The Girl and the City
The capital of the world, they called her. Once upon a time, that had been true. Maybe it still was in these nebulous, hopeless times, if one dared to look at the state of the world with open eyes – which few did, and only very few of those who called her the capital of the world out of habit would ever dream of doing. That way lay madness. Once upon a time, she had been glorious, composed of pointed arches, intricately carved friezes, and overwrought cornices that had been the envy of the rest of the civilized world. Once upon a time, her spirit had soared high above the clouds, towering over Pale and isolas, reaching for perfection and an age of enlightenment. Oh, the ecstasy that had come with success, just out of reach; she remembered it well.
That had been before. In the end, she had been like the boy of legend, flying too close to the sun against the warnings of those who could see that there was no such thing as perfection and enlightenment. Revachol had fallen, shattered, drowned in the blood of the good and righteous, the bad and selfish, it mattered not what they had been in life; in death, all were equal. She had been torn apart by their shells and crumbled into the Insulindic. She had submitted to their whims and their torture. She had survived. And she was still the capital of the world, no longer young and symmetric in her beauty. She’d reached middle age among cataclysmic catastrophe, her scars only adding to her mature allure. They still flocked to her, the young, the restless, the desperate, and the hopeless, gathering in her streets, building tall towers to worship their capital, and even taller ones to bask in vain in the glory of their Innocence. It was Revachol that they worshiped in truth, she that provided them with decadence and decay, she that would outlive them all, the ant-like humans, their feeble ideas, even their Coalition, built to last as long as pyramids.
Revachol was the capital of the world, and with every passing moment, with every millimeter the Pale inched closer to her bounds, she became more. More than she had been, more than she wanted to be, more than the insects crawling through her veins would ever know.
She was.
And she listened.
There was something about Revachol. The woman known to the locals as Klaasje couldn’t quite put her finger on it, no matter how much she pondered the question, turning it over in her mind until she found something else to distract her, mostly early in the morning (well, midday or early afternoon, depending on when she managed to wake up and drag herself outside for a smoke) before the parties started.
She’d come to Revachol on a whim; ages ago, someone, somewhere had said to her:
“Revachol, it’s the capital of the world, you’ve got to see it before you die.”
She didn’t remember who had said it, not that it mattered anyway. It was quite obvious that the sentence itself had been more important than whoever had said it, or else Klaasje would have forgotten it, just like the face and the name that had once been attached to it. Or maybe she’d just heard it said over and over again, phrased differently every time, subtly engraving itself onto the ridges and groves of her brain as if she were a record. Whatever it had been, the words were a part of her now. They’d stay with her until she died. Which might be tomorrow, as far as she could tell. She was in deep shit, and she was smart enough to know that there was no getting out of it, except that one-way ticket to hell she foolishly bought in Oranje.
So where else did one go when one found oneself on the run and about to face a painful, violent death? The answer had been obvious to Klaasje before she got around to asking herself the question. She had been sitting on the flight to Revachol when she realized what she was doing, then promptly cursed herself – it was too personal, too easy to trace if she’d ever repeated the words to anyone who had bothered to listen. She had spent the rest of the flight going over each and every interaction she’d ever had, trying to gauge whether her pursuers were already on her tail. She hadn’t come up with an answer when they landed, and so she’d stayed. One place to die was as good as any other, or so she had thought. As long as there were drugs and people to fuck, it didn’t really matter. And Revachol had plenty of both.
Martinaise had chosen itself, in a way. The same applied to the Whirling-in-Rags. A dump in a dump in a dump, in the greatest city there ever was. A good place to hide, since people didn’t ask any questions. They just let her be as long as she paid her bills on time. She was on the run, had that air about her, and the people of Martinaise hated everyone worth running from, which meant she was as good as one of theirs. It was a charming quirk, and she found herself growing fond of them, despite herself. She wouldn’t go so far as to call them good people – most of them were anything but – but they were so human, so vulnerable, angry, horny… if there was a complete opposite to the Moralintern, it was Martinaise, steeped in anarchy and sentimentality.
And then there were the quiet moments. It was those that now-Klaasje dreaded. They made her think, and thinking was bad – it was why she soaked her brain in drugs and alcohol and nicotine, to make it shut up. She wanted her peace, she wanted to lose herself. She did not want to think about Looskap and people killing themselves because of something she’d done. She wanted to fuck and she wanted to cram fifty years worth of living into what little time she had left. Reality just didn’t let her. The quiet always caught up to her in the end, after the partying was done, when the night sky’s impenetrable dark faded to blue.
But there was something about mornings in Martinaise when she was around to witness them. When she stayed up long enough to watch the sun rise behind the dilapidated church and the sad remains of a pier, there was that quiet, but also something more. Klaasje felt as if the city itself was waking up, a slow, lumbering giant that stretched its limbs in the long shadows like a kraken risen from deep down in the bay, come to devour them all. She should feel scared, she thought one morning, but she didn’t. Maybe she had lived with terror in her heart for so long that the more mundane, creeping horrors no longer held sway over it. Maybe it was just the fading high. Whatever it was, after a while, she made a habit of going out onto the roof to watch it. She felt less alone that way.
Her body was vast. It knew no bounds that her brain could comprehend. Ah, this again, Klaasje thought. Sleep did that to her sometimes, especially if the batch of drugs she’d done had been cut with Pyrholidon by some enterprising lowlife that could go fuck themselves. At least it’s not a bad trip. She didn’t feel anxious or angry or like she’d lost her grip on reality, even if reality seemed far away. She was simply drifting far from time and space, through the realm of dreams and ideas long forgotten, long buried and tossed up into the stars, to live where their brilliance would be appreciated. The world of men never appreciated anything, not even the things it professed to love. The thought was hers, yet not, in the ways thoughts in dreams often seemed like they were someone else’s. At least that was what Klaasje told herself. A whisper at the back of her mind insisted on something else.
Her body felt heavy, as if her bones were stone and her flesh bitter earth. It didn’t matter, not in the dream. A blessing, she felt. She didn’t care, not here, and she was so, so tired of caring – she hadn’t been made for it. It tore her apart sometimes. She just lay there, staring up at the stars. She couldn’t tell if they were real or not, and the constellations seemed to move whenever she blinked; one day, she found herself in April, staring at the Hydra stretching her neck. The next, it was September and swans spread their wings to fly to worlds unknown. She was everywhere, everywhen, her body elephantine in its enormity as she lay between the river and the sea, pillowed on hills whose backs ached among the strain of her weight. She couldn’t move but she moved, everything moved. Around her, inside her, above her. LIFE. Such was the nature of humans – they were constitutionally incapable of rest, always striving, never reaching. She wanted to reach too – Klaasje thought meekly, a thought almost drowned by her own weight and inertia – she wanted to reach peace, or at least oblivion.
Again, she felt her body being pressed into the ground by a force unknown, felt her bones being buried in the cold, dead earth, head – did she even have one? She must, even if she didn’t feel like she did – fruitlessly grasping for a coherent thought. It was the weight, that terrible weight of herself that kept her caged. Her feet were dangling in the sea, her fingers were grasping for meadows yet untouched. How many did she have? More than her arms allowed for.
With a sudden sense of clarity, Klaasje understood who she was – she was the city, in all her confusion and pain.
Except I’m not, she thought, waking with a start.
Shit came and went in waves. Such was life – standing on the beach and waiting for the tide to come in. It was inevitable. Klaasje’d had a good time at the Whirling-in-Rags. Life had been one endless party, chasing thrills and oblivion, until it hadn’t been. Until Lely had ended up hanging from a tree for a week, dead eyes boring into her back whenever she went out for a smoke and a look at the gray horizon shimmering in the distance like tendrils of the Pale. In truth, it had been her fault. Oh, she hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger. But he’d died because of her, and he’d ended up in that tree because of her too. It had been her idea, and Klaasje knew that it had been a good one. It should have been enough to fool anyone who came looking. Dead merc working for Wild Pines, making too much noise in a district that belonged to the Union – it didn’t take a genius to figure that one out. It only took a genius to figure out that there was more to the story, so much more. And it was just her luck that she ended up matching wits with one over this.
Klaasje ditched the Whirling-in-Rags the moment things got too hot – at least the crazy genius supercop with amnesia wasn’t interested in catching corporate spies, there’s a mercy – but she didn’t come out of the whole deal unscathed. She’d lost her cache, her passport, her way out. She still had her money, what was left of it, but no safe way to leave Revachol, so she had stayed. Martinaise was full of half-crumbling buildings of a curious shade of faded gray-brown that still nursed their wounds from the Antecentennial Revolution as if it was a matter of pride. In some parts, there were more squatters than tenants, and she felt herself disappear, just one face among many in a crowd of lost souls.
Communard Deserter Responsible for Slew of Murders in Martinaise
She encountered the words in a discarded paper dancing listlessly in the sea breeze while she walked along the old fortifications one evening, to watch the sun bathe the dark water in shimmering orange. Klaasje wouldn’t have picked it up if she hadn’t felt some odd kinship between the two of them, animate and inanimate. She was the paper and the paper was her, discarded, unwanted, with no idea what to do next, now that the purpose of their existence no longer fueled their movements. Her hand stretched out before she knew it and her eyes skimmed the lead article almost against her will.
The crazy man had done it – he’d found Lely’s murderer, and so much more besides. It seemed Klaasje had missed out on some of the news while she’d kept her head down, such as the confirmed existence of some Insulidian mythical beast that had been made public a few days earlier, but this she was glad hadn’t passed her by. In the end, Lely’s demise hadn’t been her fault after all. It had just been some delusional old man, still stuck living a lie that had breathed its last half a century ago, haunting the streets of Martinaise like a ghostly reminder that ruin wasn’t just something that happened, it was something that lingered. Especially in a place like Martinaise, where half the populace seemed to be in the process of fading out of reality the same way the color of a sweater did with every wash. With a sudden clarity, Klaasje realized that she was fading too, heart stopping along with her feet.
It was something that happened only a few times in life, these sudden moments of total and absolute understanding that sent a rush of adrenaline coursing through your veins better than any drugs and booze could offer. All at once, there was splendor everywhere, she could see the glorious past of the city as ancient ghosts strolled past in bright yellow dresses, the sky bright blue for once, not a washed-out shade of pewter. There was life even where there was none and her heart sang.
The feeling lingered. Klaasje expected it to fade, like everything else, but it didn’t. On her way back to her temporary accommodation, Revachol looked like a new place to her, or maybe it was just her eyes that had changed. She saw colors she didn’t remember seeing when she walked this street earlier – the tall towers in the distance had a purple sheen to them, gleaming in the diffuse light that filtered through the clouds. Even her squat looked different. She’d known it had been painted red, once upon a time, but now she could see it, the faint shade of red still clinging to the weather-beaten sandstone.
“Anything good?”
The question shook her out of her reverie. One of the other squatters of the Rue de la Certitude 32 had returned at the same time she had, holding a grocery bag that held the week’s supply of booze and other, less legal pleasures. She didn’t remember his name, but he was a reedy man, a couple of years younger than her, color fading out of his cheeks with every hit – for him, the drugs weren’t just a diversion, they were a reason to live. But the eyes… she hadn’t noticed it before, but there was something about those unremarkable brown eyes. They watched and they saw. The quick mind behind it might no longer care for worldly things, but it was far from gone beyond the Pale. Right now, they were looking at the newspaper still clutched in her stiff fingers, frozen from the cold.
Klaasje shrugged and tried to conceal her newfound energy from those prying eyes. “It’s a wild story. You can have it if you want.”
For a couple of moments, the wheels of a great mind turned. Then the man shook his head and shuffled off towards his room, somewhere on the floor above the flat she’d claimed. Klaasje’s eyes remained glued to his back until he was gone.
It’s as if I’ve stepped into a different world, she thought. Where I am a different person.
No, a voice she had never heard before whispered in her brain, as if something had set fire to her synapses. You’ve just opened your eyes, sweetheart. There’s a lot more to this place than you’ve chosen to see before. I can show it all to you if you want.
This wasn’t real, she knew. She’d consider the offer anyway.
Are you ready to open your eyes, my dear?
Yes.
Then why haven’t you opened them yet?
It was that sort of dream, Klaasje thought, squinting against the blur of colors and shapes. The ones where your body felt sluggish and your eyes never seemed to open properly no matter how hard you tried, forcing you to walk through the not-world with lidded eyes.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Not unless you want it to. It’s you who doesn’t want to see.
This was getting philosophical, reminding her of her university days discussing Oranjese Lit with pretentious pseudo-Mazovians who kept talking about how every piece of literature was about the lack of agency in a world dominated by the forces of capitalism in some way. Or some other shit. Whatever grand school of thought allowed them to discover that it wasn’t they who were to blame for whatever went wrong in their lives, but their mothers, girlfriends, or the world economy.
Suit yourself, then.
With a sigh, Klaasje opened her eyes, properly. The sight hit her as if she’d done so for the first time. Below her (or maybe it was above her, mirrored in an endless sky) lay the city in all her glory, spread out along the coast like a bloated beast.
That’s not a very kind thing to say about your hostess, the voice murmured. She sounded like an aged whore who smoked too much, yet at the same time like a staid old lady who had once spent her youth wrapping impressionable young men around her little finger.
Naturally. I contain multitudes.
Klaasje would shrug if she had a body, but she did not. Instead, she looked. The city was great and powerful, far away and close all at once. She saw it in its entirety, even though she shouldn’t – her field of vision wasn’t big enough to capture all the glory. But none of that mattered here, she was in a dream, and nothing was real.
Are you sure about that?
Klaasje hummed – quite a feat, considering she didn’t feel her vocal cords vibrate. It didn’t matter. Nothing did, apart from losing herself in the city and all it had to offer. As she drew closer to the captivating view, the houses, the streets, the trees, and the canals, she began to feel something quite beyond all that she’d ever known. They touched, on a level she’d never been touched, soul to soul, mind to something vaguely resembling one. She felt this energy run through her body, setting her on fire as she was living through the end of the Commune, crying and dying and vying for power a hundred, a thousand times.
She sobbed, feeling it all. It was so terrible and wonderful. Arms wrapped around her – or maybe it was wings. She couldn’t tell. She didn’t have a body anyway, just whatever one brought to the realm of dreams. Herself and the city.
And what a pair we make. A kiss was pressed to her shoulder.
The great dying faded away, followed by happier, earlier times, when Revachol was ruled by hopes, soothing Klaasje with something that felt like silk against skin, running along her non-existent legs, past her waist and upwards, like a lover’s embrace.
Come fly with me, devious one.
Klaasje took the offered hand that drew her into the clouds, where they danced among waves of pale light and red mist until the sun rose, forcing her back into something resembling reality.
Whatever had happened to Klaasje, whatever had changed, as the days and weeks went by, she came to understand that it was permanent. She was no longer a shadow living half a life – or at least she didn’t feel like one. Instead, the world had turned sideways. The city seemed more vibrant than ever when she was awake now, while people brushed past her, the same way rats had back in Oranje. They were insignificant vermin to her now, even if there was still a part of her brain that was aware that she was like them. Or had been. Something was different, and she didn’t understand what. She knew she should be scared, but it seemed her ability to fear was lost to her now. Not even the thought of the ever-present threat of the Moralintern got her heart to flutter these days. The only thing that did was Revachol.
Revachol was – summarized in one rather trite but accurate word – beautiful. Beautiful beyond anything Klaasje had ever seen. She spent her days wandering the city, the West, and the East, venturing beyond Martinaise into the finer quarters, where people liked to forget about the city’s past. To her eyes, it was no use. When she strolled past the renovated mansions and sleek steel towers clothed in glass, she saw the ruin beyond the lofty facade. The past was still alive, haunting the stock brokers and grand dames of polite society, turning their wine sour and lacing their cocaine with preptide. Revachol might look like the queen of cities in the East, but as all cities knew, buried beneath that facade were dirty secrets, drugs, exploitation, and the work of a thousand poor and hopeless creatures. And, in Revachol’s case, the deaths of a thousand hopeful revolutionaries. Not that their hopes had ever had the faintest chance to become a reality.
The West was different. More honest. Klaasje had felt so since her arrival, and she still did. The scars weren’t covered in plaster and passed off as something long healed in Jamrock, even if reconstruction was something that happened even there. There was just something more open about the run-down parts of Revachol; drug abuse wasn’t covered by a rich facade and dismissed as a charming quirk of the rich and powerful, and nobody covered their hopelessness in smiles. In the West, Klaasje saw the city as it had been, once. Hopeful for a better future for its children. A future that never came, drowned in bombs and a rain of bullets. But no less beauty. Hope was only beautiful if it didn’t turn into reality. Reality could only ever be a disappointment. Funny, she thought, she was beginning to understand why Oranjese lit was all about disappointments and personal failures.
And always there was that voice, in the back of her head. A hallucination, a figment of her imagination. But even those were real, in a way. The saner parts of Klaasje’s mind thought that she had finally cracked, that all the pressure had gotten to her and gnawed away at her brain until drugs and alcohol had done the rest.
Does that make me any less real?
Of course not. What was that thing called reality, anyway? In the end, there was only ever the reality of the person experiencing it. There was a lot of overlap between them, usually, but there was always that tiny bit of disagreement on what was real, even with the sanest of persons. Who was at fault in an argument? What had really happened? None of it mattered, in the end. What mattered was that the city was eating her brain like a giant fungus growing rampant. It should worry her. It did not. This new obsession of hers would be her end or her salvation. There didn’t seem to be a difference between the two to her.
It had been a month until she realized that she was looking for something during her seemingly aimless wanderings – Klaasje didn’t know what for, but it was there, somewhere beyond her perception, waiting. Something she needed to find, the way she needed to do drugs before (she didn’t remember when she’d so much as had a drink, now). It was like an itch you couldn’t scratch.
“Hey, you looking for something?”
It took her a moment to realize that she had been spoken to by a person. A voice outside of her head sounded alien to her, and Klaasje felt an immediate sense of disgust. She didn’t have time for trivialities, her brain protested, but trivialities had a habit of becoming not-so-trivial if you ignored them. Maybe she had ignored reality for too long in favor of a feverish dream of beauty and ruin.
“Nothing in particular,” she replied.
The person who had asked her was an older woman, bowed by her years and troubles. And yet she tried to help someone she’d never met. Maybe she was just meddlesome, an unkind voice in Klaasje’s mind said. Surprisingly, it didn’t sound like the one that had haunted her for weeks. It sounded like her.
“Well, if you need some help, dear, don’t be afraid to ask.”
Klaasje watched the woman shuffle off with her bag of tare, mind elsewhere. Something was happening to her. She’d never lost control like this before. It was unsettling, but she didn’t feel unsettled. That was what worried her the most. She was losing it, and there was nothing she could do to prevent her slow descent into madness.
You are mine and I am yours.
It had been true for so long, Klaasje couldn’t remember how it had started. She was hers, and nothing could come between them, except whatever gulf separated the two of them. It was because she was human, she thought, and the city was not. They could never be truly close, no matter how much Klaasje longed to know her like she had so many humans in the past, no matter how often she awoke in the mornings with sweat coating her body and heat pooling in her belly.
You need to learn to be patient, my dear. Impatience has always been a fault of your kind. Things take as long as time wants them to. There’s no point in trying to hurry them along – it always ends in catastrophe.
But Klaasje didn’t want to be patient. She whined – on the inside, not out loud, not that it mattered to the city that knew her every thought. She wanted to be one with the city, glowing below her in her nightly dress. Klaasje wanted to feel what she felt, all the glory, all the pain that human existence could offer a person. She wanted to know the city’s heart like no human had before.
Well, there’s one way you can try to achieve that, the city purred, stroking along Klaasje’s calf with something that was not a hand, but not not one either.
Suddenly, the city rushed at her in a blur of color and feelings that knocked the breath out of her, until Klaasje found herself floating in a small, windowless room somewhere in her very bowels. There was nothing much to see there; just peeling wallpaper several decades out of date and gnawed-on furniture that had seen better days, before the rats got to it.
And then, there was the girl. She had medium-length chestnut hair that somebody had put in pigtails. Her dress was blue with white stripes – it was meant to make her look adorable, but right now, it only made her seem… wrong. She was sitting in the corner of the room, despondent and hugging her scraped knees, then detonations shook the building they were in, hands clutching a puppet with black button eyes and a dress that looked just like her owner’s. Another explosion – this one nearer, shook the building. Then another. Then darkness.
Klaasje awoke. This time, she was sweating with fear and confusion, not the arousal that usually plagued her after her dreams.
Sleep was no longer restful for Klaasje. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the girl, the moments before her death, until every detail of the scene had burned herself into her brain, from the minuscule scratch on her knee to the run in her stockings, to the smell of powdered building permeating the air just before. But not even that compared to the doll. It wasn’t in any way extraordinary, except it was. The button eyes were scratched just so, indicating that they had been reused. The fabric too had once been part of a shirt or bed sheet. The scraps stuffed beneath its skin smelled of a lifetime of wear and tear. It was like the city – timeless and endless, a chameleon that would become whatever it needed to be, for whatever stories little girls wished to tell in their idle moments.
Finding the doll had been both easier and harder than Klaasje would have imagined it to be, had she thought about what she was doing at all. She simply went out every morning (or rather: noon) and prowled through Revachol’s streets. Aimlessly, or so she thought, tortured by the lack of proper rest that gnawed at her flesh even more than the hunger – she kept forgetting to eat, became paler, thinner, looking more and more like the junkies that littered the streets, eyes dead and lips blue. She just walked – that was what she longed to do, what she needed to do. The restlessness that haunted her nights still dogged her steps during the day, when she bathed in the dim light that managed to force its way past the smog brought on by the factories east of the river.
The city she walked was the same as ever – she knew every groove, every chipped stone, every peeling coat of paint. Klaasje had been here for so long, the city felt like her second skin. She didn’t remember how long she’d been here at this point. She vaguely remembered intending to winter in Martinaise, like a great skua or other migratory bird. Now, she was wearing her skimpiest clothes to weather the oppressive heat of summer that caused the air above the city’s pavements to shimmer and the leaves of the scraggly sycamores to droop. Some over-ambitious city planner had scattered them throughout the wealthier parts of the city against all common sense. Time had passed, and Klaasje hadn’t noticed. It didn’t matter anyway. The city did. And the obsession that ate her alive. Nothing would stop her but death.
In the end, it was as easy as that – she knew when she wasn’t in the right part of the city and subconsciously kept shambling along. She also knew when she was in the right place, her feet stopping and not moving an inch while Klaasje stared up at the half-collapsed building. It was near Martinaise, but not quite in it, clinging to the side of a hill. Half of it was uninhabitable and had been for some time. The other half had caved in when the city had been shelled. It had once been a happy, shiny yellow. The side of it that still clung to life and housed some unfortunate soul or other was yellow still – the faded sort that spoke of dreams long forgotten and hopes long dead, with weeds growing from the cracks in the stones.
Klaasje moved as if in a trance. She knew where to go, and she knew where to look. It was as easy as that. She recognized the chipped window frame on the demolished side of the building and climbed through it, finding rubble and a collapsed dresser, some discarded plastic bags, and empty boxes, but not much else.
The girl had sat where the pile of fallen plaster and tiles now lay. With a trembling hand, Klaasje brushed aside some of the debris, then some more, carefully moving the rubble as if she were uncovering the grave of a loved one. Maybe she was. The girl, of course, was long gone. There was no withered flesh peeling off brittle, tiny bones. But there was a doll. It looked so small when she picked up the shattered red tile that covered it with her adult hands. The blue of the striped dress was barely visible under the dust of half a century, but it was unquestionably the doll from her dreams. Klaasje took it into her hands and admired her find as if she had uncovered the greatest diamond ever to be found. All at once, her mind was filled with the fierce hope of ardent communards, the subliminal anger of equally ferocious patriots, the weariness of mothers who had to get up to feed their children, and the joyous energy of a young man in love. She felt it all, all that the city had felt, as if she was holding its heart in her hands.
Maybe you are.
Maybe she was. This wasn’t real, shouldn’t be real, and yet it was.
You knew that already.
But she hadn’t wanted to.
Now there is just one question, wouldn’t you agree, my dear?
What am I going to do with that knowledge now?
And will she let me go?
A hoarse laugh echoed between her ears and Klaasje shivered despite the oppressive heat.
She was vast. She always had been. Well, maybe not in the early days of shacks and muddy roads, but she always would be, until the rot of the universe would eat at her bones and even she died, like so many others had in eons past, long forgotten. For now, though, she grew. With each passing moment, she was becoming more than she had been as centuries of history accumulated inside of her. With each thought she gained awareness of who she was – she was all of them, all the time, all at once. She was the ants that had built her, and so much more, waiting, watching, until she found a voice to carry her wisdom out past her bounds, until she was no longer alone in the darkness, surrounded by starlight and the ominous vibrations of the Pale. Maybe that day had finally come.
Whether the human would have the strength to live up to her hopes, Revachol didn’t know. But she was strangely amused by her and had grown fond of the mayfly that had wormed its way past the barriers between worlds and planes of existence. Whatever came next, it would be interesting, as the humans called it. Or at least alleviate the tedium of her eternal monotony.