It can already do this; it simply doesn’t have access.

In the future—probably the near future—it will, and it will excavate texts that almost no one has read. It is to this future I am writing. The narrative structure I am proposing is meant to be the hinge between two ways of seeing. I am consciously carrying fiction across the threshold.

I don’t love the name orthogonal fiction, but I don’t have a better one. (If you do, let me know.) You can start reading at the link below. This project, which has followed me for decades, is not the only way a text might be orthogonal, but it has the virtue of being the first.

Updates and additions will be appended to the post without announcement.

If it changes, it will always have been that way.

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When the boys of my clan can balance six stones on a plank, they must undergo the satica, the ordeal. Six stone is the weight of the average timber wolf. One would be caught and thrown into a freshly dug pit, there to remain with nothing but water until its sides grew lean and it began to pace relentlessly and everything in its eyes that resembled a dog was gone and only the beast remained. The boy would be stripped to his nethers—summer or winter—and given a single severed prong from a rack of red elk antlers shed in the last season. He would climb into the pit to come out a man or else to be buried where he fell.

It is something, I can tell you, to feel the dirt of your own grave crumble between your fingers. It whispers to you of your own mortality in ways no words possibly could. By the time you reach the bottom, you know it is not the wolf you must beat but your own fear of death, a fear that keeps you tiny and cowed.

I was not a large boy—more prone to imaginary adventures than chores or fighting. My brother was who the clan wanted, but we had lost him to the satica three years before. He had not been lucky. The wolf the men had trapped was an old male, once an alpha, too slow to outrun the hunters but too experienced to be bested by a mere child. I remember the sound he made when the men stabbed him with spears. I had stopped looking by then. I had covered my eyes—or perhaps I hid them in my father’s shirt. But I heard that awful yelp. It was a hurt beyond pain. I did not know if wolves had thoughts, but if so, I imagined he expected he had earned his freedom. To be killed like that, by men who would not even climb down to face him, was the final indignity for a creature that had, for all intents and purposes, been a king.

I was luckier than my brother. The wolf I faced was not especially large. But he was swift. I had heard the men boast of the chase, how my wolf had evaded them for five leguire and nearly gotten away. He growled and bore his teeth at me before I was halfway down. By the time my bare feet touched the dirt, already mixed with freshly falling snow, he had dropped to a crouch and the thick fur on his back was pointing to the sky. I could see the billow of his breath. I remember being surprised by how white his fangs were. That meant he was young. Like me. Would that make him easier to face or harder? I didn’t know. I was terrified, of course. But it wasn’t just the fear of pain or death. I learned then that you can be terrified of many contradictory things at the same time. As much as I was afraid of having my throat ripped out, I was equally afraid of doing the ripping. I did not want to kill this wolf. I did not want to kill anything. I did not want to be in that pit. But what I wanted did not matter.

I gripped the antler prong in my right hand and dropped to a crouch of my own. I raised my left arm defensively in front of me. I did not know how to hunt wolves. I had thought I wouldn’t need to know for many months. I would learn how to hunt wolves tomorrow, I told my parents. But I had reached the age where growth comes in jumps, and now the day had arrived and I had not bothered to practice. I laid awake the night before thinking what I might do. Mostly, I thought about running away. And I would have. But there was nowhere to go. So I tried to recall everything I knew about wolves. I had seen them hunt. I had watched from cover at the far end of a snowy field as four of them hounded an elk. The snow was deep, and it took all the wolves’ strength to bound through it. They did not pounce on the elk and rip it open, like a bear would. They simply wore it down. When the elk got ahead, it would slow to rest. When the wolves rounded the rise, the elk would pick up speed again, and on and on for a leguire or more.

As the pack drew further away, I wanted to follow, to see to the end of the story, but my father said no. The only reason we were safe was because we were silent and upwind. We were an easier target than an elk—slower and easy to down in deep snow. If we moved, the wolves might turn on us. So we watched across the open valley until hunters and prey were just ants in the snow. The elk turned at the tree line and was met by a flanking hunter. But his prey was easily six times as heavy. The wolf could not bring it down on its own, so it clamped with its jaws and hung from the elk’s heavy hide. As it was dragged along, the wolf rested a moment before dropping its feet and tugging hard. Terrified at the feel of being torn, the elk burst into a sprint, and that was its mistake. The wolf held, and the elk had to drag it through the heavy snow at speed. The prey began to tire. His sprint turned to a gallop and his gallop to a trot. The other wolves caught up. The elk crashed into the snow, and the hunt was over.

Later that night, I heard howls in the distance, many more than four. The hunters had fed their entire pack.

A wolf’s instinct, I hoped, was to clamp down on its prey and hold. And that’s what my wolf did. It lunged at my arm, held weakly in defense. I remember hearing the sound of my bones breaking before feeling the pain. Perhaps it was the cold—or simply shock. Whatever the reason, once it hit, icy and hot, I could not suppress a scream. I wanted to. I did not care to impress my father, but for his sake I wanted to appear strong in front of the men watching from the rim of the pit above. But I failed. I let out a great welp, and the crowd just beyond my sight gasped in unison. Was it over already? Had I been killed?

As nature would have it, I was right in my observation. My wolf did not immediately rush for my throat, although in that instant he could have. He had tasted fear and held on just long enough for me to push the antler into his gullet. I knew his hide was thick, so I didn’t pause to see if I had even done damage. I just kept thrusting—over and over and over and over. One for fear, one for disgust, one for anger, one for sadness, one for pity.

Gradually the wolf’s snarl faded. He let go of my shattered arm. He turned, walked three paces, and collapsed to his side. I saw flecks of blood in his fur. He began panting then, heavily, like it was the hottest of summer days. And he glanced to me. Once. It was just a moment. Maybe he was looking to see if I was coming to finish him off. Who knows? All I can say is there was no recrimination in his gaze. There was no hate. Somehow, he understood we were both victims of the same barbarity. We could not both survive. We had fought. He had lost. That was the end of it. There was no shame. No ire. No blame. Would any human have felt the same?

As I stood there in my nethers, arm dangling limply at my side and draining life in drops on the snow, I was overwhelmed with a passion. I was swollen with it. It was the only time in my life I’ve had anything like a religious experience. Whatever happened to me, I was sure I wanted to acquit myself with even half the dignity of that animal. Nothing else in life seemed as important.

I’m not sure how long he hung on before he died. I know I grew faint from my injuries and collapsed to my knees. At some point, I recognized silence. There were no cheers. I had seen the satica many times. When a wolf was bested there had always been cheers. But not for me. I looked up and found nearly everyone had gone. None of the bearded men of my clan remained. None of them lowered a hand to me or raised me on their shoulders in praise. It wasn’t until later, when an old woman was wrapping my arm amid the distant chatter of the men, that I understood why. They were so indifferent.

Whatever was said about the ordeal, whatever grand reasons were quoted for its existence, it wasn’t to make men of boys. It was to raise warriors who could swing a falxiform axe for the greater glory of the clan. But I had sacrificed my arm. Whether I had beaten my fear of death, whether I bested a wolf and become a man did not matter. Whatever use of the limb remained, I would never join the others in battle. I was of no use. I may as well have lost.

To be rejected like that, in front of everyone, turned me hollow. I felt fake, less than human—inhuman even, as if I had been revealed as a changeling or wendigo who had crept from the forest and pretended to be a child. My whole life I had grown up at their feet. How could I mean nothing? I thought about my brother and how little any of us had really mourned. There had been tears and wails, of course. Men hung their heads and women pulled their hair. But in the weeks after his trace, the adults acted more and more as if his passing was part of the natural order of things. We mourned it the way we mourned the passing of the great herds every winter. I thought of my brother and my brothers—all the boys we had lost. No, not lost. We knew right where they were. A pile of six stones marked every filled pit. How many were there? How many had I passed in the brush on my imaginary adventures? How many girls did that leave to the men that remained?

That night, with an arm wrapped in musk hide, I sat in the shadows and watched them laughing in the hall. The hollowness in my heart filled with bile and turned black. I had no more fear of death. I suppose that made everything that came later all the easier. Someone had to do it. Why not me?

—from the diary of Holuphred I

Six hours along the coast from Incomium, where the Comi River makes its spectacular leap from the sea, rests an inlet at the far edge of the Western Expanse. There, nestled amid the cypress trees atop an urn-shaped hill, the City of the Dead lies in permanent repose.

Neither peninsula nor island, the hill is surrounded on all sides by an immense intertidal flat. Once a day—thrice in the high season, when the calcareous asteroid joins the moon in the sky—the muddy flat fills silently with seawater. Never more than half a lagat deep, the dark water, laden with volcanic basalt, gathers slowly, as if marching in solemn procession. At high tide, the locals call it the Black Lake, and its dark expanse is never crossed. For several centuries, until the time of the Tarquins, the water was only ever touched by the Incomium dye-makers, who sifted it, squatting on the shore, at the noontide. Tiny granules of “black salt” were separated from the mud and roasted in a furnace before being ground into a fine powder to make the infamous dye of St. George, which is said to absorb all light. So deep and ominous were the garments made from the dye that the Tarquins banned its sale, taking the monopoly for themselves. Over generations of rule, the Tarquin kings and their heirs filled immense wardrobes with fine silks and linens—all black. They draped their beds and windows with it and dressed themselves from head to foot. To this day, the charcoal-fingered tingers at Incomium are still required to make their annual trek to the city, there to deliver three hundred and thirteen leks of dry powder, packed into single-lek spheres wrapped in oil cloth. Although hard to the touch, the spheres dissolve instantly in liquid which thence permanently stains whatever it touches.

The crossing of the flat costs seven silver guiya and always takes place at low tide, when penitent pilgrims, their mouths covered in bulging leather muzzles, ascend long-legged Kadlian mounts, the only beasts capable of traversing the deep mud (all machines being banned). The lanky animals walk disinterestedly, chewing the cud, in single file along an ancient stone-post path to the sole scalable ingress: a steep, staircase-like crack in the cliffs marked by a simple white arch. (The stone posts being no taller than the high tide, the arrival of the Black Lake erases all evidence of the path.) No seabirds nest on the hill. No squirrels scamper among the cypress. There is only the silently growing grass, the odd blooming flower, and the city.

Simple stone cairns dot the lower reaches of the hill. Built before the Septuacaust, no one knows why they were erected—or even if they are tombs. Cut from the local rock, they are little more than low caves chiseled in a faded and forgotten script. Centuries later, after a pale and lustrous marble was quarried from under the nearby Comi River, cubic mausolea of either two or three lagats a side began to appear amid the cypress. Cobblestone pathways, large enough for a carriage, were added after the Second Restoration and gradually expanded until they rose and fell, joining stairways or escaping from them, in a network that stretched completely around the false island. Rich merchants from Gasfa and realms across the Strand, dissatisfied with such simple memorials, were allowed to construct grander structures, provided they were available for all. The Rothwiecz of Honenfeld built the first open-air market, still the largest, atop the north cliff. The Roscovians erected a town square—or rather circle—with an obelisk at its center, whose gradually turning shadow marked both the time of the day and the season as it moved across swooping grooves in the floor. At the very crest of the hill was an open-air temple, built by the Tarquin king Holuphred I. Its four-square struts held no roof but the sky. Its columns surrounded a deep, round hole in the floor that descended at depth into the earth: The Well of Night. According to tradition, those dead who tired of eternity could ascend to the temple, there to be judged by Othos himself and either raised to heaven or cast into the Well.

It was Holuphred who allowed poorer folk, unable to afford the cost of construction, to leave their honored dead in the newly erected common places, provided all the same rituals were observed. No body could be left exposed. If not cremated and encased in an urn, remains had to be cast inside a statue of stone or quarter-pure metal. The oldest had heavy, inhuman faces and stood rigid under archways or were built into walls. Later patricians, seeking a more distinguished patronage, began commissioning graceful statues in lifelike pose, and gradually the whole of the silent city became populated with the stony visages of the living dead. They walked down thoroughfares, bought flowers in the market, and sat on benches contemplating the sea. They hugged their children or bent in prayer. They danced silently under the obelisk or played the lexican flute or chatted genially with each other inside the simple square rooms of the family mausolea. Whenever a broken statue was found, the soul was said to have “gone to the Well,” and whatever remained of it was thrown inside by the eldest male child, or else a priest of the Sibelline Order.

And so was built an entire vibrant city where not a soul stirred and not a single word was uttered. For all of the living who visited the City of the Dead had their mouths muzzled and their pinky fingers bound with needles and swore upon pain of death not to disturb any of the eternal citizens upon whose domain they trespassed. Special tortures were reserved for he who took from the still and silent island any part of it. No pebble, no twig, no stray seed was removed. Each visitor, no matter how wealthy, was thoroughly searched—or was supposed to be—before once again mounting their three-kneed Kadlian and trekking home across the mud.

By simple irony, only the greatest transgression required no punishment. Not one of the seventeen legal scrolls that governed visits to the city in the time of the Tarquins ever mentioned the missing of the tide. It is said only three were ever trapped on the hill past the procession of the Black Lake, and that none were heard from again. But as to the truth, only the dead can know.

The Night Ship

The night ship Desod appeared from the æther as an absence over the still surface of the Gasfan Sea. A pinprick canopy of stars, faithfully reflected in the water, filled the clear night sky and camouflaged the approaching ship until at last it moved across a nebula near the horizon. Briefly, the distant glowing gas revealed in relief a falling silhouette that merged with its rising reflection before breaking the surface. Its black keel split the water and stars churned in reflection, as if the vessel’s arrival had disturbed the very universe.

Watching from the docks, seven members of the Pax Regarda stood uncomfortably in their heavy robes as the black-hulled Desod silently approached. Their immobile gazes, hidden by heavy, pointed cowls on which a single open eye was stitched, never strayed from the hold, even as the ship’s three large booms passed overhead, sliding dangerously close to the buildings near the shore.

When the Desod finally settled as a black wall before them, silent and still, the stevedores and longshoremen—some animal, some mineral, some machine—came forward to open the lok-latches and hold fast the mooring cables, and the heavy ship was fixed with a loud clang that echoed faintly off the walls of the neighboring city. Long poles were raised and special hooks opened hatches that fell as gangplanks to the dock, where passengers and crew assembled to gather their belongings. None of them wandered within ten lagats of the Regarda, whose presence, along with the late hour, suggested to all present that the ship carried a precious cargo.

In fact, it carried three. The first was a High Mendicant, a robotic saint of the Sibelline Order that had been meditating for four hundred and fifty-three years, during which time it had not once moved or spoken. It simply sat cross-legged, horns still, six hands open in perfect, immovable repose such that it was only by faith that the machine’s Atishan attendants knew it still functioned at all and was not a gilded mantelpiece. They carried it by means of a large divan whose tasseled roof swayed mightily as it was hauled over the hatchway and down to port. But the Mendicant remained still as a statue, even as it nearly fell into the water. Its attendants reached with panicked shouts and held it fast as the divan was righted from a precarious tilt. When at last the motionless machine reached the cobblestones safely, the monks bowed and made penitent gestures before lighting candles and carrying it in holy procession to the Birzkirk, where the Mendicant was to be enshrined for the next century on the hopes that the honor of receiving its awakening would fall while under their care.

The second cargo was the egg of a giant corcoran, which would, if incubated correctly, hatch in 19 years. All seven members of the Regarda lifted their pointed cowls as a large boom turned in the air overhead, reached into the black ship’s hold, and removed a speckled mass as large as a house. Because corcoran birds were massive, flightless, and distasteful, their only practical purpose was the laying of eggs for sale to investors, who bred the birds in the hopes of producing ever larger eggs. The ocean-green specimen removed from the Desod contained a female, which meant it was far too expensive to be the property of any one individual and belonged instead to a consortium of interests formed for the very purpose of buying it, including a wealthy Incomium dye magnate, the machine-worker’s union, the local Rookrip, and—if the rumors were true—one of the surviving members of the Tarquin family. Felt straps hugged the speckled shell as it moved over the water and was lowered onto a steel-sided conveyance, where it was locked behind four inches of cold-pressed metal. A whip cracked and a train of long-haired bushieks, each at least seven lagats from nose to tail, pulled the wheeled fortress away with the clatter of iron hooves.

Silence fell as the last of the ship’s tired occupants wandered into the night in search of sleep or companionship. Somewhere in the nearby sailor’s quarter, a gaggle of drunks sang sea shanties and lied.

And still the Regarda waited.

After the last batch of prisoners were pulled away in chains, and the ship’s Cyclopean captain wandered down the causeway, yawning and rubbing his eye, a heavy door shuddered shut, lights and lanterns were extinguished, and a deep stillness fell that heralded the approach of dawn. Alone in the darkness, the seven cowled figures finally stirred. One whispered to the others in a guttural language only they knew. The last of the three rare cargoes was nowhere to be seen. Had they missed it? It was impossible to say. For none of them had seen a Mysterian before. It wasn’t even known how big they were, or whether they walked on two legs or four.

When the muezzin finally called from her tower and the sky began to lighten in the south, the Pax Regarda retreated in a rare defeat. In their wake, they left only the lapping water, the gargantuan night ship, and a flitting shadow on the cobblestones.

The Summoning of Ecstasy

It was the accidental death of the poet Arthur Northbourne Pirkin that brought the ritual of dawn, called the Summoning of Ecstasy, to the attention of wider civilization. In fact, he was obsessed with it, finding it at once carnal and sacred, obscene and sublime, and he spent the last 23 years of his life in a relentless search for its origin, which he believed to be the first revelation to man. So arcane and meandering was the ritual’s history, however, that Northbourne was compelled to record every scrap he encountered, as if the crux of the mystery lay literally everywhere: in the half-remembered anecdota of pensioners, among bits of holy rubbish or the musings of a librarian of nonsense, even every variant of the children’s song, Dorca Darka, which is supposed to derive from a raunchy spiritual sung by ritual attendants before the time of the Tarquins. Northbourne kept it all on whatever material was ready to hand. Stuffed into one of the poet’s four thousand notebooks was a curled piece of hee tree bark on the inside of which was roughly scratched the lyrics “Diddly-hie diddly-day, a month of crackwork for no pay,” which would appear to be a less offensive version of the third verse. Where the bark came from or what connection it might have to the ritual is not clear.

Indeed, so varied and comprehensive is Northbourne’s collection that thus far no one has been able to make sense of it, despite numerous attempts. Col. Menshat of the Presidium of Antiquities Museum famously declared in 1092 that Northbourne was not only mad but had made madness a contagion, that the Summoning of Ecstasy was a depraved act by a barbarian culture and that was the end of it, that there was no riddle, and that anyone who succumbed to the search was a mentally gelatinous nincompoop. But many scholars are not so sure. Northbourne was, after all, an accomplished poet in his youth, and there is a kind of overlapping structure to his notes, not unlike ripples passing though each other in otherwise still water. A course on Northbourne’s Ecstasy, as the notebooks are collectively called, is taught every year at the Imperium University. (On the other hand, as far away as Margos, the Merigorn word for any overt and intentional complexity is pirgan.)

The 47 headings in the notebooks include: Lists and Things Impossible to List, Waltzes, Errant Calligraphy, Thoughts I Do Not Own, The Emperor’s Laundry, and Stella/Stelae. The latter includes a number of large chalk rubbings of rock sculptures of the Lower Gasfan Basin mapped in Northbourne’s hand to various constellations visible only from Oth, although it should be noted that it also includes a great many scraps having nothing to do with carvings or stars but perhaps hinting at a connection, such as the severed wing of a small batlike creature called a ding, one of only seven entries in the notebooks not made of words.

Northbourne’s most famous observation was that the gods of Oth do not sit atop each other as they do on every other world. On Margos, for example, pantheons form a kind of geologic strata, with the lived gods resting above a collection of imports from the Salisian conquest in turn resting above the old gods, who subsist only on a few persistent rituals, such as the cutting of the cord, that everyone on Margos practices without really knowing why. On Oth, however, old gods are still called by their first names and they mingle with new and immigrant alike. A man in clothes of unhewn fiber can don a porpal-shell mask or buy his groceries at market without ever realizing the contradiction. “It is as if,” Northbourne observed, “the gods of every world retire to Oth. Every faith is practiced and every practice is a warm memory.”

Ironically, the dawn ritual is far less discussed in wider civilization than the notebooks Northbourne collected on it, perhaps because mere mention of the Summoning causes people to blush. Sketches of the ritual by a traveler were turned into woodcut prints by Ghemt the Elder, reproductions of which might occasionally be found in the bottom bin of any shop that sells old books. One print in particular lives on in the public consciousness and variations of it often appear on punk rock posters, in wall art, or as erotic kitsch.

In 1204, Darat Tan published her award-winning novel The Emperor’s Laundry about a witty and incisive poet whose lifelong study of an ancient erotic text leads her romantic partners one-by-one to madness, although the cryptic last line of the text seems to suggest it might be the narrator herself who has gone mad.

From just before dawn until the muezzin’s midday call, the castaways from a thousand cultures shuffled about the market, sliding shoulder-to-shoulder past each other without fear: the prim-cut brandy-sellers; the flickering votives; the ramshackle meat merchants and their curious fur circus; the Tellurian Moks; the skampering shandle fairies; the red-clad Regarda staring warily at the Kuoden mountainriders and their three-meter bushieks; and underneath it all, the urchins and beggars, their arms held limply in half-hearted entreat. All of them haggled and spat, prayed and cursed, flourished and faded under the twin gazes of the noon-blue sun and the azure-black spires of the Atishan Birzkirk, which towered overhead.

The Rape of a Mysterian

It was strange to be seen as a woman again. That’s what I remember of my captivity. By then, I had not been female in many years. I had given it up with all the rest. Aspirants surrendered, totally: property, name, gender, will. Our parents were told to leave nothing, but of course many did. I remember the cries and scuffles, magnified in echo, as we shuffled in single file through the lofty stone brackets of the Terminium, a vast maze without doors. Hands found their way into our pockets, under our arms, between our legs. Fingers probed our mouths and anuses, removing not just contraband but the complete detritus of our old selves, right down to fillings that might be melted for coin. Those who hid some last vestige—a locket or note from a loved one—grasped at it as it was removed, only to be struck remorselessly by an adult bearing a staff. We were gathered and our eyebrows were pierced in a continuous line, along with our lower lips, and a dancing curtain of thin chains was hung between them. We were taught to bind our bodies with the oeutra, the white wrapping, over which we were dressed simply. We bore no insignia, no mark of status or rank. We were given secret designations in place of names and told to sleep on the floor in a great room with no windows or furniture or blanket. Nothing destroys shame like the shivering need for warmth. We clung to each other in all places private and dear. We would need to, to survive our ordeal.

I recall feeling disorientated some weeks in, when I briefly remembered being a girl. I was reciting the Prenacles with the others, rapping my knuckles between each verse, when suddenly I sneezed. I had not sneezed since before my admission, or if I had, I didn’t remember it, and that simple act triggered a memory of my mother wiping my nose. From there, I remembered the rest: my father’s coarse hands, the spices in the kitchen, candle-lit dances with my friends by the lake, the feel of my feet as they slid under the canvas blanket that covered my bed, both prickly and inviting. I began to cry and was quickly removed. My own fists began to beat me, against my will. But I did not want to let go of my blanket or my mother and I kept crying and beat myself unconscious.

Rarely after that did I imagine myself a girl. Yes, we had our secret guesses. Which of the others was a boy? Who was Almatian and who from Demeria? No one ever revealed their doubts and suggestions to me, but I could see it in their eyes, as I’m sure they could see it in mine, even behind our dancing curtains. If we made friends, we would wake up to find them removed to another sabbot—or we would be removed ourselves, as I was in my second turn. That was the most difficult. My first seasons had almost seemed a game. Everything was new, like a puzzle to be figured out. It was painful, yes, but that pain was meant to crack something leaden and evil so that it could be shed and something luminous and great could be born, or so I believed. I was suspicious the second time and never felt the privations of our order as distinctly or as deeply as at first vespers. I thought often about leaping from the top of the Great Arch to land amid screams. Others did as well. Doubt amplifies doubt, and for each cry of frustration, for each failure of our peers to achieve a miracle, our own anxieties grew.

The last time I was female was at the end of our fifth turn, when our families were allowed to clan one last time. We were told it was—Well, honestly, I don’t remember what we were told. It was a test. Those who found it too difficult to return were expelled, as were those who found it too easy. Ours was not a refuge, a place to hide from work or abuse. Those who did not waver, who left nothing behind, found themselves unable to enter the Terminium, even as the rest of us passed. Our calling required sacrifice and the strength to make it. Those who had not both were turned away. I do not know what happened to them or where they went, but many of them remain very dear to me.

For the next nine turns, I was neither girl nor woman. I was an aspirant, and whatever doubts lingered at my mother’s last embrace, when I became angry at her for tempting me from my calling, were extinguished the first time I moved an object with my mind. I had failed in my task many times, more than the others, and was taken deep into the maze and left. I drank water steeped in the leaves of the hee tree, whose sap the Imperium surgeons used to make an anesthetic paste. The extract did not dull the mind, only the senses. The more of the water I drank, the more distant everything became. My feet no longer felt cold on the floor. The white wrapping no longer itched. Everything I ate tasted of saliva. Words, if I heard them, sounded like echoes down a long hall. It was as if I inhabited a planet entirely unto myself. Lost in the study of shapes, I would raise my head to find the season had changed. When I lowered it, the season changed again.

And then it ended. My food and water were taken, and the world came crashing back. Everything was too bright, too loud, too fast. Many times I shut my eyes and shook my head so hard I thought the chains on my face might rip free. I discovered a soft impression in the wall where I stood and beat my head, over and over, hoping to dull my mind. I stopped and ran my fingers over the smooth stone and wondered how many others had done the same. I had known hunger often enough, that imp that gnaws our insides, but I learned then there is no demon like thirst. Every parched cell of my body, shriveling in want, called out to the cup just beyond my reach.

On the third day, it moved.

By the time of my ascension, the odd realization of my body—while sitting on the toilet or suffering the occasional cycle that broke free—felt as alien to me as any language I couldn’t speak. My body was an anchor, nothing more, a thing that kept me tethered to the world. I could’ve just as easily been a boy as not. All of it, right down to the plumbing, was as incidental to my being as the shape of my ears, and I was glad when, just before graduation, they finally cut it away. My fingers were dipped in Incomium dye, and I was a Mysterian at last.

Crouching naked at my capture, seeing the look of surprise—and disgust—on the soldier’s faces as the white wrapping was ripped free, I felt that which I had not in so long. To them, I was my body. And they would not touch it. All that I had achieved, all that I had sacrificed in the achieving, the blood of my blood, the rape of my self in a prison without doors, mattered less than the air they expelled in horror. I turned and covered my body, my anchor, despite that there was nothing left to hide. I had thought by becoming a Mysterian I would become terrible. If I could not arouse desire, then I at least wanted to arouse fear. I wouldn’t have said that. I would’ve said the reason was etched in ancient Merigorn under the Great Arch. But somehow the truth had been locked in that cell with me. I wasn’t a god or monster. I was just a thing.

I was not touched. I was not tortured. Too dangerous to be released, I was imprisoned and forgotten. No one from the order came to rescue me. My family no longer knew I even existed. For many months, my mind would move nothing. Not a coin. Not a cloth. Not a hair. Not until my jailers, neglectful, reintroduced me to the demon thirst. I retrieved a cup through the bars and held it to the lips of another, and I was born again.

North from the capitol, along the Aquiline Road that followed the arc of the sea to the City of the Tarquins, there was a long, steep ridge down which travelers in the time of the Restoration would often discard whatever extra weight burdened their carts and pullcars before attempting the climb to Red Wind Pass, which was notoriously difficult before the arrival of the reflex engine. Over the centuries, as more waste accumulated, the stretch of steep slope, like a dam opposite the water, became the place to discard everything, large or small, until there was such an accumulation of broken tools, wagons, engines, axles, tires, trailers, tanks, refrigerators, reclaimers, and parts of nearly every machine, sentient or otherwise, that the slope shallowed enough for human habitation, and a complex society emerged inside the tunnels and trolleyways, largely hidden from the travelers above.

Since it was nearly impossible to reach the northern and eastern shores of the Gasfan Sea without making the pilgrimage past The Junket, as it was called, a menagerie of travelers was assured in all seasons and the lawless cataract briefly became a platform for piracy. Fearing they would be cut off from the port to the south, the Tarquins waged a brutal campaign. Although they were never successful, the highwaymen were expelled in exchange for certain rights, including independence, which a representative of the Tarquins was to re-proclaim every High Solstice. Although those rights did not survive the fall of Tarquin rule, the Empire wisely continued the ancient practice of proclaiming them, and every grey season, when the twin suns briefly shared the same sky, a robotic priest of the Sybelline Order would descend the precarious mountain steps and stand in robes on a great stone outcrop and drop over The Junket echoing words that no one could anymore understand.

The Bell Tower

In the 18th year of my exile, I fell in with a Brabian woman who was neither wholesome nor pleasant but who evinced in me a kind of dread of all possibilities but herself. I had been so long without romance that I feared my potential for it was waning, and even though I secretly felt I deserved better, it seemed to me her sudden appearance in the bleak halls of my life was a sign and that if I let her go, I would regret it when someone worse came along. Thus, I was for a time able to faithfully look on the woman I then courted as if she were the very best that life had to offer. She was flattered at first, although that did less than I expected to hold her attention, but by the start of our second year of courtship, before which I had promised to marry her, she came to intuit that I still harbored secret dispositions. She attributed my false affection to desperation rather than melancholy, and I came home one day to find a statue in flesh occupying my front door. When I protested, out of arm’s reach, that this brute was standing in my apartment, I was told he was the younger brother of my betrothed, who that day had married another man, and that my apartment was now theirs.

Her elder brother shouted this to me from inside as he went about loading a pair of suitcases, one of which was my own, with everything of mine he could find, along with anything of any real value, I believe with the intent to sell it. The fact I was a foreigner made finding work difficult, and I had been living for many months on others’ good graces. It was therefore not theft, my betrothed’s brother explained to me as he stuffed a pair of antique kratchniks, the only heirlooms of my family, into my suitcase. Rather, it was the collection of a debt and would be explained as much to the authorities, if I wished to involve them. I was assured my betrothed’s brothers did not and that it would be better for everyone if I simply left town. It didn’t seem possible, but I was being exiled from exile.

After they left, I emptied my pockets at the corner restaurant and sulked at a small round table, where the mirrors behind the bar and in the little alcoves in the wall, which I had never before much noticed, mocked me with my own discountenance. I had no money, having just poured the last of mine into a glass, and also no clothes and no place to sleep, and I wondered at the possibility of suicide. I did not seriously contemplate it. I contemplated whether I had the guts for it, or for anything for that matter. And when the reflection at the bottom of my empty glass jeered at me that the answer was no, I felt a great shame and set out then to prove the bastard wrong. I scaled the spiked fence of the Astraggia, tearing my suit in the process, and climbed the steps to the bell tower, where I intended to fall off swiftly and with no drama. I had decided that if I closed my eyes and let myself fall backward, then I would see nothing of the ground that waited for me and thereby gain a moment on my nerves. By the time they inevitably failed, there would be nothing left to grab and I would be committed in my endeavor as I had been rarely committed to anything.

I was dismayed, however, to find no less than four other fellows already standing precariously atop the bell tower, one on each wall. It being a narrow structure, there was no place left for me. I don’t know who arrived first nor how long any of them had stood there, but after a short wait, it became clear their nerves were no better than mine and the line was in no danger of moving soon, and I began to shift my weight and make small sounds of annoyance. Who were these fools selfishly siphoning the resolve I had drained so many glasses to find? The longer I waited, the surer I was to fail at this, too! So, I coughed and cleared my throat to break the pre-dawn silence and remind each of them that there were others waiting.

After some twenty minutes, I heard the sound of heavy panting, and a plump man appeared behind me on the steps, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief. Even as heavy as he was, he seemed to have lost a great deal of weight recently as the suit he wore hung off him indecisively. He glanced at the wide flap of my torn jacket and we made eye contact briefly. It seemed he was not the least bit surprised or bothered that there was a line for that platform of death. Reading the look of incredulity on my face, he explained to me that there was often a line on Thursdays. I did not want to talk—I wanted to keep burning holes in the backs of the men above with my gaze—but the fat man’s statement intrigued me, and after a moment, I wondered aloud at the cause, and we began to speculate. Fridays seemed unlikely, we agreed, seeing as how that was the start of the weekend. If one was going to kill oneself, there was no point in doing it on the eve of leisure. Sunday evening, then, seemed the next logical choice. But Sunday was the Lord’s day and suicide a sin. I admitted that such a thing would even give pause to an unbeliever, such as myself, if only because waiting until morning cost nothing and was therefore worth the price to mitigate even the remotest risk of being wrong. Besides, after having just enjoyed a couple days off, there would likely be some semicolon of doubt inserted into the sentence of one’s life. What harm was there in returning to work on Monday, if only to prove to yourself that you genuinely wanted it to end?

We were just beginning our analysis of Tuesdays when we were asked by one of the fellows on the wall if we wouldn’t mind taking our conversation elsewhere, which we did. My portly friend was not, it seemed, in nearly as dire straits as I, and he offered a drink. Since I had long lost the resolve I had found at the bottom of the glass, I was anxious for a refill, and he took me to an all-night café by the sea where sailors nurtured hangovers and prostitutes wandered about tempting their last pennies from them. We found a table near the back door with a fine view of the dock where ships rocked and ropes creaked. It was clear my friend had a secret he was desperate both to reveal and to hide. With each drink, he would divulge a small piece of the whole only to grab my arm and make me swear to forget it. So it was I learned he was a merchant clerk who had, against the law, secretly invested heavily in one of his employer’s adventures. They had received word that afternoon that the ship had sunk off the coast of Astartia, possibly as a result of a Celf attack, and that as such the matter was being investigated by the authorities, who were sure to find evidence of his malfeasance. Not only was he about to lose his livelihood, he would almost certain go to jail. He was newly married, he explained, and had only succumbed to foolishness in order to provide for his wife, who had been hinting for weeks that she might be with child. Was she not a kind woman, I asked, gracious of spirit, who would forgive him this first folly on account of its noble cause? No, he explained. His wife was a tightfisted Brabian who had only recently, and finally, left another courtier, who was apparently a foreigner like myself, and also feckless and whining and not at all courageous as I had been, standing resolutely on the bell tower, ready to throw myself off.

Of course, my skin prickled at his words. I asked my new friend what he intended to do, now that his life was surely over. After turning to ensure we were not overheard, he lowered his head to the table and admitted to me he had not gone to the bell tower to commit suicide but to find a man such as myself who was possessed of nothing in the world but the strength to do it. As a clerk of soon-to-be-ill-repute, his only hope of avoiding a lengthy jail sentence was to capitalize on the secret he alone was prepared to reveal. His employer, while speaking to the Admiralty in his office, had let slip within earshot of the door that there had been a great deal of Atlantium on board the sunken vessel, and that the captain had orders to dump it at the first signs of trouble. It would not, therefore, be found on the reef with the wreckage, but likely further out to sea. The clerk had been ordered to gather all materials on the voyage and deliver them to the Admiralty that very day, which he had, but not before removing a single thin strip of paper into which a series of holes had been punched. The holes were of two sizes, and their varied order revealed information from radio bursts that only a trained naval man could read. It was the ship’s last transmission, and since it would take the admiralty a few days to analyze and reconstruct the information in the file (which was missing the tape, and which had also been provided quite out of order), there was more than enough time to steam their way ahead of the navy and recover the Atlantium!

I objected immediately that the Admiralty of any nation would never let such a prize simply disappear, but my friend was undeterred. It was not necessary, he explained, to retrieve the entire shipment. A single case would more than suffice to turn us both into kings. Since it had been dumped at great depth, and since the bulk of the shipment remained, the navy would never assume theft. The loss of a single case would be blamed on the sea. After all, the crew were all dead, and the navy had no reason to expect anyone but the clerk’s employer knew of the vessel’s secret cargo. And in any case, what did such risk matter to me? Was I not the courageous man who moments before stood ready to throw himself from the top of the bell tower? What was a few days more to such a staunch captain of his own fate? Was not the manner of my death a matter of my choosing and mine alone? If the adventure was successful, I would have reversed my fortunes in so grand a manner as to make life itself unrecognizable. And if it failed, the bell tower would remain.

I did not immediately accept but sat watching the ships rocking at dock. A wind had arrived to sprinkle drops of rain on the flagstones. Was it possible this was an accident? Was it possible the man across the table really was my betrothed’s new husband? Was it possible she had been carrying on with him for weeks or more? It seemed both unlikely and not. The face of my ruddy companion revealed all of his excitement—indeed, it could not contain it—but no subterfuge. And yet, was I willing to risk everything on mere chance?

Over the sound of the waves, I heard the distant rime of the bell tower, calling the penitent home. There was no point in returning there now. Daylight had come, and I would be seen. It wasn’t only a sin to commit suicide, it was a crime as well. I lifted my glass and drained it in one go, catching my reflection in the bottom as I slammed it resolutely to the table. Alright, I said. I would do it. My new friend and I huddled together greedily and whispered plans to meet in one hour’s time. We would rendezvous where we met, under the old arch of the vestry, and from there, we would begin our adventure!

But he did not find me at the arch. I watched from the top of the bell tower as the Pax Regarda leapt from their hiding places at his arrival and arrested him. He was confused at first. His head spun his wide eyes in every direction, and the fat on his face struggled to keep pace. Finally, he understood that I had betrayed him. Of course I had! The Regarda pay a thousand silver guiya for reliable information about traitors. How do you think I had wound up in exile? Once they discovered the paper communique in the code of the Admiralty, his fate was sealed, and I collected a beautiful promissory note that the bank exchanged for coin that very morning. It was orders of magnitude less than I would’ve gotten for a chest full of Atlantium, but it was more than enough for a nice meal, a new suit of clothes with matching shoes, and a deposit on a new apartment. To think that I would want to go on an adventure. Me! If Fate would conspire to make me work, then I would show her!

I’m told my betrothed was beside herself when the news came. Her brutish brothers, it seemed, had also had some role in the plot and were arrested shortly thereafter. Or perhaps my plump companion fingered them out of spite. (I’m sure he felt about them the same as I.) Either way, I had to thank him. Not only did he rid me of that awful Brabian woman, he had found me gainful employment. Every Thursday evening—it had to be Thursday—I donned my new suit and polished shoes, climbed the steps of the bell tower, and waited for the first man to arrive. They were always surprised to see me and stopped suddenly on the stairs before glancing down. If they were dressed lesser than I was, I would explain that it only took a single silver guiya to convince me not to report them to the authorities. If they were dressed greater, I would charge more and even walk them home—for safety—so that I knew where they lived and could check on their welfare later. When I did, they were only too happy to pay me to leave.

After a few months, word spread, and I climbed the steps of the bell tower to discover someone else in my place, a thin man with a very large attendant who took my jacket and shoes, threw me down the stairs, and told me never to return. I had been out-racketed by a professional. But it did not matter. By then, I had saved enough to invest in several firms that contracted with the Imperial Navy, which had recently come into possession of a large quantity of Atlantium. The dividends I earned kept me in a lifestyle such that I could finally marry a hostess from Evolta and retire to the waterfront casino at Tiest.

There is perhaps no more spectacular example of the complete backwardness of Oth than the Falls of the River Comi, which is why images of the falls, both in illustrations and photographs, have been a staple of postcards from the region for as long as there has been travel along the Strand. Much as the steeple at Farramore or the ten thousand steps up Wotan Mountain are immediately evocative of a certain time and place, the Falls of the River Comi are visually synonymous, not just with Oth, but with all things far and fantastic. The reason is simple. The water of the falls does not drop from the cliffs to the sea, as it would anywhere else, but rather leaps from the sea to the cliffs, where it forms the river that cuts its way through the canyons of the plateau to the plains. There it joins the Undine Delta, which empties into the eastern bay, completing the circuit. In other words, the Gasfan Sea is both the source and the destination of itself.

The first travelers from lands distant could not explain this anomaly, and so to this day, many people across the universes believe there is something deeply uncanny at work. The first attempt at a material explanation came during the Vuldronic Restoration, whose unnamed encyclopedists suggested there was a geyser at the bottom of the sea. Subsequent academics, citing the Encyclopedia, dismissed every other explanation as the fancy of yokels. The Meister of Urg, in his exhaustive commentary on the Vuldronic Encyclopedia, argued that the sure reason the water was not hot at the top of the falls—or was it the bottom?—was because it had ample time to cool on its journey. But then, as many writers of our era have noted, neither the Vuldronic encyclopedists nor the Meister of Urg nor anyone else who expounded on the topic had ever actually visited Oth, or the Falls. If they had, they would’ve understood, as the locals did, that the water was equally cool at the sea surface, which made a thermogenic explanation unlikely. Citing ample visitor accounts, many of which were available even to the good Meister, modern scholars noted that the water does not appear as a geyser. It doesn’t shoot up and out in a violent spray but rather travels as a clean shot upward at just the right angle to land on the cliff top, exactly as one would expect if the force of gravity had locally reversed.

This mystery remained until the early decades of our era, when the naturalist Iver Staunch completed his circuit of the Gasfan Basin and wrote his now-infamous guide. The phenomenon was indeed volcanic, he wrote, but it was not a geyser in the common sense. A tube in the rock that had once transported magma was left open after the cataclysm that cracked the planet drained most of the lava from the Basin. This tube narrowed as it rose, thereby increasing water pressure according to the Bernoulli equation. By the time the water table, under pressure from the whole of the sea, erupted from the opening, the liquid carried enough force that it appeared as a steady jet, regardless of season.

While this explanation has been subsequently confirmed by the engineers of Planetary Repair, no shortage of visitors have remarked both aloud and in letters home how extraordinarily unlikely it is that the volcanic tube should both narrow as it does and also lean just off the vertical such that the water it ejects gives the exact impression of falls flowing in reverse. It is simply too spectacular for some to believe such a thing could happen by chance, which is why the Falls are referenced in the index of nearly every book on the subject of theology. Across the full length of the Strand, there is no greater evidence of design, we are told, than the Falls of the River Comi, which both feed and succumb to themselves.

“On every planet I have lived, and in every time, there have always been women chasing the broken wastrel. They make no secret of it. In fact, the more a man sings of his pain, or writes bad poetry—and the more people hear it—the more falsely cocksure he is, the more compulsive, the more addicted, then the higher the bounty she can claim. For the trauma must always be in greater proportion to her own, lest it fail to serve its purpose, as if it were possible to grow one garden by tending another.

After a time, when her youth has faded and she can no longer command a high crop, she will tire of her sterile toil and seek a man whose garden is well fruited, and thence populate her own barren plot with seeds and cuttings until his is not half what it was.

Seek not, my son, such women as these, for there are ample others. Though she be less susceptible to your flatteries, oftentimes less comely, her deficits will match your surpluses, and contrariwise the same. Seek her in places high and low, where she will often be reading or otherwise keeping her own company. Do not sing of your weaknesses, but do not hide them either. Rather, provide her reason to notice your strengths. Do good, such that you may be a candle to the beneficent.

And do not—ever—consort with liars, even those not maliciously so. She may call it innocent, a game of hide-and-seek with her self, the setting of a travail through which you must pass to discover the secret flower at her heart. But no matter how enchanting, a cavalier woman is reckless and shifting, and can do naught but pour ruin over your soul.”

—advice from the Grand Dame of Altorth to her grandson on the occasion of his father’s cruel murder at the hands of the Asteroid Witch

The Ordeal

When the boys of my clan can balance six stones on a plank, they must undergo the satica, the ordeal. Six stone is the weight of the average timber wolf. One would be caught and thrown into a freshly dug pit, there to remain with nothing but water until its sides grew lean and it began to pace relentlessly and everything in its eyes that resembled a dog was gone and only the beast remained. The boy would be stripped to his nethers—summer or winter—and given a single severed prong from a rack of red elk antlers shed in the last season. He would climb into the pit to come out a man or else to be buried where he fell.

It is something, I can tell you, to feel the dirt of your own grave crumble between your fingers. It whispers to you of your own mortality in ways no words possibly could. By the time you reach the bottom, you know it is not the wolf you must beat but your own fear of death, a fear that keeps you tiny and cowed.

I was not a large boy—more prone to imaginary adventures than chores or fighting. My brother was who the clan wanted, but we had lost him to the satica three years before. He had not been lucky. The wolf the men had trapped was an old male, once an alpha, too slow to outrun the hunters but too experienced to be bested by a mere child. I remember the sound he made when the men stabbed him with spears. I had stopped looking by then. I had covered my eyes—or perhaps I hid them in my father’s shirt. But I heard that awful yelp. It was a hurt beyond pain. I did not know if wolves had thoughts, but if so, I imagined he expected he had earned his freedom. To be killed like that, by men who would not even climb down to face him, was the final indignity for a creature that had, for all intents and purposes, been a king.

I was luckier than my brother. The wolf I faced was not especially large. But he was swift. I had heard the men boast of the chase, how my wolf had evaded them for five leguire and nearly gotten away. He growled and bore his teeth at me before I was halfway down. By the time my bare feet touched the dirt, already mixed with freshly falling snow, he had dropped to a crouch and the thick fur on his back was pointing to the sky. I could see the billow of his breath. I remember being surprised by how white his fangs were. That meant he was young. Like me. Would that make him easier to face or harder? I didn’t know. I was terrified, of course. But it wasn’t just the fear of pain or death. I learned then that you can be terrified of many contradictory things at the same time. As much as I was afraid of having my throat ripped out, I was equally afraid of doing the ripping. I did not want to kill this wolf. I did not want to kill anything. I did not want to be in that pit. But what I wanted did not matter.

I gripped the antler prong in my right hand and dropped to a crouch of my own. I raised my left arm defensively in front of me. I did not know how to hunt wolves. I had thought I wouldn’t need to know for many months. I would learn how to hunt wolves tomorrow, I told my parents. But I had reached the age where growth comes in jumps, and now the day had arrived and I had not bothered to practice. I laid awake the night before thinking what I might do. Mostly, I thought about running away. And I would have. But there was nowhere to go. So I tried to recall everything I knew about wolves. I had seen them hunt. I had watched from cover at the far end of a snowy field as four of them hounded an elk. The snow was deep, and it took all the wolves’ strength to bound through it. They did not pounce on the elk and rip it open, like a bear would. They simply wore it down. When the elk got ahead, it would slow to rest. When the wolves rounded the rise, the elk would pick up speed again, and on and on for a leguire or more.

As the pack drew further away, I wanted to follow, to see to the end of the story, but my father said no. The only reason we were safe was because we were silent and upwind. We were an easier target than an elk—slower and easy to down in deep snow. If we moved, the wolves might turn on us. So we watched across the open valley until hunters and prey were just ants in the snow. The elk turned at the tree line and was met by a flanking hunter. But his prey was easily six times as heavy. The wolf could not bring it down on its own, so it clamped with its jaws and hung from the elk’s heavy hide. As it was dragged along, the wolf rested a moment before dropping its feet and tugging hard. Terrified at the feel of being torn, the elk burst into a sprint, and that was its mistake. The wolf held, and the elk had to drag it through the heavy snow at speed. The prey began to tire. His sprint turned to a gallop and his gallop to a trot. The other wolves caught up. The elk crashed into the snow, and the hunt was over.

Later that night, I heard howls in the distance, many more than four. The hunters had fed their entire pack.

A wolf’s instinct, I hoped, was to clamp down on its prey and hold. And that’s what my wolf did. It lunged at my arm, held weakly in defense. I remember hearing the sound of my bones breaking before feeling the pain. Perhaps it was the cold—or simply shock. Whatever the reason, once it hit, icy and hot, I could not suppress a scream. I wanted to. I did not care to impress my father, but for his sake I wanted to appear strong in front of the men watching from the rim of the pit above. But I failed. I let out a great welp, and the crowd just beyond my sight gasped in unison. Was it over already? Had I been killed?

As nature would have it, I was right in my observation. My wolf did not immediately rush for my throat, although in that instant he could have. He had tasted fear and held on just long enough for me to push the antler into his gullet. I knew his hide was thick, so I didn’t pause to see if I had even done damage. I just kept thrusting—over and over and over and over. One for fear, one for disgust, one for anger, one for sadness, one for pity.

Gradually the wolf’s snarl faded. He let go of my shattered arm. He turned, walked three paces, and collapsed to his side. I saw flecks of blood in his fur. He began panting then, heavily, like it was the hottest of summer days. And he glanced to me. Once. It was just a moment. Maybe he was looking to see if I was coming to finish him off. Who knows? All I can say is there was no recrimination in his gaze. There was no hate. Somehow, he understood we were both victims of the same barbarity. We could not both survive. We had fought. He had lost. That was the end of it. There was no shame. No ire. No blame. Would any human have felt the same?

As I stood there in my nethers, arm dangling limply at my side and draining life in drops on the snow, I was overwhelmed with a passion. I was swollen with it. It was the only time in my life I’ve had anything like a religious experience. Whatever happened to me, I was sure I wanted to acquit myself with even half the dignity of that animal. Nothing else in life seemed as important.

I’m not sure how long he hung on before he died. I know I grew faint from my injuries and collapsed to my knees. At some point, I recognized silence. There were no cheers. I had seen the satica many times. When a wolf was bested there had always been cheers. But not for me. I looked up and found nearly everyone had gone. None of the bearded men of my clan remained. None of them lowered a hand to me or raised me on their shoulders in praise. It wasn’t until later, when an old woman was wrapping my arm amid the distant chatter of the men, that I understood why.

Whatever was said about the ordeal, whatever grand reasons were quoted for its existence, it wasn’t to make men of boys. It was to raise warriors who could swing a falxiform axe for the greater glory of the clan. But I had sacrificed my arm. Whether I had beaten my fear of death, whether I bested a wolf and become a man did not matter. Whatever use of the limb remained, I would never join the others in battle. I was of no use. I may as well have lost.

To be rejected like that, in front of everyone, turned me hollow. I felt fake, less than human—inhuman even, as if I had been revealed as a changeling or wendigo who had crept from the forest and pretended to be a child. My whole life I had grown up at their feet. How could I mean nothing? I thought about my brother and how little any of us had really mourned. There had been tears and wails, of course. Men hung their heads and women pulled their hair. But in the weeks after his trace, the adults acted more and more as if his passing was part of the natural order of things. We mourned it the way we mourned the passing of the great herds every winter. I thought of my brother and my brothers—all the boys we had lost. No, not lost. We knew right where they were. A pile of six stones marked every filled pit. How many were there? How many had I passed in the brush on my imaginary adventures? How many girls did that leave to the men that remained?

That night, with an arm wrapped in musk hide, I sat in the shadows and watched them laughing in the hall. The hollowness in my heart filled with bile and turned black. I had no more fear of death. I suppose that made everything that came later all the easier. Someone had to do it. Why not me?

—from the diary of Holuphred I

Chiefly, there are three things to know about Oth.

First, it is very far away. The peculiar geometry of the Strand ensures that no matter where you are, there is nowhere further you can go. This was proved in QV342, when a pair of sternriders were dispatched from the garrison at Terrebrento, one in each direction. Despite having nothing between it and its destination, the second ship arrived in Oth on the 44th Vernal, a full 37 days after the first reached the capital. This remote distance ensured that Oth was the last territory to be conquered, and it is widely believed that it will also be the first to go.

Second, Oth is very old. Evidence of habitation predates the rock mazes of the Minai by 17,000 turns. Although this is not a secret—any graduate text of archeology will present the evidence—if you stop any citizen and inquire about the first peoples, they will mention the Minai, because that is what they were taught in school. That is also where the Presidium of Antiquities Museum begins its collection, briefly, before exploring the riverlands of Plantatia, despite that the Presidium possesses in its archive several spectacular specimens of gilded Gasfan potsherds dating between 85,000 and 107,000 QI. The Tarquins, proudly bearing witness to the antiquity of the lands they formerly ruled, have long claimed that the federation of clans they replaced was of such remote origin that no one knew the names of the first kings, despite a roll of at least 800 on the Codex Annuilii.

Third, Oth is unstable. The peoples of the interior will often speak as if the geologic vacillations of the Gasfan Basin were due to the political and that if only the Gasfans would put their government in order, the land would no longer shake, the floating islands would settle, and the Comi River would fall into the sea rather than leap spectacularly from it. In truth, it rather goes the other way. No sooner had the Tarquin queen Ilsapeth finally and brutally conquered the Samui, where seven generations of her ancestors had failed, than a great earthquake leveled her fortress at Fauntleruud and the plains of Osterroth were again overrun. It would be another seven generations before Holuphred the Great repeated the feat. (For the modern political struggles in Oth, see Chapter Four.)

To these three facts, we add a rumor, ridiculous on its face but so often repeated on Oth, and with such enthusiasm, that any responsible guide must mention it in advance, lest any of our readers be led astray by local folklore. Oth, it is said, is not the end.

The Agony

“Bilious” Ruben was not a well-liked man. Hated by the Celfs. Depised by the Sibellines. Wanted by the Magistrate Ren on numerous charges that included, among others, public defecation on a statue of Lord Aldous Horsefeathers. His mother, before she passed of rupturous gall stones, could only say of her son that he had paid her a courtesy by being so difficultly born that she was unable to have child again, a welcomed disposition after bearing thirteen. In fact, in all the cities of Oth, and in all the lands beyond (as far as his name was known), it was only the whores of Maynard House who would speak kindly of him, no doubt due to his frequent and generous patronage. It was even said the Provincial Governor himself, the Emperor’s very representative, spat on Ruben, twice: once when he crashed a state dinner disguised as the Marquise de l’Or, a woman of some girth who, it turns out, had passed the year before, and again on the Governor’s way to the gallows, when Ruben stopped to gloat. Provincial Governors in Oth have very short lifespans, Ruben shouted down to the man, followed by the observation that Ruben had survived eleven.

Thus it was that a sense of justice rarely felt in the outer provinces (and particularly in Oth) settled around the Gasfan basin as the word spread, appearing first in the port of Gasfa before spreading up the coast to Poliferous, through The Junket, and finally to the home of the Tarquins and their silent towers. Bilious Ruben had been killed. The immediate glory quickly faded, however, as the circumstances of his death became known. It wasn’t that he had been brutally murdered. In most people’s minds, that would’ve only salted the cold dish of revenge he’d been dealt. It was that he’d been murdered in Ith, across the mountains that rimmed the eastern arc of the Gasfan Sea, and that was wild elf country. And that made it wholly different. Bilious Ruben, no matter how despicable, no matter how despised, was still human, and in the lands beyond Oth (rarely in it) any human—even the filthy and the wretched—was infinitely more worthy than the pointy-eared vermin of Ith. And so it spread along the Strand, not that one Bilious Ruben had been killed, the very same Bilious Ruben who was widely suspected of masterminding the desecration of the Sybelline Chapel, the Bilious Ruben who was equally well-suspected of starting the great Turnip War, but rather that a human had been killed by an elf, and a wild elf at that.

So it was the fleetingly glorious death of Bilious Ruben was overtaken by that most intractable of political maladies: the much discussed, much debated, and utterly perennial “Dark Elf Problem.” In any normal province, which is to say just about anywhere besides Oth, such a matter would’ve fallen to the Governor and the local Lord’s Council to be dealt with swiftly. But Ruben hadn’t lived, or died, in a normal province. He had died in Ith, which was wild land, and he had lived in Oth, which was at the time of his death (yet again) without a Provincial Governor, and which had been unable to hold a Lord’s Council successfully in seventeen years—discounting the brief but tragic Council of 793, where the previous Lord Horsefeathers ran naked and raving through chambers.

And that is how it came to be that M. Malagaster Shagash, Esq., Most Special Investigator and High Succedaneum to the Emperor, found himself sentenced to Oth for the full term and, as he called it, agony of the inquest into the death of “Bilious” Ruben Bane.

Our third night, we stopped at the port of Issakara on the eastern shore of the Gasfan Sea, where I met a man cursed with true love. He had succumbed many decades before, it seemed, for he spoke of it winsomely and only after some hesitation. Now grizzled, he sat shadowed and lean under a pale window pattered with early winter rain.

She appeared to him still, he explained. His beloved. Bound by blood and indebted in death, she had fulfilled her oath by means rare and arcane. Nor could she leave because of it.

We sat in silence a moment while I pondered what that knowledge implied.

She only appeared under her own will, he said, seeing the look on my face. Others could see her when she so desired, but that was rare.

“She was always as secret as the desert,” he said with a dry smile.

I asked where she went when she wasn’t about, and he said that he too had wondered that long ago, when they still bothered with questions, and she could never articulate an answer.

“Not here,” he said, mimicking her intuition.

His countenance changed after I ordered our second round. He was no stranger to drink, and I watched his fingers flirt tenderly with the glass before lifting it to his mouth.

“Still as beautiful as the day we met,” he said with a well-liquored grimace.

“You mean she hasn’t aged?”

My companion ran his fingers around the rim of his drink. “Not so as I can tell.”

“Must be hard.”

I sensed I had crossed a line there and rose to atone for it with another round, but my grizzled friend stayed me with a hand. He had to be going, he said, standing on two bowed legs. He was shorter than his gaze implied. From a nearby stand, he gathered a long coat cut in the style of the Kuoden Mountainriders. I hadn’t seen a bushiek in the town—it would’ve been impossible to miss—which suggested the garment had been acquired by other means.

“Can I at least know how she died?” I asked, trying to contain my disappointment.

The question annoyed him, although he hid it well. But by then it hardly seemed to matter. I had lost him, along with any hopes of including him in the book—or of seeing the young apparition that I didn’t doubt haunted him.

He wiped at the oval scar that peered like a sideways eye from his left temple, where something round had entered violently but at too high an angle to reach his brain, which had undoubtedly spared him.

“We weren’t supposed to be together,” he said donning a wide-brimmed hat that hid both the scar and his eyes. “But neither of us could abide that. So, here we are.”

Then he gave the kind of nod you get from a stranger passing on the road and walked out, leaving me to wonder whether or not he had missed the shot on purpose.

Some weeks later, quite unexpectedly, I met the mysterious man again when our ship was grounded on a giant seel. He was among those called to coax the behemoth back to the deep. Unwilling to pass on his story, or that of his phantom bride, I joined the crew as the only woman digging trenches in the mud into which crates of explosives were placed in the hopes of irking the beast enough to move. Progress was slow as the creature ejaculated for several hours every day, and the whole of the roving coast was covered in undulating foam.

The ploy failed in its aim, and we were stranded for twelve wet and miserable days until a ship arrived from Issakara bearing some two dozen 100-lekesh drums of seel hormone, milked at great expense from the gland of a carcass. And yet, the misadventure with the creature, who had wandered accidentally into the shallows and mistook the shore for a mate, gave me enough pause to meet the mysterious beloved, whose name was Phoria. Unable to travel more than 50 lagats from the man in the Mountainrider coat, she could only meet in an old boathouse near the shore, where, over seven nights, I heard the whole of her story, which stills me to this day.

Like so many of her fellows, it begins not in Oth but at the other end of The Strand, in the land of Breget, where the young lovers found an old holocaust projector, abandoned in the Aleph War, and turned it on.

The early peoples of Oth came to much the same conclusion as the early peoples of other places. From the swaying portals of their pack-mounted tents, they looked out on a capricious, violent, and fleeting world, even as the heavens above gave glimpses of something greater: a perfect, timeless, unchanging realm that existed beyond the veil of the firmament. It followed then that their world was not the real world, which hid behind a kind of mask in much the same way that the spark of consciousness, or soul if you prefer, hid behind the eyes, and so the tribes of Oth began covering their faces whenever away from their hearth in both mimic and worship the divine.

The exact origin of the practice remains a mystery, but by 95,000 QI, the tribes of Oth carved and wore elaborate porpal-shell masks as part of their normal attire. Porpals, a kind of feathered tortoise, were once plentiful around the Eastern Sea. Of the 17 species thought once to exist, nine remain—although there are occasional reports of giant porpals still inhabiting the deep grasslands. The entobite or common porpal has a heavy, scaled, hooked beak and a thick shell just wider than a human face, which made it ideal for mask carving. Its natural aggression and predatory instinct meant it was easy to convince the creature to bite down on a heavy rood and so to be twisted on its back by means of a special staff, called a rik. While porpal bellies are softer, they’re still quite difficult to penetrate with a spear, and porpal hunting was regarded as a dangerous practice. Porpal hunters were often easily distinguished by the scars on their arms and faces. Most were missing at least one finger, and it was not uncommon for them to lose an eye, which tradition dictated had to be covered by a patch made from the skullcap of the offending animal.

Over so many eons, the traditions of mask-wearing varied considerably. In the late 7th Dynasty, they were made primarily of wood, which suggests a decline in the porpal population coincident with a drought those years. From the 17th to the 21st Dynasties, and briefly under the 23rd, only women wore them, then only unmarried women. Under the Blight, the Umb nobility co-opted the practice and banned mask-wearing among the common-born. But despite these interruptions, mask-wearing remained the common practice among most of the population of Oth until the early decades of our era, when the Tarquin kings began a series of pogroms against the native peoples, who in turn chose against revealing their identities with traditional garb. Mask-wearing revived again after the arrival of the Imperilum, who were foreign to every land they conquered, and as such, tolerated local custom as a matter of law. The first resistance fighters used the policy as an excuse to hide their faces under traditional masks, and ordinary people soon followed suit, if only to provide the fighters cover. Mask-wearing began to be seen not as a native custom but a sign of resistance popular among Othars of every race, native or not, and although tensions have eased since the Quarter Rebellion, it is not uncommon for traditionally minded Othars to don a porpal-shell mask whenever outside the home.

Dearest,

If my tone seems off, my language stiff, my grammar poor, my metaphors dull, know that I am writing swiftly with words that educate rather than inspire. I am unsure if my captors will read what I have written, but it seems likely, and I should like the both of you to know that my chief concern is not to make this unfortunate situation worse and I will do whatever is necessary to effect that end. That is the first thing.

The second is that I do not know when they will return. I have been given license to write, but no terms have been stated. I have asked for weeks to reach the Presidium and correct whatever misunderstanding has led me to these four walls. Those requests were always silently rebuffed until just this moment, when pen and paper were pushed into my cell without word.

Pen and paper! Can you believe it? And an ink so black I could so easily believe I am not writing but carving night onto the page. I hope when it dries it does not lose this magnificent luster of absence so that you may have some small inkling of what it is like in this place. An entire monochrome world! The brown of my trousers was tolerated, but I was asked immediately to remove my coat for no other reason than that it bore the Presidium seal at the cuff, rimmed in red.

The point is this, my gray jailers may return at any time and snatch these pages from me. Rest assured that if my words suddenly cease, it is not because I have. For that reason, too, I should like to append the end of this letter here lest its absence offend you as well as those of my superiors who must see it and all good decorum.

I think constantly of you and our home and of Harrot and I look forward to a swift return. Your faithful servant and husband,

M. Malagaster Shagash.

Now that that is done, let us return to the matter of my imprisonment.