Emral Lanear, High Priestess of Dark, sat lost in a world of smoke. A vision blurred saw few cracks, and the future, laid out so smooth and perfect, proved no different from the present. This was the lure of d’bayang. There had been a time when ritual had surrounded its indulgence, and the dreamscape the smoke offered whispered messages both profound and quickly forgotten. The intent, she supposed, had to do with stepping aside, out of the flesh, outside the strictures of reality. Couched in ritual or not, it was an escape. The distinction, between then and now, belonged to intention.

Escape as ritual promises a return to the present, when the ritual is done. Escape as ritual is meant to seed the ground between the dreamscape and the real world. But here and now, I seek no return to any present, and I will make of the ground between a wasteland of despair. Mine is not an escape seeking discovery, but one born of flight.

She had once valued her own sobriety, the keen mind delighting in its wakefulness, its precious acuity. She had been unable to imagine wilfully surrendering such gifts, and had seen enough fools in her life to know, with dismay, the minds of company grown dull on alcohol or smoke. Fleeing without moving. Drowning in one’s chair. The bleary gaze, the comfort with confusion, the slow disintegration of time, and the slow losing of one’s place in its eternal stream.

But look at me now. With a future crowded with crimes, I make an island and clothe it in fog. Let time stream past; I yield no harbour.

It is delusion. Rise Herat saw well the desire in my eyes, which should have shamed me. But I am past shame, and that too proves an alluring escape.

Alas, a kind of crystal clarity remained in her mind, something immune to all her efforts at flight and evasion. Its light was guilt, painting her entire inner world. Not the d’bayang. That is too paltry a reason.

I am High Priestess to Mother Dark. And yet, in place of obeisance, vespers and rituals, I weave a web of spies, each one conducting subterfuge with her legs spread wide. Her mind was trapped in a cage of her own making, wherein every thought was cast into a construct of potential alliances, possible weaknesses, spilled secrets, and the option of coercion into a host of deceptions and machinations. By these efforts – this wretched course she had taken – she was seeing her world remade. She now weighed in terms of cold economy the value of each and every citizen of the realm. Collusion against opposition, strength against weakness, deceit against trust.