When the bedroom lights go out, Sibble begins getting his brushes ready. Each is a tiny thing – eyelashes and sealing wax – gathered from cheeks and writing desks in the small hours. By the time your eyes are closed, he has strapped on his tiny paint pots and scampered onto the light fixture. From there it is tiny, precise brush-strokes of glittering phosphor spreading swathes of stars across the ceiling. Here and there he adds small flourishes – galaxies and nebulae that would seem to spin and swirl were your eyes open to see them. By the time the rays of dawn seep into the room the glitter has all but faded, and Sibble has replenished his supplies and retired to his snuggery.

The cobbled streets leading away from the harbour twisted and coiled like brambles. A left turn, then another, and another, and another, and rather than being back where they started, they would find themselves in an alcove off a passageway off an alley off a lane. “In here,” she would say, or “What’s down this way?” he would say, and they would find themselves in stores selling sugared candies in the perfect hand-crafted shapes of flowers, or delis stocking olives of every varied shade and hue. Soon their only sense of direction came from the smell of salt air or the excited murmur of people from the direction of the harbour, though that could have been the anchovies drying in parade formation on a balcony, or the pet store with parrots in cages covered with dark velvet hanging from every beam.

Hidden amongst the undulations of rock, the river splits in two. One of the branches winds out of the barren hills, and on to the sea. The other cascades down a cleft into the earth. Along its course a spray of plants has sprouted, starting with small grasses and flowers in tiny crevices. Just visible below, standing at the entrance, are the heads of small trees. Further down, in the deep, where the sediment of countless centuries has accreted, grows a vast subterranean forest. When night falls, the soft luminous glow of lichen lights the underside of spanning branches and thick vines. Through the caverns, birdsong burbles along below the splashing of water, and a soft, occasional snuffle permeates the undergrowth. No matter how still you are, no matter how long you wait, the only visible sign of life will be the twitching of leaves, and the sporadic staccato drip of water from the rock above makes even that suspect.

Inch by inch, hour by hour, his hammer and chisel turned the rock into tiny splinters that stung at his hands and face. What had once been a simple overhang was now a network of tunnels and chambers burrowed into the cliff face. Some rooms were small as closets – no more than alcoves in the tunnel walls – others were echoing halls, sumptuous bedchambers, or bathrooms atinkle with the sound of natural running water. Every time he finished carving out a room, he would rest for a day and wander through the other chambers, looking for signs of life. Every time, no matter how magnificent his workmanship, no matter how many times he checked, there were no people to be found.

After many moons aback his horse, the veil of distance lifted, and Ænor first beheld Yggdrasil, the World Tree. From eastern horizon to western horizon, its trunk cleaved to the Firmament with great gnarled knots unfurling into filament-thin roots drinking in life-giving draughts of æther. Far, far above, its vast leaves of cerulean blue whispered the soft murmurs of time. Under the shade of the boughs the luminous fruit could be seen to sparkle and shimmer. Somewhere on one of those worlds, along one and only one path of trunk and branch and twig and stem, she was waiting for him. He shouldered his pack and began to climb.

It was dark when I awoke. The side of my face that was pressed into the ground felt wet, though with the ferrous smell of a recent detonation heavy in the air it was hard to tell whether that wetness was water or blood. The relatively small exertion of pushing myself into a sitting position sent a shooting pain through my arm that almost caused me to black out again. My face burned as it moved through the air. Blood, then.

The darkness was absolute. There were no dim silhouettes to be picked out, just the constant kaleidoscopic flicker of randomly firing neurons behind my eyelids. I stood slowly, pawing the air over my head defensively in deference to the oppressive feeing of weight in the darkness above me. My legs held my weight without complaint, though I still patted them gingerly through what felt like jeans to be sure they were up to the task. There was a lump in each hip pocket. The right, a leather rectangle. Wallet maybe. The left, hard plastic. A phone? I fumbled the catch open and it spilled insipid blue light into the surrounding air. The floor was hard-packed dirt, the walls and ceiling rock, bolted and reinforced. From where I stood, three tunnels ran in a tee out of the circle of light. The phone beeped three times, feebly, then died, leaving me in the dark once more.

Down at the base of the sea-cliffs, more than half submerged at high tide, was the dark mouth of a cave. It was hidden around a kick in the rock, so that sunlight never penetrated more than a few scant meters, and impossible to see unless you were standing right in front of it. A strange heat and the smell of decay emanated from the opening, dissipating quickly in the sea air. It was the kind of place the locals of a town with a less intelligent populous might have called haunted. None living in the town had been into that darkness beyond an arm’s reach of the sunlight, but they all felt with an unspoken concert that it was the kind of place they would not like their children going on a dare. So it was not called haunted. It was not much spoken of at all, and were the things that crawled and dripped deep in the darkness capable of knowing or understanding this, it would have pleased them.

In the gently pulsing blue glow of standby lights, the forest was sprouting new growth. The bulbous mushroom heads of hubs formed fairy rings in the matted tangle of the forest floor. Thick bundles of cables were pushing free of the undergrowth to twine around heavy trunks in search of an unclaimed access port. Seedling plugs split and branched in twos and fours. Here and there a seven segment display blinking eights into the dimness, or a speaker whispering a gentle hush of line level noise.

Through this all she stalked, interfaces for dozens of protocols, esoteric and universal, old and new, cascading off her shoulders and down her naked back, searching for a place to connect.

I am sure, when they handed me the formula and a blank cheque, they did not know what they had created. As memories come back to me now, squashed short somehow as if to make room for others yet to arrive, I wonder that perhaps they did not create it at all. Regardless of their intent, it seems the formula’s true product was not the compound, but this me that I am becoming. That I am become. They could not have known this, could not have engineered it, and could certainly not have desired it.

I remember writing the zeros, watching with the corner of one eye to see when they would balk or blink. They didn’t.

The lab was sealed. Hermetic. White walls and benches and clear tubes and glassware. In my first requisition I ordered indicators I didn’t need, just to make coloured solutions to scatter about the room in beakers to keep me from going crazy. A door in one wall led to a bathroom and a bunk, and in the other wall the ‘airlock’, through which came the supplies and requisitions. And, sometime around the end of the first month, Rose. Other than the mice, she was the first contact of any kind I’d had since entering the lab. She looked somehow familiar as she introduced herself, like an old lover whose name and face I could no longer recall. She was to be my assistant, she told me, though as I look back it seems unlikely that was her true purpose.

With someone as smart as Rose in their employ I do not know why they needed me, yet she took no initiative of her own, only following my terse directions and providing a sounding board for my ideas. The first time I headed for the bunk after she arrived, perhaps a day and a half in all, she followed. I did not turn her away.

When the Princess died, the King had her body laid upon a bier in a small courtyard. Its walls were high and windowless, and its sole door hidden away in mazes of passageways and rooms long unused. This done, he locked the door and retreated into his grief.

The kingdom ran itself mostly, and comings and goings to and from the castle were few and infrequent. When, therefore, the greenery began to grow down over the roofline to cover the windows of the castle’s upper floor, it was scarce noticed. By the time the greenery had reached the ground, a week later, and blocked all egress, it was too late to do much except hack a new passage clear with pike and sword each morning.

The King cared not, thus it was the chief steward, the baker, the librarian and the scullery boy who, upon opening the door to a small courtyard (the scullery boy was no stranger to locks, or mazes of passageways and rooms long unused), discovered the source of the problem. The bier upon which the Princess’ body had lain had been shattered to pieces of rubble by a tree that erupted from the flagstones and soared upwards, bedecked with short stubby branches and drapings of vines and creepers. Just beside the door, the Princess’ small blue shoes were placed neatly in a pair, with her socks rolled up inside.