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Certain that something you have overlooked must be responsible for the irregular patches of the Strangeness on the wall, you resolve to take a closer look. You finish climbing the stairs, then you extricate the bundle from the crook of your right arm and set it down on the floor – well away from the wall, just in case. You consider pocketing your pin-stiletto as well, but you decide to keep it out, in case you need to use it as improvised probe. For a moment, you consider leaving the 'stick behind as well, or walking back down the stairs a bit, and then setting it on the jutting beam opposite to the one against the exterior wall … but as you are thinking, the flame sputters and starts to gutter. It recovers well enough, but you are going to need all the light this candle can make, so you settle on keeping the 'stick in hand as well.
Confident in your balance and climbing ability – and urged on by a a nagging concerned that you could be wasting your time here – you make haste and head out onto the beam. You pad and slide out onto the beam, slowly and steadily approaching the first of the irregular patches of the Strangeness. There isn't much room to work with here, barely a half-inch of space between the bulges of your burdened apron – which it is only now occurring to you that you should have taken the fraying thing off – and the inside of the exterior wall, which from this close looks more Estranged than ever.
You continue on, unabating … until you start to have problems with your footwraps as well. Pattern's Perdition, you know better than this, you should have treated this like a climb, then you would have b -
The left foot-wrap comes loose, just as you are shifting your weight to and with it, you lose what little grip the battered and stained linen offered. You compensate, to counter the slide – but in the process you can feel yourself losing balance. You contort yourself, desperately trying to make a safe center, just like father taught you all those years ago – all the while doing everything in your power to focus, to stay calm, and most of all, to not visualize yourself falling backwards. You are not really that far from the top landing, but with how steep the stairs are it – no, no! Do not go there! Do not even go there!
Instead, you muster all of your focus on the gap between you and the wall, on keeping it as thin as you can. And it works! It took a bit of wiggling to get there, but you manage make a safe center. You softly chuckle to yourself in relief … but as you catch your breath, you get rather upset at yourself. You didn't think about the footwraps, or the apron – or even the fraying sausage links you still have around your fraying neck. Now you are out on this beam, wearing one and a half footwraps, burdened like some miserable pack animal – though not encumbered by any intelligence, certainly! Pattern's Perdition, you are cracking up - figuratively, and damn near physically too!
