The magician’s tower toppled so slowly that it changed tenants a dozen times before it hit the dry earth and shattered. By the time of its last such tenancy, the tower was at an almost horizontal angle: it had the look of a gnarled stone tree, felled and then frozen at the last instant.
A boy scrambled, giggling, over one of its ramparts. Shouts chased him. He leapt over a window; inside a butler started at the flitting shadow overhead. Glasses jostled. He steadied them with a deep swaying motion of his tray, glared upward, and tutted. From her seat at the table the Duchess covered her smile with a white-gloved hand. Then her eyes fell and she gasped. A solitary, translucent figure in a fine night gown stood on the wall as though it was a floor, wandering back and forth, pale energy crackling at the edges of his gown where they brushed the tower wall. He glanced about, as though unsure where he was, then walked through the floor.
'Oh,' she said to nobody in particular, 'but that fellow does give me a fright.' Then she noticed her fork inching covertly toward the edge of the table. She snatched it back, knocked it against the wood in a stern but patient manner, and smiled at the butler as he delivered the wine. For some reason wine refused to acknowledge the present gravitational situation and they'd had to have special glasses made where the cups sat at a 90 degree angle from the stem. Sipping from them, mused the Duchess, was a rigorous (and precarious) art unto itself. This had led to the 'drinking room', in which every seat faced the floor-wall.
The boy hopped from the rampart to a chunk of free-floating rubble. A whole belt of it arced behind the magician’s tower, a tail of broken stone. Every day the chunks were in slightly different positions as they tumbled and jostled in glacial slow motion. Today, the boy saw, was a particularly good day: he had a clear route nearly all the way to the top. Panting and balancing and grinning wildly, the boy leapt from stone to stone. A canopy of trees rustled not so far below. The air up here whipped his hair and made his nose cold and runny. He wiped it, sniffing, and bounded on.
