Chapter 1: A Hole Cut Out of the Universe
Let's get this out of the way. The king is dead. She's been dead for decades. No one knows when she kicked it. The year 1989, ten years back? Somewhere thereabouts? Impossible to say.
So onto the good news. If the king is dead, Punk is alive. That's right, baby! We're bringing back Punk. Real Punk. Milan cocktails and colorful graffiti in the streets. Punk is so back!
There is only one tiny problem. Not even a problem, more like a slight hiccup. You see, there hasn't been Punk--not real Punk with that delicious capital P--for over forty years of blazing ugly human life. It's been a dead vibe. Even the old school anarchists in their universities don't know what a real Punk looks like. They only know it from books, the last great Punks.
But Punk never died. It's still here! They're still here. On the great ark known as Arcadia. Home to millions of people. And as it turned out, one of those people was called Sadie Crane.
All to know about Sadie Crane lived in patches sewn to the back of their denim jacket. They were a patchwork, Sadie Crane. Once and forever patchwork, said their world-weary guardian White Doe.
The Gods Are Dead, But I Am Alive said a round pink and black patch in the middle of their back. And more. They contained such useful phrases as No Gods, No Masters and No Church, No Pastors and All Kings Six Feet Under. Quite a statement, that jacket! You couldn't go wrong with good old-fashioned anti-royalist sentiment.
Thought: Going home is always the hardest part.
A long trail of bright stabbed its way through that familiar dark, cast from the enormous flat headlight perched between handlebars of a motorbike. Scrawled on the right side was the phrase anarchy and finch written in slate gray paint.
They wore a set of headphones attached to a portable cassette player. Through the headphones, they could just barely make out the sounds of jackalopes screeching in the distance and the light buzz of nighttime insects.
Thought: You're good. Real good even. Peaches.
Sadie Crane squinted their eyes. It got foggy between towns, the sorta fog like cold fingers gathered in the cracks. It was a miracle they could see an inch front of their nose.
The road was bordered on all sides by thick trees. There were never highways, not the kind you're thinking of. Arcadia was all veins. Just veins of human civilization trailing from one place to another.
Thought: Hair's longer. Braids now, thick down your shoulders. Taken the dye out, so it's dark again. In Arcadian tradition, braids symbolize new life trajectories. Starting again. Ain't quite there.
They arrived in Alcoast and stopped off at a café-hostal called Long Way Home. The building was stuck on the edge of town, close to a decent coffeehouse and the outside stands of a day market. Cardiovascular vines and moss halfway overgrew the polished marblework.
"Home sweet--cripes," said Sadie Crane.
They did a quick visual scan of their home sweet cripes, standing on the wild dirt path. It was just like old times. Times that tasted like burnt rubber and sea salt tear streaks. The gods were dead, but they were still alive.
Thought: History runs in loops. The best day ever is only the best day until it comes around again a hundred years off the first. By then you aren't even a person anymore, you're a little bit of red paint stuck to the side of a farmhouse. You could have been a poet.
White Doe used to say that. She was a poet, heart to teeth a poet. Sadie Crane envied her with everyone they had. They wanted any life that wasn't this big stinking mess.
The first floor was open this time of night. The anarchist sat at the counter and ordered a tomato sandwich. Coffee too. They were gonna need it.
From their deerskin pack, a lone jackalope's foot dangled like an offering. It's only companion was a scrap of limp black paper with the Runic symbols for life and death. Black paper, red ink infused with animal blood--an Arcadian tradition nurtured through over seven hundred years of king. Kings were all Sadie Crane knew--born too late for storming the castle, born just in time to watch all the old Punks die. Cripes.
Thought: Hey, White Doe gave you that. It's about, like, contrast. The singularity of cycles. Don't that beat all?
The person behind the counter shot them a glare, polishing a small empty glass with a once white cloth dirtied to brownish butter.
Thought: Doesn't like you. Has every reason not to like you.
The anarchist reached into their deerskin pack. Their family still had the farmhouse, untouched except for the occasional passer-through. It was off the road, if they remembered right. Not that road, the one they'd been on. You'll know it when you see it. You'll-Know-It-Road. Off the main.
They'd been written at. It'd been an age, since anyone wrote at them. There was a farmhouse that needed cleaning out and there were no better hands for it than Sadie Crane's, said the first letter.
The second was from Viola M'et-Sepirot-Keita. It was a loving piece of written with flowers drawn all around their name and a moth sketch in place of a signature. The contents--a desperate plea, a confused ramble, and an emotional appeal--was the last push. They got this letter a month back and ignored it for weeks.
Thought: Every beauty in the universe comes back to her.
From over round spectacles, O'anna stared daggers. Her gaze could have slit a throat at twenty paces.
Their back stiffened to an anxious peak. But they kept their head bowed and listened to their music. If they hadn't prepped for bug-eyed stares, they wouldn't have come back. They were in for worse, the coming days. If they stayed long enough.
Thought: Don't let them get to you.
Sadie Crane rolled the remains of their sandwich into a cloth napkin. They thought about what they could have been doing, if not this. Where they could have been. As one does after finishing a particularly good tomato sandwich.
Thought: You could have mined. Easy and safe, you know? Well, safe for everyone who doesn't need to be down there. Nothing good out there, in the mines. Leastways anymore. You could have done that, mining. If you'd been born earlier.
They stood up from the glossed wood front counter, headphones in a loving cradle around their neck. As if they didn't know what they could have done. They'd wasted hours, thinking what they could have done. It was all bull, what they could have done. Real Punks don't make room for could have done.
"Hey, O'anna," were the first words out their mouth, not very Punk of them.
Thought: Oh cripes. Did you forget how to talk to people?
O'anna waited, her face a thunderstorm.
Thought: The last names, Basalt and Eislane. Sybil always did Basalt-Eislane, his sister did Eislane-Basalt. You never asked him why. It's another piece of him you left.
Sadie Crane released a heavy breath along the taut cord of intensely polite silence. Very Punk actually, intensely polite silence. If the quiet would please stop beating them bloody.
"Room?" they pitched.
O'anna would have liked to say there were no rooms available, that every café-hostal in Arcadia was full to brim and Sadie Crane should cart all their stuff back to Perant. Maybe have a try at one of those overcrowded student homes. There was plenty of floor to sleep on.
O'anna reached for the black leather belt cinched tight to her chubby waistline. From it there hung a bunch of handsome keys in various sizes and colors. O'anna plucked a small silver one into her weathered hand the color and consistency of a tan brown sofa chair. The key was passed across the counter to Sadie Crane and O'anna slightly bent her head.
Thought: Don't.
The anarchist gripped at their thick denim skirt, cut at the ankles. They forced out words through teeth gritted into a cadaverous grin.
"Thank you kindly," they said.
O'anna's jerked her head up, then down again. You might confuse the gesture for some kind of post-death spasm, but it was actually a nod of understanding. "You wouldn't be here if you didn't need to be," that nod said. "I get it. Just get outta my sight. I can't look at you."
Sadie Crane wouldn't be getting courtesy, not in that sorry excuse. But that was just dandy. Didn't come back here for courtesy, let alone forgiveness. They deserved none.
Viola had set up her base of operations in the basement of a small staying house.
Base of operations was maybe pushing it a little. It was a desk, an old beast of scarred mahogany with four wobbly trunk legs. Bought off a young merchant for ten silvers, an absolute steal.
In the leftmost corner, beyond the wash tubs and strung coils of drying line, there stood a printing press. Some kind of legend--Old Romantic--was cursived to the side. Viola barely spoke a lick of of Old Romantic and she probably wouldn't be interested in what it said anyways.
Notebooks stacked along the interior walls, spiral bound in thick black twine. On the desk, a magnificent typewriter. On import. You wouldn't catch a fancy machine like that in Arcadia. These were for the crowded newsrooms in Ru Divine or universities in Turaq. Their sibling Fareed sent them that typewriter, bless their heart.
She plucked a scrap of pale banana yellow paper out the typewriter and fisted it into a tight ball. Something about a vanished merchant ship. She was not writing about a vanished merchant ship, probably attacked and sunk by communist pirates. That sounded bull, Viola never wrote anything bull.
To Do List, Item One. Send that letter to Fareed, thanking them for the printing press. Her desire to write far outweighed her desire to study in the sand flats of Turaq, but to each their own. If she visited her sibling, it would be for three days. That was all she could stand for blistering heat and flies.
Her graphite pencil tapped the page. She rubbed the pencil in the crotch dip between two of her fingers. A wince of dull headache screeched in her frontal lobe. A fair shake of all nights, this past week. Brown sugar coffee and hot milk tea were her best friends.
She'd taken over the wall behind her desk. It was plastered with articles and notices lifted from local rags. Over six decades of The Alcoast Inscriber, The Sunlight, and other lesser known she'd taken a shining to. There were even some cutouts from an enormously biased royalist publication and an equally biased anarchist publication. Both of them had come to the conclusion that Lord Belmonte should be thrown with weighted stone slippers off the nearest port. No one liked Lord Belmonte, least of all Viola.
Among the newspaper clippings, a photograph of three adults and three kids. They were all smiling, holding hands in the schoolyard grown rough and wild with blades of grass. The leftmost corner faintly scarred with V.M.S.K.
The journalist spread palms out at the wall. It was too much and it was hers now. This life belonged to her. There was no way out but through.
The poster on the wall said STAG in enormous capitals. Outside, chill drops of rain fell on ruddy cobbles. Inside, flickering candles and jazz. The air stank of burnt coffee, tar cigarette smoke, and wine.
De'afi sat atop a wooden bar stool, nursing a porcelain cup of red cherry wine. Ze missed the wine in hir native land, the Sannite Islands. That wine had kick. This was just mildly flavored cherry water with bubbles.
Abakris sat on the stool at hir right side, coal-dark smoke belching out the tar cigarette in his left hand. Charming as he'd any right to be, like the sultry fatale of a mid-century tragedy novella. You could tell just by looking that he was from the Picaresque region of Turaq, his skin this dull sun-spotted copper and hair black like an tar cigarette smoke. He'd been frequenting this club for two thousand days on the rotating wheel.
They banged their porcelain cup of lemon honey beer on the bar. Goldenrod yellow liquid heaved up the sides in a broad spray. Splitter splatter, splitter splatter, sang the droplets. The porcelain cup said nothing because white porcelain is famously non-talkative.
"The galleries in Ru Divine--Suzette--in Suzette, where they got the damn Vreshi," he said. "Don't you wanna go?"
He was on The Vreshi again. He'd be there a while, on the Vreshi. De'afi pretended he didn't exist while he wanted to high hells about the damn Vreshi.
Ze spread open hir leather-bound commonplace book and put down hir right index finger. A complex butterfly of blueprints spread out from hir fingertips. Charcoal sketches, quotations in pencil, pressed leaves, and transcriptions off the radio. The outer layer of Reality made up of things and places and stuff to know.
The Vreshi slapped absolute ass. Imagine the largest piece of art in All Creation, spanning floor, walls, and ceiling of the biggest damn room you ever did see. Now picture mountains--for real mountains--of interconnected naked bodies, thick gangles of limb knotted together. It took four hundred days and four hundred nights to finish the work--De'afi had never been that dedicated to anything hir whole damn life, gods alive.
"Think I'm gonna do priesting," Abakris said. "See the damn Vreshi, do priesting. Or join The Baudelaire? Gonna join The Baudelaire."
Abakris took from their rucksack a letter posted to them days back from a certain Viola. Concise. Straight to points. Viola knew her way around words and it drove Abakris up walls.
Sybil called Abakris "melancholy and misanthropic". They made love in abandoned railway boxes with stained glass windows. The artist gray fingerprints and popping red lip stain on Sybil's collarbone. Sybil made them forget dreams, forget going overseas to Ru Divine and joining The Baudelaire to become a knighted soldier-cop.
"Fuck you sideways," Abakris said to no one in particular.
He lifted it high, cinched the skinny paper between his fingers and disjointed it middle of Viola's handwriting. Snowflake paper scraps fluttered into his crop of curls and gathered dew-like in the cleave of his shirt.
Ze came to the final page of hir commonplace. A fabric pocket stuck to the back cover. Ze called this hir fabric mailbox. Tiny square folds notes for keeping safe.
De'afi pinched a torn scrap between thumb and forefinger.
"The Spinners Club," this one read, in Viola's handwriting.
The note was delivered morning last, to the little room ze kept above STAG with Abakris. That peach crate of a bedroom with two hammocks and a broken latch Abakris always said he was going to fix. He never got around to fixing the latch. Head full of tar, that guy.
Abakris spat more coal-dark smoke from his cigarette. He smoked about two packs a day and was hoping to double that number.
"Bet we could do it," he said. "Bet we could get away. Two of us, who else is gonna? Who else is gonna? And then we priest. We cop. We do whatever wherever. That's how we live."
Ze pushed the note back into hir fabric mailbox and shut hir commonplace.
"I don't wanna priest, Abby," ze sighed. "I don't wanna cop. I wanna live. You think I don't wanna live just cuz of what happened?"
De'afi yanked hirself off the stool. Oldest damn conversation, like a record on repeat. They'd been having versions of this for six stinking years on this stinking ark on this stinking planet. Reckon it was about time ze took the door.
Ze counted over four thousand days of rotation they'd been together. Ze hoped they would not see each other again for however many turns left on the wheel.
The bed was unnervingly comfortable. Not like those itchy fuck-ugly beds at the student home in Perant.
Thought: Good for getting away.
Perant used to be vacant fields and no one lived there. Said the land was cursed. Before the royals, before everything. At Sadie Crane's youngish twenty-five years, everything before the royals was before everything.
Six blazing arks and they were born to the smallest, the least special. They could've been anywhere. But they were here. Gods dead and spirits alive.
Sadie Crane rolled over in their far too comfortable bed. Did they regret it perhaps, six years university? They were bone tough, the six years. Six damn years of Speculative Philosophy, Occult History, Astronomy. Cripes. Suppose it was better than sitting on their beautiful fat ass for the next decades.
Thought: Cripes. Thinking about university ain't getting you dead to the world. Try something else? Something further from home?
Sybil. Sybil with his goofy lopsided grin. He was one of All Creation's little miracles. Born once and never again. He was beloved, perfect, the hole that just kept on sucking you in. He was relic. All nineteen years of him.
Thought: Into, away, down bad, inside out.
With this thought in their head, Sadie Crane drifted into an uneasy sleep. And dreamed.
A black fox perched on a gray boulder, the swishing back and forth of it's tail leaving trails of coal-dark. It's irises the inky black of a night without stars.
"Hello Sadie Crane," it said in greeting, it's voice like the breezy hiss of a patio door. "Do you know when you're gonna die?"
Sadie Crane knelt in front of the gray boulder, their fingers sticking pinpoints into the mud. They'd lost something. They didn't know what it was, but they'd definitely lost something. And if they didn't get it back, their mother and aunt and dads were gonna be pissed. They were gonna regret suggesting university. What good was all that book learning if you just kept losing things? The respect of the townsfolk, your relationships. And now this. Whatever it was, This.
"I mean, yeah?" said Sadie Crane. "Doesn't everyone?"
Their eyes stuck into the black fox like matchsticks and they didn't move. If they just dug around in the dirt a little more. If they followed the scraps of glinting silver--
"It's big up there," said the black fox.
Sadie Crane tilted their head up to look into the night sky, pricks of light over a quilt of black nothing.
"Yeah, sure," said Sadie Crane. "You seen the--the thing I lost?"
The black fox gave a small almost invisible shake of its head. No, it hadn't seen anything. It wasn't in the business of knowing where lost things turned up. But everything did eventually. Somewhere.
"Thanks," said Sadie Crane.
They were not being sarcastic. They actually meant it.
End of Chapter 1
A quick summary. Arcadia is the smallest of the arks we've found so far and we've found a great many arks. I believe it was the native Arcadians who discovered the place and subsequently established some kind of headless stateless form of governance. It was all going right as anything until the Badeers rose to power, we're thinking sometime around the 1600s although records from that time are sparse. We know there was some kind of religion, some kind of following. And then suddenly the Badeers had established themselves and this new big thing they called "royalism". It's said they took all the magic in the land for themselves and established divine rule united under some nameless old gods long dead. The new-thinkers say it was a cult, that the Badeers tampered with matters of godhood and ritual.
--Excerpt from "All Creation: A History" by Horra Dahla Rothka