A labyrinth of dead ends conserved in clear amber
I fall beside you, exhausted. My clothes are torn, my skin bruised. My breath burns ragged, tearing my chest, and my blood pumps so loud it feels like hammer blows behind my eyes. The pain hasn't hit yet, but I can tell I have broken ribs. I can't be sure but I think most of the blood on me is my own
A vast, labyrinthine castle floats in deep space. It's long abandoned by whatever agency constructed it and partially in ruin, but still functional. Runic engines thousands of years old hum, providing heat and gravity and keeping the air in. Managed ecosystems run wild: the roots and leaves of strange plants are everywhere, wound in thick ropes or tightly-knit nets, and small animals originally meant, it's thought, to recycle debris scurry and scamper through grooves and cracks.
I wanted to dig my hands into the soft, moist ground, to shovel it aside and sink my fingers deep. I wanted to burrow through the dirt and soil, to slither and twist through the secret, wet passageways of the earth known only to mole and worm, to slip through the cracks in the unyielding bedrock, and merge with the cool, clear groundwater.
Thirsty tongues licking at cracked lips, dry, dry, so very dry. Pain, terrible pain, wounds scabrous and sticky; ignoring it, eyes trained forward so as to avoid the blinding hot sun directly overhead. Limbs touching sand, crawling, slithering, stalking forwards. Hungering.
There is a city at the edge of the Mauve Sea. It has five districts, five Ends, each of them not in a direction, but a direction. They mix together at their edges in a fractal patchwork, send pseudopods and feelers past each other, and grow exclaves inside one another. They are only a little apart — a millimetre off, half a second out of sync — but enough.