This was the mood the second time my late guest arrived. They were still dressed as a witch but this time wore a cloak of ambiguous cut that masked it from a casual observer; the slashing diagonal weave might be a witch’s style, or it could be the even horizontal line a breath-person would wear turned askew in the weather. Something in the ambiguity called to me, an enticing possibility, though I was still unwaveringly comfortable folding my clothes into the straight hems and smooth lines of second-childhood. I nodded as they entered but waited several moments for them to settle before approaching their table.

"Grandpa, you don't have to." Dovan's little hand rests inside his. Cyfris closes his fingers around it. "I know I said before that I wanted you to tell everything, but I changed my mind. You don't need to tell this part."

The Poet Laureate was fetched from his retirement in a lighthouse on the far shore of the Founder Mer to compose a song of eighty-six interlocked stanzas like steps on a stairway spiraling down into a cool dim quiet. But on the forty-seventh stanza of its recitation, the Governor squinted into the space over the Poet's shoulder and said, "listen, any deeper and we shall hear the words those beasts sing as they pass" and demanded that the previous stanzas be read in reverse; "back to the surface," he said.

27. Parsifal confessed to me that she has never dreamed of Valis. Not once. In her youth, she learned of the city in a book: a philosophical dialogue where a poet, a knight, a musician, and a madman argue about the nature of reality while awaiting the arrival of a fifth person. Near the end, the madman recounts the story of Valis, which the others think is nonsense. Parsifal disagreed, and the city quickly became an obsession (she herself used the word 'obsession'). She said all this while pacing back and forth, refusing to look me in the face until the end.

Whatever the mallepulpus’s moral stature, it would not allow its enemies an uneventful exit. Even as Jacob, dripping and shivering, urged the Abbess and the canonesses to back away from the shore, a portion of the swamp coalesced into a roaring and amorphous mass of silt and muck. With a noise like a thousand oxen breaking wind, the monstrous pudding detached itself from Paludis Cochlea, flopped onto the shore, and undulated forward, seeking to suffocate its parent bog’s tormentors.

Merton did not answer because Soliver's jibe had struck truer than he could know. The Moult attacked more than the body. Flightlessness was followed inevitably by madness and then total emptiness of the mind, if the disease was allowed to run its course. Most Kin afflicted as he was killed themselves long before that point though or were killed by others in pointless battles the madness caused the afflicted to seek out.