Chapter 17 Clara’s Broadcast
I’m speaking on behalf of Valentina Blackwood.
Perhaps she is listening now, but I doubt it. I expect that she is on her way to do something possibly kind and certainly dangerous.
Many of you listening to this know Valentina well. Hell, many of us have lived and studied with that menacing old creature.
“Here’s your toast. We might be eaten alive today. Grab your galoshes.”
If she gets you when you’re young, she lives in your head forever.
I know she lives in mine.
Well, I’m not young anymore and I’ve been thinking about old Val.
I was trying to recall a single time I’ve heard her ask for real help and I came up empty. Now, we’ve all heard her share opportunity, calls to study, or announcements about singular events, but that’s not asking for help. Not really. She shares the crop, but not the sowing or the harvest work.
We spoke earlier today, and again this evening. She asked me to do this broadcast.
Alright, not this broadcast exactly.
She asked me to share warnings.
Firstly, observing the decay of a rag moth’s body should not be considered safe. Details are foggy, but Val’s new apprentice is not a vanilla human and his observations can’t be fully trusted as evidence of safety.
She knows how to pick ’em, doesn’t she?
I met the young man. He seems sweet.
Similarly and secondly, the glass fawn is a lethal danger and simply getting within a hundred meters or so of the creature is likely fatal.
So, naturally, she did exactly that.
She made light of it when I spoke to her, because of course she did. Of course.
My guess is that she needs help and that she’d likely scold us for showing up to offer it.
I’m in my ninth decade now and I think I’ve finally reached an age where I don’t particularly give a damn if Valentina scolds me. Better late than never.
Look here, if you’re able to go, go.
I doubt there is anything to be done tonight, but I know there are more than a few of you who could be there by tomorrow morning. She’d never ask you to, but I am asking.
Valentina may, at this moment, be walking through a dimension gate with no way to know if she’ll come out the other side whole or at all.
Honestly, I expect she won’t. This rift is a nasty piece of business.
Recent evidence suggests the glass fawn is from outside our reality.
Not from the shadow place. Not a threshold gap.
Not from one of the braided timelines, a mirror world, or the long hallway.
I’m talkin’ a full outsider. Val and I believe that enduring hole on that mountain of hers is what’s allowing the creature to remain.
So, she’s going to shut it, whatever the cost.
When…if…the worst happens, that green apprentice of hers will be left wandering alone in the woods. He’ll need us.
I won’t call her plans foolish. Nobody can do the risk-to-reward calculus on that course of action but she herself. That kind, weird old bat knows her business better than we do.
But if she does step through…and if she does come back injured or changed…I want her to see faces from the community she helped build, even if she just rolls her eyes at each and every one of you.
There’s a crawler node on that mountain. “Stone jaw,” in crawler tongue.
And I know many of you have your own methods of expedited travel.
Use them.
If she’s angry, blame me. What’s she gonna do about it?
We don’t want that apprentice of hers to try anything drastic, especially if he panics. I can only guess what she has tucked away in that camp of hers.
That fella is terribly fresh and maybe a little cursed with outsize talent.
Well.
Who am I to judge someone else as strange, eh?
Now, that’s enough chin-waggin’ from me.
If you’ve got prayer or something like it, send it Valentina’s way. She can be irked by my requests all she wants after she’s back home safe and whole. Knock on wood.
If you’re hearing this later, Val, and you think me stubborn and cantankerous, well just ask yourself who my role model might be.
I love you all. Spare a thought for your elder tonight and I don’t mean me.
Clara Rodriguez, signing off.