Will McDermott
I remember clearly the day of my trip into the countryside to visit my childhood chum, Shawn. A crisp December breeze stung my eyes as I drove my newly completed steam carriage through freshly fallen snow that cleansed the world overnight and left a crystallized sheen on the hedgerows.
It felt good to leave the dank, grimy air of London behind and enjoy the cold winter sun on my face as I weaved my steam-powered carriage through quaint villages wrapped in the cozy embrace of winter’s blanket.
My best mate and colleague, Harold Pierce, a fellow in the school of engineering, had designed the steam engine and helped me build the carriage over the previous year. The final piece, a machined boiler coupling, had just arrived during break, and I had not yet had a chance to put the Iron Camel—as Pierce had named it in honor of the “hump” of the mid-carriage boiler—on the road.
Thus, when the dean of archeology asked me to check on Professor Shawn Ludlow, whom I had known since childhood, I jumped at the chance. I wanted to see how fast the Iron Camel could go with a full head of steam, and had not visited Shawn’s family manor since we traipsed the grounds as lads between terms.
It was somewhere beyond Stevenage when I had my first inkling that something was amiss. The crisp winter breeze that had stung my eyes and filled my lungs with fresh, clean air began to turn acrid.
It reminded me of the smoke-tinged skies surrounding the mills of Manchester. But the midlands had no industry, so from where could this putrid smell emanate? That puzzle quickly solved itself but presented even more questions when I noticed rivers of smoke flowing through the air as I drove through the rolling countryside. The black haze radiated from a central point like the waning rays of the sun at dusk—if its beautiful reds and oranges were instead an inky black and purple miasma.
As I continued north, driving toward the nexus of the dank clouds, I wrapped my scarf about my face, not to keep the cold at bay but to save my lungs from the tar-like substance that hung thick in the air.
At that point, I noticed something even stranger. The very landscape had changed. The land beneath the streams of black mist had turned gray. The entire snow-covered landscape had lost its hue.
No more did the green hedgerows twinkle from a shimmering snow cover. The hedges and snow remained, but both appeared an ashen gray. They were not covered in soot, though. It was as if the color had drained away, leaving only a dirty, drab silhouette behind.
And yet, in the distance, where the sun still shone between the rivers of smog, the colors of the world remained vibrant, their bright, shining hues taunting the gray lands to either side.
As the road twisted and turned through the low hills toward Shawn’s family manor, my steam carriage alternately passed from color to gray and back again. I was amazed to find the air fresh, clear, and full of life in the vibrant sections, but dead and ashen in the gray sections.
My mood, too, changed back and forth, moving from lightness and joy to darkness and despair as my car breached the intersections between the two, separate worlds.
I soon realized these miasmic rivers of death emanated from the Ludlow Manor. And, as I drew into the lane leading to my friend’s family home, the deathly twilight became almost ever present with mere slivers of life and light between the thick, dark rays.
Then I saw the manor, which despite the peculiarities I had already witnessed, stole my breath in an instant. Large chunks of the manor had been removed, leaving huge gaps in the walls. Stray bits of stone and masonry teetered along the edges of the gaps, threatening to fall at any moment. And yet, no debris lay on the ground around the foundations. The wall sections had simply vanished.
From every gap in the manor, thick, black fumes belched forth, staining the edges of the walls the color of burnt charcoal. I had found the origin of the Rivers of Gray in the sky!
I brought my steam carriage chugging to a stop and ran to the door, not daring to enter through one of the charcoal holes. I burst through into the foyer and shouted for Shawn.
At first, I heard no response. The air was still, fetid, and oppressive inside. I found it hard to breathe and rewrapped my scarf around my mouth and nose after yelling my friend’s name.
Then I heard a scrabbling sound, barely more audible than a rat in a wall. The sound emanated from the parlor, which I could see from the vestibule was ashen gray throughout despite the giant hole in the wall that should have permitted sunlight to penetrate the gloom.
“Shawn?” I yelled again as I moved toward the edge of the gray parlor.
The scrabbling sound responded again. This time I could tell it was the rasping of a voice too hoarse to rise above a whisper.
“Is… that… you, David?” the weak voice called out. Having been to many a rugby match with Shawn over the years, I could discern his voice even when it sounded hoarse from screaming non-stop for eighty minutes.
And yet, I tarried at the edge of the gray line just inside the parlor, both unwilling to bear the blackness of despair I knew awaited me inside, but also worried that perhaps long exposure to the dank air was what had robbed Shawn of his voice.
From my vantage point outside the gray parlor, I bore witness to several sights that eventually forced me to overcome the overbearing dread and fear I felt.
An enormous, Egyptian sarcophagus, the top of which had been pried off and lay half-overturned against an overstuffed sofa, dominated the center of the parlor. Scads of darkened and shredded linen wraps seemed to have erupted from the ornate-inlaid casket and lay draped across nearly every surface in the room.
Five ashen-faced bodies lay strewn around the sarcophagus as well, half-wrapped in the cloth straps, their gray blood staining the dark cloth. I recognized the faces of several of the corpses, including that of my mate, Harold Pierce, the engineer.
The general gray tone of their dead faces, as well as their hands and even clothes was not the strangest sight of these dead bodies (of which I had seen enough during my time in the military). It was the expressions on their faces that gave me pause. I had seen fear in death before. I had even seen dread and surprise, as well as calm acceptance of death’s embrace.
But here I saw abject horror captured on each face, as their wide-open eyes competed with their gaping mouths to see which could yawn the farthest open.
More than that, however, each face looked like a monstrous caricature of the person I had once known, with every feature exaggerated to ridiculous proportions, as if they had frozen at the moment of death in the most gruesome expression imaginable.
I was no stranger to the many faces of death, but these expressions made me wish to flee the manor and never return. I might have done so if Shawn’s moaning had not stayed my feet.
I tore my gaze from the bodies, lingering for a mournful moment on Harold’s twisted visage—which nearly ripped my heart in twain—to seek my childhood friend, whose rasping moans continued to beckon me forward.
I found him draped across a wooden chair that seemed to have been carved from iron, so steely gray was its color. The chair sat before a gray desk upon which stood an elaborate, metal mechanism that looked part clock, part automaton, and part puzzle box. I had never seen its like and pray I never will again.
The clockwork mechanism stood at least four-foot high and almost as wide and deep. The center-front of the mechanism contained a face not unlike that of a clock with thirteen hands rotating in a complex pattern around no less than five points.
Two sets of mechanical arms extended from the sides of the mechanism, one each near the top and another set extending from the base. As the clock hands revolved around one another on the face, the arms on the side performed an intricate dance with one another, as if trying to find purchase on some unseen object or objects in the air.
Inside the device, innumerable gears, pulleys, ratchets, suspensions, bezels, pendulums, and springs all noisily clicked away in a convoluted and complex rhythm of oscillating and pulsating movements.
I knew not from where this clockwork monstrosity hailed or what connection it could possibly have to an Egyptian sarcophagus. I shall probably never learn the entire truth about the awful machine, but I will swear until my deathbed that the machine’s movements did not obey the natural laws of physics.
“Stop the clock!” Shawn rasped, his ashen gray arm reaching toward the mechanism from where he lay atop the chair. “End the chaos!”
With that, my friend slumped, his torso folding over the chair’s thick wooden arm before slipping off and dropping to the floor. I could hear his rasping breath, so knew my friend still lived, but I could tell he had spent much of his remaining energy to prompt my action.
With that, I made the decision to enter the room. But I was unprepared for the current of despair that flowed through me as I pushed my way into the River of Gray. Every step required more exertion than the last as the current lashed at me and tried to force me downstream, away from the chaos emanating from the clockwork.
As I moved, the gray whipped at me so strongly it felt like my skin was being shredded by a riptide of knives. I pressed forward despite this death of a thousand cuts, only to reach a second stage of agony when the River of Gray attacked my mind with the fiery flames of doubt and remorse.
If only I hadn’t dawdled at the college to await the final piece of the Iron Camel. Why hadn’t I been here with my friend all along to protect him from his unbridled desire for knowledge? How could I continue now knowing how utterly I had failed him…failed everyone? All these deaths lay on my conscience.
With renewed resolve, I vowed to push through the mental torture. I could not alter the past. I had to focus on the present. And yet every step brought waves of despair that ate away at my will. I gritted my teeth to squelch a bleating wail, tensed my leg muscles, and pressed forward as I had done a thousand times before in the middle of a rugby scrum.
The final steps through the gray were the worst, however. Nothing up to that point had prepared me for what lay in wait, hanging in the air like the specter of death above a corpse.
As I got within a step of the mechanism, the River of Gray became a thick mist as black as charcoal. Within that inky blackness, a swirling vortex of dark purple appeared between me and the mechanism. The return of color to my gray and dreary world startled me and I almost faltered.
Faced with falling into the swirling black and purple nexus gaping before me, I might have quailed had Shawn not stirred anew. I could no longer see him. My world had been reduced to the fog, the vortex, and the silhouette of the chaos clock beyond. But from my feet, the voice of my childhood friend reached me. It was faint and almost dreamlike, as if it had ridden the winds from leagues away.
“You can do it,” Shawn called, his voice little more than a whisper. “I… I believe in you!”
Perhaps I only imagined it. Perhaps at that moment, standing at the edge of an otherworldly nexus, I truly was leagues away. Whatever the case, my friend’s belief steeled my resolve, and I pushed my way past the nexus to reach the giant mechanism on the desk.
Not knowing how to halt the intricate clockwork machinations that whirred and whizzed inside the giant machine—or even whether my fingers would survive being jammed into the midst of the spinning ratchets and gears—I settled on the final option left to all men who fail to understand the ways of this modern world. I grabbed the entire metal apparatus by a corner and dashed it to the floor.
The moment the clockwork mechanism impacted the hardwood will be indelibly etched into the very fabric of my memory forever. I would never divulge this to anyone with the power to consign me to a sanatorium, but I would swear on a stack of Anglican Bibles that the giant mechanical apparatus screamed in pain as it crashed and sprayed metal parts across the parlor.
I have heard the anguished squeal made by a wild boar as its skull was crushed beneath the butt of a rifle. I have heard the screams of villagers on the subcontinent burned alive and the angry screams of soldiers faced with a firing squad for their war crimes. Nothing will haunt my days more than the death wail of that apparatus as it echoed throughout the manor.
In the aftermath of that rumbling howl came a deathly silence that had been absent while the machine ticked and clicked and whirred. The pressure upon my brain also began to ease as the ever-present current from the River of Gray abated. The monochrome maelstrom that had beckoned me into its embrace swirled away to nothingness, leaving only the parlor, still tinged in gray, before my eyes.
I’m not sure what I expected upon destroying the massive clockwork apparatus, but I was surprised color did not immediately return to the world. In fact, if I am truthful with myself, the gray darkened somewhat in the aftermath, as if the sediment of the Sky River began to settle around me.
In that moment, I almost despaired of ever seeing the bright colors of day. I worried the gray would rule my life henceforth. I could hardly bring to mind any other hues. The greens and reds of the berried hedgerows I had driven past that morning no longer lived in my brain. Neither did the blues, whites, and yellows of the sky. I knew intellectually these colors still existed, yet for the life of me I could not summon them to my mind.
Shawn’s moans once again pulled me from my dark reveries and snapped me back to the serious concerns of the present. I grabbed my childhood friend by the shoulders and dragged him toward the entryway, which I was gladdened to see remained in full color, even if that color was the deep, dark brown of stained wood.
Once we passed the parlor’s threshold and left the River of Gray behind us, I pulled Shawn to his feet and attempted to seat him upon a bench, but my friend balked at the placement.
“Sun,” he whispered, his hoarse voice regaining some strength. “Take me into the sun!”
And so I gathered Shawn’s arm over my shoulder and helped him out to my steam carriage, where I settled him into the seat behind the boiler. I must admit the sun did my demeanor a world of good as well and I was glad for my friend’s suggestion.
I felt I could never again enter the manor of my lifelong chum—a house that had been filled with happy memories of playful childhood summers and misspent adolescent holidays. But the sharp and painful thoughts of the gray would forever pierce all those gay times with irreparable incisions, like a scalpel through a photo.
Beside me, Shawn begged for water and pointed to a pump at the corner of the manor. I ran to the pump where I found a bucket and ladle. Upon spooning some cool water into my friend’s mouth, he regained a modicum of strength. He even sat up in the Iron Camel and grabbed the ladle to splash water on his face.
“So, what the hell happened here?” I asked as Shawn wiped his damp face with the tattered remains of his right sleeve.
“How long has it been?” Shawn asked, answering my question with one of his own. “What time is it? What day?”
I must admit I was dumbfounded by these questions. In an age where one can wear a clock on a chain, where automatic horns call men to factories in the mornings and send them home at night, how does one not know the day of the week or the time?
“Why it is Wednesday, the eleventh day of December in the year of our lord eighteen-hundred and ninety-five,” I replied. Shawn looked at me expectantly as I pulled the pocket watch from my vest. “It is currently one-and-three-quarters hours past noon.”
I watched as my friend calculated some interval on the fingers of both hands, not understanding yet what issue he had with the date and time.
“Twenty hours, give or take,” he muttered. “I doubt I would have made it twenty-four.”
That’s when it dawned on me. My friend had lain in the River of Gray since dinnertime the night before. He had been trapped for most of a day inside that monochromatic nightmare. I had spent less than ten minutes in the gray parlor and knew for a certainty the vision of that unholy maelstrom would haunt my dreams forever. I could not imagine what that horror had done to Shawn’s mind after twenty hours, but I doubted he would ever be a whole, functioning person again.
I decided to not force any additional information from the wretched creature before me, but after he took another long draught of water, the story began to pour forth from Shawn as if the only way to rid himself of the experience was to share it in the full light of day.
“I arrived home after the end of the Fall Term a week ago,” he began. “I was giddy with expectation, for I had gotten word that my crate had arrived from Egypt the previous weekend.”
“That sarcophagus?” I asked, incredulous at the breach of university protocol. “Why send it here instead of the college?”
“I wasn’t certain of its provenance,” Shawn replied, as if that explained everything. I stared at him hard, willing him with my stern countenance to explain, which he did, although it seemed with some—quite warranted—trepidation.
“The college elders knew nothing about this,” he said a bit sheepishly. “I made the purchase privately through a dealer I had met during my trip to Giza over the summer.”
“A black-market dealer?” I asked.
Shawn nodded before taking another sip of water while awaiting the coming storm of my condemnation.
“What were you thinking?” I demanded, aghast at my friend’s cavalier attitude toward protocol, not to mention the scientific method. “Nothing can ever be proved without proper provenance.”
“I thought this was too important a find to leave to the glacial machinations of the college elders,” he said. “If I could but prove its worth and unearth its provenance, I hoped to donate the sarcophagus to the school.”
Shawn looked so small and withdrawn sitting behind the giant boiler of my steam carriage. The man had lived inside a literal hellscape for nearly a day. Perhaps I should find it within my heart to withhold my academic reprimands for now. But then I recalled the bodies still lying within the Gray inside the manor.
“What of Shelly, Pierce, Wells, and the others?” I asked. “How did they become involved in all this?”
A deep sadness descended upon Shawn, draining the newly regained color from his cheeks, and weighing his eyes down to the point where he stared at his own feet.
“It’s all my fault,” Shawn whispered, his voice faltering again. “I should never have included them in my fool’s errand.”
I reached out to lay a hand on my friend’s shoulder to console him as he folded in on himself in the seat and began to sob.
“It’s okay,” I said, hardly believing my own words. “It will be, eventually.”
I wanted to add that life would go on, but I knew that it wouldn’t. Not for Harold Pierce, nor for Shelly, Wells, or the two students I barely knew. And not, truly, for Shawn, whom I knew would be haunted by his decisions and the horrors he had witnessed until he passed from this mortal coil.
After a while Shawn began again and told me how the dealer had reached out with an irresistible offer of a mummy encased in a gold-inlaid sarcophagus that had been liberated from a heretofore unknown set of catacombs beneath an isthmus near Alexandria.
The mummy, it seemed, was pristine. But more than that, the chamber where it had been located—which had been buried beneath another chamber and so never robbed—contained some great disassembled machine strewn inside a large, granite box alongside the sarcophagus. In addition, the dealer informed Shawn that the interior of the sarcophagus contained a message etched in some language or code never seen at other sites.
“I had heard whispers of rudimentary clockwork machines in the time of the pharaohs,” Shawn said, some of his vitality returning as his mind revisited the excitement of the search. “But no one had yet discovered anything more than pictograms; nothing to prove that the ancients had mastered the art of advanced engineering.
“If we could reconstruct the device and decode the message, there was no telling what this sarcophagus could tell us about the world of the ancient Egyptians,” Shawn exclaimed. “Perhaps it could even prove the theory that great machines were used in the construction of the pyramids. It would have been the greatest discovery of the modern age.”
“Or a complete hoax,” I prodded. “That was no rudimentary clockwork mechanism. I’m not sure even Harold Pierce could have designed such a device, and he is—was—a master of steam and clockwork.”
“Thus the secrecy,” Shawn said, calmer now after his earlier outburst. “And, yes, as the machine took shape, I too doubted it could have been buried in a tomb thousands of years ago. Perhaps the dealer was an agent of chaos and sold me this devilish modern contraption to further the goals of some foreign cult. Perhaps the device itself had been created by the god-like being it awakened. I do not know. That was why I summoned the greatest minds I knew in engineering, mathematics, and cryptography. We hoped to unravel this mystery and publish our results.”
Shawn explained that they broke into two groups with Harold Pierce working with a doctoral candidate on the machine, while Wells, the master of cryptography worked with Shawn and another student on the code. Shelly, the mathematics professor, leant her expertise to both teams as needed.
Hours turned to days as both teams worked feverishly, around the clock. One team or the other would take breaks to raid the pantry for bread, cheese, and leathery hunks of dried meats, or to nap on a sofa. Shawn had sent the staff on holiday to avoid prying eyes and his parents had long passed beyond the veil. The five academics were all alone in the huge house—alone with their respective puzzles.
Pierce’s team made the first breakthrough some 40 hours into the process, but only after Shelly noted with some surprise that the pieces of the contraption could never fit together inside three-dimensional space.
“What do you mean by that?” Pierce had asked.
“A new theory by Charles Howard Hinton predicts a fourth dimension we cannot see while trapped inside our three-dimensional space,” Shelly had replied. “Perhaps this contraption was built in four-dimensional space.”
“If I cannot see this fourth dimension, how do I rebuild the device?” Pierce had demanded.
“Hinton’s diagrams suggested what a four-dimensional cube would look like in three dimensions,” Shelly had said. “It was two cubes, one nested inside the other with vertices connecting the corners. In four-dimensional space, these vertices would form 90-degree angles, but in a three-dimensional representation, they were half that. He called it a ‘Tessaract.’”
“So, perhaps we can visualize the fourth dimension within our three dimensions by nesting the objects,” Pierce had whispered, his face beaming with ideas.
Shawn told me he had overheard that conversation, which gave him an idea for the cypher as well. Perhaps it too had an additional dimension he hadn’t considered.
The two teams redoubled their efforts after the tessaract discussion, making good progress as they toiled through the next night without any breaks at all.
As the device began to take shape on the desk behind him, Shawn decoded a single word near the end of the message. The word was “Iteru,” the ancient Egyptian word for “River.” Sadly, Shawn, told me, this sent him down the wrong path as he searched for hours for a word in the cypher that would translate to “Hapy” the Egyptian name for the Nile.
It was Wells who came to the rescue. As Shawn complained about his plight with the missing “Nile,” the cryptographer realized that a message inside a coffin was more likely to speak about the river of the dead than any river found amongst the living.
“You should search for ‘Duat,’” Wells had urged, “the land of the dead in the Egyptian mythos. Funeral barges followed the path of Ra along the West Bank to the Duat.”
Shawn was too excited to ask Wells how he knew so much about Egyptian funeral rites. He was even too excited—and too caught up in the hysteria that had gripped them all—to notice the dark circles under the cryptographer’s eyes.
Looking back on the events in his mind as he retold them, Shawn now understood that all of them had become enraptured in their work, trapped inside a trancelike state as they drove onward toward the answers to their respective enigmas. No one had eaten or slept in nearly two days since the tessaract discussion, and the only liquid they had taken in that time came from bottles of liquor in the parlor.
“We were the walking dead already,” Shawn told me as he took another long swig of water. “We just didn’t know it yet. The only thing that mattered was completing our tasks. We no longer had any other choice.”
I realized then how gaunt my friend looked. His face had sunken in on his cheekbones and the hollows surrounding his eyes made him look more skeleton than man. I fished a few scraps of bread and cheese I had packed for the trip from my satchel, which Shawn greedily devoured before continuing his tale.
“Within a few more hours,” he began anew, “both teams neared completion.”
He faltered for a moment, and I thought it was to take another bite of the Stilton, but I looked down to see Shawn staring at the manor, the gray streams of the Sky River stagnant in the air above.
“I honestly cannot remember who finished first,” he said at last. “Looking back, I believe we all walked through a shared delusion, marching from one dreamscape to another, leading each other through the various demesnes of our communal visions.”
I had no reply to this statement, and once again feared for the sanity of my friend. Eventually, Shawn continued. From his description, the clockwork team must have completed their task first, for Shawn remembered hearing a loud ticking sound as he turned to the group to share the completed message with them:
“Whosoever possesses my tomb shall lay claim to all that dwells beneath the sky should they acquire the key to the clock of chaos ere they cross the River of Death.”
Shawn recalled the ticking of the clockwork mechanism seemed to grow louder as he recited the message, and that it changed in cadence to match the rhythm of his speech. Upon completing the message, all thirteen clock hands spun to vertical positions and began rotating in unison, clicking through the seconds simultaneously with acute precision.
What happened next, I will attempt to reproduce in Shawn’s own words as exactly as I can to avoid losing anything to translation.
“We, all of us in attendance, were so transfixed by the simultaneous operation of the hands that none of us had eyes for what transpired behind us at that moment,” Shawn told me.
“When the clock hands all reached the vertical again, the automaton arms became active, further transfixing our gazes. The hands weaved a complex pattern in the air more intricate than the forms displayed by any Eastern dancer I’d seen in a Turkish bazaar.
“I felt as if I had just deduced the pattern when a gray mist began to form at their various mechanical fingertips. The sight drew me closer, which ultimately saved my life. Even though I entered the River of Gray first, I was farthest from the sarcophagus when the mummy rose and shed its wrappings in an explosion behind us.
“Shelly’s screams broke my revery and I turned to see the entity that had once lay in state standing ten feet tall above the tomb, its arms raised to the ceiling as if holding it in place. I did not recognize the being from any pictographs of the Egyptian pantheon, but there was no doubt this was a god.
“I was so taken by the gruesome beauty of the creature that it took a moment to realize that Shelly lay crumpled beneath it. The god’s skin was covered in scales that reflected the colors of the sea as it turned and twisted in the lamplight.
“But it was its face that commanded my attention. The creature’s skull was translucent. It had a multitude of eyes encircling the top and nearly invisible tentacles trailing off beneath its head that writhed about its shoulders.
“As I stared into its many eyes, the god waved about a sinewy limb, which held a golden key. It then reared back and lashed this limb forward and impaled Wells with the key, dropping him to the ground.
“I turned, hoping to stop the clock, for I knew in my heart the mechanism and the god were connected through the key. But I also knew that the entity possessed both the key and the tomb, so it owned everything under the sky, including all of us. As I pushed toward the clock, I heard the screams of my colleagues as they perished one after another. Each died with an unearthly squelch as that scaly, tentacled limb lashed at them.
“The current from the River of Gray held me back. After days of not eating or sleeping, I had no strength to wade against the swift current of the Gray. When I saw the monochrome maelstrom inside the River, I knew instantly this was the home from which the nameless god hailed, a place where tessaracts existed in full, four-dimensional space.
“I made one last valiant attempt to reach the chaos clock, lunging with all my might in a vain attempt to cover the last two feet. I did not make it, but my leap saved my life. At that moment, the nameless one lashed at me with its key.
“Instead of impaling me through the heart, however, the key sliced through my clavicle, sending me sprawling across the chair. I lay there, barely breathing and half dead with a seeping wound in my shoulder.
“Before my eyes closed, I saw the scaly tentacle push the key into the clockface and twist. At that moment, floodgates opened within the device, spewing the Gray into the air in all directions with such velocity that I could no longer move.”
At this point in the story, Shawn nodded off, his head lolling to one side against the seat. I glanced at the house, and part of me did wonder if the key was still inserted into the chaos clock inside the Parlor. For the briefest moment, I imagined what it might be like to claim all that lay beneath the sky.
But I knew that path led only to madness. I also knew that once my friend awoke from his slumber it would be too late to do what must be done.
When Shawn finally awoke, upon hearing the Iron Camel roar down the lane, I asked him where the old god had gone.
“Gone,” he said. “I know not where but I fear I may have doomed us all.”
I nodded silently. I could only hope my actions had limited the old god’s influence somewhat. I glanced back at the house, which blazed in the light of the fires I had set.
As flames licked at the multiple rooflines, the Sky Rivers of Gray began to burn as well. Fire spread across the sky, consuming the gray streams and turning the rivers to ash. The ash fell to the ground, slowly, like a snow shower. But, instead of covering the ground in a pristine white sheen, everything the ash touched crumbled, as if it had been consumed by the fire as well. The Gray was gone, but death remained.
“You can rebuild,” I said as my friend stared at the conflagration consuming his manor.
“No, I don’t think I will,” he replied. “This chapter of my life should remain buried beneath the mountain of death I wrought.”