In prison terrible things happened to her and she didn’t care. For a long time, she didn’t care. For a long time, she thought the demons died with her Other, short months later.

At least she hadn’t lived to see her daughter huddled in a tunnel under a bridge, poring madly over a journal that could not possibly, it was not possible, carry meaning. Could mean nothing to no one.

A shed and a fire but no one really in there or that the body they did find had been someone else.

She knew only the marker of territory who, like a fox, didn’t want to be seen, but only to be.>>

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Things that can be said. Things that can’t be said. You know them both. Still the smokestacks belch smoke. Still you tunnel under the bridge, you will never be quit of the place. You will never be quit. You will live always, even when you don’t. You will never have the right to decide or to understand. You will only have the right to help or not help. Through all the versions. Yourself. Not yourself.

Darkness encroaches from across the river and the salamander is truly gone and the river is calm once more.

Darkness behind and above the tunnel, on the bridge, there stands the shadow of a fox. At the end of the tunnel, a vision you know must be false, but is still better than darkness: A shining City surrounded by gardens and streams. Surrounded by a swirl of snow that forms a portal, a window, almost a globe of light. Nothing else to do but to come closer, the dark bird in pursuit. The City ahead, the City you recognize.

It’s snowing all around as you walk into that vision. It’s snowing and you feel the soft, shadowy breath, the baleful stare of eye. But you are not afraid. You are not afraid. That, at least, the salamander has given you. Or you have taken it.

You step into the tunnel, into the snow. A sense of a weight lifting from you and you’re through the tunnel, through the window, and come out gasping into a desert City, the snow still falling, like a miracle, except now you see it’s ash and the Company building is aflame and around you lies the shattered bulk of a vast leviathan.

There’s a ravine of blackened trees that shouldn’t be there, a ruined City that shouldn’t be there. You stumble down to the polluted river past the Balcony Cliffs. You stumble down, falling, struggling in the mud. Pick yourself back up.