SCAVENGER'S DAUGHTER.

         Historically, shipwreck architecture has its roots off the coast of Eastern Amphitrite, in the Second Adolescent Era, where accumulations of sunk wood and softer saline were common.  As no permanent chemical reactions such as mortar oxidation or phosphor foundering were necessary, a simple settlement could be erected from suitable wood within a matter of weeks. 
          In the early centuries of Amphitrite, the population of aquatic settlers increased rapidly.  This meant that shipwrecks were in short supply, and many villages were established upon less fertile foundations. From around the Ocean of Nowhere onwards, the climate became harsher, as a period sometimes called the "Vital Ice Age" began. Villages situated on exposed wood or upon clay vales where the silt became waterlogged bore the brunt of the changes. Eventually, crop failures forced many such settlements to be abandoned.
          By the end of the Second Adolescent Era, shipwrecks were not only used to construct domestic houses, barns, and other outbuildings but to create elaborate tower structures as well.  Using reinforced salvage skeletons, the hulls of hundred of vessels could be notched and laid horizontally overtop each other to construct wrecktowers of enormous height and complexity. Often, the inclined silhouettes of these structures were all that remained after tidal currents or corrosion lead to the abandonment of a city.  Perhaps the most well known of these deserted settlements is Scavenger’s Daughter, in which an outline of points past exhaustion was preserved in a near perfect state.

 1. It was a scar chart stacked into a skyline, it was shipwrecks of soot and shipwrecks of skin and shipwrecks of everything after.  I called it a home, I called it the shadow of a scavenger’s daughter.          The entirety was risen to scale.  A city of replaced components, perfect complements, a test of compressions to become.          If we knew each other at all, you knew it as a torture device too.

2. We crashed there in halves, cratered and splinter-limbed and salvage remaining.  Tired and torn open by turnover lungs.    

          Underwater was what was left, most of us had sunk by then.

          You tried to make an echo of who to remember or how.  Every face was a makeshift civil war, a blackout from your vocal cords.  There was never a word or workaround for when.

          We were starved by instincts they already saw coming.  Soon they would be hunting us on their own. 3. They hid in small circles, with teeth behind teeth.  True predators who knew the trauma well.

          I heard them whispering a sharpened language, syllables scripted from salt, accents serrated by remains of air.  It wasn’t long before they were breathing water like it was a weight that had always belonged in them.          Born again by drowning wrong, they were becoming natives there.

         I watch them stalk down shadow lives and whole silhouettes, changing only where to swallow them.  Their territories were open conversation, oncoming current, decomposition.

         They carried away clouds like they were a kind of critical illness, with a sky lost to conclusion, the rest was their hunting hypothesis.
4. Our volcanic arc, or a couple overriding things to know.          You told me there was drowning and there was dissolving, the only difference was the distance to tell.  You told me once and then you told me again.          It wasn’t a lie.  I was almost a fit there at first, my face either fatally or seriously injured, sustaining damage or structural failure, saving up splinters as a replacement for home.          Some truths change and some never do.  You asked me what I was waiting for.

5. Here is most of what I felt.           I was terrified.  Completely. 

                  I spent each continent suspending excuses to my neck, scarring fabric over any confession to come.  In all honesty, two eyes were still too many to know.          I was a half-life, a host for dead reckoning and daily symptoms.  Separated from a skin to witness, the shape of it meant nothing to me as my own.          Make a fraud of yourself long enough and the fault lines do what they want to you.          Often without an afterlife to fulfill.

          It didn’t feel like being worn inside the wrong body, or wearing too many bodies to tell, it felt like trying to fit inside a ghost.  Trapped wasn’t the only word either.  I became a willing part of it.          They never say exactly what shame takes away from you, the landscape of anatomy that gets subtracted entirely.  They don’t tell you how quickly a pulse can turn back to gunpowder, how you become a casualty of postponement and then the explosives appear.          It wasn’t going to stop.  Those fractures weren’t there by accident, I would have to learn to carve a capture out of them. 6. A scavenger’s daughter saves anything mauled, crushed, torn or cut.  A scavenger’s daughter sees through the camouflage of force and impact.  A scavenger’s daughter knows what secrets the slope of bone can show.          A scavenger’s daughter survives on the start and end of them.

7. Their city crowded upward, towers of shipwrecks like points in a crown, a circle of salvaged facades and vacant spires, an architecture of apologies that should have never left.          Acts of corrosion separated from acts of coincidence separated from acts of exhaustion.  All of it scattered into stacks and heaps, mast beams raised by state of preservation and staked by severity of storm.          Like solid blocks of abandoned warfare, a border of barricades built by the undertow. 8. We lived in a list of dislocated nights.  Like spare pieces of an ongoing eclipse, each one picked apart and ready for a disappearance to come.  Our defense mechanisms were late clocks or outright avoidance, we carried sackfuls of of splints and needles and knives.          We came to see the scaffolding of a near survival.  We talked in trench codes, over telegraph wires, without control of depth or expression.          You wore black ice under each eyelid, closed your landscape alone.  Every reflection was a rift to make, or else a warning they were on their way.          Yes, I heard them every night.  Somehow, you called it honesty. 9. They followed us as crows or ghosts or wolves.  Mostly fanged, sometimes in flight, occasionally invisible.  A constant feeding was their only common form.          We tracked them from a slab window, traced each inaccuracy of migration.  From the height of a shipwreck they could almost pass for a shuddering pack, close to starvation, a step or less away.  Their pacing was a well protected lie.          If only that had been their strategy, if it had just been a cry for help that way. 10. You told me even blind spots could be living things, and I believed you.          We left our rooms only during hours of colorless dissolve.  You lived within a cavity method, gave in to calling it a conditional response.  I tried on gray contacts and clear glass, uneven tactics of concealment and mimicry.          A knot came loose.  I had to keep telling myself, it was important to remember what kind of breakwater, what kind of collision, what kind of target practice.          Or what is meant to to define catastrophe by closest relative or cause of family. 11. By the anniversary of our attack, I was back to six bones missing again.  Two orbital, two nasal, and two made of tooth.  More receivers of the wreck, less a surprise than shrapnel still making sense of what it meant.          Even if we were driftwood blind, even if it had all been hidden just to kill me, it wouldn’t have mattered, it was already.  Twenty-eight edges of an eclipse, a herd of red and empty irises, that was more than enough to understand.          You told me there were ways to trust it would end, a scavenger may pray to surviving gods too. 12. Shipwrecker’s Paradox.          Whether a shipwreck which is restored by replacing each and every one of its wooden parts is still the same shipwreck.          Whether the portions remain the same if the chosen prey is entirely replaced, piece by piece, pulse by pulse. Whether a paradox is the opposite of a coping strategy. 13. That many years since.  It could have been the slowest flood, how or where it started.  I was sheltering it still.  Like a bad dream built us both an abyss to breathe.         We tried to go over it together, make sense of what we could: knock over effects, road damage, changes in the character of soil, strandlines, destruction of terrestrial vegetation, our history of litter and debris.         Every shrunken hour was a shortcoming of habitat.  I had no control of how they came to recognize us later, what secondhand absences they would use to find you.         It didn’t matter which came first or last, memory loss was a progressive remedy.
14. Hunt went on so long we couldn’t remember anything else and then it was over instead.          They strapped my head to a metal rack, tied my hands at the midpoint, forced my knees and legs into a folded position.  The blood in my face was brick heavy and bright blue.          It felt like being pinned to a concussion site.  There was a splitting at the base of my spine, a window ripped open, an incision to stop the shivering.  They punctured once to pick their portions, and then helped themselves to instinct.          The act of predation can be broken down into a maximum of four stages: Detection of prey, attack, capture and finally consumption.          Everything slowed down immediately.  Completely. 15. A scavenger’s daughter does not age.  A scavenger’s daughter will starve a shadow until it stays in its place.  A scavenger’s daughter will sacrifice a corpse until it starts over awake.           A scavenger's daughter survives by trespassing upon the totality of each mistake. 16. Woke up without a ghost for the first time.           Like a drowning in reverse, a suffocation surrendered on it’s own.  Sheets of skin severed from me and I trusted what had been erased by them.           Forgot a hunt for good. Forgot a face for good. Forgot an exile of remains. Lied there naked and nearly breathing, bare enough to believe I couldn't ever be that alone again.           You asked me if it was worth it. All those those shipwrecks saved like scavenger's tells, a city to resurrect which scars to rent and which ones to own. And yes, I said yes. Pick a carcass, any carcass. Pick your predator, pick your prey. I would never stop circling yes.

OUR NOWHERE OCEAN.

         Our Nowhere Ocean, or the Coincidences of Sand, or simply 'the ocean' was the connected body of loss that covered the majority of the temporal surface. The ocean moderated the continent’s regret and had important roles in the afterlife cycle.  Although the Nowhere Ocean was traveled and explored since prehistory, the modern scientific study of dispossession dates broadly to West Amphitrite.
         Insolvency in the open ocean was generally located in a narrow band around the incarnate continents, though it may have proceeded to more landlocked waters, near the mouths of large rivers, or at great depths as well. Owing to the present state of chronological drift, the history of continents was fairly equally divided between land and sea (a ratio of about 2:3), however the coasts of Amphitrite were overwhelmingly oceanic.  This was due to the friction of waves, produced by craving and by withdrawal, and changes in local erosion, produced by the forces of grating and decay.  The direction of this movement was almost certainly governed by surface and submarine landmasses or by the sequential rotation of the temporal surface (the water wheel effect).
         Further studies of the Nowhere Ocean have established that not all abandonment was restricted to the surface waters, even under enormous depths and pressures, dissolution streaming from remote or unknown hydro emotional vents was capable of supporting its own unique ecosystem  Many have suggested that the continents and their inhabitants may have first evolved in this voided ether, slowly increasing in density and,consistency, until their coincidences were common enough to form a chronology from nothing again.

        Dear Jillison,

        I said I would write you a letter.  What is here since you left?  Some days are like hummingbirds in plastic bags and some have some have been so long and flat they may as well have been laid out on a stretcher.  Every one I thought of you at some point or another.  
         I've told you this before I want to tell you again because it is true and I still believe it. I came to these continents to meet you.  You gave me new names for every sense.  You were sewn into every calendar entry, your crossed spine was my chronology.  Some days I could even tell what you were doing.
        I know we met between lives.  Maybe those are the only kinds of stages there are or should be.  Fingertips searching and falling over themselves  It might not have always seemed unexplored, and sometimes the trails were insincere, but it was terrain.  I felt like I knew you.  Under my eyes and with every second and synapse, I thought I knew you.
        I think of you often.  I go over things I could have done differently.  I try to remember it's not always about what I could or couldn't do.  

OUR HOLOGRAPHIC WINTER.

          The Holographic Winter was a seasonal projection which allowed virtual or recorded weather violence to be dispersed upon the continent of Cybele. Different cultures have defined varying dates as the start of projection, but it was commonly accepted that interference and diffraction were most vivid when the suns were in solitary orbit and the nights were nearest to the surface. 

          The theory that winter, as consciously experienced, was not real, goes back to ancient indigenous people of Eos who believed the darker solstice existed as a dream or illusion. In Cybele, physicists referred to the matrix, grids, simulation and hologram. However, it is important to note the Holographic Winter was not simply a generated image; it consisted of an apparently diverse structure of either varying intensity, density or profile. The recorded meteorology of the season was able to change as the position and orientation of the viewing system changed in exactly the same way as if actual weather was still present, thus making the associated snow and freezing temperatures appear hyper-focused, over-saturated or unnervingly expansive.

          Physicists of Cybele soon discovered the depth and multi-dimensionality of meteorological reckoning was not the only remarkable characteristic of the projection. After initial attempts were made to divide the Holographic Winter by month or week, each fragment was still found to contain the full scope and weather violence of the season. Even if the sections were divided again, by day or hour, each piece was always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the entire winter.

          The "whole in every part" nature of the seasonal projection provided physicists of Cybele with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, the continent labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon was to dissect it and study its respective parts. The Holographic Winter taught them that some principles in the may not lend themselves to this approach.

          Various rogue sects of Cybele took these revolutionary beliefs further and insisted that within the Holographic Winter, even time and the continent itself could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a projection in which winter and weather violence are never truly separate from anything else, even considerations such as topography and temporal space would also have to be viewed as mere projections, albeit of a more complex order. To these break-away sects this suggested that given the proper tools it might be possible to someday reach into the seasonal projections of each continent and compose a one, true meteorology from their long-forgotten core.

GORGON OPTICS.

In optical geology, a gorgon or gorgon lens is the envelope of sinew rays reflected or refracted by a physical body or object, or the projection of those sinews upon another self, skin, or surface.  Concentration of bodies may be shaped to reverse the effects of this type of sight, as well as contribute to erosion and petrification of the outer eye.
The concept of the gorgon lens is at least as old as Eris and Amphitrite, and may be represented by shame-spirals, concentric and overlapping circles, and other codependent imagery. The awkward reflection of the gorgon lens, with arms and legs at angles is closely associated with these symbols as well.  
A common situation where the gorgon lens may become visible is when anatomical material is obtained or generated or gazed through glass.  This reflection casts a shadow, but also produces a curved region of petrifying light.  In ideal circumstances (including perfectly parallel rays, as if from a point source at infinity), a recognizable patch of the body (arms, shoulders, mouthparts, face, etc) may be used to keep this reflection in place.   

Jillison, what didn’t you want me to see in you now?   Irises changing blindly, eyelids blistered, broken down, transparencies thick and thin.  Fine.  Jillison.  Did you still think there was a difference between us?   You or your memory?   
Face like a hostage.  Face it was frozen out of place.  Face like it was always a crash landing for me.
Sight split both ways, you had to remember it better than I did.

How long was I supposed to wait then, Jillison?  I was tired, out of expectations, tasting exhaustion in each eye.  
Nevermind the the vanishings, the empty lenses you expected me to forget.  Eight blackouts in four days.  Wear and tear.  Width and weight.  Any time a sky showed up, you used to take the skin off in my place.
See.  Jillison.  There wasn’t a difference between us after all.  Only one replica underground and it only looked just like you and me.    

You were overwhelmed, and still, you found me, once.  Looked for me.  
Black eye permanent and then it seeped into sight too.  Should I have asked you to stay? Would it have made a difference?
A bone here or there, maybe optics would start to shift.  Maybe we you would meet me somewhere in the middle.  No.  Wherever you were, I would see you there, try to convince you.
That kind of standstill, that kind of attraction, that kind of self scavenging gaze.   

Jillison. I wanted you.  Blindly.  
Don’t pretend I wasn't just staring at you. Trial by iris, trial by fire light.  Jillison.  
Why couldn’t you see us there anymore?  Jillison.  What had I done to you?  We came from the same place, scars as sedimentary as sandpaper.  Same abrasions.  Same ulcers.  I wasn’t letting us go back to that silt life again.
Did you think when I saw what I wanted to see, Jillison.  Did you think I opened it there to keep?

HALF LIFE UNDER THE HYDRA'S SKY.

            Half Life of the Hydra’s Sky, also known as ecliptic nyctophobia, was a many-faced disorder characterised by an intense fear of social situations and an impaired ability to function productivily in many parts of an individual’s daily life. 

            As specified by the Diagnostic Asterism Manual, the Hydra’s Sky was the offspring of post-fault line depression and a variety of deep sky anxieties.  Accordingly, the psychological symptoms accompanying the Hydra’s Sky may have included half-life mimicry (identity decay), dizziness, panic attacks and cognitive distortions (such as catastrophizing, mislabeling, depersonalization), unintentional thrashing and masking s (a form of constellation dysmorphic disorder), as well as the co-occurrence of narcissistic defenses and virulent behavior.
            It was common for sufferers of the ecliptic nyctophobia to reduce interpersonal communication and social activities in an effort to limit exposure to both others and themselves.  If undiagnosed, untreated, or both, this could hvae lead to self-confinement, isolation rituals, avoidant food intake disorders and other kinds of anatomical nausea and abuse.

            Research into the causes of the Hydra’s Sky were wide-ranging, encompassing multiple perspectives from surface psychology to celestial cartography. Scientists have yet to pinpoint the exact cause of the disorder, however studies suggested that continental upbringing can play a part in combination with chemical factors.  For some, even a minor instance of identity decay could evolve into a complex, many faced disorder, cyclically strengthened by both negative schema and self-destructive reflexivity. 

            We lived under the western edge of the serpent’s sky, closer to starlight than we'd ever been.  

            Back of each jawbone was broken still, covered in gray splotches, dust storms, pale clouds.  More sky tissue scarred open and disappearing at the same time.  Were they paying attention, keeping track of the replacements I tried to make?

            Wore black eyes every day, didn’t have a choice.  That’s what they must have meant by permanent.  

            What parts of ‘terminal anxiety’ did I forget to understand?  They said it was a post-fault line depression, found a new name for a color I couldn’t touch.
              Was I just getting used to a half life anatomy?  Was there a way to say to explain it simply, without deflection or disguise?  I don’t think I was even close.  I could barely remember which expressions I was supposed to hide, or how to keep a conversation a certain size,  or when to breathe left or right.  Slowly, the skies were getting smaller and smaller, starting to sink into each other.

            I tried to prepare an explanation for them the best I could, worked on a home-made inventory:     

            Slow.  Sluggish.   Already lost more than arms and legs.  Non-responsive.  Almost cold-blooded.  A list of minor traumas, anxieties, tremors.  I knew I couldn't just keep using exhaustion as an excuse.
            How could I tell them how corpse white they looked to me now? Kept dissecting scales and skin, it wasn’t getting better anyone else.  

            Hydra’s wrong, I wouldn’t last.

            Only exile was left to connect stars to the sky.  Jillison called it the end of denial, a rejection of clear lines and recursive intent.  She said each constellation had a consequence of it’s own. 

            It had been a year, a year and a half, two years?  Still couldn’t move to close the night windows, still hardly ever left the room.  Kept swallowing the same stale air over and over and calling it what was left of me.  

            Of course I knew the obvious metaphors.  Toothmarks on a raw white spine, a ring of cyclical incisions, a serpent swallowing its tail.

            Decay was not constant, decay was not a coincidence.  

            Tried to get as dead west from there as I could, used isolation as my last form of revenge.  That was just the way it was, I could never keep myself from taking the bait, even when I knew it would all taste the same.  

            What did you mean to take me back there for?   How much of it has anything to do with a body?

            Eyes still gravel black, and only a shallow sky allowed you to survive.  I stayed awake, I wore scales and fangs to keep myself safe in the night.  I learned there are two kinds of half-life (blood loss, sentimentality) and they can both kill you quietly.              Starlight tried to strangle us, tried to poison us, maybe we should have let it this time.

            Jillison called it the oldest and the longest of the constellation traumas.

            We couldn’t leave each other together, not there at least.  My eyelids were lying open and I still couldn’t tell the difference between a defense mechanism and a shedded snakeskin.

             Curtains as this as, yes, I still remembered it well.  You don’t forget the first time you see yourself split in half. You don’t forget a full continent without a face, without a skull, without hands or even shadows of them.

            How many times had those shadows died already?  Even after all of it since, the rifts to come and those that controlled us completely.  How many faces had we used up as an excuse to live anywhere else?  

            Hydra by starlight, naked and vulnerable, severed and choking.  Another threat within a threat, and the Hereafter wasn't anything like we thought it would be.

THE CHIMERICAL METRICS.

          The Chimerical Metrics were a collection of mathematical incantations, enchantments and formulae implemented to induce the subliminal impression of offspring (non-real, irrational, and split-complex, the so-called “Children of Estimates”) within the collective unconscious, with the eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the continental condition and Nyx society as a whole.  For proponents of the practice, the Chimerical Metrics were a compassionate method of demographic composition or population control, effectively masking the social incentives for reproduction by offering a diverse range of recombinatory stimuli to replace the demand for singular, natural, or real children. 
          Through advancements in dynamic incantation theory (namely, the development of the revealed preference method of estimating differentials), a formula was achieved which could be repeated by members of the society until a peripheral trance (non-invasive, discrete) was extended across the commonly perceived threshold of continent.  Within this induced state, Children of Estimates were generated, hybridized and raised by potential or intended parents (occasionally, those with certain medical issues which made whole, real, or rational offspring impossible or those with histories which make linear upbringing risky or otherwise undesirable, but generally those deemed unfit or unready for reproduction at the discretion of greater Nyx society).  
          As a rule, the composite subconscious offspring had a certain amount of free will, allowing them to autonomously interact with the neighborhood, the house, and all its objects, which appeared pre-rendered, and displayed diametrically.  Although Children of Estimates could independently perform these actions, they may not always prioritize them effectively and could suffer consequences for neglecting their own needs. With proper concentration and experience, the “parent” or “guardian” still retained a great amount of control over the growth cycle of their Child of Estimate, generally as a manager of aspirations or coordinator of cohesive nurturing events and occasional conflicts (“the good fight”), when appropriate.  
          Though production of offspring through the Chimerical Metric process would gradually grow in acceptance throughout Nyx, Children of Estimates were still susceptible to many societal pressures within their environment and many came to perceive their system conception and semi-concealed state as a deformity or defect.  Because of this distress and similar issues arising from a disposable identity, suicidal ideation was not uncommon, especially after prolonged periods of neglect or abandonment.  At their utmost desperate, such as near extinction or it’s subconscious equivalent, a hidden language could begun to be heard on the threshold of the waking society.  A repeated set of variables and incantations, almost similar to the Chimerical Metrics, but approximated, or in reverse, or multiplied, or inverted.  A retaliatory mathematics ready to corner the culture where it rests, clinging inward and craving more, and then pin it down, cave it in place, cage it there.

          We checked and unchecked the chimerical metrics, we were on the brink of estimates we couldn't measure.
          Jillison, you didn’t want them, did you? To keep?  Don’t tell me now.  You never struck me as the suffocating type.

          Someone told the story of vanishing sickness in our lives. Though there were many, the days were vague and dead and unused.  A lifetime was subtracted from selves we never had, voided entirely out of view, like it was a leftover, leaking, and old, or even less in the mouth.
I guess that made us offspring still.  Crippled at a local distance, like children of static of smaller sounds than that.

          Your hands were in the medicine drawer, holding half of mine, hovering over pillboxes and prescriptions and chemicals to come.  Empty calendar counts, you and I, didn’t need a tally to know us.
          We took the nights off at their corners, our childhood was one of many, imported from more like it.  Was there anything sentimental in an age of equations?  If every occupant carries an opening in their corpse and so on.

          The broadcast was called off, uncoiled and moved to another victim.  Every echo could be recycled into who you were, the outcome was only a mathematical incatation, a chemical reaction.

          We told them their blood was variable, their mistakes were variable, their bodies were a prop for the formula to exhaust or collapse.

          Didn’t have to crease any edges or erase any markings, it would happen on its own.  Childless.  Birthless.    Chimerical. Cross stitch  Concentric.  Chaos sketch.  Call it whatever you want, and keep them it way.
          Jillison said there was a lasting static to stitch into our skin.   Not for us or against them, but to form a family from within.  Every night I asked her to come back and sleep with me in that language again.

HALOWELL.

              A Halowell was a hypothesized topological anomaly that would fundamentally act as a "tunnel" or “shortcut” through the subterranean reach of the continents, allowing for both inadvertent and intended travel between stratas of the Hereafter.  The passageway was not believed to be naturally-occurring, but could be produced by the meeting of opposing currents within the undertow of time.  Given the appropriate conditions (cataclysmic or centrifugal), it may have been possible to convert this free vortex into a portal device.
          Potential for transport by Halowell relied upon the traversable-whirlpool interpretation of continental mechanics, which asserted that since every outcome of every event defines or exists in its own “whirlpool” or “history”, a very large—perhaps infinite—number of  whirlpools may exist, and every outcome that could possibly have happened upon the continents, but did not, may be accessed by a canal that connects these currents to locations in the Hereafter.
          When considering the constraints of semiclassical cartography, the difficulties of intentional Halowell construction and transit become readily apparent.  For example, if certain chronological inequalities conjectured by Nyx physicists hold true, then the energy requirements needed to sustain a portal device may be unfeasibly massive as well as negative.  Others have speculated that at the event horizon of the Halowell, a complete rotation of objects and experience in the inertial reference frame may take place, creating a misperception of psychophysical orientation and inducing nausea, cognitive decoherence and causal neglect.  In order to circumvent these effects, the mouths of the whirlpools would have to be arranged in such a way that allowed the Halowell to swallow whole every moment that once was lost, so that the body may begin again within a history that was born in hiding, hardly worn, forever hungry for a form or figure to follow on it’s own.

  Before the morning, my stepfather introduced us to a mythology of his own. He built a tower hide, attached wing tags, cast his nets over clouds and sky.
  We lived under a three tiered sky of cartilage, hollow limb and common bone. There were birds as big as bathtubs and birds with bellows in their throats. The wind was thick with them, twenty four to every eye, fits and flocks of them.
Birds of now and birds of then, he said. Both would be blacked out at the Halowell.

When the cloud cover was clear, we watched him turn on on his anesthesia machine. The sound of opposing currents came through off course, over motorized, brackish, cold. Covered in oil at the undertone, old lies backed far behind a boiling point.
It wasn’t denial at first of course, just another way to exist further and further from myself. Jillison told me had to leave us for a while. I believed him in halves and quarters, until the summer I couldn’t help but believe him all at once.
Not near sky or sleep, I saw my stepfather outside again, filling sacks with fallen leaves, covering echoes in circular rain, confirming the failed results. I could read the swears worsening on his lips. I wondered how a face could end up looking like that. A landscape for rot and nothing else. Jowls and bone and eyes barely any shapes at all. Every time he looked at me and I was exhausted, red handed, or else the inevitable was never far from where we stopped following along. Jillison called me the upcoming hopeless and we tried to laugh about it as long as we could Seven weeks I waited in our pop-up trailer. Jillison was a ghost born again. I played duck and shutter, pane and palm print, draw card and rook exchange. I practiced disassociation strategies until we were waking strangers, until we were too young to guess what was coming again. Hours began appearing briefly or repeatedly, as if each duplicate was undercut into something lesser. I listened for the recoil of commas and halts of breaths, never more than single tones, pauses before the rest. As if I didn’t notice, he was opening a nowhere out of me.
My stepfather watched us with one infected orbital. He recited another empty vision under his breath. He went back in to check on the anesthesia machine. His eyes were controlled by bruises to come. Daylight became the only delay for the decay to dry. He used both hours until I was naked enough to live through, like there was nothing was wrong with it. Like he shouldn’t have to even worry about getting caught. I could feel his anesthesia machine overheating, sweating heavily. Steam seeped out of the wall behind us. I remember it was wet and it hurt. I remember every word he used. A whirlpool’s edge felt like it was made of hands and teeth. Jillison was right when she said critical parts were missing. Blood-soaked, empty veined, a kind of sky made from shadows of flesh. She was right when she said, if the afterlife ever started, it was starting then. A Halowell for only just the both of us. A history of hollow birds buried through the ground. Left my eyelids there, left my pulse there, left my body as an echo chamber, left for anywhere but there. My throat was numb from vomit and spit swallowed back and spit up and swallowed back. Jillison told me it didn't matter now. She wasn't letting anyone do that to me ever again. We weren’t going to write about him. Not here or then. She made it simple: Hide the knives under our pillow. Wait until he comes the right night. Kill the bastard already.

IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF FAULT LINES.

          In the philosophy of fault lines, the Problem of the First and Only Tower of Eos was the question of how to reconcile the existence of the continent's turbulent inner core with the free will of the inhabitants above.
           The term “Tower” was used with a wide variety of different meanings. These tend to fall, however, into two main groups. On the one hand, there were metaphysical interpretations of the term: The “God of Towers” as a prime mover, or a first cause, or a necessary being that had its necessity of itself, or a being whose essence was identical with its existence. On the other hand, there were interpretations that connect the term “First and Only Tower” in a clear and relatively straightforward way with city affairs, and with intrinsic metropolitan desires, such as longing for a Tower to triumph, that the continent not be one where fractures prevail, or that the location never be one to be controlled or carved in error.
            Arguments from the inner continent attempt to show that the co-existence of core exposure and such a “Tower of Eos” is unlikely or impossible, and attempts to show the contrary have been traditionally known as the compatible composition defense.  If however, this defense were to fall, if a First and Only Tower of Eos was ever truly constructed or conceived beyond reflection, it could have only been approached through the dark or in avoidance, alone with outright shadows or else obscured until conclusion.