A magician took up three ornaments, one by one, and breathed life into them. It was to impress his host, a lady who giggled with joy as she watched the porcelain figurines dance about her mantlepiece. It was a trio of cats he had brought to life. They pounced upon one another, clinking gently, chasing their china tails and mewling at the towering figures who watched them. Sneaking a glance at his host, the magician saw her eyes shine with delight. Sensing her interest growing, both in him and his craft, he looked for something more impressive to whisper sentience into.

Casting his eyes around the busy living room, full of rustic furniture and crowded with miscellany, his eyes landed upon a grandfather clock. The magician placed his wine on the table and slid his fingers down the front of the dusty wood, inspecting the patterns of gilded silver that adorned it. He inspected the creature sat above the clock. A smile tweaked his lips and he sighed. It was perfect. He beckoned the lady over and stood on his tip toes, breathing life into the clockwork owl that stood atop the grandfather clock. He stepped back and waited. The lady wriggled up against him, all bright and giddy.

The owl cocked its head and shivered its wings. Light glinted off them in the candlelight. It was made of brass and steel, with layered plates for wings, dulled from years without care. Its eyes were mismatched; one a black opal, the other a miniature clock that kept time with the grandfather clock itself. It had been a family heirloom and curio since the lady could remember, though she had not looked closely upon it for many years. The owl leapt from the clock and flapped its wings hard, shaking off dust. They sounded like knives being sharpened, sliding fiercely against one another. It soared about the room before returning to its perch.

The lady’s laugh rang like windchimes and she leapt upon the magician, his cantrips soon forgotten in a fog of lust. The combined magics of wine and the late hour took them.
The cats continued to play upon their mantlepiece until exhaustion, and their chiming noises eventually stopped. They curled up together, the trio entwined. The magic would leave them by morning and the three would become a new ornament, a memento of the lady’s night of wonder. She would find them in the morning and smile. The magician would be gone by then, as he always was, never to be seen again. He changed his face often.

Time slipped past. The grandfather clock chimed out a late hour. The lady and her lover stirred, but did not wake.

The clockwork owl had sat, motionless and forgotten, observing them with its ever turning eye, silent. It pondered questions, something a bewitched thing never normally did. In his excitement, the magician had breathed too much of himself into it. He had breathed a desire into the owl that he did not intend; one he had kept buried deep within himself.

The owl needed an answer to a question it did not understand. It cast itself from the grandfather clock and flew from the window. It was searching for something, though it was not quite sure why.

Rain glanced across its wings and head as it flew, curiously watching the monsters below. They charged in file, eyes beaming with light, and screamed at one another from time to time. Some slept outside houses, rain crashing over their backs.

The owl did not recognise these things. However, it soon saw something it did know. Landing on the rooftop of a terraced housing block, it turned its opal eye to the night sky. The moon hung bright. This, it recognised. It did not know how, or why, but the name of this vast white symbol in the sky was known to her.

Her?

With a flare of awareness, she knew that’s what she was. Staring up at its lunar magnificence, she felt a sudden rush of personality. A burning desire for identity. This felt important, though she did not know the words to place what this was, nor how to make it concrete. Yet she felt that if she found the thing she sought she would know herself.

She took to the air again, searching out the magician’s long lost love. Etheric ribbons pulled at her, drew her north. A thaumaturgic connection, accidentally gifted in the magician’s breath, that drew the owl towards his erstwhile lover.
The magician woke with a start. Something deep within him felt empty. He rose from the bed and quietly dressed, taking care not to wake his sleeping host. He did not look back as he slipped from the bedroom.

He paced the apartment, deep in thought. Patting at his pockets, he found his wallet was missing. Thinking back through the haze of wine, he remembered he had placed it upon the mantlepiece. He found it beside the newly formed ornament, a trio of cats entwined. looking at his watch, he saw it was almost four.

The magician crept to the kitchen and ran a glass of water. This feeling in him was like a thirst. Deep and wrenching and a necessity. He sipped at the tepid liquid, half-smiling as he thought about his host.

The grandfather clock chimed.

A memory sparked in the magician’s brain. He finished his water and crept to the grandfather clock.

His eyes grew wide when he saw the absent space above the clockface and he rushed to grab his jacket. He felt what he had lost.
Through the sky the owl cut, rain now lashing down through the streets of London. Bright lights twinkled all around. She flew lower until she was barely above the street lamps, where she could inspect the staggering few who bustled and blundered their way past King’s Cross station.

Landing on a sign to get a more considered look, she peered at the passersby through her timepiece eye. Since she had been gifted life, the hands had steadily grown faster.

The people below blurred before her. Their faces were at once young and fresh, smooth skinned and haggard, wrinkled, like crumpled paper. At once babes and ancients. Some held one age more than another, some only fleetingly old, others only occasionally young. All of them were marked by the rainfall and blurred at least somewhat by time. The owl saw them as their manifest selves and through her eye chronologic. The magician, she recalled, had looked old and strained, particularly when compared to his youthful host.

The owl cocked her head with a delicate clinking sound and watched the passersby, perched with one leg slightly bent. A group of women, gaudy and painted, staggered past, lips full red and eyes near the same. Their most common aspect was young, infantile, with faces smooth as plastic. They were whooping and wailing and deliriously shrieking to one another. All but one. The owl watched her closely. She stood behind the rest, joining in the revelry, but perhaps not so keenly. Her face was not young often. It was mostly ancient and her hair shone silver in the rain. Her eyes were as dull as her friends’ were bright. As one of her compatriots stumbled to the kerb, and the gang shrieked with laughter, this woman shook her head, just slightly.

The owl cocked her head back the other way as she watched the group disappear into the distance. Through her opal eye, they had all seemed alike. Young and happy. The final one, aged beyond her surface years, old and wise and cynical in her heart, recalled something in the owl. She seemed close to the magician’s lost love, in aesthetic as well as soul. The owl felt close to her, somehow.

She decided to follow and prepared to leap from her perch, metal wings stretched wide and ready, when she shuddered. Her wings felt taut and slow, and she hesitated. The magic breathed into her was more great than the magician had intended, yet it ebbed away with each passing moment.

Her timepiece eye span ever faster. Then it spied something that struck the owl as peculiar.

A man in a hooded top, jeans, and white trainers up to the ankle. He was walking through a gate at the end of the road, arms held close to his body, lightly shivering. The owl stared at him through both eyes; he did not blur, not as the others did. There was a shimmer to him, a youthful essence that glistened, but he never aged further than his present self.

This held the owl’s attention. The man closed the gate behind him and walked onward. The owl spread her stiffening wings and followed. It was the same route she was being drawn to, anyway.

She glanced at the other people she flew over. They all blurred from fresh babes to taut-skinned revenants, with their closest aspects shining clearest and most constant. Not a single person matched the hooded man who had disappeared through the gates. Not a single person was without the withered face of death. Even those who would die young, she saw their skin decay and rot, as it would once they were in the ground.

The owl flew over the gate and followed. She felt the etheric string pulling her onward.

She was close.

The magician hurried through the rain and followed the path of the owl. He had whispered arcane words of finding to the grandfather clock and he could now see the trail the owl had left behind, hanging in the air like multicoloured pigment.

The hollowness inside him, he understood now. It had taken him some time to shake off the haze of sleep and alcohol, but he could tell already where the owl’s path was headed.

As he rounded the corner and saw the graveyard, tears mingled with the raindrops that ran down his face.



The hooded man stood over a tombstone, scratching his beard. The owl landed in the branches of a tree behind and turned her eyes on him, all curious and intrigued by his lack of aging. The thaumaturgic string that had drawn her here was still present, but no longer pulling. She had arrived where she needed to be. Where the magician’s desire had drawn her.

This man was a magician also, an artist who held sway over life and death. He did not age before the owl’s eye, because he would never age again. Not since he had grown into his craft 100 years earlier had he aged a day. He leant forward, hands planted on the wet grass, and whispered to the grave before him. He breathed life through the soil and into the corpse below.

“Hey!” cried the owl’s maker. He was standing a few dozen feet away. Lightning forked high above.
The necromancer scrambled to his feet and ran without a glance, kicking a bunch of flowers to one side and racing off between the graves and into the gloom of the graveyard. He knew, given his dark craft, it was best to simply disappear when caught. No words would do as an explanation. The magician followed for a dozen steps, waving a fist. He returned to the grave.

Standing above it, he felt nothing. He had wept en route, once he realised where he was headed, but this was more through anger at his own blunder more than any great sorrow. Rain continued to hammer all around and lightning spat across the sky, lighting the graveyard bright.

The owl watched him. Her wings were increasingly stiff and she knew she would fly no more, the magic inside her was leaking away too fast. She leapt from foot to foot and leant forward.

The magician looked around and found the pigment trail leading up into the tree. He looked up to see the owl perched, head cocked. He whispered arcane words.

The owl juddered and felt her life, born of his hidden desire, borrowed, ebb towards the magician.

As this desire returned to him and the emotions that lived within it, the magician sank to his knees. Leaning forward, he took the sodden flowers and placed them back against the tombstone. Adjusted them so they sat as she would have liked. It must have been her mother, he thought. She had always come here often, to sit with her daughter. She always brought flowers. She must have continued to do so, even after all these years.

“Melissa,” he whispered. The desire was almost completely returned to him now and emotions rioted through him. His voice cracked as he spoke. He took several deep breathes, fighting back sobs. It had been many years since he had been here. He had tried his best to forget.

The owl’s vision dimmed as she watched through her timepiece eye. Before her, the magician aged rapidly. A hundred faces, aging in an instant. Where earlier that night his many faces had been fresh and handsome, they were now grey and crumbling. The ashes of a burnt out hearth, once alight with passion, now long dead.

The magician wiped the rainfall and tears from his face and stared in the direction the necromancer had ran. He had not recognised him. A rogue thaumaturge from the far side of London, perhaps, or even further afield? He knew everyone in these parts. They knew him and his tragedy also; none of them would have come here. He wondered how it was the necromancer had decided on Melissa’s grave as a plaything. Was it just chance?

He looked down at the earth below and tried to picture his wife. It had been so many years since she passed and he had done his best to forget. There was a time he had visited her grave daily, but the pain had been too much.

He had done his best to forget. Wine helped dull the guilt of his indiscretions.

The magician pounded the ground with fists and wailed. He sobbed and spluttered apologies. How he should have done more. How he should have changed things. How he was sorry for his life since her passing.

The owl stood still, an ornament once more, protected from the rain by a cover of leaves.

There was a scratching noise, deep within the ground, just barely audible over the rain.

Five white worms pushed through the wet soil. They wriggled alive. More scratching followed, and another five pushed through the ground.

The magician stepped back, jaw slack.

More white erupted from the earth. A skeleton dragged itself out of the ground, inch by inch. Covered in groundmuck and with worms dangling, the skeleton stood before him. Staring straight at him. The necromancer had performed an art few can. He had brought a life back from the dead, a skill the magician had long wished for.
Though not like this.

The magician looked upon the bones of his wife and he cried. Half of her skull was missing, as were most of her teeth. A skeleton fractured. A skeleton covered in filth. Her skull was half full with soil and tufts of grass sat upon her shoulders and head. It was his wife, Melissa.

She approached him with wavering, clumsy footsteps, and lay a skeletal hand upon his shoulder. He fiercely shrugged it off and, head in hands, continued to sob. She took a step back and waited. His face may have changed, but she still knew him, somehow.
Some minutes passed.
The magician’s eyes were red and sore. He had not wept like this since that night they had found her in the middle of a road, body broken. It has been a night like this, with hammering rainfall and howling winds. She had been out with friends and a young man made a poor decision, thinking himself safe to drive despite a night of drink.

He had buried the image of her on the ground, limbs stretched out, deep inside him, but it came flashing back now. Stark and red.

Melissa’s skeleton waited. The magician forced himself to look at it. At her.

The skeleton was stood, one leg slightly bent, as was her way. It was her, certainly. The magician shook his head and tried to think.

He was a powerful man with great skill in the art. True, he did not command life and death, the dark path only few dare to take, but he had many talents. The necromancer had returned his wife to the world, an unwitting favour. The rest? He could do the rest, surely?

All she needed was a vessel, something greater than this ghastly white figure before him. One that had recently possessed spirit. The magician cast his eyes around the graveyard, but shook his head. A broken monster of a risen corpse, no-matter how new and fresh, would not do. Not for his wife. Not for Melissa.

His eyes landed upon the owl. Lying dormant in the wet grass, face down, hard and cold and lifeless. The desire for his wife that had given it temporary life now returned to the magician. Though the owl was a mere ornament once more, something puissant still lingered within it.

The magician blew his nose, beckoned the skeleton closer, and began to whisper once more. A stream of abstract words, so similar to those he had used the night before, those used to breath something of himself into something inanimate. Yet these words contained so much more.

As he finished the words, the skeleton fell in a heap on the wet grass. The magician let loose a hacking sob and laid a hand on an ivory wrist.

The owl shivered. It stood, cocked its head and stretched its wings. Light glinted off them in the moonlight. She spread her wings wide, scattering droplets of water, and took flight. She swooped in a wide circle, then back to the magician’s shoulder. She looked into him through her timepiece eye and he looked at her. She stretched out a wing and patted the magician on the cheek.

His face was young once more. No longer ancient, no longer grey and haggard. But youthful and happy, as it had been, all those years ago.

Just as she remembered it.

We completed our crossing of the blighted patch just after midday, by my estimation. The sun was beating down, but not as heavy as when we’d been stranded on those vast, flat plains of cremated earth. Her rosy glow was cut in half by the feather hands of clouds that reached over the china blue mountains in the distance, and ethereal shadows played long and delicate on the scant greenery.

The two of us had set off perhaps two weeks ago now, and Daniel clung to his horse as the drenched cloth of his shirt clung to his back. The pair of them were nothing but bones draped with fabric, and the dust stuck fast to their lower extremities. Every clockwork jerk of the horse’s leg sent fine clouds of the stuff billowing out, only for it to spiral slowly back into place. The shallow breeze from the mountains rolled over the plains and breathed a kind of life back into my skin, turning warm stale sweat into a shivery embrace reminded my body to breathe.

My horse’s hooves were covered by the same pestilence as Daniel’s, and it wasn’t likely that she’d be able to carry for more than a few days. We had found ourselves on a path of sorts, a thoroughfare that didn’t appear oft-trodden, but to my eyes it looked like it had seen more footfall than the dozen other barely legible trails that crisscrossed the surrounding dirt. As our steeds wearily lurched forward, I squinted at the horizon from underneath the brim of my hat. The salt and the sand in the corner of my eyes stung as I tried to see something that had made the journey worthwhile, but there was nothing but scrubland and a few scattered trees.

As I swivelled in my saddle to check the periphery, Daniel’s skeletal profile began to jerk as he violently coughed. His fit lasted around a minute, and his horse ceased its forward motion and began to pad the ground in panic, flinching its sinewy neck as Daniel’s dusty hands sought purchase on its weathered chest. The fit subsided, and he turned to regard me with red, limpid eyes.

“Ethan, we gotta stop. I gotta stop.”

“No use in persuading you otherwise?”

He forced himself upright in his saddle, nearly toppling off as the dead weight of his head caused him to lurch towards me. Licking his chapped lips, he shook his head at me. I offered him a slug from our last flask of water, and gave it a shot anyway.

“Listen. I reckon, if that old ordnance survey back in Collar Springs was any good, there’s a settlement a few more miles east. Heck, I hear they even used to have a place here called the City of Gardens. It’s worth it. I promise.”

Daniel shifted uneasily, and mumbled back

“Collar Springs used to be green too, at the foot of lush mountains. But you saw it. They’re blue, but they’re dead too. It’s all the trick of the light. We crossed blight to get here, but even the greenest places on the maps are drier’n hell now.”

“You just want to set down here and die then?”

He spat, a marvel considering the state of his dry, dying body.

“No. I say we set down here and rest for a few damn hours.”

There was no point arguing. Dying or not, Daniel was a stubborn piece of shit at the best of times. Knowing he would probably choke to death in the next few days if we didn’t find a prodigious amount of moisture wasn’t going to encourage him. He’d rather stick his heels in and die on his own terms than in the middle of the scorch.

“Fine. We’ll kick on until those trees up in the distance. AIn’t any use talking to you.”

“Hell, I could say the same about you Ethan. You’ve killed me, convincing me to come this way. You’re a fuckin’ dreamer/”

“You knew it, you had every chance to say to hell with it, but you still came.”

Daniel tired a smirk, but it turned into a wince.

“Well, I just wish I had the guts to dream. Closest I’ll ever get is following you.”

---

We rode on for around an hour before coming to the knotted copse of trees. I’d seen faded pictures of trees, fat and sprawling, leaves too many to count. These twisted shadows were memories of trees, their branches angled straight like the legs of an upturned beetle, leaves pallid and frail. I had decided at a young age to set out and find somewhere in these great wastes that still grew. Somewhere that sustained without the help of machines. I’d seen fledgling plants growing low and humble in the dirt, kept alive by the concerted efforts of biologists and machines that pampered them with powdered nutrients and any moisture we could afford, but I was desperate to see the majesty of a plant that had lived a life as long as a man’s. This was the reason I was seen as a dreamer, though people here hesitant to call it impossible. No one had ventured to the central wilds and returned, though people knew that life grew with a curious vigour on the cusp on the harshest areas.

The sun was almost fully obscured behind the western mountains, and Daniel lay on his sheets, propping himself up on his bag as I dug around for the few supplies I had left over. Found the metal box, and prised it open, retrieving two wads of jerky. As the sun lost its hold on the mountains, we sat and chewed our food by the fire we’d made, the brittle wood burning quick and hot in the twilight. I propped myself up like my partner, and turned to him

“I know you think I’m mad. I think maybe I’m mad too. I just… I got this compulsion to get closer to the middle. They say no one’s ever come back, but I know for a fact people have got damn close and turned around.”

He chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then craned his neck toward me

“Your old Uncle you mean?”

“Well, him’n a few others. They said they’d been up to the cusp. They said farms dotted a lot of the land past the blighted regions and I’ve even seen a photo of him working at a farm. Could be anywhere, but I ain’t seen farms like it on all my circuits of the coast.”

Daniel sighed

“Ethan, your Uncle came black blind and madder than a sack of rats. Said he’d seen biblical shit. The kind of stuff they wrote about in sand blasted countries thousands of years ago. The kind of stuff they said would save us from the heat, but it ain’t done us a jot of good.”

I turned to look at the sky and crossed my arms

“Why’d you bother coming then?”

“Well, I seen the picture of him on the farm. You’re right, it ain’t anywhere near the coast. Water there is thick enough you can near enough walk on it, but he’s stood by plants that come up to his knees at least. And I believe what I see. I think anyone who says they’ve been past the edge is a liar, but I reckon there’s a life to be had somewhere out here if you’re brave enough to cross the bli-”

He stopped and began to hack and cough again, dust blossoming off his shaking limbs. I looked on as a worm of guilt slid through my bowels. After a few awful snapping motions, he coughed a black gout of blood onto the back of his hand, and stared at it with his dry red eyes for a few moments before wiping it on his thigh.

“Daniel you-”

He looked right at me and shook his head.

“Don’t you start. I knew it’d be hell getting here. I’ve never felt heat like that. Never been so dry. Fuck. I’d be one of those hundreds of husks we saw crossing the blight if it wasn’t for you. It’s my own fault I fell in that shit, and you yanked me outta there without even thinking about your own skin, so don’t start.”

He was shaking, and the dust that caked his arms shimmered as the light from the fire cast a warm glow on his face. Working his bag into more comfortable position, he lay down properly, and pulled his rags over his twitching shoulders.

“No point in going back now anyway. We either find a farm, or we starve out here I guess. I’d rather find a farm, so I think we oughta sleep for a bit.”

“You’re right. And I know you hate to hear it, but I’m sorry. I am.”

“Too late for that, you son of a bitch.”

I could hear the smile in his voice, and I welled up a little as it was broken by another choking wheeze.

I forced my own bag into a more welcoming shape and lay down as well, staring up at the sketches of clouds that still sailed across the dead sky. It never rained for more than a few seconds at a time now, but no one knew why. So much water floated around up there, but there was no way of getting at it. No one had flown in years, the last person to fly was some lady who flew south. They said she was braver than any man, willing to fly into some godforsaken tempest just to see if there was any way through the southern squall, but she never came back.

My dad had told me stories that his dad had told him, about all the flying and sailing people did back when there was power and water. He said they treated it like it was natural, that no one had even thought to plan for a world where it wouldn’t happen. He said there were even stories about the world falling down and choking on its own dirt, but no one thought it’d happen. I find it hard to believe, but apparently that’s how it was.

Our family were lucky, in that they’d always lived in farmland, and the transfer from what life used to be, to what it is now, didn’t really come as all that a great of a shock to them, but my Uncle said he’d seen people go wild when he was a kid. The bigger the city, the madder it went. I’ve seen them from a distance, but they fenced most of them off. The last great act of production this place undertook was the construction of great fences and walls to seal off the worst of the blight, and the worst of the madness. Uncle said no one was to blame, that the sickness spread through people much like it spread through the dirt, but by the time he was telling me this, he was crippled, blind, and half deaf.

He told me stories of men he’d met that claimed they were from some of the worst hit cities when people were tearing each other up. Men who walked the plains sucking on bone marrow, thin crazed, but with a spark in their eye that showed they were still more or less human. This was always follows by a passage from the book he called “the good ‘un” the Bible that almost everyone had given up on. He said there was solace in the brimstone and that the stories in it would always be relevant, but I only ever saw sorry sorts treating it like it was anything other than a relic of a time when people could afford to believe in rubbish.

Darkness settled in, and the clouds became transparent sheets pricked with light from stars. I drifted to sleep and wondered if any of the twinkling beacons in the sky had flared so angrily as our own sun, if anyone else out there was lying on the dead skin of a world and praying to the night sky for a chance. The hypocrisy struck jolted me awake for a few seconds, but my eyes grew heavy as the horses chewed at the thick, dry plants that clung to the earth for life.