The soapstone broke easy, flakes falling to the floor in a dark heap. A man was trying to escape, to breathe, and Perpetua was doing her best to chisel him out, but the slab didn’t help. It didn’t care either way—it would continue its life as the man, should he escape. The sun was setting somewhere outside. She flicked sweat from her brow to dry on the parched hardwood, strode to the wall, and chased the darkness away with a press of the switch.
There is a slip of paper on the table, pressed gently over her sketches. No one else was in the auditorium, and no one else had been for hours—the creaking echoes would have told her.
She left the wall. It’s a cream envelope, and words lie in its center. A Letter of Departure, and below, in smaller curves, for Perpetua. She reads it, reads it again. The paper crinkles between her fingers. Behind her, the man was suffocating, hyperventilating, but you couldn’t have seen it through the rock.
She spun to face him. A crack stretched where his right leg was—or was it his left?—and a patch of lighter soapstone bloomed over where his chest heaved and his heart beat. A monstrous lump lurked over his head. One of his forearms had just begun to kiss the air, and he panicked all the more for it, for he knew his mouth would never drink in the cool and he would never stretch his legs. Had he ever wanted to do that? The shape of the stone didn’t allow for that, and how come the slab got to live, but he didn’t? He would never be more than a forearm. Not then, not when Perpetua was supposed to leave.
The Letter pulses in Perpetua’s hand.
She finally dropped the chisel, and across the floor of remembered dancing, upon the stage, the paintings and poetry books and statues marked with names not her own drank the echoes they had been craving. There was a space among them, a lacking as empty as the slab was full, that gorged on Perpetua’s glare. It would live.
She killed the light as she fled, hoping to smother the space with its own darkness, but it was still visible by the dying glow of the western sky.
Perpetua found Caroline, just about the only other human there, at her desk, and slams the Letter to the wood. “Did you know about this?” she demanded.
Eyes started up from the typewriter. “What?” She looks to the Letter, back to the angry statue above her, and covered her mouth. “Oh. Oh my God, Perpetua, I’m so sorry.”
The rock melted, and Perpetua slumped to a wall. “So no.”
“When did it come?”
“Just now. I think.” She’d been paying so much attention to the man. Her stomach grumbled, and her mouth clumped like cotton. “What time is it?” She fumbled for the phone in her pocket, but Caroline spoke before her.
“Eight-thirty.” Less than three hours to pack her things. Perpetua and the writer held that in the stare they shared—one side in pity, one in despair.
Perpetua glanced to the mess of papers crawling with paragraphs, so scattered over the desk that it was like a glass of words had been knocked over. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’ve got to have an idea.”
“I try not to think about it. Focus on my work, you know?”
Perpetua knew.
“Do you need a hug?”
Perpetua stared at the words, at the fingers drifting back to the keys. Her sandpaper tongue tried to settle. “I need water.”
The stars reigned in the sky by the time Perpetua stepped onto the dock. She didn’t know what to make of them. They would live far longer than her, and even when they did sputter out, their sheer force of life would forever sail through the darkness to speak in cosmic tongues to their brethren. But they were also smothered by every sunrise.
She tried listening to the waves, but the water was so still that they barely lived, not even enough to echo off the dock. Familiar flapping came to join her, and though it was too dark to see him, she knew the Crow stood by her side.
“Your Letter is here,” he said.
Her knuckles tighten around it. “Thanks for reminding me.”
A claw clacked to the metal. “Oh come now, rejoice your time here, Perpetua! It’s just one ending, you know.”
She kicked the water. “Thanks for reminding me.” The starlight cracked into ripples.
“This attitude will not do! What of your memories here?”
“Is that why you think this is happening? So I can get around to remembering sooner?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
He hopped in front of Perpetua, blocking her view of the lake. “Why? It is natural, and so it comes and goes with the breathing rhythms of the world. It is a winter blizzard as much as it is the stagnation of high summer. With a sharp eye, you can see it coming from a distance, but even then, you cannot do a thing to stop it.”
“Oh, great. So you’d just roll over and hope it’s not so bad?”
“Think of it this way. When you climb a snowy mountain, you never know when an avalanche might strike. Well, if you mess with the snow, you’ll know soon enough, but sometimes it truly is random. However there is time from its first cracks to when it reaches you, and there are things you can do to prepare.” He stamped a claw. “And now is your time to prepare! To fortify yourself.”
“You can survive an avalanche, though. This is a slab of granite.” Falling too fast to avoid, too fast to carve.
“Maybe so, but even then, you can fortify your mind. Face your fate with bravery!”
“Sounds like a good way to get crushed.”
The ripples sputtered out, and the Crow hopped closer. “Surely you do not mean to avoid the slab?”
Perpetua stood. The dock whispered her motion to the water, and ripples danced and sparkled anew. Sparkled brighter than before. The Letter throbs in her hand, mouth still sewn shut.
“Perpetua, you can’t avoid it!”
She turned from the lake, tongue still dry, and called over her shoulder, “Thanks for the idea, Crow.”
He looked out across the shivering surface and cooed softly to himself of the perils of starlight.
The trees bent away as the forest opened to a hilltop field, cropped close to the earth. The Moon, gazing down in full, rapt attention, had risen high enough to see.
“You’re staring,” Perpetua said as she strode.
“Long time to turn,” said the Moon in silver tones. “You must flee from sight.”
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“Fleeing your Letter. It sees far.”
Perpetua clenched her fists, not caring for the strangled crinkles that break through the envelope. “Shut it.”
“Long time to turn….”
She spun and waves the Letter at the Moon. “If you see so fucking much, who sent this? Why me, why now?”
His light floated down, calm and still. “The Otherealm.”
“Who?”
“The Otherealm.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“It is beyond. But it is within. It is around but without, seen but unseen.”
Perpetua sighed. “Don’t give me poems, not now.”
“It wears poems as you wear light. The water of its life is memory, joy, love. Metaphor flows through it as blood through you, and I prick it so you may taste the copper. You may only swallow a trickle before your stomach bursts, and that is not understanding. It sits with you, through you. It needs you. Do not bargain with it. It does not act, it does not think.”
“But you said it sent this!”
“It did. From the right angle.”
She sighed and turned away. “Goodbye, Moon.”
“Live with sight, Perpetua.”
Perpetua went to the last person she thought might be any help, though they had no mouth.
The Eye was set into the solid stone walls of the basement. No one knew if it had been built into the foundations or had grown there, like a barnacle on a rock, but it had been there for a long time, and had seen much. When one stood before it in the buzzing light of the basement’s only bulb, it was impossible for one to forget that pupils were holes, caverns with ragged walls. The iris that cascaded into that darkness was pale green flecked with gray.
Some were scared of the Eye. Perpetua liked its solidity.
“Do you know who sends these?”
The Eye looked to the right. Code for yes.
“Do you know where to find them? What they look like?”
Left, then left again.
She tapped her foot. “Do you know why these are sent?”
Left.
She breathed a puff of warmth into the sunken cold of the dark. “Fuck… fuck….” Her eyes narrowed. “Do you know a way to get rid of it?”
The Eye stared, then looked to the right.
“Do I have to go somewhere to do it?”
It stared at her; not in anger or confusion, but in cautious curiosity. It was searching for something, something in her. She stood straight and studied the ridges in the walls, the green that cut to the deep.
It looked straight down.
“… The caverns?”
Right.
“Is it a person I’m looking for?”
Left.
The Letter pulses fear through her fingers and up her arm. “A fire?” Left. “A hole?”
A hesitation. Right.
“Is it dangerous?”
No hesitation. Right.
Despite rolling her thoughts with an outward breath, Perpetua could think of nothing quicker than trying to find the thing herself. The yes/no system was too clunky to reach any sort of precise description in the—really?—less than two hours remaining.
As the darkness winked her away, the Eye closed and wished she had kept asking it questions right to the moment she was called to leave.
In the shelters of the earth, hidden, locked in mazeborn darkness, is a thing that cannot be, but is. It is a thing unseen that shines of shadow, unheard that speaks of silence, unfelt that flows of stillness.
It is not nothing. It is not the time before being. It is a life that should not have been.
Perpetua followed the sharp shine of her flashlight, but did not find it. She scraped, turned, bent, cursed through cold tunnels, and though the steady jaws of time ever gnawed at her, she refused to check her phone, for to do so would feed those teeth. The darkness was the only guide she had left, though she knew the only question it would answer was the light.
None of its replies gave her… what she sought. An error cannot be thought of, cannot be imagined, cannot be searched for. It isn’t found, it is stumbled over.
She did not know that, but the Letter comes from a place that does, so it, too, knows. She feels the fear it threads into her veins, the strings tightening her lungs, pulled by a heart twin to her own. She paused for a heartbeat, then clicked off the light. The threads tighten. She stepped forward, trying to trip, but failing. Frustrated, she turned to a new darkness and truly rolled her foot on a rock to crack her knee against the stone. The fear could be greater. She stepped backwards, backwards again, broke into a run, slid and spun to the stinging ground—she fights for air, her arm burns—crawled, frantic, a mess of legs.
The threads wind taught, and she freezes as the man in the stone. Like him, she feels the error, and like him, is afraid to move for fear—now all her own—that she might touch the error, crack, and cease to be possible. In its presence, she is caught not at the pulsing, but long before her birth, long after her death, and far from her life. If she looks down, she might see it all buried in the stone supporting her, waiting to be carved by the calm insistence of a tickle of time.
She doesn’t, though. Instead, she looks up.
It lies at the edge of her sight, distinct as a light, but when she tries to focus on it, her eyes slip back to the shadow. Now it’s closer. Her failure neither attracts nor feeds it—she merely thinks it’s farther than it is, and is wrong. She dares not guess again.
Her fingers tremble around the Letter, who now beats true with her own heart. It is slipping, twisting from her grip, and she knows that if she lets it go, it will fall into the error and crack within its own block of stone. She knows that is what she wants, what she finds the error for.
The Letter pulses. There is shared blood. Her veins connects with its veins, and through them flows the fear. She drags her sight from the depths to the Letter, though she cannot see it. It is a blindness born of darkness, not error. She realizes there is another blindness.
The envelope is unopened.
The slab holding her breaks, and she runs, strikes foot to rock, knowing where she’s going, away, away from the fear. Where the hearts slow. To the light. When did her light turn on? The tunnels shriek the echoes of her steps.
She runs. She runs. She ran.
The Moon shone high in the night as Perpetua panted on the grass. She didn’t say anything, and neither did he. She gave the wind her breath, though, who was grateful for the warm, swirling stories.
The grass cradled her, and she curled in its soft cold. High overhead, the stars turned, racing for the morning, but she lay below, calm as the soil. The giving soil.
The crinkled Letter pulses—insistently, no longer in fear.
“A few more breaths,” Perpetua assured it.
“Ok.” She lifted herself gently to a stand. A tree nearby looked good enough for leaning, and she finally, blessedly, opens the Letter of Departure.
It reads:
Now you go from here to be with somewhere else. You will change them as you change us. We remember you, loved one, and you remember us as you will remember them.
About The Author
Uluscri (they/she) is a human starsoul who stares at starling flocks and writes poetry and stories. They can be found on their website and substack :)
I started this story at an artist residency tucked somewhere in the Appalachians, and from the beginning, it was tied to my own fears that what I make--be it art, gifts, a small act of love--might not last into the future. That death may be cruel, smothering. This was in part an attempt to let death approach humbly, knowing it asks the world.
I am enchanted by flowing, strange writing. The numinous, the impossible to understand. How do you write something like that? I’m obsessed with trying. An impulse inspired in equal parts by the film Akira (1988), the writings of Porpentine Charity Heartscape, and the prose of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. They can be found in the conversation with the Moon and my attempts to describe something that isn’t and cannot be. To chase away death would either mean eternity or having never been, and I don’t know which is more terrifying. Maybe one day I’ll try to write eternity.
Why’d I choose a crow, the Moon, and an eye in a wall? They were all things I saw at the residency. There was a crow statue, a large painting of an eye, and the Moon is, of course, hard to miss wherever you go. Don’t tell me you’ve never talked to the Moon. These things have a way of growing in the course of a story.
At The Alchemist’s Cabin, we gather work made in the quiet hours—carefully built, deeply felt, and offered without urgency. Each piece is a reminder that stories still have the power to hold us. If this one did, you’re already part of what makes this space matter.
The cabin stays lit because people tend to it. If this work meant something to you, consider subscribing or supporting so we can keep sharing voices like this.
Thank you for being here 🖤
Good job with the eyeball creature, an original-feeling spin on a common type of monster. Sort of like Mario 64, but more so lol.
The guy trapped in stone almost felt like a twisted version of the Marble Lady from Phantastes , so that was cool.
Beautiful. The prose is simply stunning.