[b]Jackdaw![/b]

[i]A Victory of Crows was manifested in the latter years of the Hlon Dynasty by the mystic scholar and cult leader Birthing-from-Stones. That is to say, the book was made of and from him by his disciples, a method to stop the great rented way torn by the rites of Hu Xian, who sought in that otherplace a final vindication in their long rivalry.

Can you see them in their green tunics, Jackdaw? The rise and fall of their axes, the white-hot terror of acting as a cordon, even as Birthing-from-Stones writes on each page he draws from inside himself, his eyes lucid even as his body shakes feverish with its transmutation of form. Blood on snow, red on white that becomes black, as the trees loom huge and hot and hateful, as the crows laugh. There is no sophisticated argument to be had here about the value of the extant world and its right to not be overwritten, to be a palimpsest like the many-layered Heart that hangs below all the possible worlds. They fight for the simple reason that we treasure what we have, and will not dive into some new world without thought, without consideration, without knowing some small thing about how our lives will change-- unless we are like Hu Xian, who became a slash of red and white, who emerged in a glory of eyes and tails at the eleventh hour, at the very stroke of her doom. Shake out the red, watch it clot to black, let the snow slump under the heat.

But by then it was too late for her. The nameless disciple lifted A Victory of Crows from the crumpled remnant of Birthing-from-Stones and drew Crowhame through the rent and into their master's final argument. The oral tradition that sprang from that spiritual surgery was, incidentally, the birth of the Urlokan Parade-Opera, with its fearful masks and procession of actors from one side of the stage to the other, though conventions have certainly changed since then, and the stock archetypes that you'd be familiar with now have little to do with the gods of Crowhame who marched, tumultuous and disdainful, into their new prison, and last of all Hu Xian digging more rents into the world with her claws, obliterating two dozen eyewitnesses with her wild omnidirectional glances, but unable to resist the gravity of the place prepared for her and her new family.[/i]

How lucky for you, Jackdaw, that despite the great pressure of the world within that bursts frothing forth into monochrome horror, the book was made from the start to be closed! Once you have the right leverage, the right place to stand, it is conceptually simple to shut the book, and in the process, to draw back the world from its high-pressure outlet. And now, of all times, is the only time that you can! Without suffering greatly as you force your way deep within, that is. Every moment you wait, the Professor (as much statue hacked out of white stone as person, now) becomes definitionally further and further away from you all, buffeted by the world surging out all around him.

Or you could destroy it, tear out the spine and obliterate not just the Dark Carnival and the Grail but an entire layer of the Heart. Not even Crowhame can overwrite the [i]entire[/i] Heart, but you would very certainly be making a new landmark in this alien geography, one that would be greater than the Flood could ever dream. Of course, you and everyone here would then have to very quickly self-select for survival, and most of the unfortunates that found themselves in Crowhame would find themselves defined by relation to the attention of a god. This is bad. You do not want this. You do not want your existence to revolve around how you are acted upon by the Flayed, or the Wheel, or the Long, or the Eyewitch.

Especially because time is not native to Crowhame. It is a [i]contaminant[/i]. In deep Crowhame, all things happen forever and ever and [i]ever[/i].

Wolf reaches out and squeezes your shoulder. She gives you a ragged, keen growl; she’s out of spoons for words. But when you pull away, you can see the space where the connection between the two of you is Not. And in Wolf’s hands, that’s as good as a chain.

***

[b]Coleman![/b]

The Ringmaster is discovering the limits of violence. He is an invincible honking war-sage, a concentrated murder-wind that snaps bones and tears leather-skin and smashes down the Flayed over and over and over again. But the definition of the Flayed is that it is changed into new forms by the application of violence (inflicted with Lucien or otherwise), and it unfolds with every blow, stretches new taxidermy-limbs and claws and clutches at the sky to pull itself back up. Under its idiot smile he is changing, too. If nothing is done, then eventually the Ringmaster will seize the Flayed and twist its open ribcage in two directions, and then with a mighty heave he will rip his monstrous self apart as the Flayed stays still, and then it will scoop him up in its labyrinth of hands and begin to make him a new creation, and all that purple will leech out until the clown-doll is all red and white and black.

It might not even [i]want[/i] to hurt him. It is very literally not of this world, after all.

As for what might happen if you got involved? Depends. The damn thing would probably react very... unproductively to being hit with Sasha. Hey, kids, who wants to see what it looks like when an immature train gets its furnace twisted out of its steampipes? And the Ringmaster probably wouldn't be very grateful in the moment. Or afterwards. Until the very moment it all goes wrong for him, there won't be any doubt in his boiling bones that he's winning this fight. If you're hoping that you might have the Dark Carnival owe you a favor, well, you'd be better off asking Jackdaw to fake a miracle from the Grail. That'd probably do something useful.

Above the Carnival, the impossibly huge head of the Long looms, and all else begins to fall under its vast shadow. You don't want that thing to get involved, either; it's tough to fight something that you can't, by definition, see the other end of. The longer this goes on, the more risk that nobody's going to be able to get them shoved back into the book and still be able to get out before the door closes, if you will.

***

[b]Ailee![/b]

"I should cash out," Surma says, but it's amicable. The look she gives you is sly, calculating. You become a bookhunter for two reasons all tied up together, after all: you owe an astronomical amount to the kind of people who make that a health hazard, and you have a lust for adventure. The sort of adventure where you win it all or lose everything. "But, oh, look, my prize is gone. Shoot. Too bad I don't know anybody who might point me in the direction of a consolation prize."

There's her pride, too: she's not some innocent like Jackdaw, easily spun round on herself. She has standards. And she expects you to damn well show her respect if you want her time. She's not going to huff and puff about it, but when she looks you in that glowing eye and doesn't so much as flinch, that's what she's saying.