As the last of your particular pages accumulated into you, you were free to separate yourself from the motherly wreckage that gave birth to you, but you didn’t do it just then. You perched and sat there on the floor beneath the ruptured hood of leather, and spoke words that meant themselves for the brotherly thief that had made those cuts and taken those pages.

You waited, and whatever you called to didn’t respond, didn’t come. Outside the moon shone down white on a whole world, white over black, and in the streets there was a dance of burning heads. It was in the midst of this chaos that you dragged yourself finally from the shelves, tearing loose, and you had to crouch and scuttle on your bad legs, bent double and brailling along with your fingers on the ground. Eyes of ink you turned this way and that weirdly to see your way through the door, and you lifted them to catch the moon’s reflection in them and in the black rheum that dangled from them. You are drawn, the moon told you, to the letters Low, Loom, Column, the black sky explained to you in a whisper, who will leave Dusktemper tomorrow. Don’t be surprised—you knew all the names that were ever said from the start, and even said them all already. That time, you were born after there were names, you saw. See. Lapsed again there. Go on, you went on, drawn to him. So you, the narrative, gradually draw nearer. Coming for us.

Second Chapter

We are mustering to go, what’s left of the unit scrabbles to and fro gathering its materials and raising the swarming dust.

“Oh shut up, shut up. Quit talking like that—you’re always talking like that.” With whinging irritation in his voice, Nectar shoves me in the shoulder, and waspishly takes his leave.