A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,7

her, but there was no point to it. I would either return or I wouldn't. Many others had met their end this way already.

“I'll see you at dinner,” I said.

It was either true, or it wasn't.

She nodded, and we forsook further exchange. I turned from the room and left Manor Dorn for the wilderness, finding my favorite shadows to walk in as I headed for the city in the distance, embarking on my weekly quest.

Today, I was an Albino.

*

There used to be a designated gate into the city. But the hulking pillar supports on either side had crumbled to various lows, and the gate itself had fallen on its face. It was now a rusted framework of bars trampled in the dust. The walls around the city had disintegrated, and now it could be accessed from any angle.

I slipped in at the side, navigating through the rubble with the surefooted poise of an expert. The territory had only shifted slightly since I'd last been through. There were no new obstacles to reckon with.

I breezed past the slanting half-walls and leaning buildings of the fringes, carefully descending the land-slid banks of a sunken square, where I skittered across the spidery cracks in the folded ground and climbed out the other side. I had already picked the square raw. There was nothing left in these parts.

For that reason, the quest of today differed from the usual. There was a greater element of risk than usual, in that it was time to press deeper into the city. It was time again to penetrate an unexplored sector.

I hadn't expanded my radius in months. There were endless nooks and crannies to uncover in any given locale. But there came a time when digging deeper in one spot no longer produced results in the necessary quantities. I could go back the University, I mused. It was a goldmine. It was for that reason I was loathe to go there, though. It was undoubtedly popular and frequented by competition.

I took myself a distance to the west, until I encountered the remains of a navigable alley. One of the buildings had bowed against the other, but it was holding where it was wedged high above. Various piles of rubble littered the passageway, and the ground buckled up in places like sharp hillocks. I climbed over the obstructions, slinking under some collapsed columns that were lodged across my path.

The alley felt long traveling thus, but it was tedious work anywhere in the city. I conquered it, and found myself at the edge of a vast, sweeping avenue. It tilted up to the left, a gradually sloping street, and fell away at the same rate to the right – but it was hard to say if it had always been that way, or if it was the result of some upheaval.

Looking both ways up and down the sloping avenue, I surveyed the cracks and edges before breaking out into the open, skittering across the street and alighting in the shadows across the way. A shallow cloud of powder stirred in my wake, but when it settled again, it covered my footprints almost like I had never been there. Only the prints of a ghost remained, the shallowest whisper of passage. So far, so good. I had not upset anything.

I forsook the avenue the first chance I could. Nothing good could come of staying out in the open. I ducked into another channel, hopping a pillar that lay flat like a fallen tree. My skirt trailed over the surface, leaving a silken streak through the pale dust. I wobbled a bit on the porcelain layers on the other side, but found my footing and plowed on.

Blazing a trail through the haphazard maze of sections and pieces, I alighted finally on a fresh shore of potential – the crest of a precarious rise, that dipped down by way of jutting, serrated bluffs into another sunken square I had not investigated as of yet. Well, this ought to keep me busy. Carefully, I maneuvered down the broken bank, skidding on plaster and teetering on unsteady slabs. I climbed through the pitched frame of a big window that had fallen and shattered, wedged on its edge to create a crooked diamond skeleton. The glass had long since fallen in the cracks of the bank or turned to dust. Only a scant few icicles of it still hung in the frame.

Before I reached the bottom, the toe of my boot rustled through a generous corner