Status Updates From The Vorrh

". . . [T]here was a . . . steep, carboniferous limestone valley. Glaciers had edged their razoring weight through, cutting twisting canyons and gouging out riverbeds, so that overhanging walls of jutting cliff leered above. At one point . . . the lofty, sheer sides almost touched, either side approaching the other with a heightened tone of suspense; remembrance, perhaps, of historical connectedness."

2/2: "This is the breath of the sickly wind called Burascio by the natives of the land; a wind that sucked rather than blew, it's hot, inverted breath giving movement but not relief. It toys with expectation by animating suffocation, tantalising the arid earth with its scent of rain, while beneath the reservoirs, caves, and cisterns strain their emptiness towards its skies."

1/2: "The heat of the day has become saturated with weight, the brightness sullen and pregnant with change. Clouds have thickened and coagulated with inner darkness; water is being born, heavy and unstable."

2/2: "It grabbed at his memories and perverted them with elaborate motivations, succulent in their weirdness, making stupidity and pride fuck on the hallowed ground of his genius."

1/2:". . . [H]is own mechanism of creative invention had turned on him . . . the brilliance of his literary deceit had a vindictive twin, who could not see why his little word game, if it was so clever, should function only in his languid fiction. Each day it had started to apply the same rules of composition and invention to his life, twisting pleasure and experience into worthless jokes."

"It was the museum that changed everything and explained the volume of their lies . . . [I]t was lofty and dark; everyone whispered . . . respectful of the gods who lived there . . . On the far wall were pictures. Almost in a trance, he walked closer to these, a memory of his village, pinned to the wall and drained of color. This was the final sacrilege; the exposure of the sacred, the dead, the souls of the living."

2/2: "So good was he, in the eyes of his masters, that . . . they rewarded him by flying him from his land into theirs, a long and meaningless journey to show him the magnificence of their origins. By the time he had arrived in the grand European metropolis, he was without compass, gravity, or direction; his shadow had remained behind, bewildered and gazing at the empty sky."

1/2: "It was after that debacle that they had made Tsungali a policeman . . . He was an excellent policeman from the first day, obeying all orders and achieving all of his tasks. It was simpler than it looked—he explained to his people what they must be seen to do, they agreed, and so it was done, and the new masters believed their wishes had been carried out."