First, he had returned, an occasion of merit and celebration.
There had been the folly, a discarding of the rubbish when the merriment abated.
These acts bred truth even here in Golben, where the air reeked of sulfur and stagnant mud.
The back of your head aches. The world swims. All is darkness.
The ground is cold and wet beneath you. Unseasonably. Your head throbs.
There is the scent of mold, of fungus, of blood, of gore. The sounds are strange.
With effort, you open your eyes.
The last thing Glenn Burnie might have remembered was the sky of Golben falling down upon him like so many pieces of shattered glass. Disembodied hands had become braces around his legs, dragging him into an inevitability: the ground had become ravenous for him, an entity desperate to consume him, wrench him into its depths. The last thing he’d uttered had been a cry for Catch, a desperate hope that might be answered by a name alone.
When his eyes snapped open through scabs of mucus to stare at the sky swirling like a child’s scrawl of sloppy blues and feather-edged clouds, the word was still on his tongue. A cry that transcended a nightmare, pushed through the membrane of the false and found reality.
Hunger clawed at the inside of Glenn Burnie's guts. Starvation. It sucked at him, not like a small and menial urge, but a racking pain, a burning, hollow scream inside of his body – as if he’d not eaten for days, weeks. His tongue was a swollen eel in his mouth, as thick as leather and wrinkled by the sun.
THIRTY-TWO DAYS, said the shadow in his mind.
His skin was red and boiled over with blisters as if he’d laid for days without shade, flakes of white skin fallen away from sun-scorched dermis.
THIRTY-TWO DAYS SINCE YOUR IMPRISONMENT BEGAN.
The governor’s muscles had once been healthy and wiry things, but now, his sinews were like leaden cores in his limbs, the malnourished flesh highlighting the thinness of his arms and legs. He was windchime-thin, could have had played rattling songs against his bones. His legs throbbed with strain and agony; they begged for this rare rest, this chance to know stillness and relief.
THIRTY-TWO DAYS SINCE MINE BEGAN.
A memory. A memory inside a memory, a truth hidden in a lie. A fading candleflame of thought forced upon the governor.
A hunger flared in his belly and twisted within him, grinding against his ribs, begging him to answer it; the hedgerows were endless, one unremarkable corridor leading to the next, and the next. Freedom awaited around the next corner. No -- the next. No -- the next, and that which came after, and after, and if only he could find something simple to eat...
Glenn Burnie's hands were the bloody maps of torment and desperation. The skin had been flayed in ribbons from his fingertips, and several of his fingernails were no more, replaced only by the bleak and dirt-strewn divots where nails should have been--
Scrambling at the hard soil, scraping his fingers on the minute shards of stone until they went red. There was the elbow of a rock there, visible and gray, and as old as war. A weapon. His fingernail caught on the lip of it, ripped with a screeching tear from the base of his middle digit, leaving a strip of torn flesh and jagged nail-shard over the soft, wrinkled skin beneath.
The stone would do. When he dislodged it, clenched it in his bleeding fingers, he turned to swing it--
A quilt was upon him where he lay at the meeting of hedgerows; there was an odor of something sweet, an aroma that pried at his nostrils and begged him to follow it -- a real sensation, not muted even by his damage.
Boiled turnips. Oversalted broth. A stew.
If Glenn turned his head, he'd come to realize several very sudden revelations.
He sat where the ordeal began, well before he'd found the Storyteller, long prior to the mirrorkin.
YOU SAW THE STORYTELLER OF WEEKS AGO, THE DAY SHE AWAKENED [stirred] HERE AS A PRISONER [captive]. A VEIL FOR A FRAGILE MIND, AS WAS IT ALL.
All around him were sprawled hundreds, thousands of footsteps impressed in the cracked soil. They wound about one another, paths retraced, directions altered, the evidence of a walking confusion. And each print of heel was the same, some hardened in mud after days and weeks, others as fresh as this very morning.
LOOK UPON THE CORPSE [remains, shell] OF THE CREATURE THAT BROUGHT ME TO THESE DEAD LANDS.
Against one of the hedgerows, crumbled over itself, was a dessicated corpse; its eyes were gaping holes, its black complexion faded mottled and gray. Bulbous swells on the limbs promised the gasses of decay might they be poked or prodded. The cheek was misshapen, gravity drawing down a sagging visage until the mouth was a yawning pit. Fat black flies danced on the skin.
Audmathus, the bootblack guide in the Golben of Glenn Burnie's mind, rotting only several meters from where governor had first seen him.