Back. From. The Sewer.

I had expected the so little of the City. That my kin would only be found running in gutters or shooting in veins. That the all the gadgets and beasts had died, and all the only spirits that hadn't fled were ones who toyed with the ambitions of humans, and the only ambitions the humans had were to defeat each other.

Instead I ... well, yes it was a harsh, hot place. But as I glided and soared above the city, the slyphs were civil beneath my wings and most of all I could hear the permeating hum of the sublime struggle of millions of lives. This is what I mean when I say humans have souls. They push up like weeds through cement cracks, and leave everything changed. And the gadgets were so very much alive, only ancient, huge, patient, and they moved with the most impossible sure and slow of upstrokes. It wasn't death, it was life. Difficult life, obstructed life, but still vibrant.

My Twin and I parted easily. This sense of the end of things keeps repeating without a sense of things beginning-- it's almost exactly the opposite of the feeling of waking up from nodding off, in that you seem to keep finding yourself waking up, but you don't remember falling asleep. But we remembered how the Sevenfold Tree had been at once obliterated and preserved in us, and so it would continue to be.

The bloodstain continues to spread. On Saturday the stain turned into a spot with rays, like comets streaming down my arm. Today the rays are stiff and thickened, and I can feel where the end of it detours deep into my heart, and even now I can feel the tip of that runner lodged in the chambers of my heart. It colors my dreams, too. My thumbs too have erupted with tiny pittings that weep and bleed. Clearly some salamandrine curse was left by that poor kid getting scraped off the sidewalk.