A sincere announcement

When truth is in doubt, people wear masks.

The road becomes roads. The journey grows more complex. Travellers begin to lose their way. The longer they live, the more they learn: childhood begins to retreat, and the world, like a great forest, stretches on and on around them, and within them, a wilderness.

In such a world, there are many strangers. Are they truthful? Do the faces they show mirror their hearts? Or do they wear masks?

In such a world of dust, it is hard to become Dustless. In a world of strangers, wearing masks of lies.

Go deeper still into the wilderness: become truly lost. Then look to your comrades: look to the ones you know and love.

They, like you, are creatures of dust. Do even your friends wear masks?

And if so, who are they?

And you?

Soon to be published, and offering truth…

Dustless, Volume 9 | Mask [i]

The forest and the town

Yes, how quickly worlds melted away, and melted into being. The stuffy, oppressive grandeur of FerZon, although it was only an hour back behind the riders, now felt particularly dreamlike. For this was Ahamuji, the MerZirvora – the Sea of Trees. The forest was the law here: the forest was real, and the forest would endure. FerZon, it seemed to Zy, for all its venerable history, was an anomaly, an error, even – and for all the massivity of its buildings, its civic weight, it now appeared to the boy to be a kind of fragile bubble of stone, one that, within a few centuries, perhaps, the forest would pop, closing in on it, and crushing it back out of being.

Excerpt from Mask [i], Volume 9 of Dustless

Please enjoy…

A man of the guilds

Inquosomir had become increasingly caught up in his own words: he looked less and less often at his noble listener, and instead addressed a point in the mid-air. His eyes swam in the vitreous element of his spectacles. His speech was a kind of arid rhapsody. Zy had the image of small numerals and Gonfi running round in Inquosomir’s bloodstream. The man had rulers for veins, and diagrams for breakfast. When he dreamed, he dreamed in equations. His mind was a set of plans. His heart was made of facts. When he thought, it was like turning a page in a book. He was a useful one, only… he didn’t seem able to stop himself being useful.

Excerpt from Mask [i], Volume 9 of Dustless

World, dream, sleeper

The dreams expand and the dreams contract, closing in upon themselves.

Inside the sleeper, the eggs of dreams are hatching silently. On the surface of the sleeper’s face, there is calm. On the underside of the sleeper’s face, however, a dreamworld is extruded into being, a whole landscape bubbles up from nothing: the trees, the path, a sound of crows, a dim yellowing winter sky…

Perhaps the sleeper sighs, or turns, unconsciously seeking a more comfortable position for tired limbs. Perhaps the whole world of the dream shimmers as the sleeper moves. Perhaps the world of the dream remains entirely stable, and it is only the sleeper who rotates around. The axis of the dream is straight and still. The forest goes on. The crows creak and chafe and grumble, coming slightly closer through the winter branches. The riders go on, at walking pace. The sun continues to set. And strange animals begin to wake and move…
Perhaps the sleeper calls out a name – but no one, on the outside of the dream, is listening. The sleeper is alone, or settled among other sleepers, none of whom is awake to catch the name…

Inside the sealed world of the dream, the heroes ride, the forest grows. The snow builds up, mountainous, the landscape seemingly impenetrable, endless. But it is just a world inside a skull, made of a kind of nothingness… For what is the material of dreams?… What substance can it possess?…

And what of the dreamer? They have not realised they are dreaming. For them, the dream is a waking world. They have no idea that they are like unborn birds, wrapped up in a crisp shell of sleep: no idea that, beyond the oval darkness in which they are curled, there is an entirely other world.

The dreamer takes the steps to the top of the tower, the path through the forest, the complaint of crows, the tread of footsteps, the printed text of the book they are reading, the brushed characters of the scroll they have unwound before them, the clink of bridle and bit, the thud and crunch of hooves in snow, the dreamer takes all of this as all there is, the stuff of their life: they don’t realise that, beyond the light of the dream, there is another, an actual light, the light that comes when an egg is cracked open, and the shell falls apart…

Inside the sealed world of the dream, the heroes ride, the towers cast shadows of different intensity across the road, the readers read, the forest grows, the plain recedes and recedes: and when the heroes tire, and lie down, they sleep; and in their sleep, they begin to dream…

Excerpt from Mask (i), Volume 9 of Dustless