The Grand Spire
by Rudi Dornemann
(From A Comprehensive Guide to the Labyrinth City, by P.W. Garletts. 1087: Mewlen and Oll, Publishers; Osper Square. Pages 57-58.)
The Grand Spire is the tallest building in the Labyrinth City and, allegedly, the only one from whose upper floors the whole design of the city can be seen.
Built in the Linear Year 136 by architect siblings Oscar, Omar and Olive Specto, the tower was built of stone quarried from the mountain that formerly stood in what is now the Three Hills neighborhood.
The Grand Spire’s existence was one of the underlying causes of the Second Mapmaker’s revolt in L.Y. 260. When Queen Sheparsa IV brokered an end to hostilities, the fate of the spire was one of the most contentious issues. The only issue that united the squabbling Mapper’s Guilds was their common desire to see the Spire razed. Eleven-finger Owlsely, a steward of the Sevenbridge guild, even produced a map of a proposed park that would encompass the dunes that would result from the Spire’s being ground to sand.
The nearby neighborhoods, however, had seen the worst of the fighting during the revolt’s five years. With its massive stone blocks barely chipped, the spire was the least damaged building for nearly a mile in any direction, and a great source of local pride. More practically, the inhabitants of Spireshadow, Spireview, Baker’s Fallow, Wormtree, and Lower Seething saw the Spire’s use as a landmark as their only hope to rebuild without falling prey to the unscrupulous map sellers who were quickly amassing fortunes in other war-torn quarters of the city.
So it is that the tower wardens not only cover their faces with eyeless masks but also blind themselves each day at noon by plunging lit torches into troughs of ink-dust, filling the interior of the tower with impenetrable darkness. Behind the welded-shut windows, the wardens go about their duties by touch. No matter how they may be tempted, they are unable to abuse their position and glimpse the plan of the city.
From the time of the truce, maps in the Labyrinth City have been approximate, transitory, and provisional, but the peace, however strained, whatever injustices it leaves unchallenged, is — like the Grand Spire — enduring.
Stones without Sticks
by Trent Walters
The Rolling Stone was his own man, so to speak, and traveled past lands unseen. The stone, being a stone, was stoned with the inordinate pride of having gathered no moss–his being’s essence unsullied by another being’s essence, which his most restless and rocky friends had firmly warned him against.
To scale new heights in his rollings, he started at the foot of a mountain that poked holes in passing clouds. For millennia (a figure rounded by reckoning since stones don’t count), he forded streams and outstripped boulders attempting the same ascent. Occasionally, a biped wandered by, and Stone leaped into the crack of its foot’s second skin. This saved him hundreds of years of bounding up the path. The free rides never lasted long, however; for in short order, the bipeds removed their skins (they obviously gathered another kind of moss).
Along the way, he heckled those stones who had given up the struggle–not only gathering moss but water, earth, grass, and trees, even! What odd, stiff, wooden creatures they were to stand heartlessly on his fellow stones. It served the trees right to die in a few hundred years.
The higher he climbed, the stranger the substances that his fellows had drowned in: water solid as stone! He chatted up a few, but they all seemed frozen in fear.
Finally, Stone reached the summit. He leaned over a steep precipice and roared his triumph at achieving his dream. That’s when he heard the triumphant yahoo of a biped which swallowed his pipsqueak roar. Before he could turn, the biped’s second skin kicked him over the ledge.
Stone cursed the biped–though the beasts’ lives were already abysmally ephemeral–until he realized this was another journey (if considerably faster) to tell his grandchildren about. Stone bounced and sparked other stones who, excited about Stone’s journey, joined him in the Great Fall. Despite the descent, it pinnacled Stone’s achievements: His fall was his meteoric rise: so many other stones leaping to join in Stone’s headlong, boisterously joyful fray–a veritable pride of the unmossed, so quintessentially, so unreservedly stoned in their stony abandon.
Panting and laughing, they landed at the foot of the mountain with a flurry of dust. What a rush! They spoke of the great race for eons to their children’s children. Eventually, Stone gathered moss, but it was nice not to be bald anymore.
