vellum
Death of a Rose
The
journey
of
the
dead
man
,
Guy
Reynard Carter
of
Eternity
,
as
I
wryly
style
myself
these
days
,
began
527
worlds
south
of
here
.
I've
been
traveling
north
for
how
long
now
?
I
don't
know
.
I
stopped
measuring
it
in
days
and
weeks
and
months
and
years
and
centuries
and
millennia
about
two
hundred
worlds
back
.
Even
worlds
is
an
inadequate
measure
of
the
distances
;
I'm
not
counting
the
wide
plains
of
broken
bones
,
or
stretches
of
marble
causeway
across
shallow
tranquil
oceans
without
tides
,
places
where
I've
walked
for
decades
in
a
straight
line
,
waking
every
morning
to
a
sight
the
same
as
yesterday
.
It's
just
that
every
now
and
again
the
area
that
I
find
myself
in
has
been
defined
enough
by
those
who
were
its
denizens
that
you
can
walk
into
a
library
or
bookshop
and
pull
out
all
the
atlases
and
encyclopedias
and
know
its
boundaries
the
way
they
did
.
These
are
the
places
I
count
as
worlds
.
I'm
not
counting
the
wide
areas
in
between
I've
had
to
walk
to
get
from
this
one
to
the
next
--the
Jungle
of
Filigree,
the
Bay
of
Afternoon
.
Hal Duncan
from
"Vellum"
I
highly
recommend
this
book
to
you
fellow
skites
.
090507
...
unhinged
my
skin
new_ink
090507
what's it to you?
who
go
blather
from
