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absence. It was the corpse of a lover that still moved, if only
by the actions of the insects which feasted upon it. And so
it was with Willard—dead but for the lingering madness of
lunatics, scavenging for purpose unfathomable and fantastic.
All of this was greatly to my liking, as even undead dreams
could only sweeten my journey across a listless world of
bottommost imagination.
I continued deeper into the structure, where the darkness
rejoined the silence beyond the echoes. I encountered many
wide empty rooms, most of them hungry. I could feel them
yearning to be filled with wheeling delusion and hopeless
screams. Starvation had made them desperate, causing them
to neglect their tenuous alliance with prosaic reality—they
breathed with abject yearning, sweating from years of forced
withdrawal, hoping I might cross into their aching bellies by
means of open doors. I steered clear of the most famished
spaces, choosing my path among the least threatening of
passages, those places where hunger had starved them into
passivity.
I rose upward via a stairway that swept out from the side
of a wall, mindlessly corkscrewing around various statues
and pillars. I was eventually led to a room speckled with
reedy minarets that stuck up from the floor like jagged teeth.
Strangely, the miniature towers were afforded no view of the
sky, only a rambling brick and mortar ceiling painted with the
likeness of one, spattered with the images of floating semi-
human shapes, black against the grey firmament. It was at this
point I detected a thick plume of silence rising from a small
door. It was an oddly placed door, recessed almost invisibly
between a pillar and a statue of a man holding a snake in his
left hand and dangling an infant from his right. Inside was
a progressively widening passage, opening finally into what
appeared to be a library, of sorts. Yet instead of books, there
were only shabby moldering journals, each one placed upon
the neatly lined shelves with a mother’s care. The room itself
was labyrinthine, made from a dark stone and complexed
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