All text from Ada Rook's fallow

fallow.txt

# Text from the game "Fallow"

All the text and dialog from the game Fallow from Ada Rook, 2021.

Roughly sorted per location and according to the game timeline. Includes only the game story, does not include the out of bounds areas.

Warning: spoilers (by definition).

## Intro

please ensure audio is enabled.
headphones are recommended.

you should hear the sound of wind.

> My sisters and I
> had a secret wish
> to die in a place
> that cared for us.

Fallow

## rapid eye movement

[enter] or [space] or [c] to interact with or examine important things.
[escape] or [x] to access the menu.

The cradle is open.
Seek the furnace.

# Wednesday

Fitzdarroch scrap fields

3 days remain

## Scrap fields

A dead machine.

The tall pines remained mostly unchanged.

> The mind of our world had long ago been lost.
> Now, in the death throes of its body,
> we did all that we could to remain.

> I'd been walking in my sleep again.
> The Fitzdarroch scrap fields
> were a long way from home.

(car) It looked like some kind of keyhole.

> For a small lifetime, I had lived with
> my sisters on a disused homestead.

> Now, it was only myself who occupied
> that hollow estate. The madness of our
> world had vanished all others.

## Burnt-out hangar

Heilegh fires still burn

A key with the Fitzdarroch brand. I took it with me.

## Scrap fields

The Fitzdarroch key fit the lock.

The glass of the valve was warm. I pocketed it.

Isabelline Fallow: Human brain inside the valve.

A two-pronged valve socket.

I slid the two-pronged valve into the machine.

The image of a Dynon.

> As I walk in my sleep, this world
> whispers a dead glossolalia in my ear.

> I am patient. I will wait my turn
> as did my sisters before me.

## County highway

> Fallow is a curse for those unfit,
> Whether by sickness, treason, circumstance,
> or fate, Fallow is the name bestowed upon
> those among us who do not deserve
> a place in the world.

> My sisters and I took the name willingly.
> Many do, by pride of their alterity
> or preemption of their inevitable exile.

> Thea, the eldest, and myself, the youngest,
> had abandoned our blood families and shed
> our given names. Vivianna had been an urchin.
> Eilin spoke not of her life,
> save the last several years.

> The curse isolates those Fallow
> from all those who are not.
> It bars us from care,
> compassion, empathy, trust.

> We had been, all of us, terribly sick.
> And now I was alone.

> It took me forty-six minutes
> to get back to the farm.

## Skids (stony glade)

A sound expressing an intrusion into this reality of immeasurable sorrow.

It translates to something like "I love you."

## Home (at farm)

The old mechanical well still functioned, albeit with audible protest.

Most of our crops struggled in the dry soil of the barren homestead.

I missed the generosity of the city's refuse... bruised fruit, stale fancy breads.

A dirt-encrusted pendant bearing the sign of Mary-Ann:
"Isabelline: I'm scared.
Thea: Ssh. You're safe here.
Isabelline: It's not... a feeling...
Isabelline: It's a knowing. A deep, secret knowledge that there is no safety here. With you.
Thea: Isa...
Isabelline: It passes. But when it's there it's so real. It blots everything else out.
Thea: Are you feeling it right now?
Isabelline: Yes. It's so terrible. I wish I could tell myself that I'm wrong, but it's...
Thea: Like a holy truth.
Isabelline: Yes.
Thea: I'll be here, when it passes. I always will. So long as you want me to be."

Old pillars of rock. Part of some elder ruin than the one we lived in.

> Thea had repaired the tractor with parts form the other two wrecks.
> It had been more a hobby than anything - We tilled and planted crops by hand.
> Thea was calmed by machines; mechanisms running as intended.
> I missed to severly the unextinguishable light in her fervid eyes.

The rusted out torso of another long-dead tractor.

Pieces of scrap and debris from Thea's tinkering.

A weather-faded box of matches, now empty:
"Thea: It's from my family.
(Thea coughed a dry sort of laugh.)
Thea: Well, no. They're not.
Eilin: How did they-
Thea: I don't know. My mother, she might have told- Wel, but even then... What could she know?
Isabelline: We should burn it.
Thea: You're a treasure, Isa. That look in your eyes waould be enough.
Thea: There's money.
Isabelline: Well, take that out first.
Thea: Seems more insulting than the letter, somehow.
Eilin: Take it, Thea. We don't turn that down.
Thea: It's yours.
(Eilin smiled at one corner of her mouth. That delicate smirk, almost hidden, that made me feel like everything at that moment was exactly as it should be.)
Eilin: I'll bring you the same amount, then, minus the hex."

## Skids (at farm)

Haematite: There is a flaw... At the bottom of the world.
Haematite: A secret exit for those too broken to know.

Cenotaph: C09S. C10NS. C11NS. C12s. Carrier check. T54.033.
Cenotaph: A decision born of disease.

A silver ring that Eilin had lost not long before she'd disapeared:
"Eilin: Ah, look. This story's changed since I last read to you...
Isabelline: Which parts?
Eilin: Quite a lot of it...
Eilin: There's a picture of the symbol on the fence, now. Here, see...
Isabelline: I've seen that before. Drawn on my hands in a dream...
Eilin: Should I stop?
Isabelline: No, It's interesting.
Eilin: There's no mention of her watching the people passing by outside her lot.
Eilin: Didn't there used to be something about that?
Isabelline: There was a passage about the grey dust that strained her fingers from clinging to the links of the fence.
Eilin: Yes...
Eilin: Here... She stares up at the attic window of her house...
Eilin: "A figure there, wearing hte midday motes like a cowl, passive and indistinct but carrying some horrible significance to the deepest parts of her mind."
Eilin: Seems a little overwrought.
Isabelline: Do you think the new passages come from other books? Or dreams?
Eilin: This world has a strange soul.
Isabelline: In my dream... I was climbing a tower..."

Forgotten: That child has a connection to grandmother.
Forgotten: Hm? The Wooden Dynon. This world is her soul.
Forgotten: It's not safe here any longer.

Cordwood: (symbol)
Cordwood: Severity.

## Barn (at farm)

Piles of dead grass and dirt. We'd once kept chickens here.

> Dusty light streamed in through cracks in the back wall of the barn.
> Once, I'd had an awful nightmare after Thea disappeared.
> I'd come here, curled up against the back wall. Eilin found me, later.
> She promised me she'd never leave. I still felt such anger at those words.

## Clearing (at farm)

## The farm

### Entryway

### Eilin's room

> The sheets on Eilin's bed held not even the faintest trace of her scent.
> I tried often to remember, though I never could.
> I couldn't sleep there.

> Eilin had kept many books, stories of other worlds and lives new and ancient.
> I remembered the sound of pages turning, her gentle cough as she'd read to me.
> When Eilin disappeared, all her books had gone also. I'd forgotten their names.

Not even dust remained on the small wooden table.

> None of Eilin's clothed remained.
> It was as if she had never inhabited the room.

## Thea's room

Thea's dresses still hung in the closet.

A blank sheet of paper in the drawer of the end table.

> Markings notched into the head of the bedframe, one for each week that passed.
> Hundreds of tiny slivers in the old grey wood. I'd lost track of her final marks.
> I couldn't sleep there.

## Kitchen

The little stove had served us well during our time in the house.

We'd use the old basin for washing vegetables.

Some dried herbs, three onions, a dozen potatoes.

## a room

The trees behind the house looked worlds away.

## F2 hallway

> From the second-floor window, I could see the meadow behind the house.
> The three of us - Sometimes four - had lay often in they grass there.

## Parlor - Isabelline's room

> Vivianna loved old books with unfamiliar language.
> Often, I'd see her sitting on the floor, studying piles of olden prose.

> Eilin had sometimes left her books in my room after reading to me.
> Even these had gone now, after the day of her disappearance.

## Vivianna's wooden house / Sealed road

Warmth.

## rapid eye movement

> I dreamt of a gigantic creature in immeasureable pain.

> A Dynon, or something like it. A world-eater from the Book of Mary-Ann.

> Its shape was familiar but its body trailed wires, glass, fragments of cut wood.

> Its agony screamed across time, the death of a soul more ancient than hope.

> I came to slowly. My body ached.

# Thursday

Heileigh Mt. Summit

2 days remain

> The first time I walked in my sleep, I'd been
> living just outside the city in an old concrete ruin
> with a few other girls who came and went.
> We all came from places we didn't speak of,
> but none of us trusted each other.

> One morning I woke, body ringing
> with pain, curled up in a little park
> at the intersection of several disused
> alleys on the far side of town.

> I couldn't move for some time,
> the aches and cramps nearly blinding me.
> Thea found me some hours later,
> took me to her little tin can of a home
> off one of the alleys.

> We became close over a handful of months.
> Called each other sister.
> Vivianna sometimes stayed with us,
> skittish as always, a flighty ghost of a creature.

> I'd walk in my sleep with some regularity.
> Thea and Vi usually managed to find me.
> I missed it terribly, the long walks home
> and the comfort of a familiar hand in mine
> amidst the disorientation.

> After a year we made plans to leave
> the city together, the three of us.
> I still remember the colors of the hope
> that bloomed in me, those last few weeks
> before we left.

## Heileigh Mtn. Summit

The Tower of the Furnace loomed in the distance.
It was a symbol of the unknowable ruins that permeated our world.
It had no known entrance, except perhaps from some distant part of the skids.

> When I lived with my sisters,
> I longed often for death.

> Now that I was alone,
> the ache had somehow faded.

> I went where my body took
> me. I questioned none of it,
> I became very patient.

## Diliapidated library

> Inside the well, a skeleton key caught the light.
> There was no way I could reach it by myself.

The well's pine lid sat on the mountain grass. It looked very heavy.

The aging wood planks of the library's facade were said to come from a dead world.

## Heileigh Mtn.

My face flushed. It was Vivianna. Why was she here, at the library?

Crystalline deposits of magnetic Lodestone. Commonly occuring.

The gnarled sketch of a Mountain Oak. Most of them were dead. Poor, brittle wood.

## Keeper's shack

The rusted padlock hung defiantly from the latch, sturdy in spite of its age.

Soft pine boards which likely kept the shed clinging to its thin semblance of verticality.

## Lodestone quarry

Isabelline Fallow: Lodestone might help me get that metal key out of the well.
Isabelline Fallow: The ceaseless toil of a farmhand...

> The lodestone fragment sat in my palm with an eerie weight.
> Thea used to keep a block of the stuff in the shop to hold loose nails and parts.

## Mountain Oak

This Mountain Oak had always stood here. Stronger then the rest.

> Tendrils of cold-set glass had previously reached out for something.
> Had Vivianna passed this way?

> Heileigh Mountain was
> once a holy site.

> People would come
> here to pray to the
> Tower of the Furnace.

Only part of the rope had rotted away. I took the sturdy length with me.

## Heileigh Mtn.

> The glass of the valve had started to refashion itself:
> frozen, now, insisting on its unlikely identity.
> The cord of the great brain inside lay connected to the base of the device.

A two-pronged valve socket.

A single-pronged valve socket.

Warm air escaped from the mesh-panel grilles.

> More recently, people who
> traveled to Heileigh to pray
> had begon to disappear.

> The great library that had kept
> scripture, aging tomes on Dynen
> and the skids, had fallen into disrepair.

## Malcomb's Rive

Below me, the alien machinery of the skids protruded weirdly from the wall of the rive.

## Diliapidated library

I secured the rope around the lodestone, and lowered it into the well.
It worked. The key shone in my hand.

## Keeper's shack

The skeleton key fit the padlock.

I considered the old ladder a gradient to the library roof. Tall enough, perhaps...

## Inside the library

> Vivianna had never spoken of
> the Heileigh Library.

> I felt something strange pass
> through me, descending the
> hand-woven ladder into its
> shadowed depths.

> A voyeuristic shame; the
> guilt of anticipation; but
> something other, also.

> The fey electricity
> of forgotten dreams.

> A thin, single-pronged valve lay on the shelf.
> I picked it up. Immune, somehow, to the dusty air in the library.

> The shelved had all been emptied.

"Last Dynon over the Cleft of Aberth"

A stack of outdated books on the subject of electricity.

History books, mostly. Crumbling spines.

book: "Mystery of the Clefts and the Dynon Myth" Beatrix Harrows:
"may be created when
a sufficiently large
wound is inflicted in
the rock. ?? ??
?? explain
historical accounts
?? ?? the
old world leaping into
a great cleft to gain
passage to
(page 57)

A defense mechanism,
perhaps, to keeo out
infection.... To move
them ?? from
the wound ?? possible.

To a far away land, or 
another existence
entirely...
Questions unknown,
(page 58)"

A small misprint of the variety common to the early printing presses.

> A rusty prybar lay on the table.
> The darkened library felt a little safer with the prybar in hand.

## Underneath the library

A huge sphere of stone or rough glass. Slightly warm...

I reached out to feel the panel on the wall. Cold metal.

Vivianna's journal:
"16---
Now I have become that war
inside of which Grandmother
spke. I am ned to think she
knows whwat is happening
her. Sunday wends us to
town, some weeks, and that
rampant city-fear makes me
stare to the cloth of my
soul, and it is filthy, and it
is fraying and weak. I control
it then but soon that ability
may go.

And now Isa fallow is
afeared of me, my own
sister, and I can feel it,
the bile coming out her mind
and into my body like 'em
doctor's needles of the city,
stuck me and held me and
shooting feys and poisons
into my bloodstream. so
I ran, and woke here, to
Heileigh Library, and the
time between was missing to
me.

Possible, I soppose, that
Grandmother knows naught
after all. But, it comes to
me, neither do I.

16/II

Now I remember, for 'em
missing times, only a vast
shadow aneath me, and a
great stone body to wend
me back to my library.
Difficulty controlling itself.
The other girls, I think,
ne'er took this change.

I believe... I may be one
touched by the Dynen.
Mine own fear has ne'er
lived in me, rather flown
ahead like 'em miners'
yellow birds, putting itself
into anyone comes talks to
me. Always flits 'round my
outsides, ne'er to perch on
my shoulder. Yea, my fear,
it likes strangers. Ne'er me.
Must be appealing to 'em
gods of stone and darkness.
'Em Dynen."

The ink of the last few lines was still damp.

???: A drawing of a Dynon. I understood that much about it.

Now lit, the stone radiated light and heat.

## Mary-Ann's Furnace

> Mary-Ann's furnace. At sunset it resembled the device where she burned her failed works.
> All we took to be real, our scripture said, would one day be thrown into her furnace.
> Our only commandment was to make peace with this looming eventuality.

## Heieigh

Columns of unfamiliar names.
Most of them were now worn into an illegible scrawl.

Left behind: Holmwood family
Left behind: Aubigne family
Left behind: Round family
Left behind: Tatham family
Left behind: Yelverton family
Left behind: Birchett family
Left behind: Acker family
Left behind: Wyndham family

## Heileigh Monument

The faded monument was no longer legible.

## Heiligh Land Bridge

The gnarled sketch of a Mountain Oak. Most of  them were dead. Poor, brittle wood.

## Unnamed (Below Heileigh)

A two-pronged glass valve.
Not a scratch on it... It looks brand new.
I took it with me.

## Heiligh Mtn

I slid the two-pronged valve into the machine.
The single-pronged valve clicked into place in the dusty console socket.

The machine had boiled and swelled like inexpertly blown glass.
Parts of it still caught the light with the dull gleam of a lodestone formation.
Perhaps our dying world still heeded a few scant rules.

Though it lacked a face, the creature in the valve seemed to regard me with caution.

## County highway

Nothing but dust and wheel tracks. In the city beyond, there was nothing for me.

> It took me thirty-four minutes
> to get back to the farm.

## Clearing

Even amidst the decay, it's quiet here.
But I miss the city.
I always wondered what would've happened in a different life...
And then...

## Home

A thimbleberry bush between the trees. We'd frequently come here to pick them:
"Thea: What've you found, Vi?
Vivianna: Caterpillar.
Isabelline: What sort?
Vivianna: This one has a. Um. Sort of... Silky grey cocoon. Curled spines at the bottom. When she hatches, her wings are a rich umber, patterned with eyes.
Vivianna: White cross shape on the back of her body, usually. Sometimes it's hidden because of the way her fur grows differently depending on the color.
Eilin: Wow, Vi.
Thea: Is that why you won't have us visiting you, out in the woods? That old cabin of yours fluttering with moths?
Isabelline: Oh, don't. I think it's wonderful.
Vivianna: I only keep a few at a time. I catalog the changes in the world through the moths. I draw pictures of them, when they hatch. And then I let them go, unless they can't survive. Sometimes they're born injured...
Isabellne: You're a sweetheart, Vivi. This world doesn't deserve you."

The weathered sign had been unreadable when we'd first arrived.
We'd carved out chosen family cognomen into the old rotting boards.
Fallow

The overgrown husk of a tractor - I'd always been fond of the old wreck.
Eilin had hated it.

## Barn

A tiny copper button that I recognized from one of Vivianna's blouses:
"Vivianna: Isa.
Isabelline: Yes?
Vivianna: Do you think - Our bodies... Well, that is, our souls...
Vivianna: ...Nevermind. I had... A kind of dream...
Isabelline: What about?
Vivianna: I think perhaps I'd rather not say.
Vivianna: I'm sorry it's so hard for me. Being here. With all of you.
Isabelline: We all have our struggles.
Vivianna: I just don't want you to think... to ever think of me as cold somehow.
Vivianna: There's so much I can't explain.
Isabelline: I'm sure we all only worry that you get lonely, out in the woods all by yourself.
Vivianna: Well,
Vivianna: Yes,
Vivianna: But...
Vivianna: When we lived in the city. I.
Vivianna: I always thought we would become something more. And we have, I suppose... We were just ghosts back then, after all.
Isabelline: Not such a bad thing to be.
Vivianna: Different clothes, voices... Little grey shells.
Isabelline: What do you think we've become, Vivi?
Vivianna: Hm? Moths.
Isabelline: That so?
Vivianna: Less light in the country. The city was confusing and painful for us.
Isabelline: But less lonely, in a certain way.
Vivianna: I always thought we'd become something unrecognizable. When I stayed at Thea's home in the city and you were there... Or when we'd go looking for you,. It felt like we were building something.
Isabelline: Did we stop?
Vivianna: We just can't see it from the inside. It's sad."

## Skids (clearing)

Probationer: Are you known? Did you pray?
Probationer: Your sisters saw a light in your mind.
Probationer: It's not yet time for you to let go.

## Skids

"The system's redundancy operated on a scale outside of failure."

An empty bottle of one of Eilin's medicines:
"Isabelline: How long have you lived here?
Eilin: More than long enough. It's not all bad, though. It's a different world with the two of you here.
Isabelline: Did you inherit the property?
Eilin: You're dear to me, Isa, but there are things I prefer not to talk about.
Isabelline: Well... Will you tell me...
Eilin: You're a curious one, angel. Tread carefully.
Isabelline: Will you tell me how you and Thea met?
Eilin: Well, aren't you a nosy creature.
Isabelline: I've never met anyone like the two of you before. Well, Vi, but...
Eilin: I've never met anyone quite like Vivianna, either. Although you remind me of her, a little.
Isabelline: The three of you seem to... Know things. I still feel that I just don't quite...
Eilin: None of us belong here, angel. Ours is a world too far gone to conceive of it. What you feel is normal as anything, here.
Isabelline: But...
Eilin: Thea was the most pitiable highway merchant I'd ever laid eyes on. I bought from her some medicine and insisted she stay and rest. She looked at me like such a stray, such a broken little thing...
Eilin: Even now, I don't think she realizes the extent of what she must have been through, all the years before I found her. The adoration in her eyes made my heart break every time I looked at her.
Isabelline: Thea? A broken stray? That sounds more like Vivi.
Eilin: Don't be rude. They're not so different.
Isabelline: And she stayed with you, after that?
Eilin: Sometimes. She grew better at hiding her affections. Sometimes she'd be away for months, sometimes only a day. I think she was trying to prove that she didn't need anyone. 
Isabelline: Needing someone... The thought feels... Dangerous, I suppose.
Eilin: As terrifying as anything this dying world can conjure.
Isabelline: Do you need me?
Eilin: ...
Eilin: Desperate souls, all of us."

Haematite: Our world screamed at its violent becoming.
Haematite: The world-eater's soul shone bright as sin.

"We burrowed like insects."

Forgotten: The world-eater can open portals to other places.
Forgotten: Once grandmother takes a new body...
Forgotten: You will be able to escape, like you've dreamed of.
Forgotten: It's not safe here any longer.

Cenotaph: Ionization threshold 8492. 30% 2CH. Circulatory burst.
Cenotaph: Nothing was ever the same.

Cordwood: (symbol)
Cordwood: Transgression.

## Home

I couldn't read the expression on Vivianna's face.
We stood there for some time, before I invited her inside.
Vivianna spoke haltingly, more careful than I remembered her speech to be.
She told me she had been traveling. That she had seen our world from a new perspective.
I did not tell her that I had seen her, just that day, on Heileigh's summit, nor that I had read her journals.
Vi told me a great many things that I did not understand, and that Thea and Eilin had not forgotten me.
I felt anger swelling inside me. I told Vi that I wanted to find a way out of this horrid, dying place.
She told me she knew.
She held me, for a time, on the splintered boards of Eilin's room. Rocked me gently like a child.
Vivianna kissed my forehead and told me that everything would happen as it needed to.
And then she left.

## Parlor - Isabelline's room

> Try to sleep

## rapid eye movement: Vivianna's wooden house

In the dream, there was the sense of years going by like seconds.

I began to remember what had happened in the time that was rushing past me.

The distant sound of raised voices. My mother's smile.

A feeling of torment swept over me. Then, the warmth of Vivianna's presence.

She seemed to ask me if I knew what had happened.

Electricity crackled in the air around the wooden Dynon. Bleeding voltage.

From somewhere, Vivianna's voice:

Vivianna Fallow: This world is her soul, and it is dying.
Vivianna Fallow: But there is a secret way to begin again.
Vivianna Fallow: Our sisters are still alive in the cleft.
Vivianna Fallow: Isabelline, please hold on. There is still a way out.

I felt a cold wind. Lucidly, I woke.

# Friday

Friday
Alburn woods
1 day remains

> Eilin had been living on the property by herself
> for some years when we arrived there from the city.
> She was an old friend of Thea and Vivianna's,
> both of whom had often stayed with her in the past
> when they'd had nowhere else to go.

> Like Thea, Eilin seemed immediately to make sense
> to me in a way that I was not used to feeling.
> She innatly understood things about me that I am
> only now beginning to see the full shape of.

> I walked in my sleep less, living on the disused
> homestead with my sisters.

> The seventeen months we spent living on the farm
> together were the happiest I can remember.
> Our lives still bled; our world still decayed.
> But there was a peace I had not felt before.

> Thea disappeared first, on the third
> day of the eighteenth month.
> The dead machine spinning itself to pieces
> at the heart of our world brushed her hand,
> and she was gone.

> I cried in Eilin's arms until I lost my voice.
> Thea had been the mother I'd never known.

> I was a child again. Left alone again.
> All around me, the world shuddered and spun.

## Alburn woods

I stared through my reflection in the river.

> The book of Mary-Ann
> says the Dynen are messengers.
> Their gargantuan earthen bodies
> are flecks of ash, borne into the
> sky of our world from
> Her Furnace's approaching
> maw.

> The last Dynon sighting
> had been fifteen years ago,
> when three of them passed
> over the city, moving north by
> northwest.

## Alburn crossroads

A single-pronged valve socket.

A socket for a dual-pronged valve.

A triple-pronged valve socket.

> Forged evidence of more recent
> Dynon sightings was common.
> Some believed fiercely in the
> creatures' constant or increasing
> presence.

## Alburn woods

> My skin prickled as I thought
> of Vivianna's journal in the
> Heileigh Mountain library.

## Alburn manor ruins

A valve cought in the midday light from the floor of the manor's basement.

Isabelline Fallow: No way through these bars...

door: Locked.

## Alburn woods

A rusted out single-seater Carver motorbarrow. Very near older than the house.

We used to have one at the homestead before it seized up. We'd sold it for scrap.

A Weylith City Star. It looked like it had been stripped for parts.

The elaborate rusted husk of a vehicle far before my time.

"I know you like to
keep your hands
busy when you're
upset so I hope
you see this when
you get back from
the turbine.
I hate that you
storm off like that.
please just trust me.
I love you

P.S. here's the extra
key. Please be
careful with it."

## Alburn manor ruins

The key stuck briefly in the disused mechanism, but complied after a moment.

### Guest room

Too dark to make out the bookshelf's contents.

### Kitchen

Isabelline Fallow: 80 amps. Burnt just like paper... Lightning, maybe?

I pulled the fuse out of its socket.

Isabelline Fallow: Dead. It's marked for 20 amps. I'll need something at least that strong.

"1. Kitchen/Bedroom.
2. Basement failsafe."

In the yard outside, thick cabling stretched off into the fields beyond.

The house seemed to me like a creature parasitized, infected.

A deep sadness filled me.

## Skids

"Western Boundary - Sealed exit - Vigilance"

> I walked until I once again reached
> the surface. A dry wasteland with
> searing winds and no visible life.

> A trail of tattered fabric
> led me onward into the dunes.
> The way back was sealed.

> Miles above me, gargantuan shadows
> twisted with impossible grace
> through the sand-blasted sky.

> (symbol)

> (No... This isn't right.)

## North glade - Turbine

I felt wind from somewhere up ahead.
I flushed briefly at the sight of the deer skeleton in the dark of the tunnel.
I pulled the carcass free of the turbine. Some sinew remained.
The old bones clicked softly underfoot.

## Alburn skids

I picked up the two-pronged glass valve.

## Alburn thickets

## Alburn crossroads

The machine accepted the two-pronged valve.

## Alburn woods


## Alburn Manor ruins


### Entryway

I pulled the fuse out of its socket.

> 1. Guest room/Parlor.
> 2. Main hallway.
> 3. Study.

I thought I felt something run through the fuse as it closed the circuit.

### Guest room

Too dark to make out the bookshelf's contents.

The radiator was covered in a thick layer of dust.

Dim outline of a bed in the gloom.

The bookshelf was largely bare, save some jars and a few books on mythology.

Looked like the bedding had just been changed yesterday.

### Parlor

The radiator was covered in a thick layer of dust.

### Pantry

Cupboards of untouched dry goods.

### Kitchen

The switch was stuck in its position. Rusted into place, maybe.

A large applicance of some kind dominated the wall.

### F1 hallway

### Bedroom

The armoire looked empty. Difficult to tell in the dark.

THe large ornate bedframe seemed out of place in the manor's bare surroundings.

### Basement access

"Basement door failsafe lock"

### Lavatory

Empty.

Difficult to asertain the room's contents without light.

A large, stout vessel made of what appeared to be ceramic.

The old metal washtub had been claimed by a thin layer of rust.

### Landing - F2 hallway

A standard fuse socket. Previously, it held a twenty-amp fuse.

> 1. Spare room / Landing.
> 2. Box room / storage.

### Spare room

I stumbled over a small book in the dark. Not enough light to read it.

In the yard outside, thick cabling stretched off into the fields beyond.

The house seemed to me like a creature parasitized, infected.

A deep sadness filled me.

A journal: "She says it like I'll never know what she keeps down there.
It comes to me in my sleep. I have dreams about that horror!
The girl I married had a conscience, she adored me even when the fear of what I've lived through robbed me of rational thought. At a concern like this, she would do all she could, I know it. But here...
I sleep beside a specter of that angel.
My work consumes me also, but it keeps us safe, with a roof, walls, electricity from the skids.
Larkin's obsession takes everything away from us.
We came here to escape. I never felt at home in my own world. But it's clear now that hers is not the haven I once though it was. Tomorrow I'll leave. That fey animal of hers can keep her."

### Box room

A large ampule of some kind stood in my path. It radiated a dull heat.

The strange cannister was of a dull ceramic construction. It was warm to the touch. Deep within it, I imagined I could feel a faint vibration.

### Storage

I thought I could see some dresses in the dark interior of the armoire.

A few simple dresses hung in the armoire, pale and worn and faintly stained.

A simple bed.

A stout wooden end table.

A painting. Too dark to see.

A painting of the Cleft of Aberth.

### Workshop

1. Equipment circuit #1.
2. Equipment circuit #2.
3. Workshop lights.

Manor central electrics.
- Battery 100%.
- Battery charging.
- Battery depleted.
- Battery low.
- Turbine failure.

- Guest/parlor - error if lit.
- F1 hallway - error if lit.

It was too dark to read the book.

Some kind fo construction recessed into the wall.

A journal: "but if that's so, then i'm already so close.
It's true I'm obsessed with the work... And I've been a terrible wife. But this opportunity simply will not come again.
I know Wiera has family in the city...
Perhaps she'll be better off there after all.
If this works.
If I can really escape.

Interesting discovery regarding some new translations from the skids - "World-eater" is commonly read as a poetic name for the Dynen themselves, but I now hold this to be a mistranslation.
World-Eater, I believe, refers to the machine used to summon the Dynen-spread all beneath tthe crust of our world, hollowing its flesh, consuming it in its construction.
The skids, in fact, are the World-Eater spoken of in the book of Mary-Ann.

And I have watched it work."

### Study

Pages of complicated scrawlings. Too dark to fully make out.

A 30-amp fuse. It looked new.

"Underworld"

"stroke determines context?"

Strange polygonal symbols. Notes on stroke order and the context of patterns.

### W. Entrance

### Basement

### Alburn skids

"Cage Room"

Strange machine embedded in the wall.

### Cage room

Something pushed the atmosphere of the room like a great diaphragm as I entered.

Gently, but with enough pressure to shift souls - a living presence swiveling to watch me from an unknown dream parallel this waking one.

My body shook once. Stilled.

A journal: "strange mass of cartilage/possible organ found in neck bulb section. Function unclear. Suspended in throat area.
Its shape is uncanny but it appears too serve no clear function. Extremeties connect to surroundings via umbilical tissue(??). Mass seems to connect do Dynon sensory organs

- What role does the biological body play for the Dynen?

- What is the nature of the Dynon soul?

- Voltage seeems more important than blood.

(house circuits still burning out... switch to 30A fuses?)"

A three-pronged valve glinted atop the desk. I took it. My skin crawled.

The vertical slit in the huge ceramic vat was etched at intervals with odd symbols.

## North glade

Dead pines littered the area.

## Alburn crossroads

The single-pronged valve clicked into place in the dusty console socket.
The three-pronged valve slid into place.

## Forest

Larkin: 
Data shaft 61A, expunged.
Data shaft 61B, expunged.
Data shaft 61C, expunged.
Data shaft 61D, expunged.
Data shaft 61E, expunged.
Data shaft 61F, expunged.
Data shaft 61 plates G fthrough P, pass.
Wiera? Are you safe?
I. The turbine. I love you.

## County highway

It took me twenty-two minutes to get back to the farm.

## Forest

Arbiter:
We know you're a liar.
Isabelline Baker.

Machine enthusiast:
Why did the Dynen abandon this world?
So many contradictions in every account.
The soil in these woods is full of unfamiliar minerals.

## Stony glade

Ghost: As this worlds forgets itself, it's difficult to maintain an identity.

## Abandoned house

Letter 1: 
"?????,
I am so angry.

My body has begon to turn on itself.
There is a rot inside me
and I feel as if I am walking through a fog.
There is no blood in my veins but sewage.

Sleep is injury.
Memory is worse.

How could this have happened?
You were there all along.

So, the answer becomes: It didn't.
This malady knows no reaosn,
no causation of logic.
It is a thing of another place,
perhaps of my own mind,
a curse drawn up from within
and invulnerable to all from without.

?????, what did you do?
I am so angry."

Letter 2:
"?????,
I cannot be who I once was.

I know that you would not want me to be.
I know that if in my prior letter,
through pure unfiltered logic
and the distance of observation alone,
I had called you a good influence,
It would ahave been true.

Perhaps.

But I cannot be so removed.

When you are near I feel young,
and I mean that
in the full horror of its potential.
When you are near I feel as I once was.
I cannot allow this to occur.

?????,
you have been so careful.

My skin is unbroken but the ache
lays me lower than the world you live in."

Letter 3:
"?????,
I will never send these letters.

I wish you did not know the names of my sisters.
I wish so deeply
you did not know the name I clutch to my breast,
which I have done so much to keep from your tongue.

I wish terribly,
from a cold and broken place,
that all the years I now recall
were only nightmares to be soothed
and rocked and shushed away.

My sisters and I do what we can.
It is never quite enough.

I can never send these letters.
The guilt, I think, would calcify me.
Further - I do not think you would understand.

I want above all
for my mind to be taken away from me
so that you can no longer live inside of it.

?????,
I wish I know how to hate you.

Does your world never slip?"

Letter 4:
"Dust swirled in the sunbeams
that shot through the windows
and missing boards of the
house's second floor.

From somewhere, a wave of guilt,
followed by a rare awareness
of the present moment.

These fleeting glimpses of the now
always left me grasping for words
to describe them properly. Perhaps
it was common. Perhaps feeling
so irreconcilably distant was as
human as breathing, as loneliness.

Again the guilt.

I'd written so many letters
about the same thing. Different
approaches to the same emotional
fixation. Often, that's all it seemed
to be: An obsession that I'd chosen
to persue, over and over.

My sisters had lives through
undeniable hardship. It seemed
to me that all I had done was
recklessly throw blame in a
desperate attempt
to escape from myself.

Maybe we all felt this way,
which meant it didn't matter.
Or maybe what we felt was
the only thing that mattered.

Did I long for understanding?
Or only to be looked at?

Sometimes I knew,
so deep within myself,
that my evil thoughts had been
the cause of everything."

## Skids (below stony glade)

A letter which was never written or sent. It reads: 

"I AM SO SORRY. I KNEW EXACTLY WHAT I WAS DOING."

## Vivianna's glade

Veliform:
...

## Home (at farm)

A large snail with a striking pattern on its shell:
"(That day, I shivered in the morning
mist puring through the fields. I
couldn't remember leaving the house.)

(The world had moved again)

(From nowhere, panic gripped me for
minutes that I lost the ability to count.)

(Eventually, I found the outline of the
belief that things would right
themselves, and clutched it like a
stubborn child.)

(I drifted quietly through the mist.)"

## Misty area

Forgotten:
When the body is summoned,
The soul is forced to separate.

Fragments of lodestone.

Forgotten:
Electricity can allow the soul to speak again.

Forgotten:
With sufficient electricity, a new body can be made,
even in the absence of the magnetic skin.

Forgotten:
The World-Eater is a terrible beacon.

Forgotten:
Her body stolen from her...
For so long, she was alone.
In you, she recognized a familiar pain.
A creature trapped within its own soul.
Yearning for escape.

Forgotten:
Time here is difficult for us to inhabit correctly.

Forgotten:
The Wooden Dynon. She is weak.

Forgotten:
Isabelline,
don't be scared.

Towering forms loomed through the haze.

A knowing entered my mind:
Even the largest of the Dynon husks had only been a child.

Acres of young death.

(There were some hours I can't recall)

(After a time, I woke again in front of the house.)

(I found Thea working in the fields. She embraced me with trembling relief and told me that I had been missing for nine days.)

## Home (at farm)

An old gardening trowel of Thea's:
"Isabelline: I don't think of her as evil... I think there was a genuine sweetness within her.
Isabelline: You don't have to agree. But I truly believe that... well...
Thea: It's not simple. I understand.
Isabelline: Some days I think that I'm only inventing the hurt as some kind of excuse.
Thea: But as an excuse for what? What you feel is the most real part of all this.
Isabelline: Sympathy, I suppose...
Thea: It's not criminal to wish for understanding. There's still a feeling at the heart of it. It's clear that you're in pain.
Isabelline: Is it? How can you know that?
Thea: Because I know you, I think. And regardless, I trust you.
Isabelline: I don't wish any ill on my blood... But I can't be part of their world.
Thea: It sounds like you feel certain. That's all you need, I promise.
Isabelline: I've written letters to her...
Isabelline: Could you... keep them for me? I keep reading them and thinking about how things might've been...
Isabelline: In the city, whenever I'd see a girl with her mother I'd have to turn away. I never want to feel that loneliness ever again.
Thea: Of course."

## Fuel room

Haematite: 
The creature's soul was a perfect, ancient machine.
Holy and pure and observed by none.

Forgotten:
It's almost over. Very soon it won't hurt anymore.
It's not safe here any longer.

Some kind of scale from an unknown creature:
"Vivianna: There are walls.
Vivianna: I wish...
Vivianna: ...
Isabelline: Don't cry. I'm here.
Vivianna: This isn't making any sense...
Vivianna: There were always going to be walls.
Isabelline: I'm not certain I understand...
Vivianna: We just keep rotting and we can't even hold each other...
Vivianna: We're all too fragile.
Vivianne: And this world...
Isabelline: I'm here.
Vivianna: Everything is going to end soon."

Cordwood:
Cold.

Cenotaph:
CTSX7779, 7780, 7781.
Transient reduction 980+.
A terrible quiet under the world.

## Home (at farm)

A dirty scrap of cloth:
"Eilin: I'm not trying to wound you.
Isabelline: I don't understand how you'd like me to respond.
Eilin: I don't... want you to say anything...
Isabelline: If we're all going to hurt each other this way, then there is no safety here.
Isabelline: We make each other's sicknesses worse, and we die isolated. That much is clear to me now. I can't be trapped here any longer.
Eilin: What will you do? In the city?
Isabelline: Anything that doesn't require trust.
Eilin: I'm sorry I took such a tone with you... Since Thea left, I-
Isabelline: I don't feel safe here any longer. There's no place for me. Not in this world.
Eilin: I know that we're sick. But.,.. We have to help each other through this. We don't have anyone else... Isn't that what you always say?
Isebelline: I never had anyone. Not since mother, not since the city, not since I was fooled into the illusion of safety only to have it torn away and blamed for all the failings that you won't even acknowledge in yourselves.
Eilin: I want to do better...
Isebelline: You never do! Why am I blamed for all the anger you fail to predict? I always see it. A haze over everything, waiting to coalesce. I can't feel serenity for a second. Not one.
Eilin: Angel...
Isebelline: Clean that name from your mouth. I hope your bitterness swallows your soul.

I stayed in the city for fourteen days. I flooded my body with death. I cried until I woke with my eyes cracked and sore. And, true to my word, I gave my trust to no one."
When I returned to the property, Eilin was gone.

## Parlor - Isebelline's room

No return beyond this point.

## Rapid eye movement

Vivianna's voice cut through the air.

Vivianna Falllow:
She is weak. Come to the Tower of the Furnace.
The five of us will leave this world forever.

There was a terrible feeling of violent separation.

I woke with my heart racing and blood burning the insides of my cheeks.

# Saturday

There were flashes of dead time.
They seemed to come in waves.

Orchre Glass
- ????
- Vision
- R????

Miles of forest
- ??m
- Limbs
- Vis??

Current ve??el c????
- Rail???
- Corro??
- Limbs

?????g above

- Electric
- Dead
- Body

Isebelline we know

- You're
- A
- Liar

We did s? much for

- you
- No
- .

Blood
(I walked for hours or days. Intrusive thoughtts like a compass inside of my brain.)

- Blood
- Blood
- Blood

Is only
(Aching patterns spun through blood vessels of my eyes. I knew where I was going.)

- An
- Excuse
- .

## Sealed Road

When I was about fifteen, my mother and I left our country home for the city.

My mother was hired as a data shaft technician.

The work was hard on her. One day she came home more distraught than usual.

She told me that there had been an accident. Magnetic interfernce of some kind.

Something had pulled some of the arms directly across their plates, dozens of feet of archival data irreparably ruined.

The six uppermost plates had seen the worst of the damage.

The incident occured the same day of the Dynon sightings over the city.

The gouges from the data shaft's arme were perfect straight lines. North-West.

My mother lost her job.

We had never been close, but it was after that day that I decided to leave.

Half of it was the discomfort that I had always felt around her, and half of it was deciding to remove myself so she would not be burdened with caring for me while she already struggled to care for herself.

My mother had done so much right and wrong that I did not know any more how I should feel towards her.

So I ran.

## Vivianna's house

A sectioned box of moth corpses, carefully preserved.

The crumbling bookshelf was empty.

The forest outside the windows felt like it was holding its breath.

## Skids

The cradle is open.

Isabelline: Vi.. What's happening?

## The tower of the furnace

Vivianna: The World-Eater is opening a cleft.
Isabelline: Will the hurt finally stop?
Vivianna: We'll have safety. Fallow no more.
Isabelline: I haven't cared. Not for a very long time.
Vivianna: What do you wish for?
Isabelline: For everything to stop. I'm so exhausted.
Vivianna: You will rest. We'll all have another chance.
Isabelline: Something's wrong...
Vivianna: It'll be over soon. It's okay to be scared.
Isabelline: I don't want to feel this.
Vivianna: You won't, very soon.
Isabelline: I've struggled so much...
Eilin: I know, angel.
Isabelline: There's no place for me, is there?
Thea: Not in this world.
Thea: Soon, there will be.
Isabelline: Mother...

## Gate to the cleft

Forgotten: Because of the damage to her body, the signal is weak. You are being sent to a waystation where you'll calibrate the portal's second stage.

Forgotten: In each of the island's four shelters, there is a machine that must be maintained.

Forgotten: The machines must remain operational for four days. On the fifth day, this will all be behind you.

For too many years, I did not know why I felt the rot.

It hadn't been there, at first. It grew carefully. A soft decay.

On the day that I remember, with many unremembered before it.

I felt my soul turn to wood, warping and splitting, an empty chamber exposed to the air.

The water would swell its grain, soften its pores, as water does, invite upon it spores, mildew, blights of tangential illness.

My protector.

Her hands.

Remarks like weightless downy plumes, like passively observing an unusual insect.

That chamber could never again be sealed.

On the say I know she remembers, I struggled in the fright of my senses' chaos. Her voice carried only anger and blame.

My protector.

My wooden soul trembled and cracked.

The country air was hot with a fear I did not understand for too many years.

Mother, why?

(but no answer came)

# The island beyond the cleft

A familiar shape stands huge against the sky. I recognize nothing else around me.

The weathered cap from an old pen. It's just junk.

Some kind of antenna assembly. Wood and glass and unfamiliar metals.

The jagged remains of a well.

Wood meticulously bent and carved. Shiny with a hard, saplike coating.

The water stretches on to the horizon with no other shore in sight.

## Underground

It takes me a moment to realize there is a girl in front of me.

She stares at me, brow furrowed. She seems startled.

???: How did you get here?
Isabelline: The tower. I'm not sure...
???: Tower? That old wreck in the ocean?
Isabelline: Yes. I think so.
???: What were you doing out there?
Isebelline: I came from... somewhere else... I'm not sure.
???: That tower's just garbage.
???: It's an old art piece by the drifters who lived out here.
???: What's your name?
Isanelline: It's...
Isanelline: Harriet
Anya: Harriet... That's a pretty name. I'm Anya.

We talk for hours.

It is easy. Something about her makes me feel grounded.

I am terrified.

Like me, she'd run from her parents.

Like mine, they'd understood in their own way, which made it less like running and more like redefining, a stumbling cycle of new beginnings, a constant obsession with starting over.

For me, it had been my mother. For her, her father.

We seem to understand something rooted deep, though it has no name, and though we both seem to be very afraid of each other.

It is a new fear.

The sky of the island is empty.

## Day 2

Harriet: You said you came from a city?
Anya: Sure. Grandfield. It's on the mainland.
Anya: It's a miserable place.
Harriet: I lived in a city too.
Anya: So you said. What was it like?
Harriet: I'm not sure I ever should have left.
Anya: Hmmm.

Harriet: Do you get lonely here?
Anya: Yeah.
Harriet: I used to fantasize about living alone like this.
Anya: Sure. Everyone does. But there's no easy way out.
Harriet: I used to... live with my sisters...
Anya: Yeah.
Anya: It's hard feeling attached to something broken.

A bent hairpin. It's just junk.

Anya: I'm surprised these things still work.
Anya: Well, they light up anyway. Probably nothing else.
Anya: Why are you so interested in them?
Harriet: They're supposed to help me.
Anya: You're very strange.

## Underground

A journal: ...

A pot or small basin fashioned from hardened sap.

## Day 3

Anya: Are you going to leave for the city?
Harriet: Not for the city. But I'll be gone in two days.
Anya: Where?
Harriet: I don't know. She said my systers are still...
Harriet: I...
Harriet: I don't know.

It's a tiny metal spring. Rusted stiff. It's just junk.


Anya: So... The tower, huh?
Harriet: Do you believe me?
Anya: Yeah. I mean... Yeah. Guess I do.
Harriet: You think I'm strange?
Anya: I'm not all that certain I know how to read you.
Anya: It's almost a relief though. To believe you, I mean.
Anya: As a kid I wanted so bad to believe in other places.
Anya: I guess not that much has changed.

Perhaps part of a broken key ring. It's just junk.

Harriet: You grow your own food?
Anya: Mostly. Kohlrabi, some carrots. I fish, too.
Harriet: K... Ko...
Anya: Kohlrabi. It's a root. These wider leaves, here.

## Day 4

Harriet: Tomorrow I'll be gone.
Anya: Alright.
Harriet: Are you sad?
Anya: A little. But I'll be fine.
Anya: I hope whatever place you end up is good for you.
Harriet: Thank you for your kindness.

Anya: How do you think it'll happen?
Harriet: I don't know. Arriving here, there was... light...
Harriet: So many emotions at once.
Harriet: Like suddenly remembering every dream I'd ever had, but also remembering that they were just dreams.
Anya: That sounds sad.
Harriet: I suppose.

It looks like part of the face of an old pocket watch. It's just junk.

Harriet: Anya?
Anya: Hmm?
Harriet: Did your family live in the city, too?
Anya: Oh, no. I came to the city to get away from them.
Anya: But the idea of family kind of follows you around.
Anya: I thought I just wanted a better one, for a while...
Anya: But family always finds a way to hurt.
Anya: It's desperation disguised as something profound.
Harriet: I'm sorry.
Anya: You seem kind. I bet people tell lots of lies about you.

Anya: Mmm.

Harriet: Thank you for your kindness.

## Day 9

Anya: Are you going to stay?
Harriet: I don't know.

(the end)