A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,25

impact. With a silken swish, the weight of great black feather stems fell around me, my glossy wings spilling off my back to cradle me in a deadweight. I could not rise under their hindrance. I tried, and collapsed back to my hampered position, the appendages soaked in tar, it seemed, as they spread further out on the ground beside me and pinned me there for good. Trying to ascend, even marginally, was like straining against a great net of steel, nailed into the dirt. My wings might as well have sent roots into the ground like trees.

I was straining against trees.

Or: I was an angel with roots in this place.

Not even angels, it seemed, had it easy. Performing miracles was no easy task. It was a struggle. It was a fight.

A whisper came to me, in the drifting ash. It was omnipotent. Chilling. Convicting. It told me I would do great things, but I would have to stand my ground. I would want to run, but I was being challenged, now, not to do so. I would be convicted if I did.

Even the angels, it suggested, had to be charged with standing their ground – lest they run from this place.

Lest they run headlong from our beloved, forsaken Dar'on.

N I n e –

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