Forty days and forty nights had I stumbled across the trackless desert, from dune to dune and through valley after valley, all of them the same as every one before. Time had no meaning, neither did hunger, nor thirst: they were all things which washed over me and held dominion over me, and I offered them no thought or resistance. There was only room for the simple thought: left foot, right foot…
I crested another dune and head, wavering in the heat like a mirage, there loomed a great castle, on the very shores of a vasty ocean, and I stopped walking out of disbelief and stared at it: at the towering walls and high turrets, the windows cut into the gray rock, the moat, the chain-pulled drawbridge; the black ocean with its white-cresting waves; the smashed, broken boat, resting on the land and rotting slowly away beneath the steady teeth of time itself. There was a fetid landfill, I do not know why.
With the last ounce of strength I had, I stumbled to the gate, which opened before me, and a man stepped out: bony, hollow-faced, eyes that burned with the fires of madness, and he clasped my shoulder and said in a voice like leaves, blowing across a sidewalk, “At least, you have come, thee writer! Welcome, this day, to Castle Debacle!“
He added, sensing my hesitation, “We have tea and pens.”
It was that or the trackless desert, and I allowed him to bring me inside. The great door slammed behind me, a thunderous boom, and it was the last time I should hear them open, outside of the black vale of madness and deadline. and tea…
