He slings himself off the coach. He pushes two coins into the driver's gloved palm. She glares at him and cracks the horses on, and one of the citizens who rode with him pats him roughly on the back.

'You keep that up,' he says, 'you walk everywhere soon.' The stranger pulls his cap down and performs a pantomime sulkiness: back hunched in, arms crossed, a pouty, furrowed frown. He pats his pockets and rolls his eyes, shrugs his shoulders. It's Marlowe, the petty miser.

Marlowe huffs and strides past him. 'This is a city of clowns,' he says, and shoves aside the heavy blanket overhanging the cathedral entrance.

As the blanket falls back in place behind him all the sounds of the city cease. A bird rises to its tall, tall feet, lowers its scalpel, and stares at him from across the makeshift hospital. Marlowe blinks. The bird strides past bloodied beds and frantic nurses. Its black crow's coat is fabric and its long beak a mask. Fierce eyes are fixed on his through dense mesh windows. The bird draws up to him and speaks with the voice of a woman.

'You are Marlowe?' she says.

'Here I am.'

'Marlowe the magnificent.'

'Hello,' he says, hopefully. The woman stares at him for a furious moment, snatches something from a shelf to his left and shoves it into his hands. A robe and a mask.

'Sorry,' Marlowe begins, clutching the heavy fabric to his chest and frowning at the herbal beak of her outfit, 'is there a plague on?'

'You will be extracting the contraband from the wounded,' she says, and as the doctor storms away her robes are so stiff and her form so obscured that she seems almost to glide.

Petrichor in particular had no patience for half-measures: not only had its founders picked a gas giant at an ambitious remove from civilised space, it orbited suicidally close to the atmosphere’s phase transition. The profits from the fuel yield at that depth would have been tremendous if it weren't for the towering repair schedule and perpetual mental health crisis. As they’d descended, Orpicea would later brag, the rising pitter-patter on their transport’s hull had not been precipitation but a rain of melted gas. The station swam in pressures severe enough to liquify hydrogen.

She discovered almost immediately that nobody used the station’s official name. ‘“The boat”?’ Orpicea repeated.

The deckhand rapped on the transport’s hull with the butt of his rivet gun and listened to the sad sound it made. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The girl’s a submersible, not a satellite. Good thing you took the bubble down, your pod barely made it as is.’

Orpicea glanced at Pardoux, who scratched his salt-and-pepper beard and grimaced an I-told-you-so in return. ‘Her name’s Stepping Stone,’ he said, ‘and this is a transport you’re fixing. Not a pod.’

‘I don't see any nameplate,’ the deckhand began, but shouts turned his head. Crew scattered at the far end of the hangar where spiderlike supports had viced the skeleton of a gas transport. Some whining tool arced a sinuous white trail on Orpicea’s retinas as it tumbled to the floor. Its impact sounded like a gunshot; sparks skidded out. It bucked on its wire, yellow jumpsuits scrambling as the plating beneath it began to glow an angry orange.

The deckhand they’d cornered rushed to help. ‘The storm stripped the paint off!’ Pardoux called after him.

A modulated voice trilled: ‘Making friends already?’

Orpicea and Pardoux looked up to see a service drone, technically their commanding officer, step out of the ruined transport. 'We'll have to bargain carefully for repairs,' Orpicea, said, looking back at the deckhands powering down the arc tool. 'They know we're stuck without them and they probably want the transport for scrap.'

‘We will fine—‘ his eyes flickered as he stammered ‘—find a way back to her regardless.’

Her meant the ship, which had taken to calling itself Kelly. It had also taken to spying on them, repurposing maintenance bots to remodel her own internal layout, and most recently threatening to self destruct if they did not find her more fuel.

With a sigh, Orpicea pointed to herself and said, ‘Alright. Here’s step one. I'm going to find the quartermaster, or whatever, and buy some damn fuel. Step two is we leave forever. As much as I hate that ship, a six month contract on one of these was more than anyone needs and I'm not waiting around for those repairs if they try to pull a fast one. This thing isn’t a canary, it’s a lump of chocolate in a fucking fondue.’

As she marched off, Pardoux gave the drone a meaningful look. ‘What's canaries got to do with it?’

'Don't kid yourself, pisswit.
Our prophecy's tamper-proof.
It's an hundred-generation masterwork -
a banger, frankly -
and you're not getting out of it.

'Let's be serious.
It's not like you'd have done anything half as cool
as this chosen one shit.
With that fate?
Please.

'I've seen those threads.
You weren't doing anything with them.'

We had picked this bright stretch of coral for two reasons. Its arm thinned here, and so was easiest to mine. The second reason was Moth's passage - something we had, lightyears from here, scouring our charts cobbled together from traded data and our own amateur observatory findings, predicted - would provoke a curious excitement in the coral. From a distance its radiance had resembled Moth's. A cool pale thread. And far beneath its chaotic skin the marrow would also change.

I waved Feldt away. 'Stop crowding me,' I said, laying down the second clamp. A whir of screwdriver motion and oily dust and it was secure. Feldt stood in place, seemingly disoriented, then blinked. He drifted over to the opposite clamp. I shook my head.

Seseq barked a depth measurement. As I stood to configure the bore I thought I saw a figure moving out among the smoke-like structures. I sighed, my heart rate rising. 'Mark,' I said, jabbing the depth target into the machine.

'Already?'

Seseq sat quite far from us atop an outcropping of warped reefrock. She rose to her feet and looked at me, her face a division of reflected coral and void sky. The longer I looked at her the more the stars in her faceplate seemed to shimmer. I focused on the bore's interface.

'Just visual,' I said, batting away the mosquito buzzing in my ear, 'so far.'

sklengton

Snow-drowned,
silent,
stubbornly alive.

Each upward inch
and mote of soil skirmished for
across centuries, sleeplessly,
warmth forgotten
by their mother earth.

But this stooped, this
half-dead unruly thing
remembers.

The sergeant’s tongue curled around rusty English. ‘The maps you have said she is having,’ he grumbled, not unkindly, ‘my man found them some space back: in the tunnels.’

‘In the sewer?’ she asked, her face quite still.

‘Well, the sewer . . . Actually the water is different, it is all a mix down there, like a bee hive. Like the movie with the singer. The sewers meet it but so do other things.‘ He tipped his hand from side to side. ‘It is a tourist attraction, they make sure it’s clean or at least that it smells well. When has your friend disappeared?’

She remembered, not much more than eight hours ago, waving to that bright, grin-faced woman from the airport security gate, scarf and pale hair mounded on her like a sundae. Here was the last thing she’d said to Margaret: ‘Don't eat my cat.’ And Margaret had rolled her eyes and disappeared from view.

The flight had been sleepless and exhausting in that numbing way long flights mostly are. The police had called her before she could collect her luggage.

They were waiting for her at international arrivals and led her to a patrol car. There had been an uncanniness about it until now, a sense that Margaret would be joking about this strange moment with her later, but now her footsteps had vanished beneath the rush of the river and the sky seemed too bright and too grey.

Among the gurneys and rows of metal drawers the air was very cool and still as they lifted the plastic to reveal the body's face. She shook her head, she shook her head. She opened her mouth and a tremulous mumble escaped it which she later recognised as a failure to say her sister's name. The officers and the paramedics watched. She swallowed, brushed imaginary hair out of her eyes and looked into their faces.

‘That’s not possible,’ she said again. ‘Her flight wasn't for weeks.’

Then she was sitting in her rental car, knuckles white on the scrawl-covered maps they’d let her keep, having just realised that she had been crying for some time. She turned the ignition off.

‘You asshole,’ she breathed, ‘you miserable lunatic. You were right.’ Her voice rasped so harshly she barely recognised it. She tried to clear her throat but something was stuck there. Her fingers dug into the maps of the mountains and the tunnels, those guilty topographies. ‘You found it.’

Seseq knew more about the reef than any of us. She rapped on my helmet as she drifted past. 'Don't cut it so fine this time,' she said, turning in the coral's weak gravity with a few silent throat-clearings of her suit's oxygen jets. 'You're worth more to us as you are.' Her visor wasn't shielded and I could see the mirror plating where her eyes used to live. Her vision was the expensive kind. She watched the universe from spectrums the galactic reefs couldn't penetrate. The churning metal swept up into her hairline: a fashion choice.

As we set foot on the surface I knew instantly that the coral was reacting to our presence. Feldt guessed it too. He shivered and cast his gaze about. Oil-slick smears of unreliable colour warped and flexed in our vision as we looked out over the chaos of gnarled shapes. An infinity of tiny filaments formed towering columns like frozen smoke.

As we laid on toward our dig site a pale lidless eye sent our shadows running ahead. The white dwarf we called Moth was small but very fierce, hot enough to warm the coral's fibres even as a pinprick. Soon it would be gone. This coral's roots were elsewhere. Its structure spanned enough of its parent nebula that we thought of it as her skeleton. Moth was just passing through.

I'll defect,
idiot, because these asteroids
are rotting from the inside out, the iron's scrap
you pride-blind rock-brained metal-monger, the real
money's in neutron stars anyway and at least out in
Camelopardalis I won't have to listen to your
poetry, asteroids aren't pretty,
sorry.

Sound had died in that time, Marlowe explained, and the desert folk had dug deep. The nomads rewrote their traditions or they disappeared. Things had made roost in the desert. You heard them coming or you were taken apart. Out in the open the sound leeched out of everything until even your footsteps were dead. So walls were tugged from the dunes overnight to keep noise in: you can see so many cathedrals, here, and that’s why they have no denomination, because they are just structural. Although some of the architects took the opportunity to beseech their gods.

Ode slumped down in a seat across from them. She slid a decanter to the centre of the table. ‘Your mouth,’ she said, ‘is an unflushable toilet.’

Weary-looking people joked and ate in every corner of the watch house. A handful chainmailed and their shoulders wrapped in the city's yellow tapering cloak, the rest a noise of colour & rough fashion from far off places. This latter, the grime of travel worn deep into their armour and the creases of their faces, far outnumbered the former. Mercenaries and citizen-hopefuls the city paid to fill the ranks, Marlowe would later learn. Two such watch-folk hovered over himself, Ode and the executioner, hands resting on the hilts of their swords. The table was spread with dust.

‘Well, more likely,’ the executioner rumbled, ‘these plains was meadowed before.’ He pointed a sausage finger and twirled the air with it. Then he intoned with a queer rhythm: ‘And it dried up! And they prosp'rous grass-ed cities caged theyselfs in when the dust came on.’

Marlowe cast an annoyed look at the executioner. ‘Is there a reason,’ he said, ‘you won’t tell me your name?’

‘Take no for an answer, my overcurious friend.’

Ode rapped the table with bitten-short fingernails. ‘Things made roost,’ she said, echoing Marlowe’s story with a glare, ‘in your reason. You understand the crisis was attrition.’ She plucked up her decanter and swilled it around in front of them. ‘Why overcomplicate it? I am not impressed. Our new friends—’ she meant their escorts, one of whom, listening, narrowed his eyes and tensed ‘—certainly know better. Deaf folk can’t go on in a desert. Who needs a fairytale monster?’ She rolled the decanter around on the hard wood. Marlowe watched the wine swirl. It was almost black. ‘They died the old fashioned way.’

The haruspex shrugged. ‘That's based on determined research and eyewitness testimony, I assume.’

He reached for the decanter, but Ode snatched it away and poured some for herself. ‘Was it the drunkard, or the maniac that eyewitnessed your pifflish shit?' She held the wine up to the light. 'Our caravan,’ she said, squinting, ‘is laid up in a spot called Shambler & Company, which seems hellish.’ She closed her one eye and orbited the glass under her nose. ‘But not disreputable. It’s what we can afford. I spoke to its mistress. She was not an idiot, and also not the mean sort of clever. Storage was reasonably priced.’ She sipped the wine, frowned, and emptied her glass back into the decanter.

One of the escorts laid a hand on her shoulder. She went furiously still. He said: ‘Your guide is arriving.’ His accent was thick, and he delivered it in a rough murmur. Marlowe had to strain to understand him over the watch-house burble. A tall cowled figure stood, he now noticed, just outside, looking straight at them.

Although the escort’s hand remained on her shoulder, Ode relaxed and caught the executioner’s eye. She shook the decanter. ‘You?’

The executioner fended off the wine with an upraised hand. ‘I’d sooner piss in it,’ he said.

‘I should want some,’ said Marlowe.

‘You,’ Ode said, shoving the decanter into the hands of the other escort, ‘are about to perform some surgery.’

Last year I enrolled in a classical realism art course when, while idly researching how far I'd have to travel if I wanted to study at an atelier, I made the incredible discovery that there's one practicing not just in Adelaide but a breezy 20 minute drive from where I work.

The below piece is the first thing I finished as part of the course. It's not actually new—it's from the end of last year—but I've been meaning to put this gif together for a while and this gave me an excuse to actually do it. It's a Bargue drawing of a foot! Which is to say, there was a reference plate of a foot drawn by Charles Bargue, which is to be copied exactly using the same techniques you'd use to do an accurate drawing of a cast (taking measurements by eye from a distance, etc). This one's done in graphite.

Annoyingly I either didn't take photos of the earlier stages or those photos have been obliterated from existence, but you still get the idea.

The finished thing:

And here it is beside the reference:

Where the moon's threads touched the forest canopy the leaves were manic although the air was still. Tapic's shoulder scraped on the shuddering branches as she climbed. A long keen dagger swung at her belt. Light bent strangely against its edge so that it seemed to curve away from the eye, or sometimes towards it.

Lantern light swam in the underbrush below. Their owners muttered. They whispered among themselves. She heard: 'Douse the lantern! Give me that.' A rattling. Shadows swept in underneath. Tapic froze.

A gunshot tore open the trunk behind her. Bark sprayed. She leapt, wrapped her arm painfully around another branch, swung there. Another shot sent a twig whipping across her cheek. It nearly slashed her eye.

Shuffling down below. Something metal jangled. Bullets pooling in the palm of a hand.

Tapic pulled herself closer to the trunk and tested the branch's strength. It held. With a grunt she clambered atop the thing, ripped off her coat, and flung it into the night air. As the moonlight caught it, the fabric seemed to dance.

It exploded in a haze of thread and scraps.

Someone whooped. Booted feet bashed toward the place where the ruined jacket fell. In the noise Tapic scrambled upwards, digging clawlike into old bark, a wild grin on her face as leaves like shivering hands grazed and tugged at her.

She steadied herself on one of the tallest branches and raised her head above the canopy. Light drowned her face. She batted debris from her short hair, breathed in and bent her gaze up.

That pale unspooling yarn peered down. Moon. Its threads dangled wherever she looked. They puppeteered the forest.

Tapic's eyes drank in the light, deaf to the shouting down below. She'd judged her spot rightly. One ghost thread swayed nearby, languid. Twigs and leaves blurred in excited motion all about. They exalted. Strained higher. Tapic felt her hair begin to stir. She felt her fingers close about the hilt of that strangely turning blade. Her hand shook as she clutched it, or maybe it was the dagger that moved.

Soon it would be keen enough to cut a thought.

Above there was only the unmoving clouds, preserved mid-maelstrom. She was close enough now to see the eye of that frozen storm, which the corpse of the elder tree strained to reach with the tips of its tallest branches.

In the silence Elm became aware of the sound of her own breathing. It reminded her of the reindeer herders from the tundra and the hollow whistling of that cave mouth. She stirred, shook her head clear, and wrenched an ice axe from her pack.

The owls watched the woman writhe her way up cracked stone flesh. The elder tree’s root formed a jagged cliff which refused her axe, the surface like charred diamond, and so hers was a prying, swaying ascent that left no record. When she slipped and swung, feet dangling, by the handle of her stuck axe, there was no dust or loose stones to scatter, just her sweat and the snow her furs still carried. She clambered, a pale scratch in a charcoal painting. At last the root’s slope became gentle enough to lean into, and then to walk on, and from its peak, panting, Elm saw the owls.

They nested in the sawblade-perfect cracks where the roots had snapped as they petrified. They settled on the heights of the tallest coils. They nestled in the deep trenches where the wood had interlocked. Their eyes peered from hollows. Their feathers made detritus in the valleys.

All stone.

Some mad wizard wanders, they said, up in the old north, in the creaking airless wastes where the owls went. A hunched, arthritic witch (a barkeep drawled), a smirking magician prince (said the shepherd’s wife). A shapeless shifting thing, said the chief watchman, a “fucking kinless, deathless, skinthief mirrorshit”.

So Elm trekked further north. Game rarefied and the trees withered. Forest became taiga, a rolling expanse of snow-cloaked skeletons too heavy to sway in the wind. The winter owls used to settle here, Elm had once heard, but some animal sense had driven them out. Most things remained, but the night birds had flown on, into the north, away from the reach of man.

Here she is, a dark speck upon the shrug of the mountain. Her cloak whispers as she slips her bow off her back and nestles an arrow against the string. She draws: the wood creaks like snow underfoot. When the wind turns the top layer of powder hisses about her feet, but her hair, stuck with ice, is still.

The bird calls again. Her bow sighs. When she finds the kill at the end of its red trail she bares her teeth under the wrapped furs. She snaps its neck and finds shelter before the night comes, and by the struggling light of her campfire she plucks the bird and begins to fletch. Where she has loosened layers to feel the fire’s warmth on her face there are patches where her dark skin gives way to a veiny greyness. Knots of hair spill from the hood. They are shot with white.

Snow became deep frost. The hills flattened and the trees shrank until only plains of stunted shrubs remained. Elm felt like a giant in the tundra. She bent in against the cold. The wind rose.

She didn’t know how long she had been watched, but by the time the sensation fell over her the brush had given way to stone. The figure stood far across the plain, a statue rising from the moss. It offered a wide, pendulous wave, then cupped its hands to its face, but the wind over the flats deafened her to even her own footsteps, and whatever call the figure made was swallowed by the howl.

The pack had become too light on her shoulders. Elm had not seen a deer for days. She watched the figure for a time, then moved on. But her hand rested upon her quiver, and her eyes upon the figure as it turned away.

Elm met the nomads a week afterward. Reindeer herders on their way south. Their language had a humming, surly sound, and when they spoke to each other their sentences always seemed cut short. She had never heard it before nor would again. Accepting what scraps they offered, she took a rock and scraped, in the cavern wall, a chalky image of a man. She pointed north. Firelight glinted in their eyes as they looked from her to one another.

They debated shortly amongst themselves, but seemed to know nothing. They offered her no more food, and by the morning they had moved on.

At last even the tundra died. The flats upheaved and collapsed into a great glacial valley. It was at the base of that advancing tongue of ice that she felt once more that paranoid prickling on the back of her neck, but this time she could make out no figure in the distance.

She picked her way upward for miles. At the glacial summit she could peek over the top of the valley, where she could see to the east a ragged landscape of dead rock smashed apart, rising and falling, and there, so distant she had to squint to see it, a mountain range so tall its highest peak pierced the clouds. No, she thought: not a mountain range. One great mountain ripped apart. Glacial fingers spilled from its ruin, a frozen, impending ocean.

Tears became ice on her cheek. Elm shook. She turned away and trudged north, and with time she forgot her fear in the pace of her walking.

The snows, when they came, fought her like the sea fights the weathered cliff’s edge. She huddled in her dugout snow house as the blizzard blustered across the white north wastes, nodding heavily, snapping awake in time to spade the threshold clear of packing snow. Clouds tumbled overhead like river rapids upturned. Sleep, the thunder murmured, as the north winds entombed her.

What is left, when the storm passes and the low sun strains over the crest of the horizon, is the unbroken skin of a fresh canvas. There are places, in the plains of the tundra and beneath the snow-burdened forest canopies that skirt it, where signs remain of Elm’s passage: the snapped branches, the ashes of old fires, the discarded bones of her hunt. But when, upon that canvas, the hunch of a new white dune upheaves and a thick-gloved hand erupts from beneath, and Elm scrambles, gasping, from the snow, the winds continue their endless work and before the hour is out the dune has shifted, the dugout has collapsed, and her deep trudging footsteps through the powder have been unwritten.

The nights had been growing shorter. Soon, as the winds fell, as the clouds petrified, even the sun froze over, wheeling languidly just above the line of the dead frost flats. Elm lurched through twilight. She dug dried meat from her pack and tried to chew, but her jaw would not obey, and her hunger had become a phantom. Her vision on one side had clouded, and she couldn’t blink it clear. She brushed her cheek where it was numb. Stone dust came free.

Slouched figures rose in the stillness. Squat, formless things, no taller than a man, so caked in snow they resembled nothing. Elm wondered if summer still came to this place, if the sun exhumed them, in its longer days, so they could drink in a warmth they had almost forgotten. Or if the sun had lost that power aeons ago: and these silent tombstone things awaited a thaw that they had outlived.

These scarce shapes too slipped away behind her, and Elm, her hunger forgotten, carried on. Over days, the powder thinned. She passed a great fissure that ran deep into the earth, the strangled light rebounding and refracting tumblingly into the dark, revealing only ice and great, winding shapes coiled within. The land seemed to shrug great dunes out of the snow, but as the coverage lessened, the snow revealed it was not the land that rose up but something lying atop it. In places, ahead, the snow could not cover the shapes altogether, and there, Elm could see dead, grey wood. Above, the clouds no longer moved at all.

When Elm’s boots came to rest on black stone, she began to weep. She wept for the snow.

She glimpsed the first tree not long after that. It lay far in the mist, a monolithic, impossible thing, erupting from the earth like the petrified hand of a skeletal god. Its roots snaked over and into the mirrorlike obsidian surface, their scale absurd, the smaller ones like mountains stretched into rope.

It was here, in the twilit mist, crawling amid the petrified ruin of that distant elder tree, that Elm, at last, stopped walking. She glanced up to search for the owl she had heard.

The desert cities shut their gates when the red clouds rolled in over the dunes. Mountainous billows of sand scaled their walls, used their streets as veins, and buckled the roofs of the lower classes. Watchmen were enmoated in their towers. So the man on the ramparts explained when the heretics came in their caravan.

Marlowe batted the canvas aside, finished shoving his button shirt into his sand-stained pants, and dropped out of the wagon to get a piece of the argument. The executioner, whose name he'd never learned, loped past him toward where Ode stood. She was shouting up at that louse there on the ramparts. Strictly shouted, did Ode.

Trudging toward her, Marlowe yanked off a glove and waggled it like a fish until the last grains of sand shook free.

'And thank you for having made room!' she called, cupping both hands to her mouth. Her hair made her stern features seem ablaze. 'We have, you'll find: food! timber! a certified medical professional! These are the things you need, aren't they, you daft shit?'

Ode heard the executioner tromping through the sand towards her and she flicked at her ear as though a fly was there. The executioner halted. He muttered: 'You should lie more carefully.'

'When we're inside,' said Marlowe, knocking on the tall man's arm, 'it won't matter.' The executioner turned like an old stone door and frowned down at him.

'Your work is slag to me. A great old slag.' He hunched over and feebly gripped an invisible cane, then straightened again. 'I meant what I said, eh? But if you are reckless with the watchmen I'll be run out, they'll run me out. They are wary here. In-dis-criminatory.' He punctuated this last word by poking out the syllables on Marlowe's chest. 'I will be lumped in. With you. Like garbage.'

'Then very well tell your commander!' Ode yelled. The two men looked over: the figure on the ramparts began barking a reply but Ode cut him off. 'You will say it is Marlowe the fucking magnificent! You'll say, here he is! Great god-damn Marlowe to surgeon your ungrateful wounded!'

'Ho,' said Marlowe. Beside him, the executioner swore. 'Ho there, Ode—'

There was no stopping her. 'What a spit you are!' she tumbled on. 'In his mercy God brings you a salve at the nadir of your enplagued-ness and you turn Him away!'

'He is gone, Ode. Hopefully not to get his captain,' Marlowe added, 'because we should leave. Ode, I am not a surgeon.'

She slouched, huffing. She turned her cyclops gaze on Marlowe. A sweat-yellowed bandage encircled her head, stained by a scratchy ink drawing of an eye where it covered her ruined one. 'Do I tell you how to do your job, haruspex? Leave the words and such to me.' Her eye flitted to the executioner. 'Where is your shirt?'

'What use is one?'

'It is very hot,' agreed Marlowe.

'Its use,' she replied, 'is found in not appearing like what you are, which is a stump-brained misbegot whose back's had an affair with the whip.' Unbuckling her waterskin, Ode pulled a mouthful out of it then splashed a little on her face. She tossed the bottle in an unexpected snap of movement, but Marlowe caught it by the strap and, entirely by accident, didn't drop it.

'Make yourselves in some way presentable,' Ode growled, wiping her face and slicking back her unruly mop. Mostly she only managed to smear some of the dirt around. 'I aim to sleep in a bed at least once more before I take what's mine.'