Tempus Clausuris (1)

Part One:  Why the long face, Mister Horse?


It had been a long time, and she couldn't deny it.  Lesser souls might've termed it 'decimation', but her innate devotion to the precision of grammatical precepts had knocked that particular descriptive on the bonce with little or no mercy.  "History is everything, Miss Ryland.  Everything with a pinch."
     She still heard his voice.  Here, there, and everywhere.  Much of it, she knew, was an illusion born of frustration, originally engendered by the cruelty of enforced separation.
     "We're going on a journey, you and I, and none of it foretold, nor predestined by what passes as Fate.  I hope, for your sake, you're equipped for the bumps."
     The 'bumps', as he had termed them, turned out to be nightmares in both flesh and consequence.  Removal and repair, readjustment and regret, resplendour and replacement.  They were all covered, but never in glory.
     At the interchange between Happenstance and Salvation she encountered Dikas.  He was interesting, because he professed to knowing at least one of her former associates.
     "Y'know, he's not as dead as some might suggest.  He's still there, doing what he does, but you should know he's changed."
     "Changed how?" she asked, checking her pockets for the piece of paper that would determine whether or not she was dreaming.
     "At a fundamental level," said Dikas, reaching out to stay her hand.  "He's not my friend, Miss Ryland.  He could never be that.  Truth be told, he says he got no friends, straight up.  There's a new particular upon the tapestry, something you should definitely be aware of.  Here's how it works..."
     Dikas revealed a vastly complicated paradigm in the form of symbolic structures built upon waveforms in the accepted matrix, and then he cut it all with a spike.
     "Too much," said Dikas, waving his hands like a thing possessed.  "Too much!"
     "No!" she cried,  "Not enough!"
     Dikas held his hands to his face with sadness.  "I failed you all."
     "What?"
     Dikas moved back, his hands still fusing with the power of the constrained paradigm.  "It is what it is, Miss Ryland.  All this power, all this knowing, it's..."
     The voice cut in, oblivious to the existing correspondence.
     "Unknowable."


To be continued...