[ti]private[/ti]GOLD ROUTE

Three doors closed, and one opened.
No.
One was opened.
This is no place for passivity. It is simple to be an observer, to peek and peer at the workings of something you don’t understand.

It takes someone exceptional to be an active participant.
To change in a world suffused with the unchanging.
To do where even existence is a threat, a potential undoing.
To become in a world that was unbecoming of you.

---

Bergamot Gristleborg is surrounded.

She is in a bubble made of moving steel. There are no plates or chunks or sections of machinery here though, only scales. Fish scales, from the millions of minuscule, immaculate needle fish that school around her. Their scales reflect unknown light as they swirl and dart, and the air around you- for it is air and not water -is filled with a rising, rasping sound. The rasp of scale on fin, and tail on fang.

The sound is familiar. It is the untethered, unsheeted music of an orchestra tuning up. A swell of noise and air and vibration that marks the sudden awakening of a slumbering mechanism.

It is the sound of cold muscles as they creak into motion. Of languorous organs once again manifesting their various humors. It is the slick click of a grand eyelid opening.

The fish move faster.

The silver sphere quickens its rotation. Either that or it remains still and Morgana turns within it. Or perhaps it is the world itself and all the air in existence that is now spinning and twisting at phenomenal speed while both Morgana and the sphere of silver fish remain completely inert.

Oxidation.

Air eats away at the silvery exterior of the fish, and they blacken like a dark crust of age engulfing a lightbulb. Light breaks through the veil of iron dust as it collapses around Morgana.

To reveal a path.

The path is thin, perhaps a meters wide at its grandest, and grit with iron dust. At the sides of the path the ground curves up, getting steeper and steeper until the embankments meet above and form a roof.

But there is little room for walking. The pipe is full of snakes.

Two massive serpent lay in the path, their bodies completely blocking any progress forward. Each snake has a tongue made of perfect, unlined black steel.

One serpent is blue. Each of its scales has a faint blue tinge, like the cold reflection of a far off blue sun or a scene dipped into a stream running with too-blue water. Its brow is flat like a viper, and its scales are placed haphazardly as if they are chunks in a mosaic.

And each scale is a fraction of a memory. A recent moment that resonates. It feels right. Familiar. Pieces of a life you know and accept.

[tangent="Muir," she said softly, holding the leather sheath in her hands. "Welcome home."]A sword passing from a set of worn hands back to its true owner.[/tangent]

[tangent=Sterile hospital rooms. Fresh bedsheets. Snow. Steel polish. Sparkling water. Taxidermy animals. Old books. New books.]Morgana flouncing through endless markets, leaving a wake of scented memory.[/tangent]

[tangent=Morgana stuffed the Hibernal Heart in her mouth as the Starcatch took the other arm, reducing her to a head on an eclipse-shaped platter. ]Dancing with Celine Dionix. Spinning the wheels of fate in the hole and escaping with your hard-won prizes.[/tangent]

The serpent bends its great blue head, as if the sky were bowing in subservience.

The red snake stands in sharp relief against its blue counterpart. Its jagged scales shear the air as it moves, languid and unhurried. Its eyes are too sharp. Too thin, too far apart, to uneven, perhaps inverted?

You know that there is something vastly wrong with those eyes. Every time you look, its eyes have changed again. Never sitting still. Never the same creature's eyes.

Its scales show scenes burnished with crimson, as if viewed through bloodied amber.

A cliff side beside a lighthouse. A collapsible table set in the middle of the jungle. A church, packed for the first time in decades, and a girl perched high above the rest. A set of glass stairs, stretching across a void, and a light-footed woman sprinting up them as they crumble underfoot.

A thousand moments shifting underfoot, playing, replaying, switching like channels on a bored television.

But there is always something on. Always something to see and be absorbed by.