Convergence T-minus 0 days, 16 hours, 21 minutes
(Castor–Lagrange transmission delay: 7 days, 5 hours, 31 minutes)
The dinner that Do I Know God After The End Waking had prepared for them was…rustic. That was the first term that ey had come up with to describe it, and no matter how else Ioan tried to nail it down further, ey was left with little else that fit.
+The dinner that Do I Know God After The End Waking had prepared for them was…rustic. That was the first term that ey had come up with to describe it, and no matter how else Ioan tried to refine it, ey was left with little else that fit.
It was a venison stew with parsnips and onions, thickened with tack and stretched with some barleycorns. ‘Woodsy’ was not quite the right word, and neither was ‘simple’, for the skunk had spent the better part of an hour doting over the cast-iron pot he’d hung over a low fire, adding salt in what Ioan felt were miserly pinches, as well as pepper and nutmeg as though they were the most precious items in the world to him.
When asked where he got the spices, barley, and tack in a forest, the skunk had laughed, shaken his head, and said, “I am not a fucking ascetic, Ioan,” then gone back to cooking.
So, rustic stew it was.
@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@“I was on a field of dandelions and grass,” May said, her voice distant and dream-fogged. “And there was no echo. The world stretched out before me in empty nothingness, and there was no echo. At my back was a bar — scratched wood, stools, a foot rail, a gutter for pouring drinks — and the only way I could hear my own voice pass through the air was to huddle between those stools and face the bar.”
“Words came unbidden,” A Finger Pointing picked up where May left off. “And as they passed through my mind, they dripped and smeared; a painting with too much wet paint on the canvas stood on its edge. The dreaming mind did not know what to do with language that close to the surface, and so the language stained all it touched.”
End Waking nodded, speaking toward the fire. “And so I screamed and I ran, and when I looked back, the bar was gone, and when I looked forward again, there it was. Had I turned? Was the world so small? The words came unbidden, and with each one that left my mouth, a cord that tethered me to reality snapped, and I grew lighter and lighter, and I feared I would float up into the sky, into the sun.”
-“And through it all, time was unmoored and set adrift.” May shook her head. “Sixteen hours, twenty three minutes is what they said, but I lived lifetime after lifetime beneath that sun. The light thrummed and vibrated around me, and I lived and died and lived again. I watched eternity fall away and rot at my feet.”
+“And through it all, time was unmoored and set adrift,” May said quietly. “Sixteen hours, twenty three minutes is what they said, but I lived lifetime after lifetime beneath that sun. The light thrummed and vibrated around me, and I lived and died and lived again. I watched eternity fall away and rot at my feet.”
“Or perhaps it was just an instant,” A Finger Pointing said.
@@ -89,7 +89,7 @@“How heavy must that madness be, then,” May continued. “To crash through so many failsafes and allow someone who has been within the system for more than two centuries such a death? This is what we fear.”