A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 9

Pages of the City

The ruins of Dar'on had an art about them. Not many, perhaps, were of a mind to appreciate such a thing. But it was there. It was there in the way great walls crumbled to show their tender sides, lying across the land belly-up in beautiful wallpaper mosaics; it was there in the way the roads buckled into paved oceans, rising and falling, swelling and spilling; it was there in the way dust settled in the cracks, like gold veins that lined the precious granite of forgotten mines.

That paved ocean seemed to have its ways about it, too. It was indeed a poetic explanation for the shifting that took place day in and day out, as if the swells of its buried tide upset the balance of what drifted on the surface, and spilled one thing onto another when that tide took to coming in or going out. And sometimes, as is known to occur with oceans, there were storms – and greater upheavals took place, leaving the city utterly transformed overnight; like that eerie feeling of the first snowfall that blankets everything in the night and makes it a different place by morning. In Surbaen terms, it might be likened to a leopard that has changed its spots. An impossible transformation. But it happened in Dar'on all the time.

One morning, a tower might be far removed from where it had been the day before. Still whole, but a mile away. The entire city might be rearranged like an array of blocks that a child has wiped out and rebuilt on a whim, again and again. Toppled without ado and built back up, a tireless cycle.

An avalanche would turn into a glittering revelation of buried treasures unearthed, or a fortress, once towering, would disappear underfoot. And the breath of the gods would rattle through, an eerie whisper, barely winded.

Later, years later, people would recognize that those currents were the gods there with them, omnipotent and subtle, breathing down their necks. The very gods had flown that low over the land, so close as to breathe among them. An honor, or something entirely more convicting?

Sometimes, it was so subtle that one would not recognize it was not merely his own fingers turning the pages of the diary before him. It might seem later that he had blazed through it, that he had devoured the words as if possessed, in half the time it should have taken someone to pick their tedious way through a progressive sea of words. But the pages had blurred by, not one word a stumbling block – sped up until half a volume had come and gone, and the clock on the wall had scarcely shucked its needle-like hand past a single margin.

For the gods did not need more than a margin on a clock face to accomplish momentous things on the face of their earth. They did not need more than one breath for a long-winded effect. Omnipotence meant there was a network of power abroad. Patterns upon patterns of perfect dominoes, ripe for tipping. A great butterfly effect, always in motion.

The ripples could not always be traced, but this butterfly had its roots, places its wings were anchored. Perhaps its wings manifested in the pages of a diary, and as the pages turned it was granted flight. A draft hatched into the room, a puff as each page fell. It huffed and puffed a moment, trying to catch on; like trying to pump flickering coals into flame. Then the pages began to turn faster, and the consistency of the draft increased. The metaphoric flames caught. The curtain rippled as if someone had passed. The ashes in the fireplace stirred up from their deathbed. Up the chimney they were snuffed, where they intercepted an unsuspecting bird in flight. Its wings engaged resistance – and at that point, the current was harnessed, given birth, and propelled into the aftermath of the foreseeable future.

None would think to make the connection that, as the pages of one Winifred Sebastian's diary were turned, great patches of rubble in the city were overturning in conjunction.

The Great Butterfly was in motion. Like a hamster wheel, this omnipotent creature had taken to its gears.

Gears that could turn the earth on its axis. Gears that churned beneath the ocean, and rationed the tides. Gears that turned compass points to the great margin that was the North.

A flurry of pages.

A shuffle in the city.

I did not know it, but by the end of that diary, I had built a fortress somewhere in the city.