I studied the dead city, inventing the names of those who must have lived there, making up details about their lives and histories based on the ancient artifacts I found, or any thought-archives still working after a million years of non-use. Soon I was hallucinating them, telling them my tale, and these phantoms seemed as real to me as my life before. I had a celebration when I turned Two-and-Thirty, for, at that date, I had spent as many years in solitary prison as I had in freedom up until then. I was a maiden of sixteen when they buried me alive in here. I intended to end my celebration by hanging myself from the chandelier of some ancient magnate’s feasting hall I’d found, and I had the harness ready for my neck, when the imaginary people I’d been eating with asked me to wait, and the ghosts I saw asked me, first, to tell them the tale of how I came here. I have dreams that I am riding swiftly through the Land of Darkness, on the back of a monster, with my brother’s corpse slung across the great beast’s neck.
