You liked wearing them everywhere. I asked you once if you wished to be a dancer and you replied: //I don't know yet.// I asked you to dance with me and you said simply: //Not yet.//\n\n<<back>>
<<set $hasFruit = true>>You clutched the nectarine tight in your fist, the juice running between your fingers. The muscles of your arms felt loose, like you were barely in control at all.\n\n<<display '(maze choice)'>>
Snuck out of the house often to look up at the stars, you did, and named each one imaginary words. And think. Never got caught, always imagined telling your parents (not confessing, declaring) when you were a lady on your own, letting them in on one of your best secrets...\n\n<<back>>
A popular one with girls at court: her kisses add an extra day to your life.\n\n<<back>>
"Why are you here? I mean -- why are you waiting here?"\n\n"Not waiting," he said. "Nothing to wait for."\n\n"Why here, then?"\n\n"There's no reason for so many things -- asking only makes it worse." \n\n<<display '(man actions)'>>
It was a Wednesday evening, after the magister had ended the day's session, though the sun hadn't begun to set yet. We had skipped dinner, you and I, and went walking around the manor's south woods. You knew them well; you had spent a lot of time there as a kid, poking around in the reeds and climbing the trees. But you let me lead. It was much more interesting that way. You could watch me instead of the world.\n\nWe had only known each other four days, if you counted by the calendar. Less than a half-day, if you counted the time face to face.\n\nWe had wandered into a grove of pidera trees, and I asked you how old they were. The question everyone asks when they first see them. They were maybe a hundred feet tall and their bark was smooth and bone-gray. You explained that they were actually very young, as trees run, that they hunger for the sun so badly that they sprout to their full height within their first six months, and that because of this, they sometimes snap under their own weight. They were nicknamed //hollow trees// because their inner rings were so meager. They were like bericake to the touch, almost edible.\n\nMy eyes were on the sky, focused on a spot a hundred thousand feet above us. You wondered if I was listening at all.\n\n//Kiss me,// you whispered, but your voice trembled on the second word, so that it became almost a wordless exhalation: //kisssssss//.\n\nIt all stuck in my memory, I promise you: the story of the trees, the ribbon that bound your hair into a ponytail, even the magister's lesson. Everything that happened that day. Your eyes after our lips parted. The shallow curve of your smile; the warmth of your arms around my body. The feeling that everything after would be different and better.\n\nWe went on walking after that single kiss, deeper into the woods, and only turned back when it was too dark to see the ground. Your parents were worried. They thought you were lost. You didn't tell them about us. It was sweeter to keep it as a secret.\n\n<<back>>
They were a gift from your father, after your fourth year of lessons. He brought them to you the morning after your first recital before court. Your father was a careful man; he wanted to be a good father, so he told he loved you often. At least once a day maybe. But that was the first time you truly felt that he loved you, when he gave you the shoes. You had done something beautiful and he loved you for it. You wore them whenever you could.\n\nThe miracle was how little your feet had grown in the time since then, and how flexible the fabric of the shoes turned out to be. The edges of the shoes were beginning to turn brown -- no matter how you cleaned them, they grew visibly older and older.\n\n<<back>>
The joke shuddered through your body, the smile spreading across your face -- don't laugh in class -- don't laugh --\n\n<<back>>
The fire spread in an instant, faster than it should have, curled around the hedge walls and burned incandescent green as you stood frozen. There was something you should have done then, some way to prevent what happened next -- but you could only think of escape, of [[running]]. Your feet came unglued from the ground and you plunged into the maze. The only way to survive this was to find the way out. The smoke already was a solid cloud. The flames were chasing you and so was the man. You had only a minute to escape. Your feet counted the seconds.\n* [[Run]]
(The sixth rule of Lostnight prohibits timepieces, compasses, dead-reckoning devices...)\n\n<<back>>
Lostnight
"You must always respect it," the teacher droned, "You'll know when you find it and you'll understand why you have to keep it secret--"\n\n<<back>>
... you could feel yourself curving [[inward]], circling towards me, knowing ... thorns [[crushed]] beneath your knees... my voice was [[gone|finding]] now but you knew where I was...
The note crumpled in your hand. Pretend you didn't read it, pretend it's gone...\n\n<<back>>
"Come here," you said and placed your hands on my shoulders. We had only kissed three times before, and it had always came with a prelude, a stepping-forward. It was never an accident, an instinct -- and you leaned into me and pressed your lips to mine.\n\nWhat do folktales tell us about kisses? What magic do they weave over us, and what do we learn with our lips? There are scarcely words to describe it, what happens. There is no way to tell it to another person.\n\nThere is no way to explain how you learned in that moment that the man you kissed was not me, that the man in the maze was someone else entirely. He had given himself [[a wanted face]] and you had fallen for it. His lips were warm. It would have been easier if they felt like a monster's -- for the kind of man who would wear a wanted face was one -- but they felt just like mine.\n\n<<display '(doppleganger revealed)'>>
<<if $drank>>It was nothing, really. It was doing nothing to you that the fruit you ate hadn't already -- it was only more painful, more awful in its execution. You replaced the glass at the fountain's edge.<<endif>>\n\n"Bye," you said to the couple, again unsure how the best way to put it would be, or even if there was a way to put it that they could understand.\n\n<<display '(party)'>>
My hands. You found my hands -- smooth palms, [[scarred thumb]] -- and opened your eyes. My eyes were sealed shut with blood and my breaths came broken from my mouth.\n\nThere was no time at all.\n<<if $hasFruit>>\n* [[Try to carry me]]\n* [[Feed me the remainder of your nectarine]]\n<<else>>\n* [[Try to carry me]]\n<<endif>>
So tiny yours seemed compared to mine, so childlike and fragile, like a doll's lacquer limbs. I called them beautiful, but then I called everything about you beautiful until the word wore itself out in my mouth, til it seemed I was only saying it to hear the sound once more...\n\n<<back>>
It wasn't hard for me to learn your language, but then languages to me are just collections of sounds bound together by rules. My pronunciation was perfect, you would tell me, but I put the emphasis on the wrong words. It didn't matter to me: it was enough that you understood.\n\n<<back>>
It was an accident, us meeting. It was lucky.\n\nSo much of what happened that night was. I still think of it all. The fire was especially accidental. Only you saw how it happened. In your absence, people imagined all kinds of conspiracies. They thought that the war had finally reached their country, that it was a failed assassination attempt against the manor lord, that it was a riddle-game gone wrong.\n\nIn your absence, I tried to imagine you by my side. While I studied in the library I would close my eyes and make you re-appear at the seat next to mine; when I turned in, I imagined your body lying with mine. The intimacy we never found.\n\nBut can I tell you a secret? The pictures I painted inside my head were never complete. Your body was never more than a rough outline. You never spoke to me. There weren't enough details in my mind. I never knew you and I'm sorry for it.\n\nIt was an accident, you dying.<<silently>>\n\n<<if not /youdeath/.test($endings)>>\n <<remember $endings += 'youdeath '>>\n<<endif>>\n\n<<endsilently>>\n\n<<display '(end)'>>
"No." you said. "This is a game, isn't it? I know it. I played it before at a ball. Kiss the speechless."\n\nThe boy set his recorder on the ground beside him and held you with a sad look.\n\n"It's cruel," you said. "And I refuse it, now."\n\n"We know what you don't," Bel said. "And you'll have to play every game we can name to find out. This is how the world works, you little starling. Do you know how old you are?" But he was wrong: behind him you saw something you didn't before, what shouldn't have been there but was, that gave you all the answers you needed.\n\n[[A fire|a fire]], an enormous flowering one, in the distance. You knew I was there. It took no thought to know, no reasoning at all, and that's why you trusted yourself so, why you left without another word to those fools.
This summer's fad at court. People liked the concept of a masquerade but didn't like putting in the effort of making themselves a costume, or even fashioning a mask; eventually purchasing a new one that hadn't been seen at court before was too much trouble. Instead you simply picked from the bin when you arrived.\n\n<<back>>
Immediately the path turned left, so that you walked parallel to the edge of the square you began in. A little further the path forked, and you chose to turn right without hesitation. In class you had studied diagrams of famous Lostnight mazes; some were mathematical, others were portraits of things when viewed from above -- it was too much to think about now. You felt your body leering leftwards but couldn't do anything about it. You let the maze take you. Turn after turn. You heard songs and movement but couldn't follow any of it.\n\nYou came to a dead end, where an old man lay on the ground with his head nestled in the crook of two hedge-walls. His belly had come free from where his tunic was tucked into his pants and his eyes seemed too large for his head. Staring, smiling. Something wrong.\n\n"Wrong way," he said. His voice solicitous, perhaps seductive. "And worse, you missed the gin-stop." He flicked a lighter he held in his left hand and stared at the light as it formed [[outlines of birds and flowers]] -- and then he seemed to notice you truly.\n\n"How old are you?" he asked.\n\n"I'm fifteen," you said. There was no point in lying.\n\n"So this is your first Lostnight," he said.\n\n"Yes."\n\n"It's not like all the balls you've had before," he said. "It's not half so warm and friendly as you wished for. Is it?"\n\n"I -- don't know." More than that you didn't understand why he was telling you this.\n\n"It's cold, the world," he said. "When you grow up. You're about to grow up, aren't you?"\n\n"I -- am," you said. Not sure what you had meant exactly, whether //I am about to grow up// or //I am grown-up//. Not sure what you believed.\n\n"You won't like it," he said. "Nobody does."\n\n"Growing up?"\n\n"Yes," the man said. "Because we find out how terrible we all are, how" -- he searches for a word here -- "ceaselessly cruel, and then all that's left is finding a hiding-place, an escape from the escape."\n\n<<display '(man actions)'>>
<<set $drank = true>>You took a glass and filled it from the fountain. Odd smell, sharp but not spicy... you sniffed at it once again and then drank the whole thing in one gulp. The burn came on hard, harder than you had expected -- it was a stab, not a warmth. You blinked twice quickly. The couple was watching you.\n\n"Fire?" the woman asked, the tone of her voice a question enquiring about a secret.\n\n"Yes," you said.\n\nThe man kissed her on the cheek, but her eyes stayed fixed on you.\n* [[Drink more]]\n* [[Leave]]
There were more people than I expected -- many more. I had only been to small gatherings so far, little receptions with cumber tarts and chats about my homeland, and so the crowd of partygoers pushing against the gate startled me. We were early -- neither of us was [[wearing a watch]] but no one seemed to be let in yet.\n\nWe became part of the crowd. Odd smells, like something old roasting, floated through us. I could tell something was wrong, just catching [[scraps of words]] from the crowd, but I could not catch enough words from to understand what. You rested your left hand on my forearm, slowly rubbed the velvet of my sleeve against my skin. A familiar feeling. Then you tapped my shoulder three times: once with your index finger, then twice with your thumb. I didn't know what it meant and I knew you wanted me to wonder.\n\nIt was still light out, but just barely, when things far ahead of us in the crowd changed, and we were let into the estate. There were six men-at-arms posted at the gate, each carrying a trioche, and they seemed greatly unhappy. I couldn't imagine what was going on but I worried, and thought of [[the war|my war]].\n\nBeyond that there were a line of courtiers offering nectarines to the partygoers. We took [[a bite]] together, and [[the dream came on]] quickly. A sensation of the world slipping from our feet, a yellow buzz between your ears, then darkness.
You reached under my body and tried to lift it.\n\nIn the coastlands, we only have one god. He has no name but we call him destiny when we need to. When we die, we imagine that he comes to us bearing a purple thread, and we follow it back to where we began. He says nothing to us and he offers us no choices, but in his way, he loves us, and there's comfort there.\n\nYou pulled upward one last time and a pitiful grunt, an angry sob, escaped you. There was no hope to it, none at all. I stopped breathing. I wasn't there anymore. You let me go and felt your muscles tear.\n\nI had never believed in any gods whatsoever. Not mine nor yours. If I believed in anything, I believed in reason. It was the only way out. But -- think of it. You won't ever learn the reason for this fire, even whether it was an accident or a crime. You'll ask questions and there will be some answers, but there won't be enough. You'll never know how I came here, how we lost each other, how I was trapped, how you could not have saved me. There are no reasons. Think of it. Please, for me. There are no choices -- there is only a maze.\n\nYou are at its heart, and there is but one thread forward.<<silently>>\n\n<<if not /maze/.test($endings)>>\n <<remember $endings += 'medeath '>>\n<<endif>>\n\n<<endsilently>>\n\n<<display '(end)'>>
He was my sponsor, and took a more than paternal role in my new life. After suppers he would instruct me in the thousand-and-one ways of greeting people here. It was so difficult for me to memorize the different inflections -- that friends would fold their index fingers into their own palms when they shook hands after a fight, for instance, or that parents meeting children after they had reached the age of majority would press the backs of their hands together and intertwine their fingers (though sometimes this was done early, if the child had proven him or herself independent enough)...\n\nIt really didn't matter, the particulars. He knew rules and I was eager to learn them.\n\n<<back>>
"Right is right," goes the saying, and though anyone could prove wrong with a second's thought, it was something to go by when there was no hope of reasoning things out.\n\n<<back>>
<html>∴</html>\n\n//So far, you have seen <<print ($endings.split(' ').length - 1)>> of 5 possible endings to this story.//
You rose up slowly, and for a moment you could stand. Fell down then, face first, into the ground. Ankle twisted, screaming in pain. You could //feel// the fire now. It felt like bathing in a bonfire. You no longer heard the man. You were alone.\n<<if $hasFruit>>\n* <<choice 'Close your eyes'>>\n* <<choice 'Eat the last of the nectarine'>>\n<<else>>\n* [[Close your eyes]]\n<<endif>>
"They have them hidden about the paths," I said. "It makes it a little easier to see your way, and I think maybe there's a secret way of escaping using them." It sounded almost like I was lecturing instead of talking to you, speaking to an audience that wasn't there.\n\n"How long have you been walking?" you asked.\n\n"Maybe an hour," I said. "When did you wake up?"\n\n"Five minutes ago."\n\nMy voice finally softened. "What did you dream of?"\n\n"What do you mean?"\n\n"While you were asleep," I said. "What did you dream of?"\n\n"I didn't," you said. "I didn't dream at all."\n\nI seemed more disappointed than I should, as if this meant something more than you could understand. But that was how I was sometimes, you thought. There were things -- lots of things -- that I worried over but you didn't understand.\n<<display '(doppleganger actions)'>>
I had been warned many times not to eat the entire fruit under any circumstances. Such was its power.\n\n<<back>>
You didn't know how to say goodbye to the man -- you couldn't tell who he was, what his station was, so you didn't know how to say it, but maybe he didn't care, and he certainly wouldn't remember -- so you just turned and went.\n\nIt was a fountain, in fact, a whole fountain of it with glasses set in a ring around it. A couple kissing in the grass beside it, a pair of masks at their feet. They stopped when they heard your footsteps and spoke in a foreign language to you. You smiled, agreed to whatever it was they were saying, and peered into the fountain. It was full of a pure clear liquid that if you didn't know any better was water. There was no odor at all.\n\n"End the world," the woman said in broken language. The man's arms were around her shoulders and he had a shiftless grin on his face, too toothy, too drunk. "Drink," she said. "End the world."\n* [[Drink from the fountain]]\n* [[Try to talk to the woman]]\n* [[Leave]]
I was waiting for you. Not looking around nor seeking the way out. Somehow I had known which turnings you'd take, that I should be here and now to meet you. I had never made that kind of leap before; I asked you constantly what you were thinking, like I was playing near-or-far. I was a student. When you asked me why I never came to the weeknight dances I told you it was because I was studying, and I was the first person you'd ever met to really mean it. In your world //studying// was a word used on parents when you were doing wrong-things, when you didn't want to explain something secret. I was a student. I was here to learn the way laws were made, the habits of nobility -- but now I was a student of you.\n\nIt felt strange -- flattering of course, but mostly strange. Everything small about you fascinated me, from the way you ate sandwiches (diagonally, from corner to corner) to your [[ballet shoes]]. Strange, how curious I was about things you never spent a moment thinking of.\n\nBut this was only a passing thought. I was smiling. That was all that you saw when you looked at me then. My smile, the same moony smile I always wore around you. I held a torch in my right hand. Its wan green light gave my cheeks the shadows of a campfire storyteller, and my eyes seemed unfocused. The nectarine. I had probably eaten too much, so eager I was.\n<<display '(doppleganger actions)'>>
I seemed foolish to you but in an adorable kind of way. I made so many mistakes but I tried hard to do things correctly. I wanted to impress you -- you, a tiny flower in a rose garden.\n\nI mispronounced your name so many times that you decided to be a different person around me instead of correcting me. It was freedom.\n\n<<back>>
Scraped, you scraped them in rehearsal and the class laughed at you, openly they laughed, and the teacher didn't say a word, like you deserved an accident, like you were meant to fall --\n\n<<back>>
[>img[Masks|masks.jpeg][masksfull.jpeg]]You followed the garden paths once again, tracing a way you only half-believed in. There was supposed to be more logic to it, you knew. At that point, you should have been able to reason towards the right way to go, but you couldn't see it. You came across signs at intersections, but they were all full of paradoxes like the ones in school. "The right way to go is left." "The sign before this one is lying." "All green signs are correct." You didn't try to understand. There was no use in it.\n\nYou were alone, walking the paths, and it bothered you. You may not have expected me to be by your side but you thought someone would -- anyone at all would do. The walls grew narrower -- or you could have sworn they did. Though when you turned back to look the way you came, they seemed perfectly parallel. You were disoriented, maybe even lost. Not the desperate kind but the boring -- perfectly safe but going absolutely nowhere. Time seemed frozen.\n\nAnd then you heard a note. A recorder playing a single even-tempered tone over and over again. The pauses were barely a breath's-width long. You followed the note through the paths, so easy it was to find the way now, not thinking of why you could only hear it now, into an open space full of chatter and cries.\n\nThough it was only ten or so people, they talked, even yelled, so loudly it made the space feel crowded. They were angry about something though it was impossible to tell what, and they were all carrying enormous glass mugs -- larger than you'd ever seen before -- and they were drinking a golden liquid. It was an [[impromptu masquerade]], you realized -- the bin of free masks was at your left, and you chose [[Polle]], like you always did.\n\nWhen you finished adjusting the mask, you saw that they were all looking at you -- still talking among themselves, but watching you, fascinated.\n* [[Ask if they have seen me]]\n* [[Ask them for the way out]]
The sister of sisters; the bridesmaid at the wedding. The story that runs parallel to yours without you ever realizing it.\n\n<<back>>
The turnings came faster than you could think. No time to pick nor choose. You kept running; you took the turns on instinct, on guesswork. In or out. You could feel the fire at your back. It flowed so quickly, nearly as fast as your feet. It had its own roar, its own hum. It was swallowing you up.\n\n"Come back," the man bellowed at you, the impostor, the one who wasn't me. "Come back." His voice was different now, growlier, bestial. His consonants melted into each other.\n* [[Keep running]]\n* [[Turn and face him]]
You could no longer see the fire but you felt it still, felt it all around you. The stars filled your eyes. Maybe the last thing you'd see? you wondered. Your mind named the constellations: Alta and Hilman kissing. Boll dreaming prophecy.\n* [[Get up]]
We never were formal about it, you and I. It was surely more graceful that way. We would simply arrange to be together.\n\n<<back>>
"A boy, yes," he said, "A foreign boy?"\n\n"Yes," you said.\n\n"He was confused. He looked confused. He asked me for directions. He didn't know where he wanted to go so I told him the wrong way. I'm sorry," the man said. "I didn't know he was yours."\n\n"He's not," you said.\n\n"But you're in love with him."\n\n"I'm looking for him because he's lost."\n\n"Are //you// lost?" he asked. \n\n"Not if this is the way he came," you replied.\n\n"Then keep going," the man said. "I told him to keep his right hand on the wall as he walked, to follow [[the edge of the maze path]]."
//Ask about://\n<<actions "Me" "The gin-stop" "The end of the maze" "Himself">>
<<if ! $endings>>\n<<$endings = ''>>\n<<endif>>
| [img[Revealed|revealed.jpeg][revealedfull.jpeg]] |\n\nYou pulled away from him and the magic was gone from his face. It only took a moment's disbelief to break the spell. He was an ugly man, with a nose that looked broken but couldn't have been, and his face was rimmed by a sloppily-trimmed beard. His arm was around your waist, iron stiff, trapping you.\n\nYou shoved him hard and he fell backwards; the torch fell from his hand and that was [[when things went wrong]], really wrong.
//Soon those lessons start,// I explained. I was afraid but you didn't ask why, how I could fear power, how I was reluctant to learn how to defend myself if the war came... when the war came... no... there was nothing worth fighting for here...\n\n<<back>>
"All right," you said, and wondered why you doubted him. He waved after you -- you turned once as you left and he was waving after you as if he were watching a schooner depart the country. //Bon voyage.// The flame was gone from his hand.\n\n<<display '(party)'>>
Piercing the edge was the most difficult. To step precisely into a heat that burns your skin, to blind yourself willingly. Once your eyes were closed you could feel the smoke less. You breathed shallowly and walked on [[hands]] and [[knees]]. The ground was firm; bits of dirt and [[ash]] clung to your hands.\n\nThere was a maze still. The hedges had burned in places but it still blocked the way where it could. You called my name and I called yours. You made a path without knowing it: [[crawling]]...
"Come on, let's go," you said and held out your hand for mine. This was how you had imagined tonight going. Well -- you had wanted to find me a little later in the maze, when my wits had been exhausted. You imagined yourself knowing the maze better, feeling its contours and leading me out by the hand.\n\nMy hand -- it was tight around , and you could feel sweat in my palm. Something was wrong. Something wasn't me. You looked up from where our fingers intertwined and saw -- no. You didn't see anything at first. You felt it. You knew that it wasn't me you were really with, it was a //him//. A him bearing [[a wanted face]]. A man borrowing your memories, a man stealing me from you, a man interposing himself.\n\n<<display '(doppleganger revealed)'>>
The stars. You were on your back and your right leg felt strange and dead. <<display '(charcoal end)'>>
[[Bel]] looked at you and asked, "Who are you?" He spoke with a [[borrowed voice]] -- an old man's voice, barely breathing, backed his words.\n\nThe wrong question to be asked at a masquerade, the only rule not to be broken, but you had no thought but to obey, and started to name yourself --\n\n"No," he said. "You're answering backwards."\n\n[[Hainan]] and [[Ophel]] giggled.\n\n"What?" you said.\n\n"Never mind. Kiss him and we'll tell you."\n\n"Who?" you asked.\n\n"Him," Bel said and moved aside, so that you could see him, the [[boy playing the recorder]], who still played but whose note had become so soft as to be barely heard at all. This was unlike any masquerade you had been to before; you had never met people like this before. They were only a few years older than you but there was a naked hostility and arrogance you had never seen before.
You touched it gingerly with the tips of your fingers.\n\n//When I was little we lived on the border. We had to. There were many raids but my parents were smart about it. Usually you hear about them before they come--//\n\n<<back>>
!!Lostnight\n!!!written by <<pop 'chris' 'Chris Klimas'>><html><br /></html>illustrations by <<pop 'renee' 'Renee Keil'>>\n<<silently>><<display '(startup)'>><<endsilently>>We met at dusk, as we had been asked to. I had a top hat borrowed from [[the legate's back closet]]; you, a yellowberry crown surely fashioned in your [[afternoon recesses]]. You looked beautiful, but I had always thought so of you. The sky was still orange, bright burning orange. We spoke sparingly -- I asked after your siblings and you after my studies -- but there was so little to talk about.\n\nYou gave me your hand and I took it awkwardly. Too firmly. This was our first date [[after a fashion]], and I hadn't yet learned the ways of your country. We don't touch much in the coastlands, and when we do, it's for reasons we can't take back. Everything is carefully measured.\n\nThe manor path was cut simply for the occasion, threading an ordinary grassy path through the most straightforward of the lord's topiaries. The wind brushed brown leaves past our feet as we walked. [[Ballet shoes]] -- I noticed then you were wearing them. I thought it a little strange because you had warned me: //wear your best//. \n\nIt was Lostnight, 1099. I remember how slowly everything seemed to go that night. Every footstep a song. People say of this country that it is a dream-land, a place where they sing beautiful songs but little gets accomplished. It is a truth -- I can say that, even after only spending two months here. But you learn to care less about ticking off a to-do list. A single breath can be a contentment.\n\nThe silence grew uncomfortable in my ears and I tried to talk to you again. At home we kiss with our words and hug with our hands. But in response you only looked at me and shook your head, and then, because we had stopped walking quite unconsciously, you smiled at me. I was in love already, and I felt I had to keep it secret, because love is power.\n\nIt was impossible to tell when [[the magic]] first worked on us, but surely it did by the time [[we reached the manor gates]].
You turned. Yes. This was the right way to do it. You had nothing to fear. He looked confused as you stood looking at him -- and then you charged him, swinging wildly at his face.\n\nHe reeled back and you felt a flash of victory, a buzz of success. You would survive this. And then he hit you squarely in the stomach and you fell to the ground. You tried to spring to your feet but something was wrong with your feet but you didn't know what, all you knew was that you had fallen on your back and you were trapped. The man stood over your body, weighing something in his head.\n\nAnd then he turned and ran from you. You would never understand why.\n\n<<display '(charcoal end)'>>
A simple magic trick, taught to kids who know the way. A way to focus the mind, to remove distractions -- you never were able to do it, only could make a few hallway torches flutter as though there was a draft.\n\n<<back>>
You grabbed the arm of a woman running by. "What's happening?" you asked.\n\n"I don't know," she said. "An accident, someone told me-- my son's in there--" And then she was gone, running directly into the fire. "Wait--" you cried but of course she wouldn't listen to a girl like you.\n<<display '(fire actions)'>>
He was close to your age, maybe a little younger, and you could learn almost nothing from his clothes. They were last year's fashions and the fabric had wrinkles running through it like veins stretched across an elderly body.\n\nHe looked up at you. A cherry-colored scar ran from the corner of his left eye to his lip, and his right eyes was gone entirely. His eyelid closed but was sunken in. He wore a blank expression; his eyes seemed to focus a little above your own eyes.\n\nHe looked back down and played the note again. He had black hair with a perfect part straight down the center of his head.\n\n"Why?" you asked.\n\n"Does it make sense?" Bel said.\n\n"No," you said.\n\n"That's why. How much do you want to know?"\n* [[Kiss him]]\n* [[Don't]]
<<set $manDest = 'maze'>>"Do you know the right turnings through the maze?" you asked.\n\nHe laughed instead of speaking, formed a perfect circle from his flame instead of looking at you. "There's no point," he said. "What do you think you'll find there?"\n\n"But do you know?"\n\n"So serious, a girl who can't even stand straight."\n\n"Win what?" you asked. There weren't any prizes for finding the exit first. There were never any rewards --\n\n"Win //win//," he said. "Win the gold, the boy, the kingdom, the carrot -- whatever it is you're after. The older you get the more you want. You must have sixteen impossible wishes by now." He belched vulgarly and laughed at himself.\n\n"A boy," you said and felt shy, like you were confessing in church.\n\n"Turn around, go right, left, right," he said. "There'll you find it."\n* [[Follow his directions]]
A trick, a crime: a spell that made yourself resemble the person your victim wanted to see most. Only worked alone, never in crowds, for everyone saw someone different in you. A crime punished by a year in jail but the trick still was passed on among the lonely, the ones who had enough brains to weave a spell but not enough heart to find a lover.\n\n<<back>>
<<set $manDest = 'gin'>>"You said something about gin..?" you asked. It was a drink too vulgar for courtly parties but you knew it. The licorice tart, your father called it among his friends. A secret whispered about by adults.\n\n"Of course," the man said. "A dream's the safest place I know. Turn around and take the left twice."\n\n"Thanks," you said and gave him a wobbly bow, which he waved off.\n* [[Go back for the gin]]\n* [[Turn back and try to find the way out]]
"How did you know?" you asked.\n\n"I... did? What do you mean?"\n\n"You were waiting for me," you said. "You knew where I was going to be."\n\n"I was just walking. I -- I'm not really sure where we're supposed to be going and I came this way."\n\nJarring, my answer, because you //knew// I had been waiting -- unless you had mis-seen things, had misunderstood what happened. What was wrong here? Something was. But I wasn't lying to you. I had that uncertainty in my voice that I always did. Tonight seemed to be affecting me much more than it did you.\n<<display '(doppleganger actions)'>>
The way most believe it, Bel's crimson face demonstrates bravery and valor. But sometimes he only pretends. His sword is made of wood and the dragon scales he wears around his neck are lacquered roof-shingles. Regardless -- his is one of the leading roles.\n\n<<back>>
"No," you screamed, "no--" \n\nYour body tingled, shuddered, twisted through the paths. You were going mad -- it only took a blink to panic, for your muscles to turn twitchy. Your feet barely touched the ground anymore. Left... right... you reached your hands to the hedgewalls as you ran, didn't quite touch them, but you kept your arms outstretched like a dove's wings.\n\nA scream... you were screaming, a howl. You turned and you faced a solid wall of fire. A mesmerizing dream. The other way. There was another way. You turned and ran.\n\n"I won't hurt you!" the man lied. He was falling behind now. His voice safely distant.\n* [[Run, run, run]]\n* [[Turn and face him]]
The masks were re-used over many parties that year, and had developed kind of a personality. Polle was yellow, with an enormous set of eyes set above the wearer's own, because she never believed what she saw at first look, and yet -- she was always the one falling in love, and foolishly. She thought with her eyes and not her mind.\n\n<<back>>
<<display '(party)'>>
"A present," Lilla said. "It's your first Lostnight, isn't it?"\n\nShe knew the answer but asked you anyway -- it was Lilla's way. She knew things before they happened, guessed answers in the exams and was always right. \n\n"They were mine and now they're yours," she said. "They're good luck for girls who don't need it and bad luck for those who want it."\n\n<<back>>
<<display '(party)'>>
It was how we met. I had lost my way conveying a post-bundle to a duchess, and happened upon you. I didn't know my station, or rather I didn't know how to conduct myself in your presence, and so surely I insulted you then with a vulgar greeting rendered in archaic language. But you bade me stay a moment and talk. I said: //I'm sorry but I'm going to get in trouble, or I'm already in trouble and I don't know which yet// and went on my lost way once again. Only afterwards, when I had learned who you were, did I know that it wouldn't have mattered, or even that I had insulted you a second time by leaving.\n\nI came back the next day, politely addressed you by name and apologized in the third degree of regret -- normally reserved for high courtly matters, though I didn't know that. Instead of accepting my apology you offered me half of your sandwich, and maybe the smartest thing I ever did in my first month here was to accept it.\n\n(It tasted awful, like sardines. When I told you this, you explained that they were in fact slices of fruit, and took me to where they grew them -- enormous green fruit named //larychnise//.)\n\n<<back>>
<<set $kissed = true>>You leaned down and pecked the boy on the forehead. A [[chaste kiss]] for a stranger, as nice a way you could do it but it still felt wrong. You felt his head twitch when you set your lips on his skin. He was scared but didn't have a way to speak it.\n\n"Are you amused now?" you asked.\n\n"Behind you," Bel spoke, this time with a little girl's petulance. "There is a fire."\n\nYou turned -- it was another joke, another tease, these kids playing at grown-ups, dares and challenges, masks and characters -- but there was [[a fire]] blooming bright orange. The other side of the maze, the one you left unexplored.\n\n"That's the secret," Bel said.\n\nAs you left, they laughed at you with voices you hadn't heard since primary school. They didn't care for fires.
You swung the glass in a pretty arc and filled it with gin again. The taste was less distinct this time, more ordinary. You imagined your father standing beside you, talking of business or instead of asking about the day's lessons. You were as tall as he and he was telling a joke, maybe even a dirty one, and it was a funny one, one you had never heard of before.\n\n"Fire," the woman said again, and you disagreed and drank more. "One more," she said when you finished. But there were plenty more after that. The more you drank the smaller your memory shrank, until you could no longer remember anything except the moment before the glass touched your lips and the gin reached your tongue, and then you drank once more and you had no memory at all, nothing beyond breath and sight, and then-- your eyes closed and your body folded into the ground, and you slept once more.\n\nYou did not dream. It was a black expanse, and only [[a black expanse]].
You tripped. You fell.\n\nYou couldn't [[have seen]].
You woke again, but this time the maze was gone entirely around you, and it smelled so terrible. You remembered that scent for a long time: ashes, burned flesh, smoke. Smoke everywhere. It was daylight but the sun was far from sight.\n\nThere were courtiers kneeled over you when you woke, and it took time to focus on their faces, and even longer to understand their words. They carried you from the maze; you could not stand.\n\nAn hour later someone told you: there are many dead in this accident. They called it an accident at first. I was dead. This you learned after the third hour. They found my body flat against the ground in what once was a corner of a dead end. You never learned why -- any of the whys at all. There was an investigation of the fire but no explanation. No culprit but yourself. This you believed even though reason told you that you were only a foolish girl, that you couldn't have known anything, that you couldn't have done anything. This you believed though it hurt more than any wound: you could have saved me.<<silently>>\n\n<<if not /youdrunk/.test($endings)>>\n <<remember $endings += 'youdrunk '>>\n<<endif>>\n\n<<endsilently>>\n\n<<display '(end)'>>
<<actions 'Enter the fire' 'Get help' 'Ask someone what happened'>>
"I'm sorry," you said. At the sound of your voice, the party went silent immediately.\n\n"I'm sorry to interrupt -- am I interrupting? Interrupting? -- I'm sorry, I'm looking for a boy..." You started to describe me but felt foolish; none of them spoke, not even to fill the awkward spaces between your thoughts.\n\n"I'm looking for him and I'm lost myself," you said.\n\n<<display '(masquerade response)'>>
You woke under the moon, and for the first time in your tiny life the stars seemed real to you: not pinpricks anymore but real things floating and unreachable -- "But I //can// reach them" -- and you rose from the ground and your feet went //en pointe// without the short burst of pain you always felt in class. Your fingers grasped at the sky but only found air. "It's so empty."\n\nYou looked to see who was speaking but it was you, you yourself. You were talking to yourself in the hedge-maze now. You reached a hand to your hair, just to make sure the [[silver moons]] were still there, and they were still tightly pinned. At your feet, many, many people were still asleep. Were they dreaming? Does the dream end when you wake?\n\n| [img[A nectarine|nectarine.jpeg][nectarinefull.jpeg]] |\n\nI was gone. I was a timid boy. You had taken a solid bite of your nectarine and I hadn't, and so I had waked before you. I was lost already in the maze. It was still in your hand, the nectarine.\n* [[Keep it]]\n* [[Throw it away]]
I tried my best to keep up with news from my homeland, but reports were sparse and what came was dismal. The line pushed itself back and forth; I'd hear of an advance or a rout but never anything decisive. My parents were safe for now. They had fled to the foothills, far from the battlefront, and sent me away. They still had money; our country's money still carried weight, so perhaps not everything was lost.\n\n<<back>>
You left the lights in the center of the maze behind; there seemed to be none at all on the charcoal path. There was a half-moon in the sky, however, so there was enough dim light to see the outlines of the walls, and so you began to work your way through the turnings slowly. The path divided itself in two over and over again, and you chose the right fork each time, just for [[superstition's sake]]. There were no clues, no other bits of information to think over -- none you could see, at least.\n\nYou heard no one around at all, not even distant party-burble. Only the chirrup of crickets. It was as if you were on your own entirely, like you had fallen behind somehow and forgotten, and it sobered you. There was still a sense of imbalance in your inner ear that forced you to walk with a waddling sort of gait, but you expected to feel drugged, for the world to change colors and become beautiful. Instead everything was as dim and quiet as a museum basement.\n\n[[You found me]] waiting for you at a crossroads.
"Are you... where are you from?" you asked.\n\n"Lenell," she said. You didn't know the name -- but maybe she just didn't understand the question. Maybe Lenell was her name... maybe her friend's. He nibbled at her ear and she laughed uncomfortably and pushed him away. "Shoes?" she said and gestured at your feet.\n\n"They're... ballet shoes?"\n\nShe seemed to recognize the word //ballet//.\n\n"They're mine," you said. "I study it. Lots of lessons?" You could not remember the number of years -- it was before you started proper school, you knew that, but it could not have been that early.\n\n"You -- dance," she said. "Dancer?"\n\n"Yes," you said.\n\n"You dance when you grow up?" she asked.\n\n"Maybe," you said sharply.\n* [[Drink from the fountain]]\n* [[Leave]]
"I'm sorry," you said. At the sound of your voice, the party went silent immediately.\n\n"I'm looking -- so sorry --" (were they angry? they looked upset over something) "-- I'm trying to find the way out of this maze, and all I've become is lost. Maybe you can point me the right way?"\n\nYou asked so earnestly.\n\n<<display '(masquerade response)'>>
No need for it now. A little of the juice stays in your palm; you lift it to your nose and sniff at it, just to remember it.\n\n<<display '(maze choice)'>>
And then you took stock of the maze: the hedges trimmed to sharp edges, living things turned to walls. The burble of crowd noise, the //ting// of wineglasses. The lights -- little haloes floating in the distance tinged green and blue. This was Lostnight. [[Lilla told you all these things before]], but now -- her words were nothing compared to what this really was.\n\n| [img[Choices|diptych.jpeg][diptychfull.jpeg]] |\n\nThere would be many turns to the maze but the first was the most important. Even your parents knew this. Only the first choice, where you have nothing to go by but best-guesses and stolen luck, is permanent. The paths are marked by flags: there is the gold way or the charcoal one. One of the Lostnight paths is always short, but full of riddles; the other is longer but simpler.\n\nI had asked you which way to go when you first told me about Lostnight, so we could walk the turnings together, but you refused. You thought it would spoil the night. Now you found yourself trying to guess [[which way I would have chosen]]. You felt alone and strange, standing there among the sleeping and dreaming.\n* [[Take the gold path]]\n* [[Take the charcoal path]]
The first thing taught in physical prowess, but never taught as fleeing from something, always pursuing instead. The teacher would count off the seconds himself as you ran laps round the field--\n\n<<back>>
Even in the coastlands we have magic. It's a brutish kind of art -- mostly simple curses, honestly, because most of us don't have the focus to learn anything more eloquent.\n\n<<back>>
You almost had forgotten it: the dream-fruit. You ripped off tiny pieces with your fingernails and slipped them between my lips. My breathing became even slower, but its pace was regular. You kept feeding me until the only thing you had left was the pit, and you gripped it tightly in your hand.\n\nI had fallen into a deep sleep, but I was still alive, and remained that way until the fire was extinguished and rescuers had found us. They carried me away from you, and they told you that I will sleep for the rest of my life, until my heart itself grows too tired to beat. It's the price of eating too much of the nectarine. I am a sleeping prince without a princess.\n\nBut you saved me.\n\nYou will grow old and I won't. You will hold onto my memory for a long time -- longer than you ought to, I think. But you will forget me, take a husband and a garden, have a son and daughter. You should. While I stay sleeping quietly, frozen until I perish, you will grow.\n\nI envy you, and you must understand this. It's my gift to you.\n\nI will sleep forever -- but I will also dream. Please don't forget that. I will dream of you, but not the you I saw with my eyes and held with my hands. Instead I'll see the woman you will become, the person you so reluctantly approach, the self you secretly fear being trapped inside. There's no reason to be afraid. I see it now -- how wonderful it will turn out.\n\nThere are no words in my dreams. There's no need for them there at all.<<silently>>\n\n<<if not /mesleeping/.test($endings)>>\n <<remember $endings += 'mesleeping '>>\n<<endif>>\n\n<<endsilently>>\n\n<<display '(end)'>>
<<actions 'Ask me how I found you' 'Ask me where I got the torch' 'Ask me where everyone is' 'Kiss me' 'Head deeper into the maze with me'>>
Not ventriloquism, not even an illusion, not exactly. The magic was literally true -- somewhere someone couldn't speak so this boy could speak doubly loud to you, to try to push you around.\n\n<<back>>
You knew what it meant and you did it anyway. You gobbled it down, pushed the pulp into your mouth until all you could focus on was chewing. The world narrowed to the motion of your teeth.\n\nYou fell asleep. Your breathing slowed until. The fire burned around you but you could not feel it anymore. If your body caught aflame, you never felt it. If you were rescued, you never woke. That was the price of what you did.\n\nBut you dreamed. In my country we say: //under the blankets, seconds grow into years//. You dreamed of me. It was the sweetest thing you could find. We married in your heart. You became a dancer and a mother, and you imagined me a scholar, a teacher. It was too perfect to fully deceive yourself, but you dreamed it anyway.\n\nWhen I spoke, it was with your own voice, not mine. The sun never set. It was a shallow dream. But we do not choose our endings. We only make what we can of them. This I believe.<<silently>>\n\n<<if not /yousleeping/.test($endings)>>\n <<remember $endings += 'yousleeping '>>\n<<endif>>\n\n<<endsilently>>\n\n<<display '(end)'>>
You'd steal her cigarillos from your parents' cabinet and trade them to her for information -- you'd talk in the bathroom between Romantic and barque classes. She was only two years older than you but had seen twice as much. Her parents were poorer so there were looser rules and fewer court occasions. So stifling those dresses were around your chest.\n\n<<back>>
"Someone help me," you cried. "Water, we need water." But your voice was too logical to be understood by anyone; you spoke when you should have shrieked.\n<<display '(fire actions)'>>
... your hand jumped back -- you had touched fire itself, trying to find the edge of the wall... you had always been [[afraid of fire]] but only had [[imagined]] how it would feel, never thought you would feel it this way...\n\nYour knee brushed something [[dead|seeking]], but you kept moving... I shouted [[once]], weakly...
They were screaming, the people trapped inside. You heard them from far off and there was nothing to do but head closer and closer, to face it.\n\nHalf the maze was ablaze. You couldn't even look at the fire directly -- your vision blurred and twinkled, as though the light were too much for your eyes to accept. You felt it instead: a great roar of heat that made even your fingertips blush. The air was tight in your lungs.\n\nScreaming.\n\nYou were almost there. Somehow the pathways resolved themselves; nothing seemed a wrong turn anymore. A throng of people were at the fire's rim, calling to people within the flames. Shouting, calling them home, but doing nothing. Like they were play acting at this, wishing instead of struggling. You felt old suddenly. You were calm. //Someone needs to do something.//\n\nThere was just one scream that you heard. Mine. Though it was Lostnight and everything ought to be uncertain, you knew. You thought of the word //love// but it disappeared as soon as you caught hold of it.\n\nI was inside -- and of everything in the world to see and think, that was all your head could hold.\n<<display '(fire actions)'>>
"Why is it so empty here?" you asked.\n\n"I don't know," I said. "Maybe it's not so hard, getting out, and I've just missed the clues. The paths mostly coincide -- they don't //go// anywhere. I don't understand it."\n<<display '(doppleganger actions)'>>
"The only present you'll ever need," Lilla said. "Open it now, while the secret's still fresh."\n\nIt was empty, and she laughed so wildly -- \n\n<<back>>