Another interview with Tomoko M. Banks? Yes please! Today, we ask her questions about The First Spring, exclusively in Cwej: Springs Eternal.

Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m a freelance writer based in the south-west of England. I’m particularly interested in the intersection between sci-fi and fantasy, the pulpy and the mythic. 

What was your introduction to the Doctor Who universe?
In 2003, around Doctor Who’s 40th Anniversary, I watched Genesis of the Daleks, and became instantly fascinated by the worlds and characters of Doctor Who. 

What's your take on the character of Chris Cwej?
Chris has really been on quite a journey recently. In Lungbarrow by Loomlight, he regains all his old memories and experiences: this seems to have turned out to be a bit of a double-edged sword for him. Yes, he was able to use his memories as the impetus that drove him to save Totality from the Deathless and Lungbarrow, kick-starting reality from the moment of his mentor’s birth. However, through this act, he now seems to have deluded himself into viewing his old friend as a God, and himself as their acolyte. After the hurt and comfort in his rather traumatic reunion with Roz, this new-found frame of reference is almost like a crutch for him, as everything he held true about life is thrown into chaos once more. His more dogmatic tendencies are further reinforced when he encounters his long-lost granddaughter, the goddess of Time, and he isn’t quite able to save her, nor is he able to face up to the terrible hurt his old Superiors have put her through. It seems that, much like the Deathless, poor Chris is on a dark path. 

What makes your Cwej story unique?
It was great fun having a chance to explore the cosmic status-quo implied by Cwej: The Series, and how the various core characters react to, and deal with, this wild Totality. I was interested to see a glimpse of the relationship between Chris and his mystical granddaughter. There’s a sense of overlapping dualities—told through a series of inter-cutting conversations, between various pairs/groups of characters. Each character has their own mirror or contrast, Larles and Kwol, the Constable and the Deathless, Chris and Time, the two [redacted]. Equally, the invocation of Anaxia as the Constable’s/Deathless’ daughter creates a slight parallel to Chris and Time, to Vicky and her foremothers, to the [redacted] and her unknown makers. I was also glad to conclude an aspect of the Deathless’ story briefly set up in Loomlight — that being the character of the Constable. Here, his journey acts as an externalisation of the constant tug-of-war between the Deathless’ ego, his yearning for a sense of order / control, and his manic self-sabotaging nature. 

Would you like to mention any influences or inspirations?
I think there’s some Paul Cornell, Marc Platt, and David Lynch influences in this story. A little bit of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series too.

Did you face any interesting challenges in the course of writing?
I had a few health-scares while writing The First Spring (and its sequel that never came to fruition) so the process was a little feverish and dreamlike at times. 

What's your next creative project, and is there anywhere readers can follow you?
Currently, I’m in the process of writing two pieces, one for Cwej: Seasons Unseen, one for Cwej: Splintered Truths. After that, I have ideas for quite a few different projects across various genres. As of yet, I’m not sure where or when any of these would materialise. But my mind is constantly buzzing with ideas and characters, and so no doubt my further stories will find their home somewhere and some time.

In 2018, Jayce Black’s contributions to the iconic  duology of The Book of the Enemy and The Book of the Peace introduced Faction Paradox readers to Auteur, a skeletal Archon with the uncanny power to literally rewrite reality — and metafictional delusions of grandeur to match. Ever since then, the Mad God of Writing’s popped up hither and thither at Arcbeatle Press, putting in multiple appearances in our multi-series holiday anthologies and even menacing Graelyn Scythes of 10,000 Dawns in the novella White Canvas — but never quite as the headline feature.

Today, that changes! Under the creative leadership of Aristide Twain (Coloth: The Book of the Snowstorm, Cwej: The Flatwoods Fractal), the self-declared Author of History returns in a metafictionally mindbending but narratively newcomer-friendly anthology of thirteen original stories, with contributions from writers like L. Alves (Cwej: Always Be A Part Of Me), Nate Bumber (Faction Paradox: A Farewell to Arms), and Jamie H. Cowan ({{esquivalience}}), as well as exclusive illustrations from artists like Ari Bach (Valhalla Trilogy), Dante Vernor Katz (Faction Paradox: Great Pearl, Girl), Blair Shedd (Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor) — and many more! 

Says editor Aristide Twain, “For all that Auteur claims to be the singular author of reality itself, his world and his story would not be as rich without the plurality of tones, visions, genres, and setting that our writers have brought together in The Final World. It’s an off-beat journey through fiction, art, mythology, and history itself — each story incredibly distinct, but building on one another. It’s been amazing to see, and I can’t wait for new readers to meet not only Auteur, but the protagonists of each and every entry within this book. Each of them is a joy!” 

“Auteur is a destabilising force,” adds contributor L. Alves. “He can be thrown into any narrative and cause it to bend and collapse around him in fascinating new ways, which is part of what makes him so fun for a writer to play with. Any story in any form or genre can find itself subjected to a walking, talking, often-malevolent deconstruction.”

Auteur is a visionary, a genius, a god. The Author of All Creation. So he has claimed for centuries, and many believe him — who else could rewrite reality with one flick of a quill?

But the Cosmos has changed since he’s been away, and it keeps on changing. Old rules are broken, and new powers rise. What wonders and horrors might Auteur create, in his quixotic quest to get the final word? And what will he destroy?

From a Spire of Shadows to the direst diner on Earth, discover the truth beneath the lies in AUTEUR: VOLUME 1: THE FINAL WORD, featuring a dozen unforgettable stories from L. Alves, Erika de Atayde, Jayce Black, Nate Bumber, Galadriel Coffeen, Jamie H. Cowan, Thomas Keyton, Newton Locheye, James T. Mulholland, Louis Peacock, Plum Pudding, Aristide Twain, Molly Warton, and James Wylder — with exclusive illustrations from Ari Bach, Galadriel Coffeen, Dylan Livingston, Dante Vernor Katz, Holly Lucero, Plum Pudding, Raymond Inkwell, Blair Shedd, Robert Shepherd, Tabitha Marsh, Ophelien Twain, and Molly Warton!

Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m 21 but I’ve been doing paid creative work since about, I wanna say 17, but could’ve been later. I was doing minutes and writing the finalised script outlines for a yet to be released audio drama series, (also in the Who EU, and a franchise some readers here might be veryyyy interested in), that evolved into doing episodes and then the bug bit like no other and I’ve been doing odd jobs here ever since. I’ve written a lot of short films and I’ve helped a lot of other people with their scripts, but I shouldn’t kiss and tell. I’m currently a student at one of the UK’s leading industry educators. Outside of shoptalk (why wouldn’t you wanna talk shop?), I’m big into gaming, music, urban exploring, and I love a pub crawl. Nuff said?

What was your introduction to the Doctor Who universe?
Lots of near chance encounters, but I couldn’t for one tell you which is first. The memories all sit haphazardly beside each other. I remember doing a DVD swap with a primary school friend, I gave them that animated Buzz Lightyear film, the original one, and they gave me a double feature of End of Time and Eleventh Hour. Another moment when I caught the end of Death in Heaven on broadcast, I asked my mum for a screwdriver, like an actual one, so that I could play along. But it started being Doctor Who when I was able to actually watch the classic show all together on streaming. It was a show about literacy first and foremost, about creativity and opening your mind, looking outside, so it spoke to the curious burgeoning writer in me. Then came online communities, fandom, and the centre of all my Who related compulsions, the EDAs.

What's your take on the character of Chris Cwej?
He’s a really well centred character given that you can put him into basically any situation and it’d make for an interesting scene. As a companion, he was McCoy’s son slowly drifting away from him. Their awkward and understated finishing trip approach to Tardis travel, with so many things left unsaid, when they were on their own at the end of those books really hooked me. But I’ve gotta admit he didn’t really click for me until Dead Romance in the Benny books and you could see him under the hood a bit more. He’s quite classically pulpy in that sense, that naive well to do action-man boyishness as a front for a really avoidant, often directionless guy who’s bent on escaping himself through whatever mission he’s gotten wrapped up in this time. That cognitive dissonance with him fascinates me and I tried to emphasise it in my story by having him get hounded with genuine consequences and paired with a mirror with the same deep rooted issues but who expresses it in the opposite way and the clashes of that.

What makes your Cwej story unique?
I tried to go for this feverish stream of consciousness where the details and setting comes alive and bleeds together, there’s a lot of anthropomorphism in the prose and the tone shifts a lot  with perspective as you peel back the layers wading through someone’s head. I really wanted to hit that offbeat and often sinister creeping dream logic you get in works like Phantasm. And there’s a lot of pulp allusions, using that to inspect on the nature of Chris as this unchanging face of his genre and story engine who’s not really allowed to grow as a person and stop doing what he does, because then the story would be over. And what does he get out of that? The little things, it seems. At its heart it’s a story about angry clever boys who are scared of growing up and scared of staying where they are, and that applies for every main character.

Would you like to mention any influences or inspirations?
Moore’s Night Raven was how I pitched it, Chris faces his juvenile leaning tendencies in the power fantasy world of classic comic booky noire, but it drifted away from that into something a bit broader and less connected, more about using the stories that helped you to help yourself and tell your own to get by one day after another, best foot forward because sometimes that’s all you can do. The whole thing is very tongue in cheek British Invasion, a scummy rotten Ken Loach British realist world getting infected with this almost fiction virus, and becoming this Sapphire and Steel styled liminal space filled with larger than life titans of their respective genres (crime, western, warmags, and fantasy) and it becoming, rightly, a nightmare.

Did you face any interesting challenges in the course of writing?
Lots of them. Like I say, I’m a student with a two hour commute for three days a week, so a lot of writing had to be done on the train in a rush, and my fiancé’s family home got raided (nothing to do with me, though) and I spent the better part of a week helping fix the door and locks, which to someone with no handyman experience, was a lot harder than it looked. Yes, very surprising, I know. Generally life just kept getting into the way of me with this and I had to really bargain for my time alongside a lot of my other deadlines like videography for club work or course stuff. This was only helped by Gerard being the most gracious and patient editor on the crucking planet.

What's your next creative project, and is there anywhere readers can follow you?
Follow me on Twitter on @RG_Boyd. My next project is Simon Says, a web comic. Basically, girl vanishes from social. Dead beat and beaten down cop Imogen Hayes is the only person in the world who cares, she’s drawn into the middle of an ideological battleground for supremacy amongst Britain’s secret occult conspirators, and she’s forced to trust the deadpan possibly fictional occultist Simon Iff, who seems to only exist inside her head. It’s a horror noir for the internet age. We live in a world where people believe Etsy witches can create kill curses and the elite literally eat babies and our governments do untold acts of memetic warfare. Baudrillard hyperreality with demons, through the lens of an X Files meets Edge of Darkness paranoia thriller, and the aesthetic trappings of every conspiracy forum board you could think of. The scripts for issues 1-4 and central character designs complete and so pencilling will be beginning shortly and we’re aiming for an end of summer digital release. If you want a comic with body stealing war criminals, girl gangs using Francis Bacon’s flying witch elixir to astral project and beat up boys, teatime with LAM, and neonazis getting their comeuppance through self created memetic entities named (((them))), you’ve found the right place.

​

Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m interested in the interference patterns produced when high and low culture meet. The Cwej series is a tie-in bobbing on the outermost fringes of a TV franchise; tie-in relates to genre fiction as genre relates to literary fiction, another rung down in how seriously it’s taken. What I keep wondering is, can you do for tie-in what Delany or Ballard did for genre? How would a Banville or an Updike approach this universe? Even a Ligotti, a Flann O’Brien? What happens when a book is equally in dialogue with Dante Alighieri and Terrance Dicks? There’s my mental corkboard of red threads; you judge.

What was your introduction to the Doctor Who universe?
A dim 2005 memory: a newspaper with Eccleston in a leather jacket, and me wondering what I was looking at—“some English thing”. A slightly clearer one: turning on the television, I glimpsed Ardal O’Hanlon as a cat and reflexively changed the channel. Not till I one day watched Time Crash on YouTube did I begin to “get it”. The first real episodes I saw were The Girl in the Fireplace and The Snowmen, but I’m glad I pushed through to discover the classics. I see the essential Doctor Who story (“essential” in the metaphysical sense) as Meglos.

What is your take on the character of Chris Cwej?
Like Stephen from Penda’s Fen, he is a warred-over vehicle and conduit for things greater than himself. In gaining obliquity to the corporate core of things (i.e. the Doctor), he’s paradoxically become someone to whom far wilder things can happen. A bit like an asteroid that's veered off into lawless interplanetary waters, making it a perfect place for questionable science experiments—which brings me to my story in Springs Eternal.

What makes your Cwej story unique?
Roz Forrester, Cwej's old police partner and closest friend, is dead. In fact, that’s one of the main things readers remember about her; she was killed off in a very affecting novel, So Vile a Sin, written by the great Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman. Since then Cwej has endured unimaginable transformations, but that loss was what kicked off his trajectory. The question has loomed over the Cwej series: what would Forrester say if she could see the man he’s become? My story tackles that, in a manner I would be very surprised if anyone guessed. I won’t give the details away, but I will say that there’s no time-travel here, no parallel universes. This isn’t a young Forrester from the past, or an alternative timeline. She is alive, in the present of the narrative, and her death in So Vile a Sin remains the heart of it all.

Would you like to mention any influences or inspirations?
The setting was inspired by the novel Jack Glass by the illustrious Adam Roberts. When I delivered my story half a decade ago (!), I had no idea I’d end up co-editing the whole four-volume Seasons project, much less that I’d have the neck to ask him for a story. Adam’s earlier novella The Imperial Army—a darkly humorous tale of boyish innocence and galactic-imperial military cloning, which I read in his collection Adam Robots—always struck me as a kind of ur-Cwej story, and was a touchstone for my work on the series from The Ursine Brood onwards, so this was a great full-circle moment. My story in Springs Eternal was also influenced by a particular Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, but naming it might reveal too much.

Did you face any interesting challenges in the course of writing?
I’ll put this cagily, but in early drafts, a certain group of beings who play a major offstage role in the plot were stated to have a different identity. That had to change when a licensing agreement fell through. It took me a while to rejig things, but in the process, we alighted on a new mystery, which became a key subplot rippling throughout these four volumes. Seasons grew more self-contained, more stand-alone, and it’s stronger for it.

What’s your next creative project, and is there anywhere readers can follow you?
I’ve written my final Cwej story, which will be out after Seasons, and I’m satisfied that I’ve scraped the outermost limits of what I can do within this sort of setting. Time to get a move on. I’ve also completed another novel, a kind of experimental Hibernian response to a certain H.G. Wells text, which has neared publication at a couple of presses but remains the bridesmaid. My tiny anchorite Twitter account is @this_regard.

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These days, family dinner night actually felt like time spent with family. 
Many startling changes had come to the Lungbarrovians’ lives since Kinkeeper Innocet had put an end to the years they’d spent wandering the foothills of Mount Lung and yearning for the Promised House; yet, even now, that simple fact was perhaps still the most shocking. Family. Children crowded the meal cavern, chasing each other around, under, and sometimes onto the vast central table; only Jobiska complained, while the others simply laughed. 
Cousin Rynde now had a hundred mouths to feed, and he’d risen to the task with gusto; his ingredients were as humble as ever, mushrooms and grains and questionable meats, but rather fresher and more abundant than in their years of sequestration—and Rynde gave them freely. At mealtimes, his hissing, bubbling symphony of freshly-opened pans, of newly-ladled soups and stews would echo through the low-lit neon den, mixing with the layered chorus of shouts and murmur, the idle conversation of the Cousins and Second Cousins. There had been enemies among them, and bitter rivals, but all that had faded now, with freedom and the need for survival. They’d lost their House, but found a home with one another.
Or so it was, at any rate, with most of them. 
“I still think we should take this outrage up with the High President! …Again! We are Lungbarrow—the Children of Plutarch—old of blood, ancient in tradition—”
And senescent of form, someone thought so loudly it was audible. Cousin Xephresa, once a respected stellar astrophysician, was still clinging to a body he’d been wearing since before the House’s burial, and it fit his calcified attitudes. 
“Why should we be reduced to squabbling squatters!?” he thundered on. “Little better than Outsiders are we here! We have emerged. We are free! We should be Home, in a Chapterhouse befitting our status—not scrabbling in dirt and living off mushrooms as if nothing ever changed!”
In the midst of such much new life, the old relic’s posturing was a sharp reminder of the past. Yet even he, even bitter old Xephresa, the great traditionalist, loved the children. All through his tantrum, one of Owis’ children had been playing with fistfuls of his long white hair.  
“What was it like,” she asked him, cocking her head to one side — “the old House?”
“Oh, well I—” the old man stammered. “I—well—”
“Oh! Oh!”  the girl’s brother piped up. “Second Cousin Vesperell, he could tell us! He has the best stories!”
A few seats down, Kinkeeper Innocet stiffened. “Now Uphon, Cousin Vesperell is very tired. I’m sure he’d be happy to tell you in the morning—”
A decrepit man with a shaggy brown beard raised his head from his food. “No, no, Kinkeeper. Let him ask. I understand his desire to know… Dash it, he ought to know, they all should. They should know why we can never go back.”
Instantly, a pair of advisors closed in on Vesperell from either side. The first was tall, a woman, with long, wildly curled black hair. She’d been sitting close to the chronicler already, for Incandeline was like a younger sister to the old man, but now she leaned in closer, hissing words of warning directly into his mind — for Incandeline, in all her lives, had but rarely spoken with her mouth, letting her thoughts do the work. More demonstrative was the second cautioner, Cousin DeRoosifa, who adjusted his thick, bottle-bottom spectacles and then spoke up in his booming, sonorous voice.
“My dear Vesperell, surely you cannot think of taxing yourself so! Why, any story of our joint youths is bound to invoke… well… well, you know…” 
He trailed off, letting his gaze fall on one of the empty seats around the table. It’s Arkhew’s chair, installed at Innocet’s request along with one for every other departed Cousin — even Glospin had been given one. A rare concession to the grief which she had once borne so manifestly upon her back, now turned inward as her other responsibilities called. 
It was well known that Arkhew, DeRoosifa, Vesperell, and Incandeline had been something of a tight-knit group in the old days, exchanging favours and secrets in forgotten corners of the ancient Chapterhouse even after the burial of House Lungbarrow; that was, until they had all trailed off into the calling dark of the House, leaving only Arkhew behind at the mercy of Owis and Glospin. The death of the shy little man had hit the other three hard; harder than most deaths would have in such a bickering, distrustful family.
Nonetheless, Vesperell shook off the pair and their objections. 
“I appreciate your concern, Cousins. But I have a story which must be told… a small story, so as to not spoil our appetites. I call it — ‘A Feast at House Lungbarrow’.”
* * *
Thousands of years ago and many miles away, the feast hall of Lungbarrow was all but dead. Oh, to be sure, there were people in it—but the silence that hung over it was like that of the grave. Instead of Cousin Rynde, the great wooden Drudges served the food, their ancient limbs snapping with each bend towards the high table top. No lively conversation was to be had here, just the deadened glares and muttered accusations of a spiteful family ill-accustomed to gathering in one place. Few came to the Chapterhouse with any regularity anymore, but it was a special occasion—the Feast of Thremix the Liberator, and the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Cousin Vesperell’s publication of the wildly successful three hundred volume biography of the self-same figure—one of Lungbarrow’s few success stories in recent memory.
It was this notion of a ‘success story’ for the modern House being the biography that suddenly caused Kithriarch Quences, after hours of silence beside the ever-watchful Satthralope,  to stand up upon his oversized seat, glaring accusatorily at the young chronicler.
“So, we have our feast here today in honour of you? In honour of this… mediocrity?”
Vesperell blinked in surprise, a smile falling from his face. He had been rather handsome then; a short brown beard and wavy, well-sculpted hair complimenting his persona of the dashing young storyteller, master of the ancient lore of their world. Beside him, Incandeline—then a shockingly tall and gaunt man with a long, thin face broken in its pale monotony only by a dimple under one eye—laid his hand on his Cousin’s shoulder, cautioning against rising to the old man’s spleen.
Vesperell did not heed him. “Why, Ordinal-General, is it not good to have a success story of any sort to our name? My biography of Thremix is celebrated in the halls of even the very hoariest Chapterhouses, it—”
“Success?! You call that success?!” spat Quences. “Why, I suppose you’d call all of your little scheming quartet of Cousins here successes too then, hm? Success indeed—a biography of Thremix, of all things! Not one of the Architect, nor even the Engineer—no, for, recall, your efforts there came to nothing. So you cling to a biography of a half-wit scientist, least of our Founders, gathering us all here to celebrate your boastful nothingness!”
DeRoosifa raised a hand, almost as a scared child might to a teacher scolding their friend, his bald head beaded with sweat that trickled down to stain his omnipresent spectacles.
Quences rounded on him, his palms flat on the table, blue eyes hard as diamonds in his gaunt face. “Ah, and you, dear Cousin DeRoosifa, always with the speeches, quick to the defence! When you told me, my boy, that you wished to go into politics, I thought—at last, here is one who can fulfill our potential! But where did you end up? A lawyer. Politician indeed! And you, Incandeline, what of you? A Junior Chronogeneticist in the Bureau of De-Extinction, spending all your time poking around with that idiotic little yellow-liveried taxonomist! Not even a hint of ambition, as your fellow conspirators possess.”
All three of the previous victims of his rant flinched as Quences at last came to Arkhew—poor, quiet, unassuming Arkhew.
“Ah, and finally, Arkhew… you wish to be a cloud-sculptor. I have nothing else to say. What could I say to such disappointment?”
The small, brunette-bobbed woman—as Arkhew had been then—bowed her head, no resistance in sight.
Quences sat back in his chair, huffing and daubing his forehead with a handkerchief. He looked almost apologetic for a moment, his eyes softening to pools of clear water. 
“Ah, but I should not berate you… there are two of your kin who will give us our hopes now! They have enough ambition for all of you; why, they did not even come here tonight, so great are their callings elsewhere! One is growing closer to the organs of power all the time, the other stays studying… such unusual things, but so brilliantly! Fear not, all of you… your promise may be wasted, but you shall live to see it fulfilled in others… I promise you, my dears… yes…”
Muttering, Quences withdrew once again into his ancient senescence. 
The four he had accosted remained in silence. What could be said? Quences did not care for them—he never would. Only whichever great hope he clung to for a few centuries was ever on his mind; they were not a family here, merely obligations he put up with. 

Innocet dressed quickly, shivering in the badly insulated room. During this time of year, she slept with her family in the loft of an ancient thatched barn, on a bed that had first been built centuries ago by a long-lost Cousin. He used to sneak away from the House when the other Cousins had been cruel to him, or when Satthralope had rebuked him with particular viciousness. Innocet ached for those simpler days, when there was nothing more fearful in life than a harsh scolding.
As she buttoned her blouse and moved away from the bed, her hair trailed after her in two long, ragged brown and grey plaits. For the first years after her family’s escape from Lungbarrow, she had kept her hair short. But no matter how long Innocet spent badgering the clerks and secretaries who surrounded the Lady President, the promised restoration of her House had never come. And then war descended upon the universe, and Innocet was thrown out of the halls of governance along with her pleas. Her family were nomads now, living sometimes in the sheds and stables that used to be part of Lungbarrow’s estate, sometimes in a small underground village with other outcasts.
So once again Innocet wore her shame for all to see. In the Wildlands, it wasn’t safe to burden herself with a heavy coil weighing down her shoulders. Instead she crossed the braids over her back and wrapped them around her body until they bound her from chest to hips like a corset. The hair kept her warm in the chill morning air; it supported her aching back; and its tightness against her ribs reminded her of her failures with every breath.
Even after all these centuries, she hung the useless keys of Lungbarrow at her waist like a ring of strangely-shaped daggers. Talismans of hope, or more reminders of her failure? She didn’t let herself think too closely on it. She fastened her cloak and climbed quietly down the ladder. 
Owis and Jobiska were already awake. A small fire burned in the central pit, and the two men sat in lifeless wooden chairs beside the flames, eating leftover pig-rat and nill-grain porridge. Owis looked up from under his fringe of greying hair, then looked down again and kept shovelling porridge into his mouth. Jobiska gestured Innocet to join them.
She sat beside Jobiska, and he smiled at her. She attempted to smile back. She remembered when she and Jobiska were young together. Jobiska’s previous body, an ancient, fragile husk, had failed the same day Lungbarrow fell: like Innocet, he had emerged from their long imprisonment with a new form. They had shared so much hope in those early years. But now both of them were growing old again, and they remained Houseless.
“Porridge?” asked Owis cheerfully. He, of all the Cousins, had adapted best to this drab existence. He had never known anything but scrounging and hunting; the mere fact that he now did his foraging in clean sunlight instead of mildewed darkness was enough to make him happy.
Innocet nodded, and Jobiska handed her a bowl and a wooden spoon. Owis served her from the pot warming over the fire. Innocet held back a grimace as she dug into the bland breakfast. She reminded herself that it was better than raw tafelshrew meat and slimy mushrooms. These days, they had fruit and vegetables from the garden, grain from the small fields they had managed to cultivate, and fresh meat from the hunters who passed through. They had sunlight and fresh air and freedom. They even had children, young Outsiders who had joined their family.
But they had no House, no Kithriarch, no legal status in society, no life in any meaningful sense of the word. Owis and a few others had embraced their new circumstances, but the rest were just fading away gradually, spending centuries dying. And it was Innocet’s fault.
The porridge stuck in her throat. She swallowed with difficulty and set aside her bowl. Owis gave her a glance to confirm that she was finished before picking up the bowl. Innocet almost smiled. Her youngest cousin still had an insatiable appetite.
“Any news of Luton?” asked Innocet.
“Nothing,” said Jobiska.
She looked to Owis: he had developed a knack for talking with the true Wildlanders, the leather-clad tribes who had never set foot in House or City. Sometimes they shared news with him. But this time, he only scraped up the last of Innocet’s porridge and shook his shaggy grey-streaked head.
So, Luton was gone. Innocet had known it, of course. But she had refused to count him among the missing until a full year had passed without word of his fate. She tried to convince herself he was still alive somewhere. He’d most likely just grown tired of scraping out this meagre living. He wasn’t the first.
She rose with a bitter lump in her throat and left the barn-turned-house, pulling her cloak tight against the chill wind. The first sun stood thirty degrees high and the second glowed faintly below the horizon. The last vegetables waited for harvest in the frost-touched garden. Innocet picked up a machete from beside the door and turned her face into the wind.
Behind her on the far side of the barn were the grain fields, a primitive outhouse, and a path leading toward the underground village where her family took refuge from the summer heat. But on this side, there was only wilderness. More than a thousand years ago, the chaotic growth had been an orchard, and plenty of fruit trees still grew wild. But except once a year when the magentas ripened, nobody but Innocet ventured in this direction.
She had forbidden her Cousins from going near the ruins of Lungbarrow. They didn’t know she regularly broke her own edict. Her knees ached with every step, but she was still strong enough to hack her way through the brush and vines. Her previous body had aged into a pallid, fragile thing; but this time, the hardships of life in the Wildlands had turned her wiry and tough. Her hand on the hilt of the machete looked like old leather stretched over the knotted cords of knuckles and tendons.
She broke through the underbrush onto the scarred patch of bare earth and stone at the edge of the cliff. Nothing grew where Lungbarrow once stood. Innocet hated coming here. But if she tried to stay away, she started feeling cold grasping fingers in the pit of her stomachs and sepulchral whispers in the back of her mind. Sooner or later, she always came back.
Innocet clipped her machete to one of the braids around her waist, then moved to the middle of the barren space. The wind fluttered her cloak. Time had smoothed away most of the furrows and gouges in the ground, but a few particularly deep ditches still led to the edge of the cliff, like the marks of enormous claws scraping through the dirt before losing their grip. Innocet suspected that if anyone dared to excavate this site, they would find a trail of shingles and broken glass and shattered teacups leading over the edge of the precipice.
She didn’t go near the edge. She’d seen the view often enough. Far below, in a crevasse that had opened to swallow the falling House, lay the ruins of Lungbarrow. It was nothing but a crushed and crumbling pile of whitewood and blankstone jammed into a crack in the ground. But it still whispered deep in the recesses of her mind, a centuries-long fading moan as it died.
As the great building had taken centuries to grow to its intended size and reach full awareness, so it took centuries to crumble under its dying weight and fade from sapience. Every time Innocet ventured here, she felt Lungbarrow’s drawn-out death rattle breathing coldly upward from its crevasse. Every time she stood atop the cliff, she felt the anguish and hatred of the House’s suicide rising to claw against her mind.
She had inherited the role of Housekeeper, though Lungbarrow had already been too far gone to bond with her. Her family had taken to calling her Kinkeeper instead, but the title was meaningless. In her hearts, she was a Housekeeper. She still owed the near-dead House… something. She didn’t know what.
“Please,” Innocet whispered into the wind, “please just die.” She felt like a traitor saying those words. But as long as Lungbarrow had the faintest spark of life in its walls, Innocet couldn’t leave. She clenched her hand around the ring of keys and felt their jagged edges digging into her palm.
“Please!” she cried. “Just let it end!” Maybe when the House finally finished dying, its Cousins would die with it. Or maybe when the House’s final breath drew to its end, they would be set free at last from its jealous grip on their lives. Maybe Lungbarrow’s Cousins would be able to move on.