[roguesfolio]

Abah’s Landing is the perpetual muckstain on Khefrem’s kicking boot, where, with the lockstep of a mighty Raga, it plunges south into the Abecean. It is a scuff that no polish can ever wipe clean. Not to say that many have not tried. The land was first settled by blood of my distant blood, a crown of Yokuda, known for the spectacle of his shortcomings, Prince Hew. It is no small wonder that this land in Hammerfell’s most southerly terminus should be called, colloquially, his bane. The land is hot, barren, riddled with winged adders and fire-breathing frogs, and far too close to elven lands for my tastes. If Sentinel is the emerald of the Alik’r, then Abah’s Landing is the ruby of Khefrem, bloodred and winedark. Ruled by petulant and greedy merchant lords, broken on the rack of the Iron Wheel and its ever corruptible inspectors, invigorred with trade that knows no exclusivity and hates no race of man or mer or beast, and most of all harried, at every turn, by my kind. Thieves rule Abah’s Landing. Make no mistake, for that is what the merchant lords are. But thieves will also set her free. Indeed, there are no thieves in all Tamriel who compare, in wit or elusiveness or grandiose design, to the thieves of Abah’s Landing. And though they lie now crushed in the rut of the crushing rim of an Iron Wheel, make no mistake that they will rise again. As I walk the sandy streets of my peoples greatest port, flanked by streams of Altmer and Maomer pirates and profiteers in their dubious trades, I feel I fit right in. One more scuff on the kicking boot of the Redguard, one pebble to crack the wheel’s rim.

[roguesfolio]

From the Obdurate Gates to her cloudsmacked heights stands Korug’s dawning orc home, half carved, half built, supplanting the mountain with a city. Orsinium, soul of the long nursed wound! Yon civic summit looms o’er burghal Wrothgar, its foundations dug deep in the faces and scarps of old Black Mountain, Emeric’s honored recompense for that Murkwasten affair, its walls and aqueducts newborn behind the rugged mask of orcish make- craftwork deceptively gentle and profound. Magically, the Orisimer build a tangible past into new Orsinium, the city looking more ancient than any from my alpine approach. I suspect the city exists, lived so long in naught but her peoples dreams, with its history rich at conception. I had prearranged a bed at Skalar’s Hostel on the city limits under the guise of an appraiser of first era crafts but, after an unfortunate event at the House of Orsimer Glories, found more comfortable lodging in a refuge deep in the city’s undercroft. The small room, secreted away behind the cascading Jugular, that same river that flows through and below the Orc’s temple like forge and fills its tempering pools,is cozy save the roar of falling water and my bedmate (a kinsman of the Alik’r who hates, it seems from conversation, everything). As I pace the bustling tents of Haggler’s Bluff and watch The Jugular’s cursive flowings beneath the scaffold caged and Iron Capped city walls, surrounded as I am by fungus farmers and wooly centipedes and flocking merchants from distant stock, I think to myself what a lovely place this new hope of the orcs may one day be. Perhaps I’ll simply visit Ufgel’s bathhouse and while away the frigid Wrothgar day.

[roguesfolio]

Returned at last to Daggerfall and the work begun those moons ago in Sentinel. Revenge is a horehound treat. A bug-lamp’s abject glowings cast amber on the sublet’s walls. At the simple desk I attend, through thick greasy glass panes, the Breton streets below. Timeworn and grey cobbles cascade, the twisting streams of road and alley and causeway, pooling in squares and arcades as they tumble down from Daggerfall castle, sweeping along all manner of life as they do. Beyond those streets new light, unconquered by night as in so many dawns since the mythic first, does break over the frosted hills- Oh rimerode and bruise blue heaths of the Glenumbra dawn. How long before even these buttes and glens are ground to the selfsame sand of my home? No mortal reckoning may know but I say to you this, vengeance will persist. Be it in the hearts of man and mer and beast or be it the mighty vengeance of wind on stone or the mightier still tidal vehemence of Oblivion on liminal shores, vengeance will persist, long past you or me. How I wish there was more to my story than that. The dagger in the drawer before me cajoles my gaze downwards and I wax thanks for it’s contents’ silent loyalty, to sing for something shorter than a sword. I think on that man, now nameless by my hand, slumped forward, arms outstretched to clasp his own shadow in brotherly embrace and my journey, inverse to his, that began with a death and ended in a life reborn. The last turn of the pick, the debt is paid.

For J.L.B. C.M. & JS K.

[roguesfolio]

The stars wheel in loose forms. They are suppositions of an order, a lattice of tattered void hung on the bone frames of recognitions, that arc the vaulted roof of our Sep swaddled maybe. Hazarded they are, under a tyranny of ancient imagination, into such rude shapes as a warrior or a shade. Such history of reckoning counts the lives of empires, dynasties... No, eras as the stone must count a mortal life, innumerably brief. They author themselves, those thirteen stations of the sky, wholly independent of man or mer or god. Their mundial names and reckonings are our simple means of understanding under their immensity. Ruptga’s many children, a living map to the Walkabout ways. They seem endless, timeless, doomed to vault the firmament in rigorously exact cycles in each turn of the year and with each skin of the serpent. The stars that now shine on me in Belkarth’s night-grappled streets are in some eternal way the same stars that looked down upon Akos Kasaz, on Samara, Khibi, Kamlesh, and Kanesh and saw them cast asunder by mans own pitiful pride, those same stars that guided those Ysgranauts south and ignited passion in the now-dust Dwemer. Within the firmament’s wine-dark stage is set a play that foretells strict fates for man and mer and beast, laid out in a vast cosmic elder scroll for any to read who have the eyes of it. But what, oh children of the mundus, if such fates of man do fall upon our mortal soils? What if portents walk? Rumors under the bazaar silks of Belkarth’s caravan ways and winding arcades hint that we may know sooner than we care to.

For W.G.

[roguesfolio]

I set across a scant of southern Cyrod soil, the far flung mires now days behind me, and further crosswise Anequina’s homesame sands until I finaly trod the iron red of Reapers March. There I chanced upon a Baandari troupe; higlers, cheapjacks and mongers holding court on pillows in the russet dust. These ones offered forth a long pipe which I gladly took and drew of it to sooth sore foot and femur. We drew Satakal in smoke above our circle but, below the bitter herbpack, I tasted something sweet and my eyes did gyre in open revolt to all known sights, set upon by myriad fevered forms conjured in that long pipe’s spiked smoke, passed stummel to stem, in the company of those shifthaired sugarshits. One of them was cooing and I looked hard into his face. He grinned with a mouth now set about with fangs turned waxing silver moons. Phantasmagoric cartels of gods in their skies came down in filigrees of breathy shifting reality and swirled parallax. Gods clamored their way up from within and my skin crawled. A string of fathers’ fathers whispered their obesses and viscous shadows grew two-fold then three and back again. I made to grab the crescents of one cat’s shoulders but they waned and retreated in lunar phases. They laughed about me as I reeled long past the meridian of the night, ebbing, shifting, and finally going dark. I woke the next day, the skooma still drifting off in faint risings and fallings, my head agreeable only to cloven moons. The Baandari had left, my belongings still intact about me and I sat in wonderment, all bemuddled and bearing a silver seam of spittle that sagged mouth to arenose ground. Were they trickster aspects of Sep or Sheog delighting in my follies? It’s less terrifying with a reasoning. The bridge to Rawl’kha lies ahead, a minor hallucination of its own, catwalk to a state as sound as sugar.

[roguesfolio]

I made to travel south to the mires of Blackmarsh, buying passage with a merchant caravan to Stormhold, in the hopes that some time, some distance, some swamp between me and my left-handed dealings in the northern pact would stifle such reputations that lead the guards to seek my company. We made onerous tracings down in those southern lands, trailing our host’s rotting detritus as we made way. The food went first, bedighted as it became with all cultures of particolored mold, a rainbow menagerie of rot. Wagon wheels warped and rotted in tepid water until they too were lost, swallowed whole in a peat bog and all our machinations failed to winch them from their sphagnum prison. We cut loose the axels and began a portage of the cargo that remained. Our boots began to rot next, the skin of our footpads becoming raw, cracked and infected. one mer lost his foot to the swamp-rot, another was devoured by wamasu when he slipped on an embankment. We passed burnt out Dunmer plantations, weatherworn and vine strangled stelae, but none in our company looked up at them, too concerned we were at finding dry footing. The Droops took our quartermaster, Blood-Rot claimed the guide, by the time we had made our way to the ancient gates of Stormhold we looked a maimed and haunted regimen returned from those untold horrors of war. The city was as rag-tag as our remainder, an intermingling of swamp-taken Ayleid stones, white as bone, built over with severe Dunmer works and interspersed with Argonian mud-huts like bandages over uncleaned wounds. I cursed the swamp as I sat picking polyphore from between my toes, swearing to all my gods I would make this trip worth the pain it caused.

[roguesfolio]

Windhelm, mytholithic footprint of first man’s steps in Tamriel, will you freeze like your fatherland? Will your people make like your corner stones, themselves petrified in tradition and ale-sleep? Ysgramor himself first gazed your foundations, a name even a foreigner commits. He made to build a city on the banks of the White River where it unabashedly empties itself onto the Sea of Ghosts, the ancient body those men first cut across in times of further myth. I hold no small respect for the Nords in this way, in like kind to my ancestors they made a warrior wave to crash against Tamriel’s elven shores. By our Raga’da the Alik’r was ground to sand, Before Ysgramor’s tide the temperate climates must have fled. Such is the course of man, to crash like a wave in life, to break with death, and to leave a high water mark behind. Here is where that first wave broke and then drew up. By merish hands were man’s claims of dominion made lithic, city rising up o’er the barrow-mound, but by the hands of your own was the city first razed, in those darkest days of hemmed and hawed succession. It fell again to those eastern demons under Ada’Soom, but Windhelm never stoops for long. Only the castle remains as it was, intact, though the stones of those first houses and halls go on, refigured, undying. I walk Windhelm’s ancient cobbles, feet silent-made in fresh snow, past the amber glow of hearth and breath fogged windows, the night-before’s persisting din behind Oaken tavern doors, thin breakfast smoke trailing from chimneys, highland boys still rubbing sleep from their eyes while selling mammoth curd door-to-door, and so on into a hoary pink-tinged dawn-a-breaking. My pack in tow is fat of it.

[roguesfolio]

The Illiac bay is like the great azure neck of some forgotten sea-goddess and about it, along the golden thread that is her beaches, are strung those shining gemstones of her key ports of call: emerald Sentinel, sapphire Daggerfall, and diamond Wayrest, showy centerpiece of the Covenant’s crown jewels. Is there one drake that has not passed through her manifold coin-houses? One antique that has not fallen under the discerning eye of her appraisers? One ship that has not called her harbor home? Those in Daggerfall would tell you otherwise, being her chiefest of rivals, but untold great deeds are done under that three flowered banner. The city is huge and winding, of stacked manor houses and narrow alleyways, seemingly endless. To loose one’s self or lose one’s tailing troubles is no hard task amongst those ever jostling causeways. The city is so large, in fact, its map sits noticeably heavier in case from all the weight of my annotating ink. Wayrest was not always such a well-cut stone, it began as a simple fishing hamlet on the Bjoulsae’s deltic limit, a few crude nordic then breton huts clinging by loose foundations where river weds to sea. Now, though, it is the great walled city that survived fifty and seven days of the Black Drake’s siege, that funds the new king’s hunt for the ruby throne, that filters all those travelers, like the great baleen of an Abecean leviathan, through its excise offices and on to Highrock, Hammerfell, and Orsinium. Wealth beyond measure the Dunmer said to me in Morrowind, but looking on Wayrest’s gilded gates I wonder, did they mean it as a blessing or a curse? Commerce breeds cystic wealth in Highrock and I am come to lance the boil.

[roguesfolio]

Velyn Harbor bustles with Abecean trade. Picaroons from Auridon swagger down the docks in half-rot garnishments and flopping hats while salt-skinned freebooters and seamen from distant provinces do treat in dubious unloadings before returning to ply Tamriel’s lucrative shipping lanes. The harbor is home to privateer ships, their crew’s impunity granted by flimsy salt-cracked parchment, those covetous Dominion letters of marque, that absolve their nipping at the heels of blue or crimson.  Even so a land-thief’s not safe here, those lawless pirates and smugglers want their piece of mind at port and guards do patrol Velyn’s streets and docks, turning blind beneath helmets where the coin is heaviest.  I made my stay in a weatherworn inn that went to rack and ruin long ago. The flimsy beds therein all sold to men and mer ashore, stinking of rotmeth and vomit. One ramshackle mattress was half spared to me and I was glad of it, save my unmet Bosmer bedmate already asleep in its stained sheets.  “Better to sleep with a drunken cannibal than a sober Aurielite”, thought I. The next day I mercifully awoke, my person intact and ungnawed. It seemed in some small way the Antlered mer had taken to me in our brief parle. We parted ways when I chartered passage on a north-bound tar-and-timber vessel and he would not step on its deadwood deckings. He posited age old advice as I departed him, "I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views—Yffre, so be it.” I mulled those words, thinking on deeds to come, and I saw Velyn like a shrinking pearl strung on that great green of the jungle till that too shrunk into sea.

For H.M. & R.L.S.

[roguesfolio]

I stand now before the Graht-Oak, stately namesake of its supplicant wood. Those servile trees in court around it, huge as they are, resemble arrows strewn about a tower, that city-as-tree and tree-as-king-of-trees of the Bosmeri homeland. It stands with regal bearing, a mile high from its verdant crown of foliage and hanging vine to truncated torso half-mile wide, wound with the coaxed pathways and pocked hollows, not carved, nor cut, nor built at all, of wood elf architect make. This tree once walked with the labored steps of a giant, making its migration south in summer and north again come Hearth Fire, but the walking city was planted by Anumaril, who walked with a secret femur, he that fangled and failed. The citizens of Elden Root still lash their trunks and tables to smaller branches with thick leather straps (just to be safe) and hedge bets on when the Graht will groan to life again (if ever) while smoking their tree grub and caterpillar from bone pipes in Elden Root’s tree-branch inns and taverns. “The Green Pact” protects this king of trees, the Bosmer never taking from the tree even the smallest strip of bark or leaf to their own ends. The pact protects those supplicant tree-whelps who are never harmed, protects even the low shrubs, the vegetable smoke, the valuable alchemical reagents of the forest floor. Its tandem principal, “The Meat Mandate” has resulted in truly gut-wrenching and creative liquors, ingenious bone tools, and more than a few hungry looks my way. All live, and work, and steal, and love together in its mighty trunk and branches, waiting patiently for the walking wood to stir anew.

[roguesfolio]

A thin road pierces the jungle, a wild thorn pierces the heel, fresh tracts lead to Marbruk, fresh tracts break old wheels. The city grows, fruit-like and virgin, sprouted overnight, taking root miraculously in darkest jungle that extends, tree upon tree in monotonous green, well beyond measured imagination and on into more primeval realms of the mind. I see Marbruk in its name’s shape, its peaks and eaves the pointed Altmer roofs, false thorns o’er the Valenwood bramble. An impossible feat, to build a city, timefast and delicate, so hastily amongst such rough and roiling vegetation. Impossible until one remembers there’s wood elves here can talk a fiction into fact, high elves here can sing a house up from poetry, Kajiit here can sell a tree its own acorns in autumn. Impossible is a foreign thought in Dominion lands. Outside the frontier gates the jungle’s din wrestles more cosmopolitan sounds from the air, to drag them off, no doubt, to some root-nestled den for devouring. Low huntsman’s horns moan glories to Hircine, pierced by the calls of mating multitudes from crust to canopy. In the distance the sound of a horavor colony shedding hive, cutting its deadly march across the jungle floor is accompanied by the rude songs of bough-hid Imga. Antlered beasts and antlered mer stalk about the buttress roots of tallest trees, strangler figs hang from branches above. Of strangest note here is the Bosmer’s “Rite of Theft. Those antlered folk steal from each other and demand a boon commensurate in worth, ransoming, in good sport, each others goods. My hands’ work pariah-make me but here I’m respected. I could live in Marbruk if not for the fear that jungle breeds in me, fear of the hunt, fear of the feast to come.

[roguesfolio]

How they treat with the worldskin in Auridon, dividing it as a child does a pile of sweets, parsing bitter horehound from the sweet remainder. Here, they fall at the altar of twice sublimated stasis, anon Auri-el, disdaining change as if the two were not one; oh hungermost serpent, Satakal! When one stares at that light only, as they do, shadows are obscured in squinted eyes. Can they see their own umbral nature? Can they see me, obscured as I am in these shaded summer alleyways? I will not disdain their gentle aesthesis, by it they have sung a city of splendor, Vukhel Guard. The cultural rivalries between the Altmer of Vulkhel Guard, Skywatch, and Firsthold have authored a wealth of mastercrafts amongst them. This mer boasts the most delicate torchbug-wing-windows, that mer sings the most intricate filigrees from stone, this mer carved Trinimac’s face into an agate pinhead, another claims the most sublime embroidery, stitching three furlongs by one unbroken spider’s thread; all of it a honey of haul for me, fretful large. In Vulkhel proper, the stonesung homes arise, twelve measured rods exactly, round public fountains of crystal water, framed with obsessive horticultural spillage; it is a goblet of beauty filled well beyond its brim. The high mer’s obsesses do not stop at art and architecture, they bring this pathos to all schools. Spies meticulously sift through every word spoken and written in Auridon’s versicolored glens. Nobles pontificate for days in orations of marked perfection. Simple farmers groom their fields for hours, going so far to tend the low hostas of the wilds. With everyone staring at the details its quite easy to make off with the whole.

[roguesfolio]

Mournhold, god-city of Almalexia, Mother Morrowind, Dunmer god of Mercy-as-long-as-its-convenient-to-whim-and-wish, lies in the fertile fungal veldts of Morrowind’s Deeshan Plains. Like the cities of the god of Makes-Us-Women and the god of Nobody-Really-Cares-Untill-It’s-Too-Late, the Mourning Hold is a mirror of its god-ruler’s fancies and nature. It is a glorious city, beautiful and lush, thick verdant carpets of grass extend between stepped terraces and virile mushroom trees loom over clan houses, markets and many clear fountains. Time spent in Mournhold’s stacked patios and verandas banish the megrims of a life spent running. Decadent house-mer travel in layers upon layers of brightly colored robes, kin tassels glinting in the sun. Guar graze languidly about the gates, only bellowing when prodded by their Hlaalu masters. It is starkly different from the ash wastes of the north but no less dangerous. The city reflects its god, beautiful yet deadly. How quickly the moonstruck mother’s fancies turn! Not like mother Morwha’s chiding, inconsistent with morals, which even I have. How quickly, too, will her city destroy you. There is danger under every surface, Morag Tong assassins and depraved nobles, slave masters and unhinged Telvanni mad-mancers go about their debased businesses, some with impunity in the daylight. The only true crime here, heresy. There is an unsettling feeling of being watched. How does one steal under the nose of a walking god and sleep at night? How may an outlander evade the pervasive evil-eye of her brass-faced orphan elite? They cut an intimidating silhouette, arraigned as they are in brass armor with the balls to match. One croaked an ill omen as I passed him yesterday, “We’re watching you, scum.”

[roguesfolio]

Perhaps when we see the world destroyed we may also catch a glimpse of how it was made. Travels in the star-wounded east brings these thoughts to mind. Godspoke pilgrims crawl on scabby knees along ashen roads to the saint-shrines of the changed mer, dragging their blue bodies until palms and soles are bloody in penance. They go in hair-shirts and kresh, prostrating themselves before the living triune, prone in faith and fear. Their sorrows are mirrored in the venomous land, who’s sulfurous effusions and molten discharges spill from the crust-cracked ground as if the land was sick. As the Dunmer weep so too does the land in magmatic lamentations . They worship that demon-king here, the Ansu-Gurleht, the Twice-Vehk, Circle-Talker, who lady-made my ancestors and whose companions in inscrutability, the Tribunal, do not live here but make their presence felt, one need only see the ecstatic processions of faithful, mortifying their flesh, chanting through the streets. There is malice in this land, slavery, rend-head justice, practices in business that make even this ne’er-do-well balk. Malice and ecstasy rule. I set out regardless of my trepidations into Stonefalls, a land of natural glass that runs the bottoms of my boots ragged. The road to Davon’s Watch is grey, volcanic ash falls as snow, more pervasive than the haboobs and dust-devils of my home, caking everything, finding ways into ears and nostrils, choking and suffocating, blackening spit and mucus. The fungal air is hot and smells damp. Ash-danced Parasol mushrooms of titanic proportions tower over gas-beasts and Scarabs. I aim to leave quickly. Davon’s Watch is patrolled by the Pact guard, They’ll chase you like a Vvardenfell cliff racer whose nest is upturned. Safety is not to cross them or their Nirn-walking gods. Safer still is to be free utterly of this land on the edge of eternity’s cremation.

For C.M.

[roguesfolio]

With forged papers proclaiming me as a ship’s surgeon I found passage on a free-merchant’s vessel from Northpoint and left behind Highrock and my reputation therein. We traveled east, hugging the shore when safe, never veering further into the Sea of Ghosts than was necessary. A quiet week at sea was punctuated tragically as our ship was swallowed in a mighty northern storm and she was pulled asunder ‘bov Pilgrim’s Trench. Like unto that Nordic Yngol I felt, indeed. I quit that troubled wreck and the new ghosts she interred, south to walled Riften, where I stand now. 

Riften, you city of timeworn driftwood, half afloat on pylons and gangways that spill and collapse into broad Lake Honrich, your tumbledown piers criss-crossed with laundry lines and cargo netting give the appearance of a city held together by twine alone. Riften, rat-home, you are the coarse heart of Skyrim’s mild autumnal holdings. Riften, ne’er before have I seen a place of such schism between have and have-not; how I’d like to tip your ancient scales. The squalid septic underbelly of Riften is a city in its own right, or maybe a mockery of a city, the Ratway. I stopped in the main concourse first to unload an antique Betnikh nocturlabe, liberated in my travels, when I met a destitute guttersnipe. This youth had a sly brightness in his eyes despite a pitiful situation and, taking to him, I deigned to impart in him some pick techniques and my methods of marking maps with coded symbols. The youth, whose name I never inquired, has taken to affectionately calling my symbols “Shadowmarks” and has made quick work of carving them onto the lintels and cornerstones of houses across Riften. I should probably leave the city before his antics catch on and bring me unwanted attention. I head south-east next, to Morrowind.

[roguesfolio]

Nobles from every corner of Highrock, I’ve found in my travels, enjoy masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality. Here, the mask and the face beneath bleed into each other and no truth remains, unsafe masquerade. I have made my way from Evermore and am met with the terminus of northern Breton influence, where it washes against the inscrutable Sea of Ghosts. Having climbed the King’s Guard and assailed the flint-danced soils of Rivenspire, I find myself on the witch hazel path to Shornhelm’s gates, flanked on either side by bleached trees and jagged basalt spires that reach up to puncture a bleak sky. It is a scabby land, exposed and raw, an ossuary loomed over by that massive failure of Ayleid pride. Inside the gates a maze of monochrome ochre alleyways meander up the hill. Clouds are low, fog likely. I can’t trace the constellations for a telling but my gut is unsettled and it is never wrong, there are worse things in Shornhelm than meets the eye, not guards, no, Something subtler. The smell of death supplanted, maybe. Umbral forms flit at the periphery and dart across Shornhelm’s posterns denied all ingress by the paranoid double boltings of doors. I don’t feel right traveling after dark within the city walls, I work instead by day. Plenty of fat bepursed house-friends of Tamrith out and wandering by the daylight, I think. I’ll make enough to buy myself out of Highrock and not dally in this city, this masquerade, this wrong-feeling costumed ball.

For W.G.

[roguesfolio]

I rode east on the heels of a great dust devil, the trailing dust and sand off my horse and distant pursuit all swept away into a higher and more monstrous form in that storm. On this windwhip demon maelstrom I did ride into Bangkorai, like some mythic jockey of nemesis, and my horses tracks did vanish as I laid them. I rode on, face sandshorn and raw, no rations spared the grit of it. The storm swept me along to the far edges of the river’s charges of grass and shrub, past trees and bramble further in, and eventually to the city wall: gray breton buildings shaggy with green vine, protrusive like the teeth of a supine giant. That brings me to where I stand now, gazing up at the clearing clouds with sand a memory, at the gates of Evermore — free of Sentinel’s pursuance. Evermore, throat of the Bangkorai Pass, murmurs its secrets in a language of black flapping wings and stirred dust motes. Breton merchants fill the markets, whispering money. The Bjoulsae laps wet syllables on the city pier as small skiffs and light schooners cut up and down its glass back, strangers from further ports. Soldiers clatter down the streets in formation, the many legged hulks of regimens, creaking like a Dwemer derelict as they pass, steel fluttering with shocks of covenant blue in sashes and standards. The chapel bell chimes for any matter of small notice. Laborers percuss with mallet, peg, and saw, undoing the wreckage of past decade’s cruel sackings. The town is a cacophony of life and that din envelopes me- I am become silence, untouched. The creak of a back door is lost, the turn of a key, the footfalls on granite cobblestones, the flutter of a startled crow, the jingle of a cut purse- all is washed away in the steady hum of Evermore’s song.