Quoted By:
Deliberately, you avoid looking at your surroundings, instead settling for staring at the Great Work as it winds overhead. As miserable as this night has been - and even as miserable as this night is going to be once you get into the sewers - it certainly is beautiful. The lights wax and wane, twinkle and shimmer. The moon is full, and is throwing off a considerable amount of light as well, seemingly doing as much to illuminate the streets as the streetlamps are, now fewer and further apart outside of the wall. The buildings that frame the scene from the bottom are made of wood, as is nearly all construction in Stickport - but there are scant similarities beyond that. They are handsome, built with deliberation, diligence and purpose entirely absent in the Mount's original harbor. Not to mention craft and skill. Or materials for that matter. Even in the nicer areas, by the Upper Boardwalk, you are hard pressed to find a building without glass windows - here you are hard pressed to find one without ... though perhaps the comparison is not fair, as closed shutters may hide open frames. But there is no succor for ambiguity past the roof-line. The roofs are all held at the second story, all within a few feet of one another and all square from what you can see. The ones that don't look to be freshly shingled aren't shingled at all - they are slate instead. Likewise, the chimneys are straight and true, and dull as they may be in the heady mix of moon and lamp light, you cannot see one that doesn't have some aesthetic consideration - patterns, colors, curves and the like. The way they all starkly jut right up into the sky, an irregular fringe to the markedly less irregular frame of the roof-line ... perhaps it is silly, but it feels somehow profound, seeing the Work - from which Man ultimately sprung - so distant, being mirrored and continued through Man in such an incrementally small way, so close. Had you the time to do so, you might kneel down and pray properly - instead you must satisfy yourself with yet another quick and silent prayer.
But even as you look for the words, you find yourself beset by cynicism. Is it any wonder that you are waxing so spiritually? What with your admittedly poor and presumably dwindling odds of making a clean break from the Mount? What with what will almost inevitably happen if you aren't able to make a clean break? And what with everything that you have done these past few days? You ... don't dwell - no, no damn it! For the sake of your Thread, you must dwell! You killed four men! Four men that were three. Any thought, any hope that you aren't being Tried, that you haven't been Judged in this Realm - that line of retreat, of comfort is cut. And never the twain shall meet. You ... you saw the Lodestar. In life, you saw the Lodestar. And then you immediately proceeded to desecrate the revenants of the men you just killed - and that smuggler besides!
