THE SPACE BETWIXT

There’s here. That’s familiar. Towns and forests; roads and rivers. Death waits for the careless, but a simple sort of death. Knives. Teeth.

Then there’s the Elsewise. As changeable as the winds. Labyrinthine halls of antediluvian stone. A sea with stars below and eddying currents up above. Dream, Delusion, Delirium, Doom. A cluster of mirror worlds from whose grasp escape may prove impossible.

But also, there is the place where the two come together. Always a space betwixt. Beads of light and gleaming metal. Threads of copper running like golden veins through the fabric of reality. A nearly invisible ring of crystal where two slabs of stone fit too neatly together. Miss it and you might be hours along before you notice the difference. A burnt taste to the air. An unfamiliar color. A second sun dappling through the trees. By then it’s too late.

Be they reliquer, bountyman, outlaw or tramp--those that find themselves often at the corners of civilization learn to keep sharp for signs of Transience. To do otherwise would be suicidal.

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CANOPIC LOOM

A funeral engine the size of a pair of cupped palms. Fibrous, iridescent carapace that reheals when split open. A placid face atop.

For the burial of stillborn princes.

Interred in the Loom, they are laid to rest in a stone vault the size of a grown man and brimmed with organic slurry. Over time, the Loom renders the liquified meat. It knits skin, stitches bone for the never-was king. Pristine muscle ripples under dead flesh. Regal hair sprouts roughly from a clammy scalp. Within the span of a single moon, a fully formed corpse lies in the grave, wearing a tranquil death mask and wielding a midnight black repeater & delicate blade of chitinous lustre.

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