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be done before I could completely smother her in dream.
And I would be a fool to count Mister Hide among the
tombstones.
The road to Willard was a long one, and nicely decorated.
Shade trees lined the trampled paths that looped around thick
stands of thorns, and the sun fell in honeyed pools which
made the day mercifully tolerable. Granted, the Deadworld
expresses no pure, unfiltered beauty, yet the woods—these
woods in particular—hung close to bygone dreams, for
reasons I would not care to fathom for fear of spoiling their
secrets.
I’d forged my bones from mystery, and so the suspense
of my journey was especially revitalizing, growing wonder
as potent as the hemlock I crushed underfoot. I made stops,
of course, at places hewn from the shrouded wisdom of the
Darkness, when men and woman existed without pretense
or pride—our great meditation of the shadow within us all.
One location was especially handsome, shaped as much
from forbidden imagination as from stone—The Grey
Crowd. Unfortunately, due to society’s custom of burying
the dead, the skins that once dressed the thousands of
limestone statues were removed and placed into the earth.
But even without their clothing, the statues still lurched
purposelessly through the woods, which I took as a criticism
of life before the Darkness—rock-solid souls weighting
down dead skins, men and women stumbling through the
world like listless corpses. Despite the statues’ current state
of undress, I was glad to know that a tradition had sprung
up shortly after the close of the Darkness. On the eve of that
grand day’s anniversary, the statues had been found year
after year once again repossessed of their skins, if only those
of animals. And despite certain constabulary efforts to quell
the practice of this new ritual, it had persisted. There was
once an idea to demolish the statues, ridding the world of
their biting reproach once and for all. But when the skins of
those persons most vocal about supporting the effort were
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