An unnamed traveller meditates on the foreign landscape he finds himself in.

When my walking stick plunged into the dirt and jostled the loose soil, little rocks tumbled off the edge of the cliff. This path was dressed with moss, fronds, and little succulents that drank up morning dew too deep. You little desert flora—what are you doing so far from home?

I should've asked myself the same question.

A cosmic entity with a story to tell lands unexpectedly in someone’s bedroom.

“I’m the last thing,” the lion said. “After all the futures collide, I’m the result. I suppose it won’t make sense to you, but that’s what I am. I can try to explain, if you wish.”

A shipbuilder in the underworld finds that his masterwork is also his own demise.

“Tsk tsk,” they said as I banged on with my hammer.

“Should’ve been more reserved, should’ve been more timid—nature is as predictably cruel as providence is fortuitous.”

A city with two sides—one inventive and industrious, the other arcane and unseemly.

Superficially, it appears like any other city. It has shopkeepers, barbers, thoroughfares, and government buildings that evoke Victorian flair. It sits on a plateau overlooking the ocean, and its lower districts have ports that jut out from chalk-white cliffs. Taverns hum there with the clink of glasses and the din of poorly tuned accordions; whalers swap stories of sea monsters and Flying Dutchmen, and each time the monsters in the tales grow larger—many-headed—and the Dutchmen fly higher.

In a distant time and place, an elder seer guides a young woman through a sacred rite.

“Let my hands become your eyes. See through my fingers—not in the spaces between, but through them.”

I felt the cold touch of her skin over my brows and nose, but her palms were warm over my ears. I could feel the chalk nestled between her skin and mine.

“See,” she said. “See—”

Where every wonder is more extravagant than the next, but none are truly what they seem.

The city of Lethe is a city with a thousand torches. It is surrounded by a wall whose appearance is like the architecture of the Nabateans—that is, it appears to be from many cultures at once, piled on top of each other: from Babylon to Egypt, from Sumer to Greece, and on.

The Museum of Silence has many exhibits, all different kinds of quietude.

If you ever visit the Museum of Silence—and by all means, you should—the first thing you will notice is it’s made of nothing different from any other building. It is low and fits neatly on the horizon. It doesn’t traverse sharp angles. There are grassy terraces that need no tending.

On a rare stellar occasion, two gods, a father and a son, discuss the merits and flaws of the human race.

The old man was a haggard, sickly father who’d long since abandoned his sons. His shoulders were hunched inward, but his belly was swollen, veins visibly drawn across his stomach, and it stirred with kicks like the womb of a pregnant mother.