It came from the south. It spread like oil across the wastes, but as it neared and magnified in his vision he saw that it was not liquid, but a metallic, bristling multitude. A hundred thousand men or demons, all on horseback, each bent forward, clutching black reigns in gauntleted fists, staring ahead with a ravenous intensity. The horses were black and wild-eyed, every one. Spittle flew from their open mouths. The riders were armored in gray iron that cast back no light. They had passed the gray lands and were on the flat red expanse of desert. How they had made it through the twists and spires and ravines of the wastelands ahorse he could not fathom.

Above them spread a shadow-thing, roiling like smoke, pulled forward above the riders by some powerful force...and as he looked into its bodiless form, he realized that the force was its own will.

It came on, faster and faster, and a great maw opened up inside of it, revealing a darkness greater still…

* * *

The Watcher awoke surrounded not by demon riders, but by the soft red cushion that served as his sofa and bed. He lay on his back. The tower ceiling narrowed to a point overhead, the way roads narrowed as they approached a horizon on flat ground. Not that he could remember very clearly what roads had looked like.

He sat up and hobbled south across the stone tile floor. His pace was slow; he was very old. His shadow barely dampened the sheen of the floor as it passed. The immense room was lit brightly and totally by something or other. Not the sun, for there was only one opening in the walls, the one toward which he was now traveling.

It was a long way there. He passed his desk and table, though a hundred paces lay between him and them. Farther away still was the circular wall of the tower, lined all the way around with bookshelves. He could see the colors of the books if he squinted. It was the distance, not poor eyesight, that made them difficult to see. His eyes were the one part of him that had never gone bad.

The Watcher reached the balcony and stared down at the desert, miles below and hundreds of miles before him. There was nothing down there but rock and sand, and yet he felt compelled to look into the spyglass anyway. Through it, he could see all the way to the end of the wastes, where nothing lived and nothing dared to try. There was nothing there either.

He had known he would see nothing. He had been putting up with those dreams for nearly four hundred years. They were always different, but always the same. And there was never anything coming from the south when he woke. Yet the fear was as powerful as it had always been. He could never resist looking into the spyglass, if only to reassure himself and put his mind to rest.

Something would come one day, though. That was what the Book said. It would come from the south.

He was not sure if he believed it. He felt that the thing would never come at all. For so long he had regarded its coming as something far in the distance, an event that may or may not even happen in his long lifetime. Eventually, it had ceased to have real meaning for him. He believed it was nothing more than dreams. He believed just as fervently that the thing was nearly upon him, reaching out toward him with claws or flaming swords or a gaping black maw from only yards away.

He had a task, a single purpose in his life, which was to watch for the coming. He was meant to believe, and so his unbelief worried him. He was not much of a Watcher. He would never have admitted his doubt to anyone, even if there were anyone to admit it to. Yet it did not disturb him greatly. His doubt, too, had become something distant. He had worried about it for so many years that it had begun to seem as meaningless as it was dire, like the belief itself.

Somewhere in this internal struggle, amid the tempest that it had created for itself, his mind had found something else to latch onto.

His feet were moving, he realized. The hallways and doors and cavernous open spaces of lower tower floors passed him by in their fleeting, enchanted way. He walked through walls, dropped through floors, climbed upwards on ladders and reached places that were farther down. He knew all the shortcuts. He knew the long ways too. For any given part of the tower, he knew at least one way of getting there that was mind-bogglingly, unnecessarily long. He knew every inch of the vertical temple by heart. All but one room.

He came to it.

He stood in a very narrow hallway, unlit except for two very dim orange glows that came from near the ceiling at either end, unattached to any light fixtures. Ghosts floated by. In front of him was a door of dark, heavy wood. It was almost black. The door looked very ancient, and yet the wood seemed perfectly, comfortingly sturdy. A hundred barbarians with hammers could not break down that door. But one hand could pull the ring and open it.

The ring was silver, a little more than a hand’s breadth in diameter, and carven with symbols he could not read. It lay very still, as rings of silver must. There was a silence around it. He reached out his hand, hesitantly, and brushed his fingers across the metal. He did not like what he felt there.

The Book did not forbid this room. The Book did not say anything about it at all. He had entered hundreds of other doors in his explorations of the tower. He did not know why this door vexed him. But he dared not open it. For the hundred thousandth time he wondered what could be behind it, and for the hundred thousandth time he pretended to himself that the thought was an idle one, and that it did not concern him much. The door loomed in front of him.

He decided to ask the Connoisseur.

He turned around purposefully, set his foot on the wall, and began to walk up it. His surroundings shifted, and he was on a floor again. It was made of wooden planks. Wrought-iron chandeliers hung from the ceiling, each filled with dozens of short candles, non of which was lit. It looked like an attic, but it was only another floor. He went to a circular hole in the center and dropped through onto the top of a spiral staircase. Down a flight, through a door. He shifted three more times, and reached the Connoisseur’s lair.

It was a rectangular place, low and wide, with passageways branching off in all directions like the legs of a spider…or perhaps an eight-legged dog, for it slept on its stomach. Yes, thought the Watcher, that made more sense. The walls were of a grayish stone, flat but roughly textured, and they were covered in green and brown lichens. The place had the earthy coolness of a cellar, and it was, in fact, below the earth. Directly above them was the first floor, which was comprised of a very tall room with a pool and some ghosts.

Shelves lined every wall, and held an assortment of oddities in jars, trays, flasks, boxes, crates, bags, bowls, and urns. Each was painstakingly marked. The far wall held the catalogs in their cases, in front of which a stepladder had been erected. There was a very short work bench in the center of the room. The Connoisseur bustled about.

It was a small creature, less than three feet high. Its skin was brown, and tightly drawn. The robe it wore was of the same burlap as a large, lumpy sack that sat on the floor within the Watcher’s field of vision. The Connoisseur ambled about on stocky legs. He wondered if its race had a name. Outside of the tower it would have been considered an oddity, but he had seen only it for so many years that he thought nothing of it anymore. It was just one more of the temple-tower’s quirks. He would have been far more surprised to meet a common gremlin or fairy, or another man like himself. It might not even be a man. He recalled that there were women, too. Or at least there had been four hundred years ago. Now, who knew?

This musing took him little time, and he did not let on that it had occurred at all. He glanced around him pleasantly at the shelves and jars, the way someone out on a stroll might look at trees. “Hello, Connoisseur,” he said. It looked up at him. He went on: “I have noticed that there is a room on the seventeenth floor with a silver pull-ring. How odd it is that I have never been through it before. Do you know what lies behind it?”

The Connoisseur was carrying a large and obviously heavy jar in both arms. The jar was at least a third as large as the creature itself, but the Connoisseur did not seem to mind the burden. It shuffled across the floor over to its work bench, step by step, taking the pace it pleased to take. Then it set the jar down atop the work bench, and, its shoulders at last being free, turned to him and shrugged. “No.”

“Do you not think it strange,” said the Watcher, “that there is a room in this tower which neither of us has ever been to?”

“I have not been to a lot of places,” said the Connoisseur. It was standing on a stool beside the work bench and peering down into the jar, which was filled with a preservative liquid in which floated balls of pale pink something. “I like it down here better.”

“Ah,” said the Watcher. “Well. Yes. Very well.”

The Connoisseur removed one of the pink balls, carefully wrapped it in cloth, and placed it in a box.

The Watcher wound his way back up to the top of the tower, visiting every floor as he went and observing the particular kind of silence and solitude unique to each. So his days often went.

* * *

Something moved on the horizon. No. The horizon moved.

It came from the south. It was a bulge, a great rising, lurching landscape. It came to have form, but it was not form enough for the thing to be called manlike. Its surface was the surface of the wasteland—lifeless, labyrinthine, jagged , epically tortuous. It was the sort of landscape through which great heroes must walk to at last find the object of a lifelong quest. Now it was a monster, if it had not been before.

It came on, gathering the earth to it as it went. Spires of rock jutted from its earthen skin. Tar dribbled down it where the cankerous pits had been overturned. It rolled forward, smashed against the ground and reformed in one motion. It reformed with a forward motion and came on. It grew.

The black clouds over the wastes were being dragged down in funnels. They were joining it. It was a nexus. It was eating the world…

* * *

The Watcher woke and paid his homage to the spyglass on the south balcony. The wasteland was still and dead as it had always been, except for the slow tumult of the black clouds over it and the occasional spear of lightning. It was really quite a dull view. It did not do wonders for his mood. It was the only open space in the whole tower, the only opening through which he could view the outside…and it faced the deadest land in existence. He found himself wishing that there were even just one other window, facing the north or west or east. He wished to know what was on the other side of the tower.

He ambled back off of the balcony, into the great monolithic space that served him as bedroom, library, watch post, place of contemplation…and throne room, audience chamber, and fortress, he supposed. He could call it whatever he wanted. There was no one to argue with his decrees.

A reflection played ever so slightly across the shine of the floor as he walked. If it were clearer, he would see a slight and ancient man. The reflection’s robes would be largely white, but trimmed and inlaid and filigreed with elaborate designs in colored cloth and in wires of precious metals. Its nose would be bent, its teeth gray and gapped, its hands skeletally thin. The reflected man would appear as delicate as a spiderweb.

His white beard trailed all the way to the floor, and brushed along the stones. He had never thought to cut it, nor seen a need. He looked down and saw beard and robes mingle together into a single sheet and trail between his legs.

He made his way toward the desk and wondered, as he often had, why the furniture was so remote. In the whole room, excepting the hundreds upon hundreds of book-laden shelves along the wall, there was only the table, the desk, and the red bed-cushion. Each was spread hundreds of feet apart from the others, as though some decorator long-past had decided to fill the empty space of the room as best he could. Each small task the Watcher must do required a journey. He often thought that it would have been a good idea to move them closer together centuries ago, when he had still been young and strong. There was no moving them now.

There was an odd gold-and-marble pedestal, as well. A red stone sat on it. He had never figured out what it was for. It too was far away, but he never needed it for anything anyway.

What purpose the sheer size of the tower could serve was a mystery to him, but like all of the mysteries of that place save one, it had long since faded into the back of his mind and become something he accepted as simple truth. The tower was all he really knew; it had been four hundred years since he had been anywhere else. Even in his dreams, he could only hover at the balcony.

He tried to remember what the outside had been like.

Before he had been the Watcher, he had been a little boy in a town. He had had parents, and other little boys had been his friends. He had worked with his father in the fields, in which living green things had grown. He had gathered colored balls from bushes and eaten them, and they had stained his hands. His friends and he had gone to the river, which had been a body of water like the pool on the first floor, except that it had flowed on forever, and by the river they had chased gremlins. Or had the gremlins chased them? Perhaps they had taken turns. It was so very difficult to remember, after all this time.

He had tried. In the strangeness of appearing in the tower and trying to understand his surroundings, he had begun to forget almost immediately what his life before had been like. When he had realized this, he had tried desperately to keep the memories in his head. He had tried to put them in internal catalogs, like the dusty sheafs of paper in the Connoisseur’s cabinets. But the memories could not be easily held, and the tower had presented him with so much information of its own, and he had had to find and memorize the ways through it from floor to floor, and the dreams had come every night and forced themselves into his mind.

The tower’s height, he suspected, could be accounted for by the fact that he needed to be able to see very far from the top of it. But that did not explain anything else about it.

In theory, the Book had the answers to all of his questions. The Book said so itself.

He reached the desk at last, feeling weary. The Book lay open upon it, amid a small sea of papers and writing implements and other tools and oddities he had never used. The answers to all thy questions be found within

, it read.

It was a great tome, a thousand pages or more, and bound in a black material that was something like leather or parchment. On the front, in gold, was written its title: The Book. The script was beautiful and flowing. Closed, it was like a block of stone, massive and almost cubical. When he had first come upon it as a boy, he had not been able to lift it in its entirety. There had been a brief period, in his prime, when he had been able to do so without great effort. He did not know why there were so many pages. Only the first four had writing on them.

He had been appointed to a position of great responsibility, the flowing script told him. That was the reason he had woken in an incomprehensibly vast tower one morning in his tenth year after a night of fitful dreams. He was the Watcher. Something would come from the south. He must watch for it.

What he was to do then, the Book had neglected to say. The more he had read the words over the centuries, the more convinced he had become that whoever had written it had simply taken that detail for granted, and had neglected to write it down. No one was playing a game with his mind, and no sign would be revealed when the day finally came, and the terrible thing showed itself in the wastelands. It had been overlooked. That was all.

He pondered that question rather abstractly now, when he pondered it at all. There was another thing that worried him more—not just puzzled him, but worried him. It nibbled at the edges of every other thought. It had hold of his mind and heart, and would not let them go.

He pored over the text of the Book another time. He knew every word by now, but he hoped as he always did that there would be some subtle hint he had overlooked before. But there was no mention, even indirectly, of the door on the seventeenth floor.

He let the Book lie, and looked up from it. The clear, blue sky was framed in the arched exit onto the balcony. To either side of it were blank stretches of gray stone, and then, on the edges of his vision, the bookshelves began.

He had never read a single one of them, nor laid hands on one, except for the one on his desk. It had purported to be the only one that mattered; was that why? There were alchemic texts on the third floor, decaying storybooks on the twenty-fourth, and the records in the Connoisseur’s cellar. The Watcher had browsed through them all from time to time, to pass the hours and to preserve his recollection of words that did not exist in the Book. But the vast library that surrounded him in the very place where he lived, watched, and slept…he had been intimidated by their numbers, perhaps, or had thought them unimportant, or had feared what he might read. In truth, he could not recall what had kept him from them for so long.

It seemed odd.

He shrugged his papery shoulders as well as he could, feeling the weight of his robes as he did. Then, he began the slow odyssey toward the nearest wall.

Tiles passed underneath his feet. He felt as though days and years passed with them. It took a very long time to reach the bookshelves.

But there came a moment when it occurred to him that he had reached them. Colored spines were arrayed in neat rows an arm’s length from him, hundreds of feet to either side and hundreds of feet up. Never had he felt the height of the room, and the strength of its walls, so much as he did there, at its edge.

He would never be able to reach most of the books. There was no ladder, nor any other way to get to them. But he must begin somewhere. He reached out and took one. It slid out easily, and with a leathery rasp.

He opened it and read: And Ehezeded begat Bashagor and Jedezeded and Zeded; and Bashagor begat Bashagor and Bashago and Bash; and Jedezeded begat Mok and Nok and Ashezhedezar...

He flipped through it. There was only more of the same.

Unperturbed, he placed it back in the gap from which it had come, and selected another.

Jabujez took for his bride a woman of the Magu clan upon the night before he was to go to battle. The next day, he did ride forth with all the men and boys of the Saieites at his back, and the Spirit of the Will was with them…

Another.

And they did construct a wooden bear, ten cubits tall and fourteen and a half cubits long. The length of its nose from nostril to eye was seven tenths of a cubit, and the length of its leg from heel to knee was…

Another.

Thus did King Bozog slay he the dragon…

He thought that the sky darkened outside, and the sun rose again, and fell and rose and fell and rose. It was difficult to tell, intent as he was on his search. The light inside the tower never changed, but it never had. He wondered, one day, if time had ever had meaning for him.

Mahedag did rule over Oboz for eight hundred years, and in that time he did defeat the Tammaphites led by Mag Rul Bog upon the field of battle, and drove them from the land.

He came upon his wife as she lay with another man, and he cast her into the earth...

There he found men of learning, and they showed him the way to bring fruit from the soil, and how to defeat his enemies with sling and sword. And so it was…

And so it was…

And so it was…

A book was in his hand. His gaze lay on a space where it had been before. He could put it back, and take another.

He let it fall to the floor.

He turned and shuffled away. Tiles and days and years passed underfoot. He was very, very tired.

The Book lay open on his desk, where he had left it.

Thou dwellest now in the Skyreach Temple of Watching…

He read it again. There must be something about the door. It seemed the only important thing now. Surely they must have known.

When he reached the end of it, he flipped a few more pages, knowing nothing was there. And then, on a whim, he flipped a few more. He turned over a hundred pages at a time, flipped a few more, opened again and again to blank paper, exactly as he expected to each time. Then he stopped.

What he saw on the page froze him.

It was written not in the flowing script of the original writer, but in another hand. A Watcher had written it. The one whose place he had taken, or the one before, or the one before him…it might be thousands of years old. For the first time, he had found a sign of someone else who had gone before. This other Watcher had left a message, a communication. There were five words.

What lies behind the door?

The Watcher spun, nearly falling over in his hurry. He lurched four steps and emerged in a white hall covered in ornate bas relief. He went on, half staggering, the closest he could manage to haste. Four more shifts, and he was there.

The wood was old and dark. The silver pull-ring hung still. Silence surrounded it.

The drift-ghosts went by in the shadows, little more than shadows themselves. They whispered without sound, and in their wake came a breeze without motion. He paid them no heed.

The door was there, less than a yard away, inviting and repelling him. There was something behind it. He must know what. He could bear it no more.

He grasped the ring. It was full of life and terror. He tore his arm away, flung himself back until he hit the wall. He heard himself whimper. And he buried his face in his hands, and staggered away.

* * *

There was a cloud of dust. It came from the south.

He had watched her mount at the edge of the gray lands. She had brought the horse through the wastes carefully, lovingly, leading it by the reigns. She had spared most of her food for it, so that it could serve her now. She had barely eaten at all.

She was coming now, as fast as it could take her. She must know that she would ride it to death before she cleared the desert, but something was so important to her that she kept coming. Her clothes were filthy and torn. Tar stained her skin, and she bled from a hundred small cuts. A silver chain hung from her neck, and on the end of it was a ring, flapping against her chest as the air rushed around her. It was a simple band of gold with an emerald set into it.

For some reason, it frightened him.

* * *

The Watcher began to spend his days pacing the tower, floor by floor. He took no shortcuts; he walked every inch of it, from the top to the bottom and back to the top again. There were thirty-one floors, counting the cellar. It took him a full day and some of the night to make the full loop once. The rest of the night he slept. There was no more than that. Each time he went down or up he passed the door, and he went by it quickly, pretending that he could not feel something on the other side drawing him to it.

The Connoisseur let him pass by the first five times without looking up from its work. The sixth time, it stopped halfway up its stepladder, holding a wrapped parcel tied with string, and stared at him with a cocked head, and remarked, “You have been down here a lot lately.”

“Yes,” said the Watcher, reaching the other end of the cellar and pausing to catch his breath. In a moment, he would begin retracing his steps.

“There are sometimes years between your visits,” said the Connoisseur, putting its parcel on a shelf, “but now you come every day.”

“Connoisseur,” the Watcher said, “Have there been many other Watchers?”

The Connoisseur reached the bottom of the ladder and, without hesitation, began to drag it backwards. The feet of the ladder scraped along the floor. “Fifteen. You are the sixteenth.”

“And you have been here all that time?” said the Watcher.

“Oh, yes,” said the Connoisseur. It found the place it wanted to be and climbed the ladder again.

“Do you ever wonder why?” he asked it.

“No,” it said.

“Neither have I,” said the Watcher.

The Connoisseur was peering into a shelf, scanning its contents. The shelves in that room were so deep that its whole body could have disappeared into one of them, if it chose to crawl inside.

“What happened to the others?” the Watcher asked. “The other Watchers.”

“They ceased to be here,” said the Connoisseur, “and were replaced by other Watchers.” It withdrew a flask of sickly, green liquid, stepped down from the ladder, and brought the flask to its work bench. “The ninth Watcher was only here for a few years. He must have been a mistake.”

“But what happened to them?

” said the Watcher.

The Connoisseur, now at its work bench, shrugged without looking.

“Have you seen the rest of the tower, Connoisseur?” the Watcher asked.

“No,” it said.

“It is a grand place,” said the Watcher. “The thing that will come from the south must be terribly important to warrant its presence.” He thought for a moment, and added, “Suppose it came out of the wastelands ten miles to the west? It might appear small, too small to see at that distance. It might pass us by entirely.”

“I suppose,” said the Connoisseur, “that someone else would see it instead.” It poured green liquid from the flask into a small glass tube and stared intently at it for a moment. Then, with a satisfied nod, it poured all the liquid back into the flask, recorked it, and carried it back to the shelf.

The Watcher left.

He wended his way back up toward the top of the tower, slowly zigzagging up through the floors in succession. He picked up where he had left off.

He found himself at the end of the hall on the sixteenth floor, staring at a pattern of bricks inches away. It would take him up to the seventeenth floor. The door would be there.

He turned away. Ten steps away was a hole with a ladder, leading down. He took it, and climbed out onto the twenty-seventh floor. Three more steps, and he stood beside his desk and the Book, facing the south balcony. The spyglass gleamed bronze in the sun.

He could almost see the wastelands through the tiny eyehole from where he stood. His vision was still good. The magic of the tower must preserve his eyes, so that he continued to be useful as a Watcher. He began to hobble out to the balcony.

As a child, his eyes had been so much better than the other boys’. He had seen fish moving under the surface of the river at night. But none of them were allowed to be out at night, and his father had switched him for it. Or had it been one of the other boys who had been switched? And he could not remember what the fish in the dark had looked like.

The Watcher peered through the spyglass. The wastes were there. He knew each gray rock formation that lay in the view of the lens. He had seen more of that place in his dreams, but could see no more through the glass. The tripod legs would not come loose from the stone railing, and the joint where they met the tube of the spyglass did not turn. It was fixed in place.

He draped his palms over the shaft, just inward from the eyepiece, and pushed down. Nothing happened. He pushed again, rocking himself up and down, but not the spyglass. He was far too weak to be hurling himself at immovable objects. But he pressed down again, and leaned all his weight on his palms.

There was a faint creak. The spyglass shifted, it’s glass eye tilting a fraction of an inch upward. The Watcher’s hands slid away, and he lost his balance. The floor of the balcony came to him, and pounded his downturned palms. He fell to it.

For many moments he knelt, letting the pain fade away to dull throbs on his hands and knees and hip. No one would ever know what had just happened, but his dignity suffered. His dignity was something that he still had, something that still belonged to him. He wanted to erase the fall he had just taken. He wanted to go to the Book and declare that the sixteenth Watcher had never been victim to a fall. But that would appear suspicious to later readers, whenever they might come.

He wondered how long he was to be the Watcher. It might be hundreds more years.

He picked himself up unsteadily, and as he did his eye brushed past the eyepiece of the spyglass, and he thought he saw a glimpse of a color that was not gray. He bent back and stared into it.

He saw the tops of what he thought were the same handful of old familiar earthen spires, and just beyond them an apparently insurmountable thorned wall of rock. But farther still, as far as the spyglass could see, there was a band of green.

Something lived out there, past the gray lands. He had never known.

A mad notion took him. He was tired of living in the tower. He wanted to go there, to the band of green. Its beauty and vibrance sung to him. He wished to find that place, and learn what manner of creatures dwelled there.

There might be other lands too, to the north. He imagined himself, an ancient and wizened traveler, coming to a village in distant hills and meeting the descendants of his brother’s line, so far removed that they had forgotten the names and lives of everyone he had once known. He and they would not recognize each other, nor know what to make of each other. He might pass them by, and find other people.

That, however, was a fantasy. There was no exit from the tower.

Unless…

What lies behind the door?

Thirty seconds passed. He was at the door.

His eyes crept across its surface many times as he stood there once more, over the dark, dry wood, and over the silver pull-ring. Animate shadows drifted past him like lives.

He wanted to open it.

His right hand hovered in the air, between him and the ring. He stood in the silence, wondering why he could never open the door, even now. What he felt was no longer fear of what lay on the other side, or fear that the powers that had bound him inside the tower would seek retribution. It was only a recognition of finality. When he opened the door, the life he had had for the last four hundred years would be over.

He gripped it. It was cold, and painful. Lightning-bolts of terror crawled over the surface of the metal. He savored the feeling for a moment, and then he pulled the door open.

It was a square room, empty except for one corner, in which a figure was curled. It was thin and naked, and it moved with such zealous erraticism that it seemed to writhe. Pale green-white light flared out from it, and danced all over the room. The figure seemed to be crouching on the balls of its feet, facing away from him. It writhe-turned toward him as he opened the door.

Its eyes were light. Its mouth opened in a scream, which was made of light. All of it was light.

It came so fast that in the time before it reached him, he thought of very little. He thought of his brother’s children’s children, catching fish by a river, and he wondered very distantly, being above all else a being of habit, from which direction the creature now came.

And so it was.

* * *

It came from the south.

It was unclear to him how he knew direction, for the sky was almost pure black with the most evil-looking clouds. South seemed very urgent to him. He was in a wasteland without color, facing south, at something beginning to happen.

There was a light out there, a pale greenish light. It colored the rocks, and made them seem sickly and dying. Something about the light seemed false to him, almost implanted, as though he were being supplied with the thoughts of someone else.

The light grew and brightened. It played about in rays over the wasteland, blotting out even the spears of lightning, almost. The rays of light tried to become something, but they seemed sick. Nothing formed from them. And underneath them, the ground began to fall away, swallowing up the empty rocks. The swallowing emptiness came on toward him like the rush of waves…

* * *

He awoke on an unfamiliar bed, in a room too huge to understand. He thought that he must still be dreaming, but that thought in itself was enough for him to realize on some level that he was not. He was not the smartest boy in his town, so they said, but he figured things out sometimes. And he could read, too.

Worry had not quite set in. He could not explain why he was in the giant room, but for a few minutes yet it was only a curiosity. He was a boy. He accepted and investigated.

He looked around. There was a table, a desk, a great deal of floor. His eyes stopped on the book.

The walk to the desk gave him a greater sense of how vast the place truly was. Distant things seemed to pass him slowly, and everything was distant. There was a balcony with a spyglass. He did not let it distract him yet.

The surface of the desk and the weighty book were above his head. There was a tall chair next to it, and he climbed up onto it. He suddenly felt very small. And there, kneeling on the seat of the chair, he began to feel for the first time the pangs of dread. The weight of the book seemed to foreshadow something. The infinitely upward columns of the bookshelves on every wall were a presence like nothing he had ever known. Where were his parents?

Carefully, he peeled back the front cover of the tome that lay in front of him. His father had once trained as a page boy for a courtier, back in the kingdom days. He had learned to read; a decade later he had taught that skill to his wife, and two decades later to his son. They had been so proud of him.

The answers to all thy questions be found within

, the book read. There was no other writing on that first page. It required another turn. He did not find the words comforting.

And then, already with a kind of resignation, knowing the way a fish knows when it lies in the jaws of a bear, he turned over the next dusty page and read on.

Impressum

Texte: Aaron Redfern
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 29.06.2012

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