(no subject)

Unrest had come to the valley.

It could be seen in the whirling stones--the pendulums and the bolas, the gyromantic balances, all of them. The spiral patterns they traced always pointed to the same thing. Even the sand paintings gave the same signs. Disaster lay in the whorls and curves, great change in the pattern of every stone cast and every shadow measured. Every spiral groove counted. Every number arranged and rearranged. Every tone heard, every dream recalled, every detail meditated upon.

Unrest and curiosity.

It was not absent from the castle, either. In many things the urRu and the Skekses differed, but in this they did not--however twisted their senses, the Skekses could feel something lurking on the multiversal horizon as surely as did the urRu. They could read it in flames, in tarot cards, in runes, in patterns cast again and again. Furtively.

The only thing neither of them could see, no matter what they tried, was whether any of the disaster or change would come to them. Upon that the Master Time Spiral remained silent. Upon that the Crystal gave nothing. Worlds would end, realities would die, and there was nothing that would indicate whether they, themselves, were safe or not.

There was only one thing for it.

The Skekses, as was their nature, took the easy path. Hiding in their castle, they sent Crystal Bats into the Nexus, far and wide, in the hope that the spy crystals would send back some indication that someone, somewhere, would know more. And that that someone could be captured and interrogated.

The urRu, on the other hand, came to a decision, and it was a difficult one. Theirs is not to act, but to observe, and to learn not from doing, but from being. And yet, not even these ultimately resigned beings wished to die, to see their world destroyed. They would have to journey to the Nexus. And they would have to learn more.

So they set out on the trek, knowing that the Crystal Bats searched far and wide on the bidding of their masters. What would come of it would come.