storm abated. It was called the Month of Cold Rice. To go outside during the monsoon was to risk disappearing forever. Although ropes were strung from end to end, and looped around bollards down the main avenues, these were no guarantees against the screaming winds and the crashing waves. Let go for even a moment and you would be blown into the trees or over their tops and out to sea. Only a fool ventured out during the monsoon. As the storm began, Auuenau sent his apprentice out on a fabricated mission to the far end of the span, from which he could not possibly return before it struck. Thus safely isolated by the storm, Auuenau assumed he could achieve what he’d read in the scrolls.
“To begin he had to score a specific and intricate pattern into the woven floor of his house. Drawing it first with a stick of charcoal, he discovered that it took up almost the entire space. He had to tear up his bedding, and shove aside tables and cushions. His collection of shells and dead sea creatures he piled up in the corners. Then began the task of carving the pattern he’d drawn, using a mallet and small chisel. This proved to be exhausting. It took him days to chisel out its symmetrical curves and whorls. All the while the storm pushed the walls and roof so that the house seemed to breathe in and out like a living sea creature itself, with curved window eyes and slatted ribs.
“At last he completed it. He rested, he couldn’t say how long, for the monsoon made everything dark, everything the same, so that night and day melted together. But finally he stuffed the scrolls into the front of his tunic and began to walk the pattern. At various points he was to stop and recite certain text. Most of it was in arcane languages he did not know the meaning of, forcing him carefully to sound out the words, the phrases. What the scrolls failed to mention was how enervating each recitation was, as if at each stage some part of him was siphoned off. He found that he could not go any farther than the first two stops upon the pattern that first day. Having arrived at the second branch, he had to retreat, his legs barely holding him up as he backed carefully along the line he’d walked, and out again. Then, in the corner, he collapsed, sleeping as if dead.
“Hours later, perhaps the next day, when he awoke, he entered again, finding that he could pass the points where he had already recited from the scrolls. He entered deeper into the pattern, making it through the third and fourth stages before he had to withdraw again and rest.
“The storm never let up. It shrieked and shook the house, and the walls and roof continued to flex. By the time he entered the fifth stage, the outer darkness seemed to have entered the house and penetrated him as well. He could feel the blood in his veins going gray, then black. It seemed he’d been walking this pattern for eternity. There were places along it, so the scrolls claimed, where a wrong step could suck him into nonexistence, into some other world, or turn him inside out. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d backed out and come back in, how many times he’d passed out from exhaustion, nor when he’d last eaten. The swirling pattern of spirals was no larger than this room, this hut, yet it seemed to have expanded to the size of Shadowbridge itself. As he cleared the tenth and final stage and dizzily walked toward the center, he sensed a second self beside him, an umbra in his shape walking at his shoulder. Precariously he stepped, balanced on one leg, and then set the other foot down in the center of the pattern.
“He had arrived.
“Auuenau glanced sidelong at the dark self sharing the center with him. It hadn’t gone away, but turned and looked back at him with blackness for eyes, and in the blackness stars sparkled.
“He stood, waiting for something explosive—for the fabric of space to tear apart, for the gods to unveil themselves and embrace him, for the sense of cleaving, for anything to tell him that the transformation had occurred. There was nothing. He dangled in the wedge between wholeness and split.
The thing hadn’t happened but hung on the brink. Exhausted, he fumbled for the final scroll