002. L’Undone’s Burning

Black and white. Warp and weft. The flames dance and the whole thing stirs stories in them. Sat in a cave, paintings on the wall. Sat in the National Gallery in front of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Sat here now in the burned out shell of a building.

Britten sits there, a ghost, draped in the flesh of a tulpa, and walking around inside the story she crafted.

‘It keeps happening – echo after echo. You hear it – a God getting so wrapped up in what they are doing and suddenly the word they wrote is the word they are.’

‘It’s a shifting edge – the Wordsword blade, and the cut of Metaphor Tech.’

‘You seem to be doing OK, Jubilee.’

‘I was trained by the best.’

‘How is your dad doing these days?’

‘Same old Carter Brecht.’

‘And your mum?’

‘Handling some kind of Peace Accord between Nesters and Locals in an adjunct reality somewhere. They’re not speaking, as per usual.’

‘I’d heard she got into a lot of trouble on Store-Ri.’

‘Yeah, that alternate Tara Bengal went toe to toe with her.’

‘Why are you here, Jubilee?’

‘I heard you were back, Britten, and I’m assigned to you. There were rumours of a rebuild motion gathering off on the ragged edges of The Knotlands. And there is talk of Cheng Waybill and her Surreality Engineers at large.’

‘Yeah, I heard The Copyists were at work rebuilding a new version of my animal iteration.’

‘How is that going to affect the balance?’

‘You tell me. Isn’t Gaveston Pluck your reader? I heard he was paired with Houston Caravaggio as a writer, and Kendal Carlisle and his Bloop Hen, Larry.’

‘Your information may be better than mine. I arrived here before I was made aware of the assignments. I knew we had a crash, but I didn’t know the place was still on fire. I thought all that was snuffed out with Coran Andress and Ardenti In Mundo.’

‘Whoever drops a story? I mean that mask carried on pretending it was real, and we all know how that’s worked out in terms of the thing it was meant to be living on past its termination.’

‘You mean David Arnover?’

‘Who else? The King Of Full Stop himself.’

‘What of Warp and Weft, Blanc and Noir, anything of them turning up?’

‘Some grotesque couple calling themselves Pitch and Yar have been hanging around like the tramps from Waiting For Godot, but this is a lesser script we’re all running.’

‘I don’t know what to say, Ma’am.’

‘What is there to say, L’undone’s burning, fetch the Reality Engine.’

001. The King Of Full Stop

They called it The Tower Of Period, and it stood like an exclamation mark at the end of time; at the end of all stories. They called him The King Of Full Stop, because he reigned over this period. He had been crowned because he was once a great story teller, and only a great storyteller knows how to bring the curtain down on a long running tale.

‘My name is interesting. Arn is the old name for the elder tree; a tree that unites earth, air, fire and water, according to the Celts. For air they tell of the whistles that were made of it – bird whistles mayhap. Cut it and the sacred fire inside turns it orange, for fire. The tree makes the water around it rich, and it is good for the soil – water, and earth.
‘Over explains itself.
‘Or, here, at the end of all things, perhaps I could offer a different origin for myself, and the name. I am the male principle of the story; the story’s Y chromosome – add that Y to my name, and you get Yarnover. Yes – yarn over – end of the story.
‘Or is it Ya, Nova? Birth of a star.’

‘You seem changed, David.’

‘As do you, Jenny – as do we all. Hard to make the transition to another level of consciousness and state of being without something changing.’

‘But since when did it all become so dark, David? You were a writer once, and now? Did you drink the D-Notice Kool-Aid? Decide that we should all be trammelled and trapped? Are you scooped out? Is there anything of David Arnover left? Do you think Carter Brecht saved you for you to do this?’

‘What business is it of his? You don’t give someone their freedom and then dictate what they do with it. Reality Engineer in the sense of someone sent in to fix things, not someone designing the way it runs. Their remit shifts depending on the context.’

‘And you owe him nothing?’

‘He freed me to live. I’m living.’

‘But how?’

‘Jenny, who sent you here? What’s the point? What do you hope to achieve? I spent three hundred years in The Burn Out’s Bar trying to change my state from zero to one, or something a little more superpositional. I got to the Phoenix Bar in Else City after an overdose; I spent some time in The Pinnacle being re-educated. I came back, but there was nothing for me.
‘I didn’t even know I was infected with a Tulpa by some Tulpamancer. I didn’t know I was involved in super-positional influence writing. I didn’t know I created Skein, and The Musehick, and Ardenti In Mundo, that I set the world burning. I walked the Metafloor with Cheroot, and I stared into the mirror and we cut out the cancer some call cuckoo, and this is what was left.
‘I am a sad story with a bad ending, Jenny. Perhaps I’m, the warp to your weft. I heard tell that we are all masks for the gods of The Knotlands anyway; that Britten dreamed us up with her friend Tollemeyer.’

‘Look, I’ve been the spirit of reportage for the longest time; I haven’t gone diving through the depths of semiotics digging for much more of a truth than what I can see with my own eyes, and it’s kept me ticking along.
‘I used to run this magazine called Intoviews, and I spoke to a lot of people, and the one thing I learned is that most people don’t see themselves as they are, but through the filter of another person they can catch a glimpse of the truth, and move closer towards it. Talk to me; we’ll find where you are.’

‘I know where I am now. I dropped Phelim into a Feedback Loop; I dreamt Madrigal into the vortex of her own dream-catcher; I’ve been mainlining Plateau Drone, eating Beige, and banging that drug Ruebeau used into my eye-balls.’

‘Wow. And you know where you are? I don’t think I’d know what day of the week it was. I think you’re confused David; I think somewhere along the line you snagged yourself on a Butcher Bird Narrative and you suffered a Metaphorical Personality Collapse.’

‘Oh, you’re a psychologist now, as well as a journalist?’

‘I read; I see what I see. You’re a warzone, David; I’m reporting.’

‘I’m the King Of Full Stop, and you’ve outstayed your welcome.’

She smiled – a sad defeated smile. Someone she loved was surrendering to something worse than death, but she had carry along  with her journey – this wasn’t where her path terminated. She had to rendezvous with The Walking House later that night. At least she knew now what had happened to Phelim; at least she knew what had happened to Madrigal. At least.

000. The Buildings Forgotten In Fire

Belarus Floot sat there, a small coney cooking on a spit, barely any meat on the poor thing, and this was what passed for a good day here, now. It was no nightmare, no bad dream to be woken from; it was purely what was … that left after fire.

Across from him sat Charlie Gank, smoking what he claimed was a cheroot, nursing his ever-leaky eyes. Berenice, or Benny Fred was reading the rescued scrap of a piece of paper, said to contain the last words of one of the chiefs they pulled from the bunker.

‘Is that good,’ asked Peril Dewberry ‘Tell me if it’s a funny joke.’

‘Didn’t know metalmen had a sense of humour,’ offered the Dragon Melmice.

‘Give her a break, Melmice,’ said Tenken, The Metaphorman.

This small grassy knoll, high enough above the ruins of a city that remembered. So many cities that remembered. And as many men that remembered the same.

And what did they remember? That The Cuckoos stepped down through the clouds, and were driven back? That The Time Wars found themselves gravitating here and almost obliterating the planet – anchored at Greenwich and sending waves out through the Chronon Sea? That the Reality Wars birthed 666 anomalies that scattered out through the distributed network consciousness of five fictional characters become tulpas, that popularity had granted with powers beyond those described in the books? That all the machinations of the secret organisations stretching back through time had led to a point where extinction was more definitely on the cards than at any other point in time.

‘I heard,’ said the green-eyed Living Element, ‘That Quint Essential is helping to hunt down Ardenti In Mundo with the help of Carter Brecht, and that Spay was around again; reiterated, reconstituted, or however you would like to phrase it.’

‘Funny, that even here, with nothing left, with it all terminating, to expect peace is asking too much.’

‘Says the man with Weapon Eyes.’

‘Ah, shut up, Needler. Can I have some rabbit, Belarus?’

‘Sure, why not. Look, over there – there’s Martello, drawing another damned map. Go and stop him before he pulls someone in through A Slice.’

The streets were buried, shadows burned down to nothing, people gathered about trying to muddle on. It didn’t feel like there was a next waiting around the corner – this felt like the place you came to watch the world drain out the bottom. Stories must have an end, or the appearance of such, and this place was the knocked down kingdom of an ending; the toppled remains of a dream; a period at the end.

All these buildings fallen into their own footprint; set alight and burned down; a candle reduced to a wax seal. And who was going to say this wasn’t little more than epilogue? Little more than fade to black.