The seeker sinks deeper into the city. Ten thousand souls surroud her, their lives swirling, and she seeks the one in the center, the stone in the current. The red towers sink their teeth into the earth around her. They were built five hundred years ago; they are still new, still digging their places. They shimmer like a mirage. The streets shift with every blink, except for the kingsroad which cuts the city in half. That broad street bears the ghosts of generations older than the towers, older than the city itself. They walk slowly, heavy with the years, but they do not stop, they are walking to the ends of the earth.

She entered the city by the kingsroad herself, but she came flying as a bird down its length. There are houses built over it now, its course diverted like a river. She found the true way, winged down it and came to rest in the center of the city. She set her feet on the tallest tower and it began to crumble, bearing her into the earth, into the darkness. She rode its soft destruction, for she seeks darkness, she seeks silence and a place of emptiness from which to start.

Deep beneath the earth in the darkness she finds it. She takes up residence and fortifies herself with subtlety, leaving no trace as she enters or leaves, leaving no path to be followed. She passes down crevices or hides in plain sight, always lingering on the edges even as she seeks the center.

Sitting in solitude she weaves threads of light, then ties them into nets. Standing strong and straight she casts the nets, out into the waters that are minds: the minds of masons at the towers, of bakers at the ovens, weavers at the looms, a blacksmith at her forge. These are her broad strokes. She draws the nets tighter as she draws her brush across the canvas. The background takes shape and waits for the focus to emerge.

Wallowing in the weary walk of a fisherman’s daughter, hawking the morning river’s bounty with this bony compatriot and the bony wares, the seeker catches a glimpse of her quarry. It is only a brief touch before he slips away. It is enough for black hair and broad shoulders but nothing more. Maybe a little touch of arrogance, but that might be invention. Then there is an eddy in the crowd and vision fades. It tempts, the glimpse, but it is early yet. She turns away, forcing herself not to run after him. She brings fish to the mind, she brings back nets. Those nets must be finer. When he is caught, he must be caught entire, not a glimpse of hair and broad strong shoulders. She plucks these details one by one, tosses them into the heaps in the corners of the streets. The remainder is only a feeling, the way she felt when she caught the glimpse, the moment of panic and sheer blind success. That moment she folds into a packet and tucks within her coat, keeping it near her, opening it from time to time, reading it over and over, making it familiar.

The canvas is less clean now, the first few layers defacing it. The scene grows. It is like an image of mountains, their darkness looming, and a valley below. And it is a night scene. The sky grows dark. That is what she has so far.

Two old men sit in the sweet low light of flickering candles, deep in the night. They tell each other stories as they sit and smoke, long hours passing as they have passed since the old men were young men. Their crooking fingers trace the pictures, carved in ink on their skins, which illustrate the stories their tongues shape out of breath. As the morning nears they take tiny sips of fire and tell each other that life is too short. She notes this down in the margins, a sketch for a theme she’ll flesh out later.

Two young women talk over blue glass mugs, steam rising, in a cafe where these two can be alone, surrounded by people. They take bitter sips of the infusion, a foreign root at the core of it, brought from afar at great cost to be ground in small amounts, steeped in boiled water. Later, when they speak with tongues and lips but not with words the taste is still there, tying two times together, merging moments of innocence and experience. Then, like the old men, their fingers trace images on skin, but these are pictures yet to be drawn, lines engraved by age not ink. They light candles too, and she sits and watches, pleased at the convergence, stories on skin the night’s overriding theme. She notes it down, calls it a good day’s work. She sleeps and dreams of skies on fire.

She works, she works, tying the nets ever tighter, crafting her lures more specifically as she begins to see what she is fishing for. She attains more tantalizing sightings, more glimpse on the verges. A glance up from a man washing dishes in a basin shows the profile in the window as he passes. Concentration on the chords a singer calls from her guitar brings a flash of the face over her shoulder. A tangle of lovers’ bodies shows the next steps, briefly outlined in light like the shape of a boot vanishing in a puddle: this way, that way, like the mortal merging on the bed. Each time she throws away the detail (eyes, lips, shirt, coat, fingers), adds the lunging excitement of the moment to the packet in her pocket. She reviews it day by day as she gets closer.

Now the mountains are finished, the moon is up in the sky. In the valley below a village takes shape, little people moving about. There are blank blurs on the canvas yet, undefined areas, but they grow fewer and fewer as each new layer brings new detail. A tree here, a bird there. Still the focus is unclear. Is it up on the shoulder of the mountain, overlooking the valley and the town? Is it down in the village, or further along the banks of the stream, or in the forest in the foothills?

Sometimes it is a long time before she makes any progress. Years can flow by in the wink of an eye and she is no closer, though usually no farther, than she was before she cast her gaze onto the spire of a cathedral, the ankle of a woman in the street. She tries not to begrudge the time lost. She has no patience for the anger at herself, she pushes it away and treats herself with care, she buys herself a drink in the quiet cafe and they move on, not dwelling.

It is during one of these lulls that the end comes. She is not in the studio, not by the banks of the river casting the nets. She is sitting in the cafe, watching the stream rise from the blue glass, and he sits down across from her. She reaches into her coat and tosses the packet on the fire. Sweet smoke drifts up from the crinkling paper and a thousand brief glimpses rush up to fill the ceiling. His face, his body, his wearing, all familiar; she’s drawn him in perfect detail before. All there is now: recognition. She orders a second cup and never looks back.

In the empty studio the canvas sits forgotten. Above the village on the shoulder of the mountain a figure sits on a rock, facing away from the viewer. There is no telling who it is, whether they look down into the valley or up towards the mountain or the moon. The figure is alone, save for a small tree growing out of the soil.

By the river a boy finds the nets and lines abandoned. He pulls them up in curiosity. The fish is unique, sparkling scales like a rainbow and a living eye that stares back, gives you a choice. But the fish slips from his hands as soon as the hook is freed, and is lost in the water despite its irridescence.

His ideas often seemed to come in the middle of the night, and he would spring out of sleep in order to capture them before they left him. He kept a notebook by the bed for this purpose. He would turn on the light, and write and write until the idea was safe in a place more permanent than his mind, and then he would close the notebook, turn out the light, and go to sleep.

He often wondered why he only seemed to have ideas at night. Of course he was creative during the day. That was when his real creative work happenend anyway. But it was just that: work. The inspiration or talent seemed to be present only during the night. At first he thought he dreamed the ideas, but when he started recording his dreams the ideas dried up and the work became drudgery. And in any case there wasn’t any sign of inspiration in the dreams he wrote down. He guessed that in between the dreams, in between sleeping and consciousness, must be a more relaxed place where his brain was able to throw ideas at him without any sort of constraints. This seemed well in line with his other psychological theories about himself. It was when he was most relaxed that he did his best work. Didn’t it follow, then, that those highest peaks of his creativity should arrive only when he was more relaxed than he could ever be in waking life?

This was his theory, a little theory about the space between dreams and between waking and sleeping, and he held to it. He held to it until he caught the muse at its work.

He was in the throes of a creative dry spell that had lasted almost a week. He sat at his desk for three hours every morning, but nothing came of it. It had happened before, of course, so he wasn’t very concerned. Just frustrated and impatient and ready to get back to work. It was during the eve of a full week of dry spell that he finally came awake with an idea in his head (and it was a prize of an idea, a real zinger). He was so ready for it to arrive, so impatient to be back in the swing of things, that his hand was on the lampswitch before his eyes open. The light came on, and his lids snapped apart, and there, across the room, sitting on the dresser and writing madly on a homemade pad of paper with a quill pen, was the muse.

It was one of the ugliest things he had ever seen, and he recoiled. It was certainly the ugliest living thing he had ever seen, made all the more hideous, perhaps, by the fact that he had never seen anything remotely like it before. It was like a hairless little man, covered in wrinkled gray skin like an elephant’s. It was about two feet tall, but all hunched and gangly, and it had two batty wings sprouting from its shoulder blades.

He must have gasped. The thing looked up and froze. Its face was a nightmare, with a nose which was both bulbous and hooked at the same time, a nonexistent chin, and ears which twitched and quivered. It was looking at him with beady, jet-black eyes opened wide, and it said, in a deep, mellifluous man’s voice:

“My god, it’s seen me.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Then the thing pointed out the window with a long, crooked, clawed finger, and said:

“Look at that! What is that thing?”

Inexcusably, he fell for it, and by the time he realized his mistake and looked back the creature was gone. He leapt out of bed and searched for it, under the bed, under the dresser, in the closet, and out in the hall, but the thing was not present. He was about to dismiss it as a horrible, uncharacteristically life-like nightmare, when he reentered his bedroom and stepped on the quill pen. The feathers tickled his foot. Next to the pen lay the notebook, no doubt dropped in the creature’s hurry to disappear. He picked it up with a trembling hand and read the neat cursive.

There on the roughly bound pad, written in ink with the strangely-feathered pen, in the exact words he would have used to set it down himself, was the idea. His idea. After a week’s worth of drought, there it was, as clear as day, and it was indeed a zinger.

It is a red place, this city. A place of bricks and rust. We are indwellers here, my family and I. We were the builders, and we are the residents.

Our materials were brick, iron, and glass. Our structures are strong yet subtle. We took our patterns from nature, and we designed without plan, drawing in the moment, laughing at the cacophany, not pitying the latter souls who might wander lost on our twisted streets or find themselves crossing a wrought-iron bridge only to find themselves back where they started. We played with the light as it streamed down out of the sky. Our towers caught it as it passed through their windows or reflected off their walls, and the streets glimmer with a red sheen and with the thousand pictures in the windows, riots of color, like a prism lighting every street.

When my sisters and I were young we would go to the river and look down on its perfect blue waters. The charmak forest upstream gave it this hue, something derived from the leaves of the trees or stolen from the roots in exchange for nourishment. My first memory is of the riverside park. Walking through rich green grasses and weeping willows, with the blue water between me and another fold of the red city, the rising curves of the opera house with its image of “The Oneness of All Things” in the upper story window, done by Mortebrande, my great-uncle. That’s where I found one of those bridges. I had snuck away from my sisters and our minder, and in a secret stand of low blooming brush by the water’s edge I found the brick patio, living with moss, and the base of the bridge, iron curled and blossomed like the flora that surrounded it. I ran up the fine planks, polished by many passers there, my one small hand only able to grasp the irregular balusters of the railing as I passed swiftly. Up ahead of me I saw the opera house again, this time from a different angle, the conservatory in the east wing. I thought I had surely escaped from my minder, that I would run free of my sisters and be my own little young woman, and then I found myself following the curve of the bridge down to earth again, landing on the same brick patio living with moss, and when I emerged from the stand of blooming shrubs I could see the opera house again over my shoulder, still across the water, “The Oneness of All Things” a rainbow in reverse.