I knelt by the roots of a bone white tree and searched the soil. Among the bare stones and tumbled debris I found a sprig with a ripening bud. I put it in my pouch and went looking for Kendra, who I found sitting alone against the well near the east end of the concourse. Her back was to its smooth wall, and crawling on her hand was a weta to which she quietly sang. She paid no attention to me as I came down the empty pathway and passed the door to the occulary, or even when I sat down beside her. But when I held the sprig in her view, her eyes lit up and she sang more loudly. Nothing gold can stay, were her words while taking the sprig and handing it to the weta. The ponderous insect instantly clutched it and began to chew. Kendra giggled, then laid her head on my shoulder and resumed her song. A new mold springs from clay...

  I left her there after sitting for a few moments, making my way slowly to the caldera doors where I encountered a Cataphract in worn armor. I asked him his name, as while I'd never seen his face, he was familiar somehow. He ignored me, so I contented myself with checking off the tasks I'd performed since waking, relieved at how few remained. It had been a trying day, filled with mundanities that left me feeling hollow. I'd had no time to visit the excrutiants, or to spend in contemplation at the Protora Memorium, where I often went to reflect on the narrow chance by which we few had survived the Fall. I generally preferred visiting the memorium, but I knew it was best not to put my own absolution above those whose sadness was surpassing, so I decided to make my way to the westing house once I'd delivered the patrol report from the tarrasquin sellswords to the Dolomites.

  It was Griseo Adept who took the report. He left the door open a crack, but as I had no responsibilities in this particular examination feast, I shut the door and turned around. There was a sound coming from the room that gave me pause; a choking growl that was uncomfortably close to speech, yet decidedly animal. I stood there for a moment and reconsidered my choice not to enter, but I would then have had to knock to be let in, and as I'd already refused Griseo Adept's invitation I decided it best to move on. The Dolomites were a difficult bunch to read in terms of temper, and I'd learned that they valued consistency in the behavior of their servitors. I saw the cataphract again, standing in the hall outside the ramp leading down to the Dolomites' labratorium. Xanthous Adept passed him by unconcerned, his six fingered hands fumbling contemplatively.

  My stroll that evening to the westing house was an experience I would often look back on. Not so much for the significance of any event, but for the general mood and dream recollections that were brought on. Kendra had left the well, and was now skipping along a piece of broken wall, the leg bone of some animal in her hand and a string of nettles stuck in her hair. I thought that she must have meant to wear the nettles as a necklace, but they got trapped in her hair and tugged it too much for her to keep pulling them down, so she left them there instead. I laughed, even though I did not know for sure she had done this thing, but I could see her doing it, and everything she did made me happy. Some elderly woman rushed along three children far too young to be hers, but hers they were, and a thin white hound sniffed at a piece of rot. The dim light of the tall torches erected by the Dolomites glowed ever on in the ever night, and I walked with instinct while my eyes clung to the bloodstain above the leaden sky. In this manner I ambled into that old dream, my feet finding their own way to where the departing wept.

  The dream began with a shoreline of cream colored sand. There was a mother standing with her back to me in the shallows. It seemed that no matter how far I walked in her direction, she was always that much further into the sea, so I stood still for both our sakes. Then there was a distant horn call and a disturbing of many birds, the largest of them smoke grey and tattered. Their pinions blazed with bright light as they plummeted down, each one finding a different place to roost, and from their eggs hatched deep boroughs in the ground. I heard a beckoning call from beneath a haven by the sea, and Kendra's mother and father turned back to smile as they entered the vaults of the adepts, followed by a wisp of river fog so dense it closed behind them like a door. I thought sadly that I'd been placed upstream while those I knew continued down the current. I looked to my little friend, expecting to see her trying to pry through the fog, but she was playing among the headstones of some great necropolis. I left the river and went to her, then took her by the hand and led her to a cold place where we could sleep. There was a foreign voice in the dream, calling for me to search her out, but a hand in mine gripped tight and I looked into eyes as pale as spider eggs.

  The excrutiants were a motley of withered humanity, rotting tyflochs, lucien martyrs with eye sockets still weeping blood, antagarthan stoics and giantesses who sat together at moon-dawn with their scarred faces turned south. The tyfloch I comforted then was tragically young for his rotted state. They all rot, the tyflochs, and some say they rot because of sin, while others say they rot because they are far from home. Looking into this boy's eyes, this boy who was of my age but infinitely closer to death, I saw such a deep well of sadness. He did not know why his richly plumed wings had dried away and left him with hideous clawed bones stabbing out of a wrinkly back. He did not know why his piercing eyes that once navigated the fathoms of the sky had turned to crusts of salt. He did not know why his once strong lungs now coughed up powder. He was born alone in a desert of corpses, and before he met a girl of his kind he might love, he was watching his body turn to dust, and he did not even know his own name.

  I lingered until I began to worry I might be late getting to sleep. I spent most of that visit with the giantesses, sitting on the high window sills they leaned against and cleaning behind their ears with a scouring stone. One I knew apart from the others lifted me to a hole in the roof, knowing how much I loved to stand there and raise my lantern. There I could think and feel, and hear the wind whisper while I gazed at the fossilized warscape surrounding our sanctuary. The giantesses never told us their names, but once I sat on a buttress in the cold of day and heard another call her Anassa. Anassa kept her fingers on the roof as I climbed to the steeple and raised my lantern, so that when I'd filled myself with loneliness and ruin I might return without risking a fall, as the roof was old and likely to cave in places. I tapped on her fingernails when I was done, and she carried me down and set me at the door.

  I saw the Cataphract again while I walked to the porter house. He was sitting with legs bent, arms crossed over his knees, mean bright eyes reflecting a waning fire that sent a thin white ghost into the night. He wore only his trousers and arming shirt, while his armor and fur-lined cape were set in an open chest inside his pavilion. His greatsword was on the ground within reach and his destrier waited quietly by a tinkling stream. I wondered who he could be, and though his face was fearsome, I braved his mean bright eyes and approached.

  "Victor I am, and thirty-ninth servitor."

  I expected the man to ignore me, or sneer and shoe me away. He seemed for a moment torn between those very two responses, but his face seemed to soften from curiosity. He was a dark skinned man with very short and curly hair (quite different from the olive skinned and fine-haired Ossarians), and he looked strong enough to wrestle a Dolomite to the ground. His mouth opened as if to speak, but he looked past me and was quiet. I followed his gaze and saw Rouge Adept standing on a hill with his inquisitor's fork and chanting rod stabbing at the air. This was their habit when they finished testing their survival treatments on a living host and found the results unsatisfactory. I'd only ever seen failures; their skin turned to a pulpy, colorless mass of bare nerves. It typically fell on me put the subjects down out of mercy, as the Dolomites usually just wandered off when they'd finished their ritual proddings. To see one miming this act in plain view was deeply problematic.

  Curiosity won over fear, and I found myself scrambling up the hill after him. We stood there together for some time, bathed in the dingy splendor of the tall torches that gave us warmth as well as light, and chased away poisons and stinging insects with their exalted beams. I looked up at Rouge Adept, wondering what reason there could be for his bizarre behaviour. I raised a hand to place on his arm, but withdrew it, not wanting to startle him. His hands shook and he lowered himself into a bent position, then convulsed as if seized. Some of the townsfolk had gathered and were watching from a fearful distance.

  "Adeptus?" I said. I remember still how terrified I was, and the way the Dolomite turned to my voice, knowingly, but unsure if he'd heard it in ear or in thought. Suddenly he cocked his head and snapped his beak, then looked around confused, scanning the scene with his small, glowing red eyes. He squawked again, patted me on the head, then gestured with his chanting rod for the townsfolk to disperse before turning back for the caldera doors.

  The cataphract spoke to me then, briefly, and I was comforted by his presence.

  "Thirty-nine, you say?" His voice was deep and devoid of pomp.

  I nodded excitedly. "Victor, I am. A Boy of the Batch, brought from Labor Pool Nine on the eve of endsommar, nigh to white's landing. Let autumn reign eternal in the sunless womb of stars."

  I laugh when I think back to how I spoke then. To me, a boy branded as a wraith and raised by creatures both less than and beyond human, all things were myth and prose, as I'd had almost no one to converse with other than myself. Even with Kendra I was silent, save a few words here and there, and the same it was with my masters. I wasn't aware of it then, but Turk represented the world outside the stillwater security of Ossary and the sanctum, and I felt a distant bell toll awakening a desire to see the unseen.

  That's when I saw my first Turk smile; wry and not so far from a scowl. I was nothing like this man, but I felt a kinship with him. It may have been for no more reason than his eyes, which were similar to mine. Eager to make an impression, I lifted my robe over my head and undid my shirt collar, showing him the brand on my chest.

  He stood quickly and patted me on the head before refastening my collar. "Such a brand goes deeper than the flesh, and links you to our nebulous past. There is no need to display it. Nor any other mark. What we do is the true brand; what a soul is capable of, and the extent to which it is willing."

  Feeling emboldened by his fatherly manner, I spoke freely the thoughts that leaped up my throat, sometimes two at a time. "Did the Dolomites give you your eyes? Can you hold your breath longer than others? Did you give your heart in exchange for your armor? Have you fought any Devils? Is it true there is an evil sun beneath the world that seeks to supplant the old one that is shrouded? Has the sky always been dark? Why do tyflochs rot?".

  I paraphrase to you here, but there was much flowering of my speech back then, and I bowed and flourished often, as did the knights and courtesans I read about in crystal codices from the sanctum archives. I questioned him on the vagaries of our established doctrines, and eagerly regaled of how I'd not chosen a covenant, and at the age of nine was branded, again showing him my mark (though I quickly covered it, remembering how he'd told me not to be in a rush to display it), and I told him how the Dolomites had been kind to me and how soundly I slept and dreamt often of wondrous things and longed to one day rise above the sky and see the Sun and Moon and Stars, and he raised his finger to his bearded lips, quieting the outrageous adolescent who'd besieged him.

  "Were you ever given a tincture to drink?" he asked, when I had finally calmed down. "By the Dolomites or the sifters? It could have been either."

  I scrunched my brow then. There was an ampule in one of the sifters hands, and I thought she may have placed a droplet from it on my tongue either before or after my branding.

  "A drink like silver turned to water," Turk elaborated, "marked by a number on its vessel."

  "Eighty!" I exclaimed, surprised that I remembered such an obscure detail from a day I mostly recalled in fragments.

  "I am Turk," he said, then showed me his mark. His brand was on the underside of each forearm, as I saw when he untied the sleeves of his arming shirt and rolled them up. The brand was the upturned triangle of terrakin, slashed through just above the bottom point, known to those who studied lore as Gaia's Kiss. I envied the simplicity of Turk's brand as much as I envied his august candor. My own wraithkin mark was such a mess of squares and circles, with a triangle thrown in for obscurity's sake. I always supposed it referred to the confusion of my beliefs, a badge of indecision perhaps.

  Before insisting that I go to my quarters and get plenty of sleep, Turk asked me to help him in his errand, which he claimed was to make sure the Dolomites were comfortable in their old age. He told me that such mighty creatures as my masters would show only small signs of weakness, and he asked me to pay close attention to their every move. I agreed, and asked him as an afterthought where he came from and whom he served. He told me he served all of Tarthas, then closed the flap to his pavillion.

  The next day began the same as the last, but come noontide, when the sky is closest to bright, I saw three of the Dolomites dancing in circles near the gate to Ossary, while others squatted on rocks or rolled in the dirt. They were naked, so I couldn't tell which one was which. One of the squatters rose to his full length (ten feet or more), stretching out his digitigrade legs and fully extending his neck. His lips wriggled, exposing the needle like teeth that lined his beak, and from his back sprouted corroded metal wings. I searched in a panic for Turk, but he was gone. Frightened, I stood statue still on a hill and focused on my breathing and the slowing of my heart, and as I did so, the madness beneath me eventually dispersed.